What is American soccer culture? Ask that question to 100 people and you may very well receive 100 different responses. People’s perception of American soccer culture depends entirely on where they are coming from. Soccer moms, for instance, have very different perceptions of soccer culture in this country than do immigrants recently arrived here. Yet despite the obvious level of diversity among Americans involved with the sport, many observers ignore this variety and attempt to make proclamations about a single monolithic entity called “American soccer culture.”
I’m from a town of 4,000 people. The idea that my hometown would host any kind of professional team is laughable. So I was surprised recently to find out about Gretna FC, a Scottish club from a town of 3,000. Gretna won promotion last season and will play in the Scottish Premier League for the first time ever beginning this year.
Gretna players celebrate their promotion
The town of Gretna is best known as the wedding capital of Scotland, a distinction it initially gained by catering to underage English couples looking to take advantage of the Scots’ less restrictive marriage laws. Gretna FC also has a history of eloping, as the club played until 2002 in the Northern Premier League of England. Since returning to Scottish football, the Weddingmakers, as Gretna are affectionately known, have moved quickly through the ranks and next year will play the likes of Rangers and Celtic. But Gretna, it turns out, is not the only top division team from a small town. (more…)
I would not be so presumptuous as to assume that major news outlets get their ideas from reading my website, but it sure was a coincidence that so many things I have written about popped in stories this week.
The Irish Independent, for example, ran a story on Brazilian maestro Kaká revealing his “I Belong to Jesus” t-shirt after AC Milan won the Champions League. As I have previously written, Kaká is perhaps the most high profile evangelical Christian soccer player. Given his incredible skill, Kaká is often given a platform to share his religious views and he never fails to do so. Hopefully, though, this doesn’t mean that God approves of the cynical catenaccio that Milan used to win the final (Spanish newspaper AS had a headline the day after the match reading Campeón sin Fútbol, roughly meaning “Champion Without Playing.”)
I remember being surprised when I first read that soccer cleats (that’s American for boots) are commonly made from kangaroo leather. I was browsing through a soccer products catalog and came across the description. With a child’s naivete (I was probably 10 or so at the time), I assumed that this “kangaroo leather” couldn’t actually be made from those cute Australian animals. I was wrong, of course. Many high-level cleats today are made from the pelts of those adorable marsupials.
Soon to be seen on David Beckham’s feet
The first recorded pair of football boots came when Henry VIII of England ordered a pair from the Great Wardrobe in 1526. The royal shopping list for footwear states: “45 velvet pairs and 1 leather pair for football.” At that time, boots were made from cowhide.Throughout the early development of soccer, cowhide continued to be used to make cleats. The large bovine population in the UK, where soccer was codified, led to the wide adoption of cowhide to make boots. This material was also well suited to players’ requirements at the time, which were more about self-protection, rather than improving touch on the ball. The Wikipedia article on football boots says that they “were originally heavy boots with protection for the ankle, and these remained the standard style of boot in northern Europe for many years where the boots needed to stand up to the rigours of use on muddy winter pitches.”
An old school football boot, likely made of cowhide
But as soccer spread to areas with different climates, a new type of boots came to be used. “A lighter boot without ankle protection and resembling a studded shoe became popular in southern Europe and South America where pitches were generally harder and less muddy and this eventually became the standard style.”
The Puma Super Atom, the first screw-in boot
In addition to making the switch from hi-tops to low-tops, European and South American practitioners of soccer brought about a style of play that valued touch on the ball. As anyone who has used a pair of boots made from cowhide can attest, the material is relatively stiff. To advance the game, new materials were needed.
One material stood out among the various options. It was kangaroo leather, a material whose properties had been recognized since the 19th century, as former British citizens settled en masse in Oz. That Australia stayed a member of the Commonwealth even after independence in 1901 meant that trading connections with the UK remained strong. Australia has been a relatively small contributor to the world game in terms of players, but in terms of materials, its exportation of kangaroo leather fundamentally changed the production of footwear.
Kangaroo leather caught on because it is light, strong, and soft. According to the website Soccer-Boots.com:
Kangaroo hide is the toughest and most durable available and been used to produce quality sports shoes for rugby, American football, baseball, basketball, tennis and cycling shoes for over a century. It is lightweight yet very strong and many times stronger than the same thickness of cowhide. Comfortable and supple it requires no break-in period and gives the player a tight fit with optimal feel for the ball.
