Franklin Foer's How Soccer Explains the World

I just read Franklin Foer’s How Soccer Explains the World: An (Unlikely) Theory of Globalization, which my brother bought me as a gift, and which Miguel uses in a comparative politics class. I enjoyed it, though I had one nagging question that never quite went away.

His main argument is that globalization tends to reinforce local identities. Despite having foreign players and advertisements for multinational corporations on the players’ jerseys, fans still view their teams in highly parochial terms. The argument is not exactly like Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations,” because he doesn’t assert that globalization necessarily intensifies differences. Rather, it is that people (or, in this case, soccer fans) continue to filter their experiences through local lenses, which include nationalist antagonisms, socio-economic differences and racial/ethnic conflict.

The nagging point for me was that Foer is a self-described soccer fanatic, yet the chapters (each of which covers a country) almost uniformly discuss the dark side of soccer fandom. Xenophobia, racism, corruption, abuse of power, violence, bigotry, ethnocentrism, the list goes on and on. An alternative title could easily have been “How Soccer Reflects the Worst in People, and How Globalization Reinforces It.” An avenue is thus left unexplored—is there something intrinsic to soccer that produces such outcomes, despite globalizing forces? Or, more specifically, is there something about soccer that creates a certain type of fan who has such characteristics?