I can remember playing soccer as a child. I was six years old when I joined my first soccer league. The kids on my team were about as knowledgeable about the sport as I was (which isn’t a very knowledgeable at all). My understanding of the sport was basically, I had to either play soccer or take karate lessons. The ultimatum was my mother’s way of “broadening” me. My father and I would practice by passing the ball around in the backyard. At that time I only viewed our practice time as hanging out with my dad, not preparing me for game day. My father would set up cones and do his best to make me run beneficial drills. I remember it being a lot of fun.

Time progressed and with my improving skills I also began desiring better soccer gear. I wanted the best of everything: shin guards, cleats, soccer ball and so on. My understanding at the time was that if I had the best gear, I would be the best player. There were the professional soccer players on TV that had the really cool stuff and they were amazing. But, when you’re eight years old you don’t really have the best understanding of the way things work. After a total of three seasons of soccer I lost interest and got hooked on baseball. Then I had a new obsession with new things to want: bats, gloves and different cleats. Fast forward to today where I have a terrible addiction to expensive ‘grown-up’ toys like mountain bikes and snowboards. It never stops! Soccer was only a momentary bleep on my radar of sports activities, but the recently assigned book drummed up those memories of playing soccer as a kid.

In the book “How Soccer Explains the World” Franklin Foer discusses violence and other dynamics associated with international soccer clubs. Foer begins by establishing his love for the game of soccer and then moves on to outline the three parts of the book. The first part explains the failure of globalization to eliminate old hatreds, the second part discusses the relation between soccer and economics and the third part defends the “virtues of old-fashioned nationalism.” (p.11) So far I’ve read the first part and really like the book. I can relate to the very beginning of the book in the prologue, where Franklin talks about how bad he was at soccer. When I first started playing soccer I wasn’t very good at all. But, rather than give up and live with the childhood shame, I obsessed over becoming proficient at the sport and practiced really hard. I got pretty good, but then I moved onto baseball like I mentioned earlier.

The book goes on to talk the history of violence associated with international soccer clubs. This part of the book was really amazing to me. I couldn’t believe some of the violent incidents the book described. Right off the bat Foer describes the time “the Ultra Bad Boys had quietly gathered their toughest guys at one end of the stadium by a small outcropping of trees. Each thug carried a metal or wooden bat. They formed a V-shaped formation and began to rampage their way around the stadium, beating anyone in their path.” I was completely blown away when I read this. You just don’t think about that sort of thing happening at a sporting event. I have been to several different kinds of games over the years and have never really considered the possibility of that sort of thing happening, but foer goes on to mention several other incidents, some of which are probably a lot worse.

A bit later in the book, Foer mentions a few possible reasons for the violence and rage contained in so many soccer fans. He talks about the obvious pasts that soccer clubs share and how there’s a deep seeded hatred that goes far beyond a simple game. He also mentions the effects of capitalism and communism on the sport of soccer. On page 38 Foer touches on some points that I thought were very interesting. He said “According to most schools of social science, places like Glasgow were supposed to have conquered ancient tribalism. This was the theory of modernization, handed down from Karl Marx, refined in the sixties by academics like Daniel Bell, enshrined in the foreign policy of the United States government, and rehashed by the globalization enthusiasts of the nineties.” This followed the mention of several extreme cases of soccer related violence in the city of Glasgow. I just really liked the way Foer worded the paragraph. He goes on to point out the fallacies about the belief that a society’s political advancement would come after their economic advancement. This obviously wasn’t so in the case of Glasgow. Despite their strong economy, the city is still at times home to terrible corruption. It seems to me capitalism and simple greed has driven the powerful people in soccer to exploit their fan’s loyalties. The way Foer describes the situation it sounds very complex and the violence can’t be explained simply by saying it’s an age old war. I don’t yet see entirely how soccer explains the world, but I intend to.

Thus far in the book I’m really enjoying it. I really like the way Franklin describes his journey through the different countries and would love to do something that cool. I look forward to the rest of the book.