Toby Miller: Soccer Conquers the World
[Toby Miller is a professor of media and cultural studies at the University of California at Riverside. Among his books is Globalization and Sport: Playing the World (Sage, 2001), which he wrote with Geoffrey Lawrence, Jim McKay, and David Rowe.]
Why are the Ivory Coast soccer player Didier Drogba and the Portuguese star Cristiano Ronaldo featured in underpants on a recent cover of Vanity Fair? Why was Drogba just named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine? The answer is that the men's World Cup tournament, in South Africa, is imminent. Vanity Fair is running a blog, Fair Play, and the magazine's cover story has even taken a baby step toward maturity: In best deconstructive style, it presents the word "soccer" with a line through it—put under erasure by the big word used globally, "football."...
Most histories of association football describe Britain as the home of the game. As early as 1860, an anonymous handbill was issued proclaiming itself to be an "Obituary: Death of the Right Honourable Game Football," after two court cases prevented the citizens of Ashbourne, Derbyshire, from playing an annual festive street game. But just as soccer was "dying," it was actually developing first into a national pastime and then into an international sport. Its codification domestically coincided and blended with the establishment and synchronization of the British Empire's cultural mission. The game was reborn through diffusion across the British and French Empires in the 19th century; organizational domination by European entities and then by Latin American ones in the 20th; and a return of power to Europe, based on its status as a profit center of the game, thanks to the combination of deregulated TV markets and new technologies, which together generated untold revenue for soccer from the sale of rights.
Soccer worldwide is about more than sport tout court. The famous Dutch coach Rinus Michels likened it to war—and the Soccer War itself broke out, in 1969, because the Honduran government expelled Salvadorans following a match between the two countries. In the Biafra-Nigeria civil war, at one point in 1967, fighting was halted so the combatants could watch the Brazilian star Pelé. The Brazilian junta took the national team's 1970 World Cup song for itself. In 1978, the fascists running Peru helped out the fascists running Argentina during the World Cup. Argentina, the host, had to beat Peru by at least four goals to nil in order to qualify for the second round. With the help of 35,000 tons of free grain and $50-million in credits to Peru that allegedly came from Buenos Aires, they did so. Four years later, the Argentine generals used the 1978 team song during the Falkland Islands war.
During the revolutionary events of 1989 in Central and Eastern Europe, sport was part of the intense passions. Some athletes in the army sports club shot at the secret police in Romania when players from another team, the Dinamo Club, defended the police force, which was their patron (the Dinamo teams of Eastern and Central Europe were KGB-backed). When Georgia achieved its independence from the Soviet Union, almost the first act of its new government was to submit an application to join the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA). After the Communist-bloc revolutions overturned the state-socialist sports systems, the system of cultural labor destroyed the club and national teams that had been built up over decades. Within two years, Torpedo Moscow, for example, had sold 23 players to Western clubs; top talent was desperate to leave in search of higher pay and better quality of life. Home sides were left with cash balances to pay inflated wages to second-raters.
That gives us a clue to part of the reason for soccer's globalism: It is a major site of international mobility, via what could be called a New International Division of Cultural Labor, a concept that I have been using with collaborative research teams for 20 years to analyze both sports and the media. Players move because of several factors beyond talent and money. There is a clear link between imperial history and job destination in the case of Latin Americans going to Spain, Portugal, and Italy, or Africans playing in France, while cultural ties draw Scandinavians to Britain. A small labor aristocracy experiences genuine class mobility in financial terms, underpinned by a large reserve army of players. A Professional Football Players' Observatory tracks players' success and value and comes complete with an interactive online instrument to illustrate migration (eurofootplayers.org).
In the wealthy West, an even more significant soccer revolution was brewing after 1989, as the Belgian midfielder Jean-Marc Bosman appealed to the European Court of Justice against his suspension by the Union Royale Belge des Sociétés de Football Association for seeking an overseas transfer. The right to freedom of movement for European Union workers led the court to rule in Bosman's favor in 1995. That decision, opposing restriction on movement and upholding freedom of labor within the European Union, has prevented the imposition of quotas on foreign players. Immigration authorities' power to decide whether players from outside the EU have sufficiently rare and demonstrable skills to merit a work permit has become the only formal barrier to labor-market entry. Even those rules can be circumvented through the accelerated awarding of dual citizenship and the use of European nurseries to assimilate young players before their formal entry into the football labor market....
