Soccer FAQ: All That's Left to Know About the Clubs, the Players, and the Rivalries

Copyright © 2015 by Dave Thompson

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, without written permission, except by a newspaper or magazine reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review.

Published in 2015 by Backbeat Books

An Imprint of Hal Leonard Corporation

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All images are from the author’s collection except where noted.

The FAQ series was conceived by Robert Rodriguez and developed with Stuart Shea.

Printed in the United States of America

Book design adapted by John J. Flannery

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

www.backbeatbooks.com

To Louis Burgess—student, statistician,

and all-round devotee of the game at every level

Contents

Author’s Note

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Birth of the Kicky-Round-Thing Game

1. Soccer: How Did It Get Here, and What Does It Want?

2. Belo Horizonte and All That: What Was So Special About 1950?

3. That Was Then, What About Now? The Cosmos and the Birth of Modern Soccer

4. Let’s Call It a League: How Did Soccer Kick Off in the First Place?

5. The Global Game: Are All Leagues the Same?

6. The Greatest Competition in the World: We’re Going to Win the Cup . . . Aren’t We?

7. Okay, There’s a Lot Riding on This Game . . . But Is It Really a Matter of Life and Death?

8. We Are the Champions. Probably. Who Are the Greatest Teams?

9. Simply the (George) Best: Who Are the Finest Players?

10. The Unfathomable Joy of Being the Underdog: Does Everybody Really Love a Winner?

11. The Buck Stops Here: Who’s the Boss?

12. Soccer Songs: What Are They Singing in the Background There?

13. What Did He Just Say? A Collection of Soccer Quotations

14. Continental Competitions: When Is a League Not a League?

15. The Biggest Stage of All: Club? Or Country?

16. On Top of the World: But It’s Not All About FIFA, Is It?

Appendix 1: World Soccer Timeline

Appendix 2: Selected Glossary

Bibliography

Author’s Note

Some Words on Usage

Soccer is an international sport, possessed of an international language. Yet there are many words that, meaning one thing to an American reader, will mean another to a British one. And something else, perhaps, to a Canadian or an Australian.

In the interests of clarity, the vocabulary in this book errs on the side of American English, but will inevitably lapse into Transatlantica.

The game, for the most part, is referred to as soccer—a Victorian English word dating from the sport’s earliest days, when it was coined as an abbreviation of the game’s full appellation Association Football. Since that time, it has been most popularly grasped in those English-speaking nations where other forms of football (rugby, Gaelic, Australian Rules, American, etc.) have staked a prior claim upon the term football itself. Ironically, what should be regarded as one of English slang’s most successful exports is now ignorantly despised by many English people, who condemn the word as a coarse Americanism.

The term football cannot help but creep in, however, particularly when discussing organizations, associations, magazines, and clubs who have the word in their names and titles—the universally familiar FC, after all, stands for football club. To keep things simple, then, reference to other forms of non-Association Football (see above) will be prefaced by the appropriate cultural or geographical qualifier.

Elsewhere, the American term fields should be regarded as interchangeable with the English pitches; stadia are also grounds; and spot kicks frequently become penalties. The period of play is usually a game, but match and tie also creep in, and so long as we remember that a tie can also be a draw, while a draw is also the process by which teams are paired together in cup competitions, then we should be okay.

For further details of these and many other terms, the reader is directed to the glossary that appears at the end of this volume.

Finally, financial details, fees—no matter where they originate—are initially given in their contemporary British pounds equivalent, followed by their modern-day equivalents in pounds and US dollars. (Figures accurate as of August 2014.) Keen-eyed readers discerning certain inconsistencies in these latter values are referred to sundry historical British currency devaluations.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to everybody who kicked something onto the field as I was writing, but most of all to Louis Burgess, for so many years of ceaseless enthusiasm, and to Dave Makin, for an equal amount of cynicism and rage. Between one example and the other, this book took shape.

To Amy, for letting me win at Subbuteo; to John Cerullo, Marybeth Keating, Wes Seeley, Bernadette Malavarca, John Flannery, and Gary Sunshine for bringing the project to life.

To Bideford, Gillingham, and Bournemouth and Boscombe Athletic, for being there when Saturday comes.

To When Saturday Comes for being there.

And finally, to all the people who, knowingly or otherwise, hoofed something strange into the stratosphere, even if it was just sympathetic glances in the direction of a teetering pile of cigarette cards, programs, and 1970 Esso World Cup coins: Karen and Todd; Linda and Larry; Betsy, Steve and family; Jo-Ann Greene, Sheelagh Crewe, Jen, Gaye and Tim, Oliver, Trevor, Toby, Barb East, Bateerz and family, the Gremlins who live in the heat pump, and to John the Superstar, the demon of the dry well.

