The globalization of soccer since the 1960s is epitomized by two matches: one on May 25, 1967, and the other on December 26, 1999. In the first of these, Celtic of Glasgow—led by “Jinky” Johnstone, a great-hearted five-foot-four winger who died in March—beat Inter Milan to became the first British winner of the European Cup. (Scotland has always had both a separate national team and a separate domestic league from England’s, and Celtic was a year ahead of Manchester United, which, in 1968, became the first English club to win the cup—with a team that was “international” only in that it included the Scotsman Denis Law and the Ulsterman George Best.)
Most or possibly all of Johnstone’s teammates were Catholics, since the city was notoriously divided on sectarian lines; at the time of Celtic’s victory, and for years after, Glasgow Rangers, the Protestant club, had never had a Catholic player on the team. But there was something even more remarkable about Celtic then: not only was the team entirely Scottish, it contained no player who had been born more than thirty miles from the club stadium at Parkhead.
Now fast-forward to 1999, when Chelsea, playing Southampton, became the first club in the history of the English League—formerly the First Division, now pretentiously called “the Premiership”—to field a starting team without a single English player. (On February 14, 2005, Arsenal improved on this record, fielding for the first time an entire team of foreigners, substitutes as well.)
Far from being confined to soccer, globalization affects many sports, reflecting patterns of migration and flexible definitions of nationality, though with some quite strange effects. South African and New Zealand rugby players pop up in Europe not only for clubs but for national teams, and some years ago, at Lord’s, England fielded a cricket team of eleven that included three batsmen born in southern Africa and three bowlers born in the West Indies. And, in a Test match played at Mohali this March, there were two Sikh bowlers: Harbhajan Singh, playing for India, and M. S. Panesar, playing for England.
Now the story has taken more ominous turns, in national as well as in club sports. There have been cases of African track athletes suddenly turned into representatives of Arab countries, having changed names as well as nationalities. Money talks—and nowhere more than in soccer. The most unappealing aspect of the game at present is the way the rich European clubs scour Africa for talented boys of fifteen or younger and whisk them away from home, a trade with unhappy overtones. It will be gratifying to see those kids in Germany playing in their national colors for Ivory Coast, Ghana, and Angola. The day should not be far off when an African team wins the World Cup.
Plenty of Latin American countries have already won the World Cup, from Uruguay at home in the first cup in 1930 to Brazil taking its fifth in 2002 in Japan. But nowadays this is the only opportunity for fans from those countries to identify with their heroes. When the immortal Pelé helped Brazil to victory in Sweden in 1958 and in Chile in 1962, he was playing his club soccer for Santos FC—in Brazil in front of Brazilians. Now, most Latin American internationals—and almost all Brazilian players of the front rank—earn their living with European clubs. The extreme case is Villarreal, the Spanish club that was a dark horse among the final four of this year’s European club cup: it has reportedly signed fourteen Argentines since 1998, and at present has six members of the Argentine national squad on its roster. And so while the World Cup is for Europeans a sharp reminder of how much of their club entertainment is provided by condottieri, for Latin Americans it is a rare chance to identify directly with their finest native sons.