Soccernomics (21 page)

inhabitants in 1852, and five times as many by 1901. Barcelona’s population trebled in the same period to 533,000 people. Turin, for centuries a quiet Piedmontese town, began acquiring factories in the 1870s. Milan surged with the new railways that followed Italian reunification.

Once the local merchants had grown wealthy and discovered En -

glish ways, they founded soccer clubs: Juventus in 1897, Barcelona and AC Milan two years later, Bayern in 1900. The clubs then grew with their cities. Newly industrial Milan, for instance, sucked in so many migrants that it could eventually support two of the three most popular teams in Italy.

The second stage of the soccer boom in the continent’s industrial cities happened after the war. The 1950s and 1960s were the years of Italy’s “economic miracle,” when flocks of poor southern Italian peasants took the “train of the sun” north. Many of these people ended up in Turin, making cars for Fiat. The historian Paul Ginsborg writes, “So great and persistent was the flow from the South, that by the end of the sixties Turin had become the third largest ‘southern’

city in Italy, after Naples and Palermo.” The migrants found jobs, but not enough schools or hospitals or apartments. Often there was so little space that roommates had to take turns sleeping. Amid such dislocation, soccer mattered all the more. Goffredo Fofi, author of a study of southern immigration to Turin in the 1960s, said that “during 142

a Juventus-Palermo match, there were many enthusiastic immigrant Sicilian fans whose sons, by now, like every respectable FIAT worker, backed the home team.”

It’s one of the flukes of history that this mass migration to Turin began soon after the Superga air disaster of 1949 had decimated the city’s previous most popular team, Torino. The migrants arrived soon after Juve had established itself as the local top dog, and they helped make it a global top dog. For starters, they transmitted the passion to their relatives down south.

Barcelona experienced the same sort of growth spurt at about the same time as Turin. In the 1950s and 1960s perhaps 1.5 million Spaniards moved to the Barcelona area. Entire villages in the country’s interior were left almost empty. On wastelands outside Barcelona, self-built shantytowns sprang up—the sort of thing you might now see on the outskirts of Jakarta—packed with peasants who had left behind everything they knew. Many were illiterate. Hardly any spoke the local language, Catalan. A lot of them attached themselves to Barça. In Spain’s new Manchester, it was the quickest way to belong.

The link between industry and soccer is almost universal across Europe. The largest average crowds in all of continental Europe in the 2008–2009 season have been at Borussia Dortmund (average: 72,400), one of many clubs in the industrial Ruhr region. In France, too, it is the industrial cities that have historically loved their clubs best. The country’s few traditional hotbeds of soccer are the mining towns of Lens and Saint-Étienne, and the port of Marseille.

All these industrial cities were products of a particular era. In all of them the Industrial Revolution ended, often painfully. But besides the empty docks and factory buildings, the other legacy of industrialization was beloved soccer clubs. The quirk of a particular era gave Manchester United, Barcelona, Juventus, Bayern Munich, and the Milan clubs enough fans to dominate first their own countries, and then Europe.

If Sport+Markt had polled the popularity of soccer clubs in Turkey, it would have found the universal principle holding there, too. The country’s capital of soccer is not the capital city, Ankara, but the new in-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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dustrial powerhouse, Istanbul. The city is home to all three of Turkey’s most popular clubs: Galatasaray, Fenerbahce, and Besiktas.

It’s true that Istanbul, like St. Petersburg, was once the seat of government, but both cities lost that role more than eighty years ago, long before soccer amounted to anything in their countries. Even as late as 1950, Istanbul was a sleepy place with barely a million inhabitants.

Then it became possibly the last big European city to experience an industrial revolution. Migrants were sucked in from all over Anatolia. Between 1980 and 1985 alone, Istanbul’s population doubled. Today it is the largest city in Europe, with nearly 12 million inhabitants. The rootless peasants needed somehow to belong in their new home, and so they attached themselves to one of the city’s great clubs. Often, these were their strongest loyalties in Istanbul.