Introduction

The Birth of the Kicky-Round-Thing Game

For as long as man has had feet to kick with, he has kicked things. And that is really all we know about the origins of soccer. History and archaeology have unearthed countless supposed forefathers of the game, from ancient China to medieval Italy, from pre-Columbian America to Mesolithic Europe; and their discoveries have seen the modern ball preceded by everything from inflated animal bladders to the recently decapitated heads of enemies; from bundles of cloth rolled and tied into shape, to . . . well, you name it. If it’s round (-ish), light (-ish) and bouncy (-ish), the chances are that somebody kicked it to somebody else, at some point in the distant past, and Eureka! I have just invented soccer.

Certainly soccer is the most instinctual sport that we have today, and the most simplistic, too. See ball, chase ball, kick ball. And if you don’t have a ball, then you can use a stone, a can, or yes, a skull. With the exception of those activities that are purely athletic (running, jumping, hopping), soccer is the most basic and uncomplicated sport there is, requiring the minimum of equipment.

The face of football, 1890-style. The players wear hats, the goals have no nets . . . It’ll never catch on.

Sergey Goryachev/Shutterstock.com

Other sports demand sporty stuff. Sticks, bats, rackets, clubs, nets, poles, hammers, spears, correctly proportioned egg-shaped projectiles. Even swimming insists upon water. Soccer demands something to kick and something to kick with, and that’s it. No matter how much other kit is available to the discerning acolyte, from fancy shirts that do your breathing for you, to lighter-than-air cleated booties that make you run, kick, and dive like a pro, and onto training regimes and dietary schedules that claim they can transform you into a Marc Overmars overnight, in truth they are little more than window dressing. You need something to kick and something to kick with.

You don’t even need someone else to play with. Soccer is one of the very few team sports that don’t require a team. George Best, one of that select bevy of players who lived up to his last name in a good way (cue a host of infantile jokes about Kaka, Fanni, Fuckal, Quim, and Dickov), spent much of his youth perfecting his skills by volleying a tennis ball against a wall without another soul in sight.

Pelé used to do much the same. So did Diego Maradona, so did Stanley Matthews, so did Gerd Müller.

Modern coaching is full of Youth Academies, Centers of Excellence, Gulags of Greatness and so forth, all of them dedicated to transforming the youth of today into the soccer stars of tomorrow. Whether or not they will succeed in these aims appears to be a question that every successive generation puts off having to answer, insisting that we wait until the next crop of promising youngsters comes along.

One thing, however, does seem peculiar. No matter how magnificent the latest, greatest player to grace the game might be, we only ever hear of him being the next Pelé, the modern Maradona, the best thing since Best. A potential equal to the princes of the past. But rarely their successor and never their superior.

And why is that? Because even the future seems willing to admit that the past had something that modernity has found is irreplaceable. It’s called history, it’s called tradition. It’s called acknowledging that sometimes, science does not have all the answers. Sometimes, primal instinct and unschooled skill are far more instructive mistresses.

Not that education should be despised. Indeed, without it . . . or, at least, without the grand establishments wherein education is disseminated . . . we might not even have a game to play.

For centuries, the glorious rough and tumble that would one day grow up to be soccer was a game played by veritable armies of uncoached, untutored, and utterly unrestrained peasants, madly rushing across hill and dale, bashing brains and breaking bones in their pursuit of a ball that could be five miles away at the time. Like the villagers massed with torches and pitchforks to march upon Baron Frankenstein’s castle, a medieval soccer team probably looked more like a lynch mob than a bevy of sports enthusiasts, and generally it behaved like one, too.

What we would today regard as the playing field, the pitch, was measured across however many acres the participants agreed was the appropriate dimension, with its boundaries marked not by neatly painted white lines, but by whatever natural features happened to be there—a raging river, a prickly hedge, a dreadful precipice, whatever.

The goal was whatever they said it should be, but it was rarely a scientifically measured and designed netted frame. It was far more likely to be another local landmark—first to hit the lightning tree wins. And the participants were numbered according to however many people wanted to risk life and limb for the sake of a few hours (sometimes extending into a few days) spent playing the game.

Mob football, as sniffy histories now refer to it, enjoyed a sticky relationship with officialdom. In 1365, insists tradition, the English king Edward III outlawed the game because it interfered with his military ambitions. Quite simply (and perhaps understandably), his troops preferred playing soccer to training for warfare.

Of course the prohibition did not, and could not, last, and the game quickly returned to the landscape; to the streets of London, where young apprentices played riotous street games on Cheapside, the Strand, and Covent Garden; and to the fields and bogs of the countryside, where Shrove Tuesday (the day before the commencement of Lent) was just one of many excuses to celebrate with a wild game of football.

