Greenland is an autonomous province of Denmark with a population of around 50,000. The Faroe Islands are an autonomous province of Denmark with a population of around 50,000. The Faroe Islands belong to FIFA; Greenland does not. A reasonable person might wonder why the Faroes are given membership into the international soccer governing body while Greenland is excluded. Such a reasonable person would not come up with anything resembling a reasonable answer. Greenland is one of the “countries” featured in Steve Menary’s new book Outcasts: The Lands That FIFA Forgot. The book is a whirlwind tour of forgotten lands scattered throughout the globe. During his visits with teams from places as diverse as Greenland, The Falklands, Northern Cyprus, Zanzibar, and Occitània, Menary introduces us to players, coaches, and officials struggling for international soccer recognition for their countries which, according to FIFA, don’t exist.
To many Americans, even hard-core soccer fans, knowledge of this country’s soccer history is decidedly limited. Not that it has been entirely their fault: a comprehensive history of American soccer has never existed. That is, until David Wangerin’s authoritative, engaging, and enlightening book Soccer in a Football World.
Jafar Panahi is a reknowned Iranian filmmaker who chooses to deal with controversial topics in his work. His movies (Crimson Gold, The Circle, among others) have been heralded abroad and banned at home. In many ways, then, it’s incredible that Jafar Panahi was able to make his latest movie, Offside, about women trying to sneak into an Iranian stadium to watch a soccer match.
Panahi knew that taking on the subject of female football fans in Iran would be controversial, and so tried to make his movie quietly so as to avoid the censors. In an interview, he described how even his best attempts to avoid notice were ultimately unsuccessful.
We tried to be very discreet and avoid any mention in the press. However, five days before the end of the shoot, a newspaper published an article stating I was directing a new film. The military immediately gave orders to interrupt the shoot. We were instructed to bring them our rushes to be verified. I immediately announced to the official in charge of cinema in Iran that this was out of the question, and that I would not allow a single soldier during the final days of the shoot. Luckily, there were only a few scenes left to shoot, inside a minibus, so we just left the military zone and continued filming sixty kilometers outside of Tehran.
But the difficulties Panahi faced from overzealous authorities is nothing compared to those encountered by the subjects of his movie. They are the female football fans who so desperately want to watch Iran play Bahrain in a 2005 match that would decide which team would go to the World Cup.
The movie opens on a bus, as Iranian fans make their way to the Azadi Stadium to see the crucial qualifier against Bahrain. The scene is joyous, with fans hanging out the windows and singing, psyching themselves up for the game. But one fan is more nervous than excited. This fan, it turns out, is a she and shes are not allowed into stadiums in Iran.
The female fan (we never find out names of any of the women in the film) is going in disguise, trying to avoid the glare of police at the stadium. But her cover is blown by her own nervousness and she is taken to a holding pen, along with other female football fans.
It’s in this holding pen, which is really just metal barricades shaped into a rectangle, that the majority of the movie takes place. The action of the movie, if it can be called that, is mostly the captive female fans attempting to persuade their captors to let them watch the game. Those looking for dramatic shots of the action on the field will be sorely disappointed; this is a movie about the repressive realities of contemporary Iranian life that just happens to have a crucial World Cup qualifier as its background.
The Azadi Stadium is as good a place as any to show many of the injustices that exist in Iran today. The rationales that the female fans are given for not being allowed into the stadium are as numerous as they are absurd: women will be harmed by the coarse language in the stadium, they should not be looking at attractive young male players, soccer is just not a women’s game, etc. The most argumentative of the detained female fans points out that Japanese women were allowed in to a game at the same stadium and wonders if “my only problem is I was born in Iran?”
The soldiers who become the women’s captors are hardly enthused with having to keep the fans from watching the game. One soldier is completely disinterested in his work, another continually sneaks peeks at the game, and a third laments that his conscription has taken him so far from his family farm. The root of the problem does not lie with the soldiers; they are merely forced to carry out the unjust laws created by those above them.
That seems to be the point Panahi is most interested in making. Individually, Iranians may support female fans’ right to go to the stadium, but the authorities in the country create a system that forces some citizens to oppress others.
