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The World's Game
JUNE 2006
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The World's Game
This month 32 nations will compete for the World Cup of soccer, the "beautiful game" that unites and divides countries around the globe. To celebrate that we bring you excerpts from The Thinking Fan's Guide to the World Cup.
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By Sean Wilsey
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Photographs by Marco Anelli, Grazia Neri
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"Introduction" by Sean Wilsey
"IVORY COAST—The Way to Win Juju on the Field," by Paul Laity
"ENGLAND—Faded Glory: Taming the Hooligans," by Nick Hornby
"BRAZIL—Ballet with Ball: A Love Story," by John Lanchester
"COSTA RICA—Soccer Inc: Marketing Fanaticism," by Matthew Yeomans
"SPAIN—Morality Play: Soccer as Theater," by Robert Coover
"ANGOLA—A Greater Goal: Healing a War-Torn Land," by Henning Mankell
"ARGENTINA—Ode to Maradona: Falklands' Revenge," by Thomas Jones
"CROATIA—Group Therapy: A Nation is Born," by Courtney Angela Brkic
SPAIN
Morality Play: Soccer as Theater
By Robert Coover
Spain, summer of '82. The smog cap over Barcelona is like the lid of a pressure cooker, ablaze with sunlight, and up here on the top tier of the little Sarriá soccer stadium, where Brazil, Italy, and Argentina are meeting in a World Cup knockout round-robin, they seem to have sold ten tickets for every square foot of space. We have to go an hour and a half early just to squeeze in at all. No way to sit, no chance to go for drinks, by the time the matches start it's hard to breathe. My teenage son spends one entire game hanging over an exit from a stair railing. Each day we say: If it's not bloody sensational, we'll go to a bar and watch it on TV, this is crazy. And each day we stay.
We've been here before. The other time, in 1977, two years after the death of the dictator Franco, it was raining and dark and turning cold. We stayed that time, too, huddled under an umbrella high up on the roof under the floodlights in the blustery winds and pouring rain in the only seats we could get, and happy to have them. That night we were watching a late autumn Spanish league match between the two archrivals of this city, FC (Fútbol Club) Barcelona and Real Club Deportivo Español (the Spanish Royal Sports Club), a match that was more like a reenactment of the Spanish Civil War than a mere athletic event.
There are, it sometimes seems, only two universal games: war and soccer. War is perhaps closer to the realm of fantasy, soccer to that of the real, but both share this ubiquity and centrality, as though arising from some collective libidinous source, primary and intuitive. Perhaps they are simply variations of the same game, modern industrial-era ritualizations of some common activity from the Dreamtime of the species, back when both used the same players and the same field—which is to say, all the men of the tribe and all of nature. Still today, they often fade into one another. Soccer managers "declare war," generals apply soccer tactics and terminology, warlike violence invades the soccer field, spreads into the stands and out into the communities, soldiers wear their team colors into battle, fan clubs are known as "armies."
The explanations advanced for soccer's intense mysterious power, the trancelike quality of great matches, its worldwide domination over all other sports, have been many. There is the game's inherent theatricality—not the razzmatazz of an American halftime, but the inner dramas of sin and redemption, the testing of virtue, the pursuit of pattern and cohesion, the collision of paradoxical forces. Soccer has often been compared to Greek tragedy, or seen as a kind of open-ended morality play. Perhaps the difficulty in scoring (and thus the usual narrowness of margins of victory, even between teams of markedly unequal ability) intensifies this sense of theater, causing the denouement—or the collective catharsis—to be withheld almost always until the final whistle. Nor, until that whistle, is there relief from the tyranny of time's ceaseless flow: Once you've fallen into a game, there is no getting out. The player must stay with that flow, maintain the rhythm, press for advantage, preserving all his skills, his mind locked into the shifting patterns; and the spectator, though less arduously, shares this experience.
One is left at the end, not with data, but with impressionistic images of bodies in motion. Nothing of importance can be statistically recorded about a match except corners, shots, goals, and saves (the American effort to record assists is admirable but—since it's often a complete mystery, even with TV replays, who's scored the goal—a bit desperate), and these will tell you almost nothing about the game itself. The player who actually wins the game may be the one who moves into space at the opposite side of the field, drawing a defender, forcing a new configuration upon the defense and making virtually inevitable a goal that was before impossible, but no one—not even he—may be aware of this. It's all narrative, and thus subjective: Each game is a story, a sequence of ambivalent metaphors, a personal revelation couched in the idiom of the faith. No game I know of is so dependent upon such flowing intangibles as "pattern" and "rhythm" and "vision" and "understanding." Which may all be illusions. And at the same time it is a very simple game: like dreams, almost childlike.
(Click here to read Robert Coover's entire essay. He's a novelist and essayist, first became obsessed with soccer while living in Spain. He has since chased the game through several decades and continents. His most recent book is A Child Again.)
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