Laws were enacted to restrict the game, sermons were preached against it in church. Landowners prohibited it, employers outlawed it. But deep into the nineteenth century, the game of football continued more akin to mindless thuggery than sport, as the sports historian Joseph Strutt, writing in 1801, makes clear. True, some semblance of order was creeping into the game, but the equal number of competitors, to whom he refers, and the goals placed at the distance of eighty or a hundred yards the one from the other were but niceties that scarcely related to the game itself.

The ball which is commonly made of a blown bladder, and cased with leather, is delivered in the midst of the ground, and the object of each party is to drive it through the goal of their antagonists, which being achieved, the game is won. The abilities of the performers are best displayed in attacking and defending the goals; and hence the pastime was more frequently called a goal at football than a game at football. When the exercise becomes exceeding violent, the players kick each other’s shins without the least ceremony, and some are overthrown at the hazard of their limbs.

All of which sounds considerably more diverting than the often-anodyne displays served up to us in the guise of the modern game, but there, that’s progress for you.

It was within the confines of the great British universities that the game developed along the somewhat more gentlemanly lines that we would recognize today. At Oxford, Cambridge, Eton, Charterhouse, Rugby, and so many more, the glorious game of football was refined and revised, reworked and redacted, and slowly . . . very slowly . . . the first sets of rules were devised and then distributed.

Different schools promulgated different sets of regulations, but within the multitude of variations that sprung up, Association Football was born and, in 1863, a Football Association was created by those members who agreed on one basic set of rules.

Other associations arose for those souls who preferred to play by other regulations, in England—where rugby became the preserve of those who believed football was incomplete without hands; in Australia, in America, in Ireland; and for all the progress those games have made from their original violent prototype, somewhere deep in their DNA there lurks a few threads of the original game’s primal joy. See ball, kick ball. Okay, and pick it up and throw ball too. If you must.

It was the absence of hands that separated Association Football from its peers. Indeed, the feet-only footballers frowned so darkly upon the wriggly things at the end of each arm that many early players took the field with coins clutched tightly in their fists, insurance against the devil ever tempting them to handle the sphere.

So that’s what this book is about. Association Football in all of its glory and manifold beauties. What it isn’t about, on the other hand, is a lot of the pomp and paraphernalia with which the game sometimes likes to bedeck itself.

It isn’t about winners and losers, facts and figures, statistics and tables. It isn’t about whose sheikh is richest, whose oligarch is oddest, whose multinational parent company has the most dubious ties to environmental carnage, child labor, and war. It isn’t about which teams show up in the headlines the most often. And it certainly isn’t about further tooting the trumpets of those clubs that currently consider themselves the greatest. Because, even for the clubs at the very top of the tree, success is not guaranteed.

If it was, the 2013 champions of Europe, FC Bayern München, would not have succumbed to a 5–0 mauling as they tried to defend their title the following year; just as the reigning champions of the world, Spain, would not have crumbled to a 5–1 hammering when it came, that same summer of 2014, to live up to their billing. Nor would Manchester United have finished with their worst points tally in almost twenty-five years; nor would Brazil have crumbled to their worst defeat in close to a century; and so on.

No matter how successful you believe the team that you follow is (we’re talking here, of course, to the people who do support a successful team; the rest of us should go put the kettle on), and no matter how gloriously gold-plated their history may be, still they are just one game away from throwing it all away. One season away from abject self-destruction; one bad decision away from absolute dissolution.

An example.

In January 2011, potash mogul Suleyman Abusaidovich Kerimov took control of FC Anzhi Makhachkala, a modestly successful, but more-or-less unremarkable club that had just won promotion to the Russian Premier League. And life in that tiny outpost of Russian sporting aspiration, the capital city of Dagestan, changed overnight.

In a region where the average wage was around $265 a month, and the soccer team’s own aspirations were scarcely any grander, Kerimov presented the club with an annual budget that fell just short of $200 million, and essentially challenged them to spend it all on success.

Which, of course, they did. Bugattis all round, and salaries so grandiose that not one of the newly assembled team (spearheaded by Cameroonian international, and former Barcelona and Inter striker Samuel Eto’o) thought twice about signing for them. Especially after they discovered that they could all live and train in Moscow, and only make the 800-mile journey to Makhachkala when they had to play a home game.

It was an audacious experiment, but it seemed to be paying off. With a team stuffed with more stars than the town had ever dreamed of meeting, Anzhi finished fifth in that first season, 2011–2012, and third in their second. The Europa League beckoned, and manager Guus Hiddink, himself fresh from stints with PSV, Chelsea, and the Turkish and Russian national teams, could have been excused for dreaming ever greater things.

Then the bottom fell out of potash.

