Soccernomics (20 page)

The first, from 1956 through the late 1960s, is dominated by the capital cities of fascist regimes. Of the first eleven European Cups, eight were won either by Real Madrid (favorite club of General Franco) or Benfica (from the capital of the Portuguese dictator Salazar). Seven of the losing teams in the first sixteen finals also came from fascist capitals: Real, Benfica, and, in 1971, Panathinaikos from the Athens of the colonels’ regime.

But by the start of the 1970s, the dominance of fascist capitals was eroding. Fascist governments seldom outlast their leaders, and Portugal’s had entered a twilight after Salazar died in 1970. Meanwhile, everyone was waiting for Franco to go, too.

Yet even after fascism disappeared, teams from Europe’s remaining dictatorial capitals continued to thrive. Steaua Bucharest, run by a son of the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceau¸sescu, won the cup in 1986. Red Star Belgrade triumphed in 1991 just as Yugoslavia was breaking into pieces. The same phenomenon was at work in the communist countries T H E S U B U R B A N N E W S A G E N T S

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as in the fascist capitals before them. Dictators send resources to the capital because that is where they and their bureaucrats and soldiers and secret policemen live. Also, it’s the last place where they want a popular uprising. So the dictators do up the main buildings, boost the local economy, and help the soccer club. That’s totalitarian soccer.

A communist takeover of Britain could have done wonders for a capital team like Arsenal. Just look at the triumphs of Dynamo Berlin, founded in the former East Germany with the express purpose of keeping the league title in the capital. The club president until the Berlin Wall fell was Erich Mielke, feared octogenarian chief of the East German secret police, the Stasi. Mielke loved Dynamo. He made all the best East German players play for it. He also talked to referees, and Dynamo won a lot of matches with penalties in the ninety-fifth minute.

Dynamo won the East German league title every year from 1979 to 1988. This was possibly Europe’s most extreme case of politicians rigging the soccer market.

Dynamo never got far in the European Cup, but General Franco’s local team did. The general made a point of catching Real Madrid’s games on the radio, taking a transistor along with him if he was out partridge shooting, writes Jimmy Burns in his
When Beckham Went to
Spain
. It wasn’t so much that Franco fixed referees or gave Real money.

Rather, he helped the club indirectly, by centralizing Spain’s power and resources. And he believed that Real’s European Cups helped him. Fer-nando María Castiella, foreign minister under Franco, called Real Madrid “the best embassy we have ever had.”

DOWN AND OUT, PARIS AND LONDON:

THE FAILURE OF DEMOCRATIC CAPITALS

Totalitarian capitals got off to a great start in the European Cup. But for the first forty-one years of the trophy’s life, the democratic capitals of Europe never won it.

There is only one caveat: Amsterdam is nominally the Dutch capital, and Ajax of that city won the Champions cup four times. However, 136

Amsterdam really is only nominally the capital. The government, Queen Beatrix, and the embassies are all in The Hague, a city that often does not even have a team in the Dutch premier division. The Hague’s only professional club, ADO, traditionally plays its games in front of a couple of thousand people, a large proportion of whom are nuts. Little happens on the field beyond the occasional smoke bomb or plague of rabbits. This is the curse of the democratic capital.

Instead of western capitals, provincial western European cities have dominated the competition. The rule of the provinces holds true even in the most obsessively centralized countries. Teams from five provincial British cities have won the European Cup, but never one from London.

Olympique Marseille won the cup in 1993, but Paris St Germain never has. Porto has won it twice since Portugal went democratic, while the Lisbon clubs have been winless since 1962. Clubs from Milan and Turin win all the time, but never one from Rome. The cup has gone to Munich and Hamburg, but never to Bonn or Berlin. For many years, in fact, neither of those cities even had a team in the Bundesliga. Hertha Berlin, the only big club in the current capital, has not been champion of Germany since the Weimar Republic.