Read entire article at CHE
Why are the Ivory Coast soccer player Didier Drogba and the Portuguese star Cristiano Ronaldo featured in underpants on a recent cover of Vanity Fair? Why was Drogba just named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine? The answer is that the men's World Cup tournament, in South Africa, is imminent. Vanity Fair is running a blog, Fair Play, and the magazine's cover story has even taken a baby step toward maturity: In best deconstructive style, it presents the word "soccer" with a line through it—put under erasure by the big word used globally, "football."...
Most histories of association football describe Britain as the home of the game. As early as 1860, an anonymous handbill was issued proclaiming itself to be an "Obituary: Death of the Right Honourable Game Football," after two court cases prevented the citizens of Ashbourne, Derbyshire, from playing an annual festive street game. But just as soccer was "dying," it was actually developing first into a national pastime and then into an international sport. Its codification domestically coincided and blended with the establishment and synchronization of the British Empire's cultural mission. The game was reborn through diffusion across the British and French Empires in the 19th century; organizational domination by European entities and then by Latin American ones in the 20th; and a return of power to Europe, based on its status as a profit center of the game, thanks to the combination of deregulated TV markets and new technologies, which together generated untold revenue for soccer from the sale of rights.
Soccer worldwide is about more than sport tout court. The famous Dutch coach Rinus Michels likened it to war—and the Soccer War itself broke out, in 1969, because the Honduran government expelled Salvadorans following a match between the two countries. In the Biafra-Nigeria civil war, at one point in 1967, fighting was halted so the combatants could watch the Brazilian star Pelé. The Brazilian junta took the national team's 1970 World Cup song for itself. In 1978, the fascists running Peru helped out the fascists running Argentina during the World Cup. Argentina, the host, had to beat Peru by at least four goals to nil in order to qualify for the second round. With the help of 35,000 tons of free grain and $50-million in credits to Peru that allegedly came from Buenos Aires, they did so. Four years later, the Argentine generals used the 1978 team song during the Falkland Islands war.
During the revolutionary events of 1989 in Central and Eastern Europe, sport was part of the intense passions. Some athletes in the army sports club shot at the secret police in Romania when players from another team, the Dinamo Club, defended the police force, which was their patron (the Dinamo teams of Eastern and Central Europe were KGB-backed). When Georgia achieved its independence from the Soviet Union, almost the first act of its new government was to submit an application to join the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA). After the Communist-bloc revolutions overturned the state-socialist sports systems, the system of cultural labor destroyed the club and national teams that had been built up over decades. Within two years, Torpedo Moscow, for example, had sold 23 players to Western clubs; top talent was desperate to leave in search of higher pay and better quality of life. Home sides were left with cash balances to pay inflated wages to second-raters.
That gives us a clue to part of the reason for soccer's globalism: It is a major site of international mobility, via what could be called a New International Division of Cultural Labor, a concept that I have been using with collaborative research teams for 20 years to analyze both sports and the media. Players move because of several factors beyond talent and money. There is a clear link between imperial history and job destination in the case of Latin Americans going to Spain, Portugal, and Italy, or Africans playing in France, while cultural ties draw Scandinavians to Britain. A small labor aristocracy experiences genuine class mobility in financial terms, underpinned by a large reserve army of players. A Professional Football Players' Observatory tracks players' success and value and comes complete with an interactive online instrument to illustrate migration (eurofootplayers.org).
In the wealthy West, an even more significant soccer revolution was brewing after 1989, as the Belgian midfielder Jean-Marc Bosman appealed to the European Court of Justice against his suspension by the Union Royale Belge des Sociétés de Football Association for seeking an overseas transfer. The right to freedom of movement for European Union workers led the court to rule in Bosman's favor in 1995. That decision, opposing restriction on movement and upholding freedom of labor within the European Union, has prevented the imposition of quotas on foreign players. Immigration authorities' power to decide whether players from outside the EU have sufficiently rare and demonstrable skills to merit a work permit has become the only formal barrier to labor-market entry. Even those rules can be circumvented through the accelerated awarding of dual citizenship and the use of European nurseries to assimilate young players before their formal entry into the football labor market....