The Beautiful Game Mapped, or How the World Looks to a Soccer Fan

In Portugal today, as I type, the culmination of a season-long struggle between the best teams in European soccer has been played between two teams from Madrid, Spain. The best player in the game—perhaps in all of soccer today—is from Portugal. A valued teammate is Croatian. Another is Welsh. Their manager is Italian, while the opposing manager is Argentine. In order to be at this tournament, these teams had to beat the best teams from England, Germany, Italy, Turkey, France, Greece, and Russia. When they took the field, the teams from Madrid wore shirts bearing the names of their sponsors, one a Dubai-based airline, the other the entire country of Azerbaijan. The map of this space has no capital city. 

It’s difficult to translate for a non-soccer-watching audience the importance of this game for a fan of European soccer. The first thing you need to understand is it’s not really about Spanish soccer (although increasingly these days, it really is about Spanish soccer, but that’s another story). The only way to truly bring this into focus is by analogy. Therefore, imagine this: each NFL season lasts 38 weeks instead of 16. Also imagine that every country in the Western Hemisphere has a football team, with some as well-funded, exciting, and contentious as the NFL. Each year the three or four best NFL teams play their international counterparts in a Final Four-like bracket structure that takes the teams all over the hemisphere to play mid-week games while still playing their regular season weekend games—for example, the New England Patriots might play a game in New York this Sunday, then another one in Mexico City on Wednesday, and then return to Massachusetts for another game next weekend.

Finally—and here’s the kicker—imagine that the NFL teams only win this tournament occasionally, certainly not every year, but maybe two or three times every decade, if at all. In fact, in this imaginary world, NFL fans might go decades or eons without seeing their team play at this level of football.

No matter who wins today, Regardless of Real Madrid's victory today, the outcome of this game will soon be forgotten in favor of an even bigger event, the 2014 World Cup, which begins next month in Brazil and lasts for an entire month, twice the length of the Olympic Games. To understand how big this tournament is, an analogy really won’t do it, so I’ll have to describe it the way it happens: Aside from playing in their regular leagues, such as the English Premier League or Italian Serie A, the best soccer players from around the world also play for their national teams, and for many this is the honor of a lifetime. For these players, every four years marks not just the culmination of their best personal efforts but perhaps even the best performances of their careers. Legends can be made with just one ball kicked to the back of the net.

If you happen to watch the World Cup next month, you will experience what scholar and critic Mary Louise Pratt calls a contact zone,” or a “social [space] where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other” (4). In the contact zone of the World Cup, there is a continuously moving balance of power, one that still has traces of a "European 'planetary consciousness'" (9) but which also contains "copresence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practices, often within radically asymmetrical relations of power" (7). In this world, concepts like copresence and asymmetrical power relationships play out at regular intervals in ways most American sports fans can only imagine.

The World Cup, without too much stretching, also exemplifies Pratt's notion of transculturation. "While subjugated peoples cannot readily control what emanates from the dominant culture, they do determine to varying extents what they absorb into their own" (6). The worldwide diffusion of soccer ever since the first British traveler dropped a basket of soccer balls in a colonial outpost—and there were many baskets of balls dropped worldwide in the late 19th century—is one of the great stories of globalization. Beginning with the Scottish, and moving south to Europe, Latin America, and Africa, and eventually the rest of the world, what was once known as the British game (the thing emanating from the dominant culture) became a global game that dwarfed any other cultural export. However—and this is the key to making a connection with Pratt’s concepts—wherever the balls landed, the cultures absorbing the game (some subjugated, some not except by extension of the power of Great Britain) chose for themselves the “correct” way to play the game. The game itself has a shared set of rules worldwide, yet the English definition of excellence might run to, as soccer writer Jonathan Wilson states, blunt pragmatism, while some Latin Americans might say that excellence lies within the beautiful individual style of the artists on the field. The Dutch might disagree with both. In this world, there is no dominant culture of soccer anymore, something the British will be the first to admit, as witnessed by the large numbers of non-English playing in England at the highest level of the game.

To be an American soccer fan of the international game is to accept that there are limits to cultural imperialism. On the World Cup soccer map, Brazil, Italy, and Germany are the superpowers, with second-tier status going to the Netherlands, Argentina, and Uruguay (and perhaps Spain, but we'll see). Great Britain, France, and Russia are still in development, while the United States, China, and Japan have yet to be discovered. On what other map is this reality? In this forum, the contact zone is a postmodern spectacle, and the map is ever-changing. 

Work Cited

Pratt, Mary Louise. "Introduction: Criticism in the contact zone." Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. 1-11. Print.