British soccer fans, kicked again (Washington Post 22 May)

Last week, globalization hit Manchester, England. An American businessman who owns the Tampa Bay Buccaneers bought Manchester United, the world's most famous soccer club (by Stefan Szymanski and Andrew Zimbalist)

Most observers reckon that Glazer's interest is purely financial. The franchise he bought was not "sweating its assets" properly -- ticket prices were too low, promotion was too weak and not enough income was being extracted from broadcasters. Any NFL owner could draw up a plan in an afternoon that would raise income by 20 to 30 percent in the short term. And then there's the potential of the global brand. Manchester United, England's most popular team, is big in China, Japan and the rest of the Far East. With proper marketing, Glazer could be sitting on a gold mine. He's already planning a casino-hotel across from the stadium.

Amidst all this beamish marketing talk, it may be easy for you to miss the look on the faces of the local Manchester fans. Glazer may have paid $1.47 billion for the team, but they think he robbed them of their rightful heritage. To understand why they feel this way, you have to understand a little bit about soccer culture, English style.

Soccer -- "football" here and in most of the world, of course -- was born in England in the middle of the 19th century, the product of a leisured upper class, and spread rapidly abroad. It was loved precisely for the gentlemanly virtues of teamwork and fair play that its founders espoused. Unlike cricket and baseball, both of which carry an overbearing national identity, soccer was embraced wholeheartedly almost everywhere it was played. In the early 20th century, a global governing body emerged, empowered to spread soccer to every corner of the globe, using funds generated by international competition. Even the heathen United States was brought into the fold in 1994.

Today, virtually every conflict known to man or woman is played out on the soccer field. Catholic vs. Protestant, fascist vs. communist, aristocrat vs. the working man, town vs. country, east side vs. west: For any given feud there is a soccer rivalry to match. Soccer hooliganism is often presented as an aberration on the face of the beautiful game, but in fact it is merely the dark side of the intense rivalry soccer inspires everywhere.

Such strong emotions do not make for serene enjoyment, and the tormented life of an English soccer fan is vividly depicted in Nick Hornby's autobiographical 1992 novel "Fever Pitch." Hornby managed to explain just how difficult it is to support a team -- the sheer volume of unhappiness one has to go through in order to experience the buzz from winning. Now consider that Hornby is lucky to support Arsenal, which like Man U, is one of the few successful English clubs. The peculiar misery of most English fans arises from the fact that for most teams, the prospect of ever winning a championship is remote. That's because there is an extreme playing field imbalance built into English soccer, and it creates a defeatist mindset that few Americans -- except, perhaps, Cubs fans -- are likely to understand.

Think of it this way: American sport, not unreasonably, is built around the concept that spectators want to be entertained. Since they are largely entertained by winning, American leagues routinely redistribute resources, impose salary caps, implement reverse-order drafts and the like in order to maintain some kind of competitive balance. That doesn't happen here. There is almost no revenue redistribution in the soccer world, and therefore big city teams dominate perpetually. When the Yankees won three World Series in a row at the end of the 20th century, many fans were fed up and the baseball establishment expressed dismay. When Manchester United won eight out of the first 11 championships of the Premier League (1993-2003), no one batted an eyelid.

Of course, even a losing team can console its fans with good food, drink and the razzmatazz of going to the game. Not so in English soccer. Part of the misery evoked by Hornby involves the antiquated stadiums, the lousy food (generally a lukewarm meat pie of dubious provenance and a cup of the beef-extract brew known as Bovril) and the long lines, which mean that if you do opt to buy something during the 15-minute half-time break, you are almost guaranteed to miss the first five minutes of the second half. No scantily clothed cheerleaders, no cartoonish mascots, no wacky races. And by the way, it's illegal to drink beer anywhere in view of a professional soccer match in the U.K. -- even in a so-called luxury suite.

