A Bit More Detail

The Russian soccer team Dynamo Moscow has its roots in a factory club that was founded in 1887, at the Morozov mill, on the city’s outskirts. In the spring of 1923, the club was co-opted by Vladimir Lenin’s feared secret police, the Cheka, and given its current name. (The playwright Maxim Gorky is credited with coining the club motto, “Sila v Dvizhenii,” or “Strength in Motion.”)* By the mid-thirties, Moscow was home to five major teams, four of which represented different arms of the Soviet state: CDKA, now CSKA, was the team of the Red Army; Dynamo, the secret police; Lokomotiv, the state railways; and Torpedo was the club of the city’s sprawling Torpedo-ZiL automobile factory. The exception was Spartak Moscow, founded by the Young Communist League and the local soccer hero Nikolai Starostin, who named his club after the gladiator who revolted against Roman rule. Spartak forged an identity as “the people’s club,” which is why, even today, it has more fans at its games than any of its rivals can boast.

Dynamo, led by Lavrenti Beria, a vicious sexual predator and head of the N.K.V.D.—the police force that succeeded the Cheka, and was succeeded in turn by the K.G.B.—won the first Soviet championship, in 1936. A bitter rivalry between Beria’s Dynamo and Spartak—support for whom represented a small act of everyday protest against the politburo—ensued. The enmity reached its peak in 1939, when Beria ordered a cup semifinal that Spartak had won to be replayed, one month later. Spartak won the replay, 1–0, and went on to win that year’s trophy. In 1942, Beria wreaked his revenge, sending Starostin to the gulag for ten years for “praising bourgeois sports.” (Upon Stalin’s death, Beria was arrested by Nikita Khrushchev, and, in 1953, at the age of fifty-four, he was executed.) Dynamo dominated in the nineteen-forties, but it has not won the domestic league since 1976.

In October, I visited Khimki, a suburb of Moscow, to watch the latest installment of Dynamo versus Spartak, known as Russia’s oldest derby. The prestige of the contest has dimmed as Dynamo has been eclipsed by crosstown rivals CSKA and by Zenit St. Petersburg, a team founded in 1925 and bought, in 2005, by the state-owned gas company, Gazprom. Zenit is now littered with stars and competing well at Europe’s top table, the Champions League. Meanwhile, both Dynamo and CSKA are playing their matches at Arena Khimki, an eighteen-thousand-six-hundred-and-thirty-six-seat stadium built to house a club from the surrounding suburb, and awaiting new arenas of their own. As I watched Spartak come back from a 2–1 deficit to win, 3–2, on what was practically the final kick of the match, a local writer turned to me. “It’s the curse,” he said, referencing Beria, for whose sins Dynamo, many say, has yet to atone. But the club’s predicament owes more to the topsy-turviness of Russian soccer than to some historic hoodoo.

Russian soccer has rarely been run in parallel with its European neighbors. The Russian Premier League took shape during the Soviet era, and it is studded with clubs run not as businesses but as the playthings of oligarchs, despots, and, chiefly, the Russian state. However, a landmark ruling last year by the sport’s European governing body, UEFA, may, eventually, change that. Under the organization’s Financial Fair Play (F.F.P.) rules, Dynamo, which is funded by a state bank and by Boris Rotenberg, Russia’s hundredth-wealthiest person and Vladimir Putin’s former judo partner, was found to have grossly manipulated its finances and, consequently, was expelled from European competition.

Now its biggest international stars have left for teams in other countries, and the once-powerful side is languishing at the bottom end of the Premier League table. What’s more, people have begun to speculate that the fall of Dynamo could precipitate trouble for the country’s other major teams. For Russia, the timing of the case could hardly be more awkward: in just a few years, it will host the World Cup, and the Kremlin is keen to project global power and prestige. With Dynamo shamed, and more teams potentially to follow, the standing of Russian soccer could be in tatters before a single ball of the tournament is kicked.

[Eduardo Sacheri, 46, a prominent author of soccer fiction and an Independiente fan] pines for the era when a player like midfielder Ricardo Bochini could play his entire career at Independiente, which he led to a host of domestic and regional titles in the 1970s and 1980s. When Argentina won the World Cup at home in 1978, only one of the players on its roster plied his trade outside the country. When it added a second crown in 1986, in Mexico, more than half the team — including Bochini — still played domestically, though by then stars like Osvaldo Ardiles and Diego Maradona had begun to open the path to Europe ever wider.

The trickle soon became a flood. A surge in television revenue gave European clubs millions to spend on scouting networks and player acquisitions, and the proliferation of agents eager to facilitate deals only fed the market.

By last summer, when Argentina reached the World Cup final in Brazil, its roster included only three domestically based players. Two had spent most of their careers in Europe before returning home.

Now, European clubs scour the Primera División for talent. One representative of a Russian agency called Argentine players the “raw material” of world soccer. “That’s why we have to be here,” she said, adding that European teams are often viewed as finishing schools.

Every four years, Torontonians congregate around bars and cafés, glued to live broadcasts of World Cup games. Flags fly from cars and shop windows, and every so often a street fills with fans celebrating their home country’s victory. In the 1960s, such celebrations were still unheard of in Toronto. While the World Cup did warrant some coverage in the local newspapers, it scarcely dominated the local sports sections as it does today.

In 1962, the CBC broadcasted Brazil’s victory in the final over Czechoslovakia—a full two weeks after the game had taken place. CBC aired the 1966 World Cup final between England and West Germany live on the radio at 10:00 a.m. EST, and aired it on television two hours later. Although local newspapers reported the tournament results with some interest, none of the Toronto papers took a special interest in England’s victory, nor reported on any reactions from English expatriates living in the city.