Admittedly, almost all cities in Europe have some experience of industrialization. But very few have had as much as Manchester, Turin, Milan, Istanbul, or Barcelona. These were the European cities with the most flux, the fewest long-standing hierarchies, the weakest ties between people and place. Here, there were emotional gaps to fill. This becomes obvious when we contrast the industrial cities with old towns that have a traditional upper-class streak. In England, Oxford, Cambridge, Cheltenham, Canterbury, York, and Bath are all decent-size places, with somewhere between 100,000 and 180,000

inhabitants each. Many industrial towns of that size or even smaller—Middlesbrough, Reading, Ipswich, Blackburn, Watford, Burnley—have serious soccer traditions. Yet Oxford, Cambridge, Bath, Canterbury, York, and Cheltenham between them currently have just one team in the English Football League: Cheltenham Town, which joined it only in 1999. In towns like these, with age-old hierarchies and few newcomers, people simply didn’t need soccer clubs to root themselves.

Oxford’s face to the world is the university. In industrial cities it is the soccer club. Barcelona, Marseille, and (even now) Newcastle are the pride of their cities, a symbolic two fingers up at the capital. When Barcelona wins something, the president of Catalonia traditionally 144

hoists himself up on the balcony of his palace on the Plaça Sant Jaume, and shouts at the crowds below, “Barça wins, Catalonia wins!”

These provincial clubs have armies of fans, players who will bleed for the club, and backing from local plutocrats. Bernard Tapie put money into Olympique Marseille, the Agnelli family into Juventus, and Sir John Hall into Newcastle because they wanted to be kings of their towns. Local fans and sponsors invest in these clubs partly because they feel civic pride is at stake. In the Middle Ages they would have built a cathedral instead.

Usually, provincial cities such as these only have one major club, which often becomes the only thing that many outsiders know about the place. For instance, there must be many Manchester United fans around the world who don’t know that Manchester is a city in England.

True, most provincial cities have two teams that compete for top-dog status: United and City in Manchester, Inter and AC Milan in Milan, Torino and Juventus in Turin, United and Wednesday in Sheffield, Celtic and Rangers in Glasgow, Forest and County in Nottingham, Everton, and Liverpool, Bayern and 1860 in Munich, Barça and Es-panyol in Barcelona. Many of these rivalries have something to do with religion or politics or both. But usually one team struggles. Manchester City, Torino, and 1860 Munich have all spent long phases in the lower divisions. Everton last won the league in 1987. FC Amsterdam went bust. Midsize provincial cities are simply not big enough to sustain two big clubs for long. In the end, one club pulls ahead.

”THEY MOVED THE HIGHWAY”:

THE RISE AND FALL OF SMALL TOWNS

Provincial industrial towns began to dominate the European Cup in the late 1960s. But their rule breaks down into two main periods. The first, from 1970 to 1981, is the small-town era, when clubs from some very modest places won the European Cup. Figure 7.3 shows them, with the populations not just of the cities themselves but of their entire metropolitan areas, including people in all the local suburbs.

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F I G U R E 7 . 3
European Cup winners

Club

Year(s) they won it

Metropolitan area

Feyenoord Rotterdam

1970

1 million

Ajax Amsterdam

1971–1973

1 million

Bayern Munich

1974–1976

2.9 million

Liverpool

1977–1978 and 1981

1.4 million

Nottingham Forest

1979–1980

470,000

Note that we are estimating the size of these places very generously, going way beyond the city borders. The figure for Liverpool, for instance, includes all of the local Merseyside region.

The rule of the small is even more striking when you consider some of the losing teams in European Cup finals in this era. In a remarkable four-year period from 1976 to 1979, the towns of Saint-Étienne, Mönchengladbach, Bruges, and Malmö all had teams in the final.

F I G U R E 7 . 4
Winning towns

Club

Size of town

Size of total metropolitan area

Saint-Étienne

175,000

320,000

Mönchengladbach

260,000

260,000

Bruges

115,000

270,000

Malmö

240,000

600,000

Perhaps the emblematic small-town team of the seventies is Borussia Mönchengladbach, whose rise and fall encapsulates that of all these towns.

In the 1970s Gladbach won five German titles and reached four European finals. The Bökelberg stadium, perched on a hill among the gardens of smart houses, saw the best years of Gunter Netzer, Rainer Bonhof, and Alan Simonsen. Fans drove in from neighboring Holland and Belgium, as well as from the town’s British army barracks. Decades later, a German marketing company showed that the knee-jerk response of the country’s fans to the word
counterattack
was still
Gladbach
.