So if it's all so miserable, why do the English care so much? Many outsiders attribute their passion to a specific brand of masochism. But there must always be hope. And while English soccer doesn't redistribute money, it does dangle in front of every fan, no matter how lowly his team or humble the league in which it plays, the maddening possibility of a better future. This comes through the "promotion and relegation system," whereby the two or three teams finishing at the bottom of one league are demoted to a lower league the next season, and the two or three teams at the top of the lower league are promoted to the higher rank. Lowly teams really do rise to the top. This month Wigan, a smokestack town of 300,000 in northern England, saw its team promoted to the Premier League (first in a hierarchy of five professional English leagues) after 27 years of fighting its way up from the equivalent of single A baseball. Such a possibility breeds resilience.

But it also works the other way. This season Nottingham Forest, once Champion of Europe, was relegated to the equivalent of baseball's AA leagues. Given the scale of the drama, you too might find it hard to worry about the quality of the food.

In case you're wondering, that law against beer was introduced in the 1980s to deal with the hooliganism problem. Until recently, the misery of the soccer experience was compounded by a high probability of being close to some kind of violence. In the 1970s many fans abandoned the game entirely because of hooliganism, and attendance fell to an all-time low in 1986.

Gentrification reversed this trend. For most of the last century, English soccer fans came mostly from the working class; one reason they were so badly treated was that they had no money to spend on revenue-generating frills. Until the 1960s, the working class put up with this peacefully, but as traditional soccer authority broke down, the game attracted the kind of young thugs more likely to be found in inner-city gangs in the United States. Eventually, under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the British government stepped in and imposed draconian policing and new laws to stop the violence; since the 1990s English hooligans have had to go abroad to find the kind of opportunities to fight that they had once enjoyed at home.

Once English soccer was safe again, it became fashionable. Hornby himself played a role by raising the misery of the soccer fan to the status of art. Recognizing a lucrative audience, broadcasters started to pay huge sums to show live games, giving clubs the resources to attract star players from abroad and to fund a massive investment in new stadiums. At this point, business saw an opportunity to make serious money in soccer. Clubs raised equity, issued IPOs, and moved from the back pages to the financial pages.

The new guys in suits set about finding a way to maximize soccer's value. Higher prices brought in a new kind of clientele, more hedonistic and less fatalistic. But the old guard still has the biggest voice in the game, and it is not happy. Roy Keane, the iconic captain of Manchester United, derisively referred to the newcomers as the "prawn sandwich brigade" and blamed them for the declining volume of cheers.

The old fans are not happy that their story of true grit is being sanitized. They don't want pizza and hot dogs at the stadium. They don't want fair-weather fans who pay fancy prices for executive boxes. They don't want Americans and American accents and most of all they don't want an American businessman who's only in it for the money.

In England, the vast majority of soccer clubs have never made a profit. Emulating the U.S. model and uniting Europe's top clubs -- Man U, Chelsea, Arsenal, Real Madrid, Barcelona, AC Milan, Inter, Juventus, Bayern Munich-- into a single, closed league would be a surefire way to make more money. Not only would it add to the value of broadcast rights, it would create a system for controlling costs and raising revenue. But it wouldn't be the traditional English way.

Some might have said that Roman Abramovitch, the Russian billionaire who bought the Chelsea soccer club and invested $400 million to make the team champions this season, brought globalism to English soccer. But he borders on being acceptable, because, unlike Glazer, he loves the game -- and he's not an American.

Hornby's "Fever Pitch" was recently released as a film, in what you might call the American translation, as the rather more upbeat story of a Red Sox fan. If Malcolm Glazer is trying to rewrite downbeat English football as upbeat American soccer in Manchester, he is going to have to overcome the English taste for misery.

It's one thing for the British to buy Chinese-made shirts or Chilean fruit. There's no cultural subversion there. But sporting passions are another matter. The implicit ethos of globalization that one size fits all just might meet its match as American capital invades the playing fields of England.

Authors' e-mails:

s.szymanski@imperial.ac.uk

azimbali@email.smith.edu

Stefan Szymanski and Andrew Zimbalist are the authors of "National Pastime: How Americans Play Baseball and the Rest of the World Plays Soccer" (2005, Brookings Institution Press). Zimbalist wrote from Northampton, Mass.