Panahi also clearly hopes that Iranians might take collective action to stop these injustices from occurring. When a female fan escapes from her captor with the aid of some male fans, it is impossible not to see Panahi’s desire that more Iranians take a stand against injustice in their country. As the famous quote goes, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”
Jafar Panahi
Offside is undoubtedly an interesting, it is not the most engaging movie. Its topic may be unique, but the film itself is all too predictable. The soldier least interested initially in the female fans’ plight comes to see their perspective by the end of the film. The women are detained, but in the end are released onto the streets of Tehran to celebrate with their countrymen and women. Watching Offside, you’ll rarely be surprised by what’s coming next.
The one surprise in the movie is how little soccer there is. Leaving the theater, my friend and I concurred that we would have liked to see shots of what sounded like an intense game. Of course, as we quickly realized, not showing the game was an intentional decision on Panahi’s part and that we had little right to complain. We, two twenty-something American men, had been denied a peek at the game during the ninety-minute movie; women in Iran have been denied the right to watch soccer for their entire lives.
I shouldn’t be writing this. No, I’m not going to write anything lewd. What I shouldn’t be writing is this non-review of the movie Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait. But, having arrived too late to get into the theater, I cannot write not about the movie itself. Instead, I will speculate about why so many people turned up on a Thursday night in America, a country whose people are not supposed to care about soccer.
The announcement in the Washington Post warned readers to get there early to get seats, but I didn’t take it that seriously. How early did I have to arrive on a Thursday evening to see an obscure art film about a French soccer player? This is America, after all. Nobody cares! Or so I thought.
When I arrived at quarter to eight, I knew immediately I had underestimated the interest in the movie. The line at the Hirshhorn Museum stretched from the back door around the large building to the front. Crowd-estimation skills have never been my specialty, but I’d say there were a good three to four hundred folks there.
A very small part of the line waiting to see Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait
I asked the middle-aged man at the end of the line if he was waiting to see the Zidane movie. He said he was but that he’d already been informed that the cut-off for the eight o’clock showing was a good hundred or so people in front of him. He told me they’d decided to add a ten o’clock showing due to the extraordinary interest.
Now, I love Zidane, but not that much. Zidane’s beautiful moves can’t make up for my lost beauty rest. Having decided I wouldn’t wait around to watch the movie, I immediately became interested in the masses who were responsible for me not getting to see it. I watched as those who had gotten there early enough (some arrived at 6:45, I was later told) were ushered into the theater and those who hadn’t stayed outside.
A Hirshhorn employee came to the door to tell those who were left outside that they would, most likely, not get to see the movie that night. She said that they had let in those who would see the eight and ten o’clock showing. People could wait outside in the hopes that some inside would leave, but there were no guarantees.
To my surprise, some of my fellow rejects were downright angry. One tried to bully the employee into letting him in. Others simply looked frustrated and forlorn. The employee’s attempts to tell them they could order the movie on DVD from the UK were almost like salt in the wounds (doesn’t she know about DVDs being coded by region?). Most of people eventually left, but a few stuck around.
Kasim George was emphatic about trying to get in to the ten o’clock showing. “Oh yeah, oh yeah, I’m definitely going to stick around.” Was he frustrated? “Not at all,” he told me. “[Zidane] is a legend.”
George told me he had long followed Zidane’s career (his first memory of the Frenchman was when he still had hair) and said “if you are a real fan of the sport, you would have ultimate respect for him.”
What was he hoping to gain from the movie? George said he had “heard the way they did the documentary was like you being beside him. I had to see it … to get an idea of what he sees on the field.”
George was not the only person who to refer to the now retired Zidane in the present tense. José Granados told me that Zidane “is still a good player.” For many, it seems, Zidane’s influence on the game and on them was so huge that they still think of his presence on the field in the present.
Does Zidane live on even in retirement?
I was only able to speak to a limited number of people, those dedicated enough to stick around for two hours on the off chance they might be let in, which means I can only speculate about those who did see the movie. I imagine they had similar motivations for wanting to see Zidane as did those I spoke with, but what surprised me most was the number of fans who had shown up to see the movie.