There is a scientific rationale for why kangaroo leather has these properties:
The skin of the Kangaroo does not contain sweat glands or erector pili muscles, which would weaken the skin surface. The yellow elastic fibres (elastin) are evenly distributed throughout the skin thickness which gives the leather greater tenacity.
Soccer-boots.com quotes a study that found “kangaroo leather retains between 30% and 60% of its original tensile strength, as compared to a retention rate of 1% -4% for calf and bovine leathers.”
Lotto Stadios, my favorite kangaroo leather cleats
As kangaroo leather has become more and more common in soccer cleats (see this list for some of the most well known ones), some complaints have been raised. Most vociferous is the group Viva!, (Vegetarians International Voice for Animals) which fills its website with complaints that focus primarily on inhumane treatment of kangaroos and the impact that widespread killing of the indigenous Australian animals has on the ecology.
A Viva! protest
Viva! claims that kangaroo harvesters routinely ignore government guidelines on humane killing of the animals. They say, for example, that a “million “joeys” die – battered to death or left to starve when their mothers are killed.”
The large numbers of adult and baby kangaroos killed (Viva! says that, at a minimum, 100,000 kangaroos were killed to make the 500,000 pairs of Predator Mania boots that Adidas sold in 2002) are also an ecological problem. Viva! claims that the so-called kangaroo harvest undertaken to reduce overpopulation is simply an excuse for companies to kill the animals for profit. The effects of reduced kangaroo populations, which are well adapted to the Australian environment, are not completely understood.
Hilariously, an article in The Independent on Viva!’s efforts finishes with a recipe for sauteed kangaroo. It reminds me of this t-shirt I once saw in the butcher’s department of a grocery store.
Viva!, not surprisingly, promotes the use of synthetic materials to make soccer cleats. Until recently, this would have been unthinkable, but several boots have been produced with man-made materials (see, for example, the Nike Mercurial Vapors)
The Danish company Hummel has gone a bit retro in their use of materials. Rather than using synthetics, they have been promoting a new boot that uses goatskin leather.
Hummel’s 4.2 Concept FGC, made of goatskin
One advantage these shoes have is that ten year olds like me won’t wonder if they are really made of hopping marsupials. There is also the benefit that animal rights organizations are unlikely to raise a stink over the use of goatskins in soccer cleats (the cuteness equation goes: goats < kangaroos). Whether they succeed, however, will ultimately depend on their quality. If goatskin can be used to make boots as high-quality as those available today, they may be become commonplace. If not, expect to see kangaroo leather boots for a long time to come.
Coming out threatens to expose the homoerotic components of what they prefer to think of as simply male bonding. And it generally is. It’s not so much that there’s a repressed homosexuality at play (except for a small minority), only that there’s a tremendous fear that the behavior might be labeled as such. Or, as I heard the anti-gay epithets pour forth that gay men in the locker room would somehow violate this sacred space by sexualizing it.’
Amaechi knew he would get some negative responses to his decision to come out and another former NBA player, Tim Hardaway, obliged, letting fly on a Miami radio station. Hardaway ranted, “yeah, I’m homophobic,” insisted he “hate[s] gay people,” and said that “[homosexuality] shouldn’t exist in the world or in the United States.”
Amaechi took it in stride, telling ABC News he wasn’t surprised. “To me, it’s astonishing that anybody would be surprised to hear them,” he said.
Amaechi’s lack of surprise probably came, at least in part, because he is almost surely aware of another English athlete who came out. When the former Norwich City striker Justin Fashanu came out in an interview with British tabloid The Sun in 1990, he did not expect the response he received. “I genuinely thought that if I came out in the worst newspapers and remained strong and positive about being gay,” he was quoted as saying, “there would be nothing more that [people] could say.” In fact, the opposite occurred.
The denunciations began with Justin Fashanu’s own brother, John, himself a professional soccer player. John Fashanu said bluntly, “My gay brother is an outcast” and disowned him. His manager, the often-lionized Brian Clough, followed suit calling Fashanu a “bloody poof.” Fashanu was denounced by many blacks in England for “bringing shame on their race.” Tony Sewell, columnist for black weekly magazine The Voice, wrote,
[We] are sick and tired of tortured queens playing hide and seek around their closets. Homosexuals are the greatest queer-bashers around. No other group of people are so preoccupied with making their own sexuality look dirty.