Capitals—especially London, Paris, and Moscow—tend to have the greatest concentrations of national resources. It’s therefore striking how badly their clubs seem to underperform. We can speculate about why this is. But perhaps the main reason teams from democratic capital cities are not up to much is psychological. In capital cities, no soccer club can matter all that much. There was an instructive sight, sometime in the late 1990s, of a group of visiting fans from an English provincial town wandering down London’s Baker Street yelling their club songs at passersby. In their minds, they were shaming the Londoners, invading the city for a day, making all the noise. But the Londoners they were shouting at—many of them foreigners anyway—didn’t care, or even understand the point they were making.

Capitals simply have less to prove than provincial cities. They have bigger sources of pride than their soccer teams. Londoners don’t go around singing songs about their city, and they don’t believe that a T H E S U B U R B A N N E W S A G E N T S

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prize for Arsenal or Chelsea would enhance London’s status. Roman Abramovich and David Dein brought trophies to Chelsea and Arsenal, but neither could ever have been voted mayor of London. Soccer matters even less in Paris, where it’s possible to spend a lifetime without ever knowing that soccer exists. Paris St Germain, whose ground is not even entirely within the city’s Peripherique ring road, is hardly going to become the main focus of Parisian pride.

London, Paris, and Moscow don’t need to win the Champions

League. It is a different type of city where a soccer club can mean everything: the provincial industrial town. These are the places that have ousted the fascist capitals as rulers of European soccer.

DARK SATANIC MILLS:

WHY FACTORY TOWNS BECAME SOCCER TOWNS

In 1878 a soccer club started up just by the newish railway line in Manchester. Because the players worked at the Newton Heath carriage works of the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway Company, their team was called Newton Heath. They played in work clogs against other work teams.

Famously, Newton Heath became Manchester United. But what

matters here are the club’s origins, well recounted in Jim White’s
Manchester United: The Biography
. White describes the L&YR’s workers, “sucked in from all over the country to service the growing need for locomotives and carriages.” Life in Manchester then was neither fun nor healthy, he writes. “In the middle of the nineteenth century the average male life expectancy in Little Ireland, the notorious part of Manchester . . . was as low as seventeen.” This was still the same brutal Manchester where a few decades before Karl Marx’s pal Friedrich Engels had run his father’s factory, the industrial city so awful it inspired communism.

Industrial Manchester had grown like no other city on earth. In 1800

it had been a tranquil little place of 84,000 inhabitants, so insignificant that as late as 1832 it did not even have a member of Parliament. It was 138

the Industrial Revolution that changed everything. Workers poured in from English villages, from Ireland, from feeble economies everywhere.

By 1900 Manchester was the sixth-biggest city in Europe, with 1.25

million inhabitants, more than Moscow at the time. Inevitably, most

“Mancunians” were rootless migrants. Unmoored in their new home, many of them embraced the local soccer clubs. Soccer must have given them something of the sense of the community that they had previously known in their villages.

The same thing happened in Britain’s other new industrial cities: the migrants attached themselves to soccer clubs with a fervor unknown in more established towns. When the English Football League was founded in 1888, six of the twelve founding members came from industrial Lancashire, while the other six were from the industrial Midlands. Montague Shearman wrote for the Badminton Library that year:

“No words of ours can adequately describe the present popularity [of soccer] which, though great in the metropolis, is infinitely greater in the large provincial towns. . . . It is no rare thing in the north and midlands for 10,000 people to pay money to watch an ordinary club match, or for half as many again to assemble for a ‘Cup Tie.’” It helped that workers in the textile industry in the Northwest began to get Saturdays off in the 1890s, a luxury that workers elsewhere in Britain did not enjoy.

By 1892, all twenty-eight English professional clubs were from the North or the Midlands. Soccer was as northern a game as rugby league.

The champions in the Victorian era came from northern industrial towns like Preston, Sheffield, or Sunderland, then still among the richest spots on earth. When these places became too poor and small to support successful clubs, the league title merely migrated to larger northern cities.

The legacy of the Industrial Revolution still shapes English fandom.

