How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization Read Online Free PDF Page A

to create his own Red Star. First, he bought a team in Kosovo and purged its largely ethnic Albanian lineup.
    Then, in 1996 he traded up for the Belgrade club Obilic, a semi-professional team that had lingered in Yugoslavia’s lower divisions for decades.
    Part of Obilic’s appeal was its namesake, a knight who fought at the Serbs’ defeat in the 1389 battle for Kosovo—the defining moment in the national narrative

of victimization. Just before the battle, Obilic infiltrated the Turkish camp and stabbed the Sultan Murad with a poisoned dagger. Arkan added to this preexisting mys-tique, figuring himself a latter-day Obilic. He changed the color of the club’s uniform to yellow, a tribute to his Tigers, and made the tiger a ubiquitous symbol spread through the stadium. Its face greets you as you enter the club’s headquarters. It appears on the doors of vehicles the club owns.
    Almost instantly, under Arkan’s stewardship, the club triumphed. Within a year of arriving in the top division, it won the national championship. Arkan liked to brag about the secrets of his success; the fact that he paid his players the highest salaries in the country; that he forbade them to drink before games; that he disciplined his players to act as a military unit. But his opponents provide another explanation for Obilic’s impossibly rapid ascent. According to one widely reported account, Arkan had threatened to shoot a rival striker’s kneecap if he scored against Obilic. Another player told the English soccer magazine Four-Four-Two that he’d been locked in a garage while his team played against Obilic.
    At games, Arkan’s message to his opponents was clear enough. Obilic’s corps of supporters consisted substantially of veteran paramilitaries. These Tigers would “escort” referees to the game in their jeeps. At games, they would chant things like “If you score, you’ll never walk out of the stadium alive” or “We’ll break both your legs, you’ll walk on your hands.” As English newspapers pointed out, it was in the player’s best interest to adhere to the demands. Fans were frequently waving guns at them.

HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE GANGSTER’S PARADISE
    According to Belgrade lore, Arkan made a habit of barging into opposing teams’ locker rooms during half time, where he would shout abuse. To avoid this fate, Red Star once simply refused to leave the field during the game break. Its players loitered on the pitch, even urinated on the side of field, rather than risk encounter-ing Arkan. After another match, Red Star Belgrade striker Perica Ognjenovic complained, “This is not soccer, this is war. I think I’d better leave this country.”
    With its overnight success, Obilic had qualified to compete against other top teams in the European Champions League. But even the European soccer oªcials—not exactly sticklers when it comes to criminals and dictators—couldn’t tolerate the presence of Arkan at their stadiums. They banned the club from continental competition. To get around the ban, Arkan resigned from the club. He installed his wife, Ceca, as his replacement. It didn’t take a prosecutor from The Hague to poke holes in this sleight of hand. When I interviewed Ceca, she told me, “I was the president. He was the advisor.” She chuckled at the mention of both president and advisor.
    Obilic never flourished in continental competition.
    Arkan hadn’t dared lock players from Bayern Munich and other giant European clubs in garages. Soon, Obilic began to slip in the domestic game, too. After Obilic’s championship season, clubs understood that throwing the championship to Arkan had exacted too great a financial cost. They banded together and dared Arkan to kill them all. “The teams called one another and said,
    ‘We can’t let this happen again,’ ” the theater director and soccer columnist Gorcin Stojanovic told me. With

the clubs aligned against him, Arkan deployed intimidation less frequently.