Given the response of family, coaches, and members of the media, it is hardly surprising that the British public’s response to Fashanu’s coming out was largely negative. The groundwork for the homophobic chants that would follow from the terraces of stadiums across England was laid by the attitudes of those in power. Fashanu committed suicide in 1998 and the response to his coming out surely played a part in the tragic end to his life.
(Fashanu was a very troubled man, however, and his sexuality was not the only reason for his suicide. At the time of his death, there was also a warrant out for his arrest in Maryland for having sex with a 17 year-old boy.)
So, will John Amaechi in 2007 be treated in the same way as Justin Fashanu 17 years ealier? The United States and Britian have moved forward on issues of gay rights, to be sure, and there is much wider acceptance of homosexuality in society at large. But if Amaechi’s announcement shows us anything, it may be that homophobia retains a strong presence in sports.
Tim Hardaway was not the only NBA player to make his feelings known about gay players. Oliver Irish writes on the Guardian Unlimited sports blog about the responses of several current NBA stars. He quotes the Sixers’ Steven Hunter saying “As long as he don’t [sic] make any advances toward me I’m fine with it.†LeBron James insisted it is all a matter of trust:
With team-mates you have to be trustworthy, and if you’re gay and you’re not admitting that you are, then you are not trustworthy. So that’s like the No1 thing as team-mates – we all trust each other. You’ve heard of the in-room, locker room code. What happens in the locker room stays in there. It’s a trust factor, honestly.
Irish adroitly analyzes the underlying attitudes present in such pronouncements:
You don’t need to be a master of the subtext to see that Hunter, like so many athletes, is pretty far from cool with sharing a locker room with a gay man. It speaks volumes for the rampant vanity of many sports stars today that Hunter would qualify his tolerance – and it is mere tolerance, rather than acceptance – of Amaechi’s sexuality in such terms: “Sure, I’ll play ball with the guy. We’ll just be two sweaty, muscular black men trying manfully to get a rubber ball through a hoop… but if he tries to touch my balls in the showers, boy, there will be a ruckus.”
But these remain isolated examples in a sports environment which remains, by and large, wary of homosexuals, if not overtly hostile toward them. In December, Simon Kuper of the Financial Times reported on three gay players in Germany who were set to come out of the closet. As of yet, none has. John Amaechi is to be applauded for having the courage to announce he is a gay athlete. But sadly, the response to John Amaechi’s coming out may indicate not how far the world of sports has come in its attitudes about homosexuality, but how far it still has to go.
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Soccer is often seen as a tool for conflict resolution. During World War I, German and British soldiers called a “Christmas Truce” and celebrated the holiday by organizing a soccer game between the warring sides. Ivory Coast’s qualification for the 2006 World Cup was seen as helping to heal the wounds of 17 years of Civil War. Yaya Toure said at the time, “Politics means we are divided, but I think football can sort that out.”
While soccer has often helped to heal rifts, soccer fields have also been the sites of political violence. Unfortunately, nearly every example of peace brought about in a stadium can be matched by an atrocity perpetrated on the pitch. Such atrocities have occurred throughout the world. Given soccer’s unrivaled global popularity, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the best and worst of human nature has been witnessed on its fields.
I began writing this post on political violence on the soccer field with a few examples in mind (Afghanistan, Chile, and Rwanda). With just a bit of research have come up with many, many more. I am sure there are examples I have not documented here; I had to stop looking in order to share what I have compiled.
I have broken the examples of political violence on soccer fields into the regions in which they occurred. I want to stress that these are all examples of political violence on the field. We all know about hooligans who bring violence to stadiums, but they are not what I am focusing on here.
Asia
Long before the Taliban gained worldwide notoriety as the hosts of terror network Al Qaeda, it was primarily known for its brutal human rights violations. Chief among these was the public execution of violators of its extreme interpretation of Islamic law. In 1999, a woman named Zarmeena was accused of murdering her husband with a hammer as he slept. Zarmeena was brought to the national stadium and publicly executed on the dirt field, which still had soccer markings. The AP reported at the time:
Zarmeena was taken from the back of a pickup truck that drove into the sports stadium. Two female police officers, both in deep blue burqas, held Zarmeena’s arms. Witnesses said the convicted woman walked slowly, each step followed by a pause. When she reached the center of the field she was ordered by one of the women to sit.
Behind her a young Taliban soldier, his head wrapped in the traditional turban, took aim with his Kalashnikov rifle. But suddenly Zarmeena stood up and tried to flee. A policewoman stopped her and forced her to sit, said witnesses.