Today the combined population of Greater Merseyside, Greater Manchester, and Lancashire County is less than 5.5 million, or a little more than 10 percent of the English population. Nonetheless, in the 2009–

2010 season 40 percent of all clubs in the Premier League were based in this region. Their advantage: more than a century of brand building.

Manchester United became arguably the most popular club on earth T H E S U B U R B A N N E W S A G E N T S

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largely because Manchester had been the first industrial city on earth.

The club is only the biggest local soccer relic of that era. The forty-three professional clubs within ninety miles of Manchester probably represent the greatest soccer density on earth.

Almost all of Europe’s best soccer cities have a profile like Manchester’s. They were once new industrial centers that sucked in hapless villagers. The newcomers cast around for something to belong to, and settled on soccer. Supporting the club helped them make a place for themselves in the city. So clubs mattered more here, and grew bigger, than in capital cities or ancient cathedral towns with old-established hierarchies.

The market research company Sport+Markt has been studying fandom since 1994. In 2008 it asked ninety-six hundred people interested in soccer, spread over sixteen European countries, to name their “preferred” club. The top twenty are shown in figure 7.1.

F I G U R E 7 . 1
Europe’s favorite clubs

Estimated number of fans

Club

(in millions)

Barcelona 44.2

Real Madrid

41.9

Manchester United

37.6

Chelsea

25.6

Zenit St Petersburg

23.9

Liverpool

23.0

Arsenal

21.3

AC Milan

21.0

Bayern Munich

19.8

Juventus

17.5

CSKA Moscow

11.1

Inter Milan

10.3

Olympique Lyon

9.4

Olympique Marseille

9.4

Galatasaray

9.0

Spartak Moscow

8.1

Fenerbahce

7.3

Wis*a Kraków

6.5

Ajax Amsterdam

6.5

Dynamo Moscow

5.7

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It would be wrong to treat the results as at all precise. The figures differed significantly from those in Sport+Markt’s survey of the previous year. In that one year Chelsea, for instance, had supposedly gained almost 6 million fans. Enormous numbers of people change their answers to the question, “Which is your preferred team?” depending on who just won the league or where David Beckham happens to be playing. However, the survey does tell us something. Few would dispute that this top twenty includes most of Europe’s best-supported clubs. And there is something remarkable about this list: the biggest clubs are not in the biggest cities. They are in the formerly industrial ones.

Of course, some teams from capitals are popular. They would be, given that London, Paris, Rome, and Moscow are by far the largest cities in their countries. Clubs in capitals have unparalleled catchment areas, even given the profusion of local teams. But in none of the seven largest European countries surveyed does the best-supported club come from a capital city. Here is the favorite team of each large country, according to Sport+Markt:

F I G U R E 7 . 2
Favorite teams of each large country
Country

Best-supported club

England

Manchester United

France

Olympique Lyon

Germany

Bayern Munich

Italy AC

Milan

Poland

Wis*a Kraków

Russia

Zenit St Petersburg

Spain

Barcelona

In six out of seven countries, the number-one team comes from a provincial town with a strong industrial history. The sole exception is France, where Lyon is a provincial town but was mostly bypassed by the Industrial Revolution. We saw how its popularity has come from nowhere since just 2002, thanks to their brilliant gaming of the transfer market under president Jean-Michel Aulas.

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Taken together, the provincial industrial towns in Sport+Markt’s top twenty dominate European soccer. Between them they won twenty-seven out of forty-seven European Cups from 1963 to 2009. The smaller industrial or port cities Glasgow, Nottingham, Birmingham, Porto, Dortmund, Eindhoven, and Rotterdam have won another nine between them.

And all these cities have a story much like Manchester’s, although their growth spurts happened later. Peasants arrived from the countryside, leaving all their roots behind. Needing something to belong to in their new cities, they chose soccer. That’s why in all these places, the soccer clubs arose soon after the factories.

In most of the cities on Sport+Markt’s list, the industrial migrants arrived in a whoosh in the late nineteenth century. Munich had 100,000