If Americans don’t like soccer, someone forgot to tell the hundreds in line at the Hirshhorn last Thursday night. Of course, Washington is a large city with a huge immigrant population that was well-represented in that line. But those who say that America is not a soccer country often fail to take into account the diversity in the US of A. Immigrants who play soccer in this country, often under the radar, have been an important, if often ignored, part of the sport in this country.
That’s not to say there were no native-born Americans in the crowd. I saw suburban high school kids, college frat boys, and middle-aged men reading serious magazines. Anthony Stepter and Maria Flores, among those who were hoping to be let in for the ten o’clock showing, told me they were attracted by the art of the film as much as the soccer. The reasons to want to see the film were as diverse as the people who espoused them.
I draw two lessons from my experience of trying and failing to watch Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait: 1) there is more of an interest in soccer in this country than many people recognize and 2) when the Washington Post says show up early, take them at their word.
(If you want to read actual reviews of the movie, I would recommend hitting up Rotten Tomatoes. And if you’ve seen the movie, feel free to leave a comment and let me know what you thought of it.)
When I first came across Desmond Morris’s book The Soccer Tribe, I thought it was a joke. I was on the campus of Amherst College and popped in the library to see what kind of soccer books were on the shelves. There I found the book that has since become one of my favorite soccer titles of all times.
The Soccer Tribe is a coffee table sized book from the early 1980s. The biography of the author said he had earned a Ph.D. from Oxford and had carried out much important research on animal behavior (he may also be known to readers more worldly than I was at the time as the author of the classic The Naked Ape).
The book, in 320 pages and complete with full-color pictures, looks at everyone (players, coaches, referees, fans, bureaucrats, etc.) who has anything to with soccer. This so-called “Soccer Tribe” is studied with the type of precision usually reserved by anthropologists in their work on tribes in remote parts of the world. As I flipped through the pages for the first time, I couldn’t tell whether Morris had written a serious study or if his book was simply intended to amuse.
It turns out the book is quite serious (it would have been quite a lot of work to simply make a joke, I now realize). The Soccer Tribe is, in some ways, reminiscent of the satirical paper Body Ritual Among the Nacirema, in which anthropologist Horace Miner made typical American behavior (like teeth brushing) seem exotic. Like Miner, Morris employs tools that anthropologists typically use to study “real” tribes in other cultures in looking at those involved in soccer. The result is a book that is simultaneously brilliant in analysis, hilarious in making light of things we take for granted, and beautifully presented (fair warning: short shorts and mullets do make many, many appearances).
I now have The Soccer Tribe on my coffee table and love to show it off to both soccer fans and non-fans alike. It is, to be sure, not a typical coffee table book, but this uniqueness is one of the things I most value about it. Morris’s book is now, sadly, out of print so it will take some searching to find it. But trust me: it’s worth it.
* * *
Looking back at Morris’s book recently made me think again about some of the funniest of soccer rituals. Having watched so much soccer in my life, I rarely stop to consider the uniqueness of many such rituals, as I am so accustomed to seeing them. It is only in looking at The Soccer Tribe or watching games with friends not familiar with soccer that I remember how unique they are.
The pre- and post-game rituals offer some of the most striking examples. The most interesting pre-game ritual I have seen develop in the past few years is the players walking out to the field with young children in tow. Every Premier League game has these “mascots,” to use the British terminology. The sight of cute little children accompanying sporting superstars to the pitch is something I have not seen in other sports. Perhaps the thought of how Allen Iverson would respond if this happened to him is enough to dissuade the NBA from trying something similar.
On behalf of Steven Gerrard and all overpaid superstars ever treated poorly by four year-olds, Thierry Henry gets revenge on a mascot before a game against Ajax.
In Argentina, four year-olds are clearly over the hill. Most games there involve players carrying out infants to the field. But watching this Argentine spin on the pre-game ritual, one can’t help wonder if this might be a bit too young. The deafening roar of the crowd, the confetti thrown toward them, and the thought that they might be dropped by a sweaty many with strange clothes on has brought several of these young children to tears. And quite why parents trust soccer players, who clearly have other things on their minds right before a game, to not drop their infants is beyond me.