It was a cozy little club: Berti Vogts spent his whole career here, and when Netzer later played in Zurich he often used to drive up, 146

sometimes to scout players for Spanish clubs, but often just to eat sausages in the canteen.

Like David Cassidy, Gladbach would have done well to combust spontaneously at the start of the eighties. In 1980 it lost its last UEFA Cup final to Eintracht Frankfurt, and the decades since have been disappointing. There was the spell in 1998, for instance, when it just couldn’t stop getting thrashed. “We can only get better,” announced Gladbach’s coach, Friedel Rausch, just before his team lost 8–2 to Bayer Leverkusen. “I feel I can solve our problems,” he said afterward.

When Gladbach lost its next match 7–1 to Wolfsburg, Rausch was sacked. Gladbach has spent most of the decade since in Germany’s second division.

This upsets leftist, educated fortysomethings all over Germany, who still dislike Bayern, revere the socialist Netzer, and on Monday morn-ings check the Gladbach result first. But there is nothing to be done.

The glory days cannot come back, because what did in Gladbach was the modern era.

In the words of Norman Bates in Hitchcock’s
Psycho
: “They moved the highway.” In the seventies Gladbach’s coach, Hennes Weisweiler, was able to build a team of boys from the local towns. The part-Dutch Bonhof came from nearby Emmerich, Vogts was an orphan from Neuss-Buttgen, and Hacki Wimmer, who did Netzer’s dirty work, spent decades after his playing career running his parents’ stationery shop just down the road in Aachen.

These stars stayed at Gladbach for years because there was little more money to be earned anywhere else in soccer, because most rich clubs were allowed only a couple of foreign players at most, and because their own club could generally stop them from leaving. In short, there were market restraints. That’s why Gladbach, Nottingham Forest, Bruges, and Saint-Étienne could thrive in the 1970s. Even then big cities had bigger resources, but they had limited freedom, or limited desire, to use them.

The beginning of the end for small towns was the day in February 1979 when Trevor Francis became soccer’s first “million-pound man.”

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In fact, Clough agreed to a fee of only £999,999 (then about $2 million) to bring him from Birmingham to Forest, but there were taxes on top.

Three months later Francis headed the goal (against Malmö) that gave Forest the European Cup. But the swelling of the soccer economy that he embodied would eventually do in small clubs like Forest.

In the 1980s TV contracts grew, and Italy opened its borders to foreigners. Later teams around Europe began renovating their stadiums, which allowed the ones with a lot of fans to make more money. After the European court of justice’s “Bosman ruling” in 1995, big clubs could easily sign the best players from any country in the European Union. Around the same time, the clubs with the most fans began earning much more from their television rights. Big clubs everywhere got bigger. Bayern Munich, previously Gladbach’s main rival, mushroomed into “FC Hollywood.”

After that, clubs like Gladbach could no longer keep their best players. Lothar Matthäus made his debut for “
Die Fohlen
” at the end of the golden era, but when he was only twenty-three he graduated to Bayern.

The next great white hope, the local lad Sebastian Deisler, left Gladbach for Hertha at age nineteen in 1999, as soon as he distantly began to resemble Netzer. Small towns couldn’t afford the new soccer.

”THAT’S NOT COCAINE, IT’S SAFFRON”:

THE DEMISE OF THE CATHEDRAL CITIES

Wandering around Florence, you can still imagine it as the center of the universe. It is the effect of the great cathedral, the endless Michelange-los, and all the tourists paying ten dollars for an orange juice. A Medici ruler returning from the dead, as in one of Florence’s umpteen paintings of the Day of Judgment, might feel his city had won the battle of prestige among European city-states.

But he would be wrong. These days a midsize city in Europe derives its status less from its cathedral than from its soccer club. Here towns the size of Florence (600,000 people in its metropolitan area) have slipped up.

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Fiorentina’s last flurry came in 1999, when it beat Arsenal in a Champions League match at Wembley thanks to a goal by Gabriel Batistuta, with Giovanni Trapattoni sitting on the bench. In those days “Trap’s”