The Taliban soldier moved closer and shot her three times.
Afterward from the crowd several people shouted “God is great.”
The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan has the full AP report, complete with photos and a video (warning: it’s very gruesome).
After overthrowing the Taliban 2001, the ISAF (Internationl Security Assistance Forces) realized how potent the image of the soccer stadium is. What better propaganda coup than replacing public executions with an actual soccer match? They organized a game in 2001 between an Afghan team and a group of their forces.
Soccer returns to Afghanistan’s National Stadium
The Taliban may have gotten the idea of using stadiums for public executions from the Chinese, who used the tactic for years. Although capital punishment in China is now carried out in private by lethal injection, for years the Communist government used very public ceremonies to execute its criminals.
The Ottawa Citizen reported in 1994 that “In Chengdu, capital of Sichuan province, photographs from a September sentencing at a sports stadium were displayed prominently in the city centre for at least two months.” In 1998, 30 people were killed in the soccer stadium in the southern city of Shenzhen. 2001 saw public executions in stadiums, again in Sichuan province. A report by Amnesty International in that same year suggested that mass executions were occurring at the Beijing Workers’ Stadium, which will host games at the 2008 Olympics.
Condemned criminals are paraded before a crowd in a stadium in Chengdu in 2001
East Timor was the site of extreme political violence during the 1990s, as it fought for independence from Indonesia. A soccer stadium in Dili, capital of the former Portuguese colony, was the site of alleged torture by Australian troops sent there to stabilize the country. The Sydney Morning Herald reported in 2003 that members of an anti-independence militia group “were marched by their Australian Army captors from the Aitarak headquarters in Dili to an empty football stadium. There they were forced into the wasp-infested toilets and had their heads pushed down toilet bowls.”
Africa
Political violence and soccer have been prevalent throughout Africa’s history. In 1979, the Toronto Globe and Mail reported on refugees from Angola who claimed that “public mass executions took place frequently at a soccer stadium near the Angolan capital of Luanda.”
15 years later, Rwanda was the site of extreme political and ethnic violence. During the 1994 genocide, 500,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were murdered. Many of these murders took place in soccer stadiums. A report titled “A Quantitative Analysis of Genocide in Kibuye Prefecture, Rwanda” lists 4,500 people killed at Kibuye Stadium and nearly 3,500 killed at Gatwaro Stadium. Thousands of others were murdered at stadiums across Rwanda.
Trials against leaders of the genocide led to many death penalty sentences. In 1998, the Globe and Mail reported that the first 33 people convicted of being involved in the genocide were themselves put to death in a public execution in a soccer stadium in the capital, Kigali.
Latin America
One of the most well known instances of political violence occurring in a soccer stadium occurred in Chile. Shortly after seizing power in a military coup, dictator Augusto Pinochet rounded up many thousands of his political enemies and took them to the National Stadium, where they remained for several months. Conditions in the stadium were awful, with torture common. Many murders were also carried out at the stadium. A Chilean commission studying the torture later offered even more details:
[T]he room for medical treatment was sometimes used for [torture]. Firing squads were simulated and other cruel techniques were employed. As a rule the prisoners were subjected to constant and intense interrogation.
The representatives and medical representatives of the IRCC (International Red Cross Committee) have found that many prisoners show signs they have undergone psychological and physical torture.
This Commission also concluded that a number of executions took place inside the National Stadium.
Prisoners stand on the terraces of Chile’s National Stadium in 1973
Chile’s neighbor Argentina also had a ruthless military dictatorship in the 1970s that was keen to use soccer to maintain its power. Although no evidence exists that stadiums themselves were used as torture centers like in Chile, the violence in that country could not be hidden when it hosted the 1978 World Cup. The military junta’s policy of “disappearing” its political enemies was known around the world, leading Dutch superstar Johan Cruyff to boycott the tournament. Those players who made the trip to South America may have tried to shield their eyes from the brutal policies of the Argentine rulers, but they were closer than they may have realized to sites of torture in the country.
[N]ear the World Cup stadium there were hidden concentration camps — they were so close that the fans’ shouts of celebration when the Argentine national team scored a goal could drown out the screams of the tortured people.
Europe
The break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s lead to a period of brutal violence, as people in the Balkans fought to establish the borders and identities of their newly independent republics. Soccer played a part in sparking the conflict and soccer stadiums often were the sites of violence.