Boca Juniors’ Martin Palmero is lead to the field by young children.
There are also several post-game rituals which are unique to soccer. Players in most sports will exchange some sort of handshake at the end of a match. Soccer players (in big games, at least) take it a step further in exchanging shirts. On occasions when a smaller team players a bigger opponent, less well-known players fight to be able to exchange their shirt with superstars.
The US’s Claudio Reyna and the Czech Republic’s Pavel Nedved exchange shirts at last summer’s World Cup.
Soccer players also have a post-game ritual that I find completely endearing: applauding their supporters. Even in this era of massive money in sports, it is refreshing that professional soccer players recognize their fans after nearly every game by clapping to them. The gesture may be symbolic, but it epitomizes the fact that soccer teams in Europe have historically been clubs to which all belong, not the franchises that reduce the connection between professional athletes in American and their fans.
Sunderland players applaud their fans.
The post-game ritual of applauding fans is given a Japanese spin in that East Asian country. Instead of simply applauding, players there bow to their fans. This has come as a shock to some foreigners who have played in the J-League, but bowing is, of course, prevalent in Japanese society.
When I lived in Japan, I often saw bowing in soccer games. The middle school I worked at had a team whose players would bow both before and after matches to show appreciation to their coaches, opposing players, and referees.
Japanese (American) football players bow before a game.
* * *
If a new version of Desmond Morris’s book The Soccer Tribe were to be written, it could certainly include this Japanese and the above Argentine example of soccer rituals. The 20 years of globalization since it was published have brought increased connection among the peoples of the world. In this time, we have been shown the similarities and differences of the rituals of the soccer tribe.
What do frozen chicken and soccer have in common? More than you might suspect. The poultry processing plants which have sprung up across the south during the last twenty years have brought an influx of immigrants. These newcomers arrive from big cities and the US like Chicago, New York, and L.A. and from south of the border. The arrival of Mexicans, Salvadorans, Hondurans, and others to fill jobs in poultry plants has led to an economic resurgence in many rural towns. But the arrival of Latinos has been hard for many towns to accept. Many such rural communities of which have reached only an uneasy understanding between the majority white population and the black minority. Throwing a third group of people into the mix has been further complicated by the fact that the newest arrivals don’t play “American” sports but instead soccer.
Paul Cuadros’s book A Home on the Field documents the economic and sporting tensions seen since the beginning of what he calls the “Great Latino Migration†to rural areas. Cuadros went to North Carolina intending to study the impact of the growing Latino population on life in the southern United States. While there, his focus shifted as he became involved with the high school soccer team in rural Siler City. But even as his interest in soccer increased, he never lost his original focus. In the end, Cuadros performs a masterful feat by drawing the reader in with an engaging story of soccer success while at the same time showing them the complex lives of Latinos living in the rural south.
One of the first experiences Cuadros has upon arriving in Siler City, North Carolina is a KKK rally, complete with a David Duke speech. Many in the rural town are clearly not pleased with the recent influx of Latinos. This rally shows the degree of resentment many in the area have toward the new arrivals, and these negative feelings come through time and time again throughout the book. When Cuadros later attempts to organize a soccer team at the local high school, he is met with much resistance, undoubtedly fueled by anti-immigrant sentiment. Administrators in the school system offer him excuses that show both unwillingness to help their Latino students (they refuse to share the fields used for other sports) and their open mistrust of them (they claim that not enough students will have the grades to make them academically eligible). It is a miracle that the team gets off the ground at all.
The initial hostility to the team’s formation in Siler City is nothing, though, when compared with that shown by some opposing fans. At away games, the players are often showered with insults that leave little doubt the fans’ views on outsiders. Cuadros’s players often struggle to hold back tears and fists while being pelted with cries of “wetback.”