Things started changing in 1970, as the advent of mass communication enabled Torontonians to watch live broadcasts of the matches from Mexico. These live broadcasts were not available on regular television, however; the Toronto City Soccer Club acquired the rights to show games on closed-circuit television, and charged admission for those willing to pay.

On June 7, 1970, a capacity crowd of 5,300 watched a group stage match between England and Brazil at Varsity Arena, while a further 3,000 fans were turned away at the door. According to the Globe and Mail, the decidedly pro-England crowd at the arena “applauded and yelled through most of the contest. Loudest cheers were reserved for the outstanding play of the two goalkeepers, and Bobby Charlton of England and Pele of Brazil.” The same article notes that the game would have been shown at Maple Leaf Gardens—where, indeed, the later matches were shown live in 1970—but the venue was unavailable due to a Red Army Chorus concert.

Tickets at these live, closed-circuit broadcasts sold for between five and seven dollars. One Globe and Mail article predicted a sellout at Maple Leaf Gardens for the Italy-Mexico match. A few days later, the Globe ran a picture of an Italian crowd celebrating in the Toronto streets following their semifinal victory over West Germany, setting the stage for the final against Brazil. A mostly pro-Italy, sellout crowd watched Brazil cruise to a 4-1 victory at the Gardens.

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• Torontoist notes that many employees of the provincially-owned Beer Store chain have been active on social media in arguing against allowing convenience stores to sell beer.

L’Afrique subsaharienne risque ainsi de se retrouver minoritaire dans les travées, qui seront largement occupées par des supporters britanniques et américains. Elle sera en revanche majoritaire aux alentours des stades. Alors qu’entre 3 et 5 millions de continentaux se seraient déjà installés illégalement sur le territoire sud-africain, certains redoutent en effet que l’approche de 2010 n’intensifie encore ces flux migratoires. Le gouvernement de M. Jacob Zuma prévoit de dépenser 102 millions d’euros pour prévenir un afflux de clandestins venus tenter leur chance à l’ombre du Mondial.

Pour autant, Darshan Vigneswaran, spécialiste des questions liées aux migrations à l’université de Witwatersrand, estime que le renforcement des contrôles aux frontières n’ empêchera pas hommes et femmes descendus du Nord de rallier les neuf métropoles où seront organisés les matchs de qualification en vue de la finale (« World cup could lead to migrant influx », Agence Sapa, 23 juillet 2009). Le chercheur note qu’il est en effet facile pour les migrants, à l’instar des nombreux Zimbabwéens qui versent déjà des pots-de-vin en traversant pourtant « officiellement » le fleuve frontalier du Limpopo à Beitbridge, de « payer » leur passage vers l’Afrique du Sud. Un récent voyage le long des frontières sud-africaines, dans le cadre d’un reportage à paraître pour le magazine Géo, permet de constater que la corruption est en effet courante parmi les fonctionnaires d’Etat en poste sur les principales portes d’accès à la nation arc-en-ciel. La porosité des 3 500 km de limes séparant le pays le plus riche du continent de ses voisins d’Afrique australe, l’ancienne ligne de front, contribue tout autant à faciliter cette migration.

Sub-Saharan Africans may thus find themselves a minority in the aisles, which will be largely occupied by British and American fans. It will be, however, a majority around the stadium. While between 3 and 5 million sub-Saharan African already live illegally in South Africa, some fear that the approach of 2010 will intensify this migration. The government of Jacob Zuma plans to spend 102 million euros to prevent an influx of illegal immigrants trying to sneak through under the shadow of the World.

However, Darshan Vigneswaran, a specialist in migration issues at the University of Witwatersrand, said that the strengthening of border controls does not prevent men and women descended from the North to reach the nine cities which will be held qualifying matches in for the final ("World Cup could lead to migrant influx," Sapa Agency Sapa, July 23, 2009). The researcher notes that it is indeed easy for migrants, like many Zimbabweans who are already paying bribes to "officially" the Limpopo river border at Beitbridge and pay their way into South Africa. A recent trip along the borders of South Africa, as part of a forthcoming report for the magazine Geo, shows that corruption is indeed common among the government officials stationed on the main access routes to the Rainbow Nation. The porosity of the 3500 kilometre-long border separating the richest country in the continent from its southern African neighbours, also helps facilitate this migration.

Let’s take the archetypal provincial city with giant club, Manchester, because what happened there prefigured later events in towns such as Barcelona and Milan. In 1878 a football club for workers of a railway company started up in Manchester. Newton Heath played in work clogs against other works teams. Newton Heath, of course, became Manchester United. What matters here are its origins. The workers were “sucked in from all over the country to service the growing need for locomotives and carriages,” writes Jim White in Manchester United: The Biography.

Almost all of Europe’s best football cities were once new industrial centres. Clubs grew bigger here than in capitals or towns with entrenched hierarchies. That’s why no team from Paris, London or Berlin has won the Champions League.

In most leading European football cities, the industrial migrants arrived in a whoosh in the late nineteenth century. Munich had 100,000 inhabitants in 1852, and five times as many in 1901. Barcelona’s population trebled in the same period to 533,000.

[. . .]

In all these cities the industrial revolution ended, often painfully. But besides the empty docks and factory buildings, the other legacy of the era was beloved football clubs.

These were the cities with the fewest long-standing hierarchies, the weakest ties between people and place. Here, there were emotional gaps to fill. Contrast these cities with traditionally upper-class towns. In England, Oxford, Cambridge, Cheltenham, Canterbury and York have more than 100,000 inhabitants each. Yet between them they have just one team in the Football League. In places with settled hierarchies, people did not need football to root themselves.