As Franklin Foer documents in his his book How Soccer Explains the World, “a match between Red Star and Dinamo “was the first time in fifty years that Yugoslvia had seen its ethnic groups openly battle one another.” A brawl exploded between fans of the Serbian team (Red Star) and Croatian team (Dinamo), which spilled onto the field itself. As Serbian police beat a Dinamo fan, Zvonomir Boban made himself into a hero of the Croatian people by directly a flying kick at the cop, as seen in this video.
Of the many countries which attained independence during the 1990s Balkan Wars, the one which experienced the most violence was Bosnia. Massacres there have since become well known, especially that which occurred at Srebrenica. Of the nearly 9,000 Bosnian men murdered in that town, many were executed in a local soccer stadium. David Rohde, a reporter for the Christian Science Monitor who would later win a Pulitzer for his investigation, found that “At a soccer stadium in a nearby town, human feces, blood, and other evidence indicated large numbers of persons were confined, and perhaps shot.”Middle EastIt will probably surprise few that there has been violence in soccer stadiums in the Middle East. The region has both a passion for the game and governments far from averse to using violence.
Soccer in Iraq under Saddam Hussein was controlled his son Odai. The elder son of Saddam tortured many players based on their performances on the field. A 2003 San Francisco Chronicle article depicted some of the brutal practices Odai used to punish players who failed to win matches. Before the games began, the national team would watch videos of Odai preemptively threatening the team if they lost. The threats were very real as the post-game punishments demonstrate:
A missed penalty kick could bring a humiliating head-shaving at the Stadium of the People.
Sometimes players were forced to play “matches” in which they would kick concrete balls around the prison yard in 130-degree heat.
If a player made a number of poor passes, Odai would sometimes call him into the dressing room, where he would be punched or slapped once for every errant pass.
Another player, Sharar Haddar, has said that Odai dragged him and his teammates over concrete, pulling skin off their backs, then yanked them through a pit so that sand stuck to their raw skin and made them jump in a vat of sewage.
A device used by Odai Hussein to torture Iraqi soccer players
Israel’s 1982 incursion into Lebanon is remembered most for the massacres carried out against Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. At least 800 people were killed when the Israeli army, led by then defense minister Ariel Sharon, turned a blind eye as a Lebanese Christian militia rounded up Palestianians in these two camps and executed them. The murders occurred in many places, one of which was the local soccer stadium. The stadium was initially used as an interrogation center, but according to a report by Israeli journalist Amnon Kapeliouk, “28 dead prisoners were discovered on the premises with their hands tied behind their backs.” Thomas Friedman would win a Pulitzer prize for his reporting on the massacre, and he details how soccer stadiums were the sites of torture and murder.
Conflict involving Israel, its Arab neighbors, and soccer fields arose again in April of 2006. The terrorist group Islamic Jihad fired rockets from the Gaza Strip which landed on the Israeli kibbutz of Karmiya. In response, the Jewish state identified the launching pad for these rockets and bombed it. Where did they bomb? A soccer field.
Other Examples
Numerous other examples exist of political violence perpetrated on soccer fields. Amnesty International has a series of reports condemning police forces for brutally cracking down on crowds in stadiums across the world (Tunisia, Turkey, and Syria for example). The 1968 Olympics in Mexico are remembered for the Tlatelolco Massacre, in which 200 to 300 student demonstrators were killed by army of that country. Reporter Susan Bilello described the lead-up to the event, which occurred near one of the world’s great stadiums, which would host the 1970 and 1986 World Cup finals.
Ten days later, the lighting of the Olympic torch in Aztec Stadium peacefully inaugurated the first games ever hosted by a developing country. Outside the stadium, troops and tanks were poised beyond the view of television cameras.
The violence in the breakaway republic of Chechnya spilled over into the soccer stadium when Russian-installed president Akhmad Kadyrov was killed while at a stadium in the capital Grozny (only three weeks after Kadyrov’s death, the local team, Terek Grozny, won the Russian Cup). And Haiti’s bid for stability has been interrupted by periodic violence, which has included massacres in soccer stadiums (in July and September of 2006). Even a “Play for Peace” match organized to help stamp out violence in the Caribbean country descended into violence, with at least six people killed.
Soccer fields have been the site of political violence throughout history. Dictators, armies, independence fighters, rebels, terrorists, and even peace keepers have perpetrated unspeakable offenses on the pitch. Ugliness has stained the fields of the beautiful game far too often.