Over the next three years Cuadros’s team steadily improves, though not without growing pains, many of which are unique to the lives of the Latino students. The beginning of the second season is almost ruined when the team’s goalkeeper must return to Mexico to see his ailing grandmother. Not having legal residence in the US, he must return with the help of a coyote. He arrives just before the beginning of the season, having hiked through the desert for a week with only meager supplies of food and water. Clearly, these are not the concerns of most high school athletes.
When the team eventually wins the North Carolina state championship, it is nothing short of a miracle. Formed from scratch only three years earlier, the boys have become the best in the state despite incredible obstacles. The final whistle at the final game will be moving to any reader.
The sporting triumphs in A Home on the Field are reminiscent of the movie Hoosiers: a small-town team with an incredibly dedicated coach overcomes numerous obstacles to win a state title. The book does, in fact, read like a movie at times. Cuadros describes the games his team plays in with an incredible level of detail, making you feel like you’re sitting on the bench next to him. This is both a positive and negative. While the descriptions of the games will surely draw in readers brought to his book by the soccer angle, but I found them a bit long and drawn out. The games, while important in story development, distract from what the book is really about: the lives of Latinos in the rural south. Soccer is an important aspect of this, of course, but I would have preferred shorter descriptions of the team’s triumphs and more analysis of the larger issues which underlie Cuadros’s team.
That is not to say that the books lacks analysis of larger issues at play with regard to Latinos in the rural south. Cuadros has clearly done a wealth of research, which enables him to put the narratives of his team’s success into context. His ability to use soccer to bring out larger issues surrounding this newest Latino migration is the high point of his book.
In an era in which many try to demonize “illegal immigrants” under such demeaning monikers, Cuadros provides the stories of the Latino residents from their own perspectives. There is the mother who has brought her children from Chicago to Siler City to keep them away from gangs, the families who work hard to get by on meager salaries in the poultry processing plants, and their children who struggle to feel connected to the United States as well as their homelands. Cuadros does an excellent job of reminding us that immigrants are people, and have stories that ought to be heard.
Cuadros also points out the larger economic issues at play. The Latino migration to the rural south has been fueled primarily by economic factors. Most of the Latino residents of Siler City work in the town poultry processing plant. This is difficult, dirty, and low-paying work. Cuadros’s book dispels xenophobic claims that immigrants are taking American jobs: non-Latinos who have tried working in the plants have not lasted long. What’s more, the rise of poultry plants has led to an economic resurgence in a part of the North Carolina that had seen little hope since its textile factories realized they could not compete with products coming in from abroad. Some in Siler City may resent the arrival of Latinos, but their coming has boosted the lives of everyone in the town.
Even those outside of rural North Carolina are playing a part in the Latino migration there. Cuadros demonstrates the link between consumers who increasingly rely on the convenience of pre-processed chicken and the need for workers to do this work. If you cook boneless, skinless chicken breasts tonight, there is a good chance that a Latino immigrant processed it for you.
Paul Cuadros’s book A Home on the Field is a wonderful account of the lives of Latinos in the rural south. It focuses on a soccer team, but that is only the jumping-off point to discuss the many issues which surround this demographic shift in our country. Cuadros’s detailed research, insightful reporting, and clear writing make his book a must-read for soccer fans as well as those interested in immigration.
To many Americans, even hard-core soccer fans, knowledge of this country’s soccer history is decidedly limited. Not that it has been entirely their fault: a comprehensive history of American soccer has never existed. That is, until David Wangerin’s authoritative, engaging, and enlightening book 
When I first came across 
What do frozen chicken and soccer have in common? More than you might suspect. The poultry processing plants which have sprung up across the south during the last twenty years have brought an influx of immigrants. These newcomers arrive from big cities and the US like Chicago, New York, and L.A. and from south of the border. The arrival of Mexicans, Salvadorans, Hondurans, and others to fill jobs in poultry plants has led to an economic resurgence in many rural towns. But the arrival of Latinos has been hard for many towns to accept. Many such rural communities of which have reached only an uneasy understanding between the majority white population and the black minority. Throwing a third group of people into the mix has been further complicated by the fact that the newest arrivals don’t play “American” sports but instead soccer.