Reeling from his business losses, Keimov slashed Anzhi’s budget by more than half, and placed the entire playing staff on the transfer list. Eto’o and another star, the Brazilian Willian Borges da Silva, headed for Chelsea. Lacina Traoré moved to AS Monaco; others joined clubs around the Russian league. Manager Hiddink departed; his assistant, René Meulensteen, was briefly employed as his replacement but then sacked after just sixteen days.

The 2013–2014 Europa League campaign shuddered to a halt with just three victories to the straitened club’s name, and the Premier League campaign collapsed around a similar statistic. Long before the season was over, it was clear that Anzhi was destined for relegation back to the First Division, and sundry doomsayers insisted that the team might well still have further to fall.

And all because someone with a lot of money happened to be passing by one day, and thought, I think I’ll buy myself a soccer team.

Soccer is a game played between two teams of eleven players, chasing a single ball around a field. It stands to reason, then, that the best soccer teams are those comprised of the best eleven players. Or, at least, the eleven players that best gel into a single cohesive force.

Sadly, reason is often not a key ingredient in the modern business plan. Not when it can be shouted down by so many other things. Wealthy sugar daddies, shady property developers, avaricious accountants, the tax man, politicians, even the courts, all have their role to play in the success or otherwise of a team, and often their contribution is more definitive than any the players themselves might make.

Would Scottish powerhouse Glasgow Rangers have been consigned to the depths of their nation’s lowest league if their exploits on the playing field alone were what mattered?

Would Spanish giants Valencia have been saddled with two stadia, one they could not sell and one they couldn’t afford to complete, had somebody—presumably not a member of the playing staff—recommended they get into the property market?

Would Parma have plunged down the Italian league had they not placed all their financial eggs into a basket being carried by a doomed and disgraced dairy company?

And that is before we even begin to consider several well-stocked leagues-worth of eastern European sides who were undone by their home countries’ shift from Communism to capitalism, and the fact that it was no longer acceptable to win every game, just because you were the army’s favorite side.

It’s not all bad. The English Premier League’s right to describe itself as the best in the world comes down to cash, as its own chief, Richard Scudamore, remarked at the official opening of the 2014–2015 season. The fact of the matter is we have got the most competitive league. The way we distribute the TV rights to all the clubs, the way we make every club able to compete is very, very different to how they do it in other leagues—particularly in Spain. The result of that, he said, is a league where we are talking about five, six, maybe seven teams that can possibly come and challenge to win the title. In Spain, it’s not quite the same in terms of strength in depth.

He was right, too. Chelsea might never have established themselves as one of the most successful European teams of the twenty-first century, had they not been purchased by one of the wealthiest men in the world. Just as the French side, Paris St Germain, seemed destined to struggle through the 2000s until their fortunes came under the aegis of the Qatar Investment Authority. Money talks and, in these cases, money wins.

Indeed, there are times when the exploits of the players feel secondary at best to the wealth of their owners; and they are certainly immaterial when the shit hits the fan.

The team can win all the silverware in the world. But if the boss man fiddles the taxes, fills his office with goldfish, or sells off the stadium so that his shell company can build a parking lot on the ruins, it’s rarely him that sinks out of sight. It’s the team. He will just brush off the inconvenience, complain that the club still owes him a bucketful of cash, and then head off to work his murky magic some place else.

The impact of money is, of course, a detail (although some might call it a grouch) essential to any understanding of soccer, at least in terms of its role as the most popular game on the planet, and the sheer weight of coverage, cash, and competitiveness that it has assumed for itself.

But money is only one half of the equation. The other half is a somewhat less quantifiable kaleidoscope of opinions and obsessions, of admiration and antipathy, of never-ending love and undying hatred.

Soccer is about opinions and biases. It is about mad ambitions and crucifying disappointments, unimaginable highs and unfathomable lows. It is about joyless subservience to failure, and mindless adherence to the twisted but inescapable bondage that is loyalty to your team.

The Uruguayan journalist and author Eduardo Galeano famously declaimed, In his life, a man can change wives, political parties, or religions but he cannot change his favorite soccer team. But he touches only a small part of the true, awful equation. Supporting a soccer team is like marrying a stranger when you’re still wearing short trousers, and remaining with them for the rest of your life, no matter how atrociously they treat you. Because only one thing is guaranteed. They will treat you atrociously. And more than once, as well.

You may think you can leave them, and you may believe you have. But deep down inside, in a corner of your soul you may not even realize exists, there’s a little bit of you that always looks out for your first love’s results.

Soccer is about hoping, sometimes unreasonably, often fruitlessly, but always with a fervor that is tantamount to religious, that this will be the year when your team finally justifies the years, decades, and what seems like aeons that you have devoted to them, and wins . . . the League. The Cup. The derby. A game.

Pick your own target, but remember this. It is a sport in which the most fervently held beliefs can turn on the head of a pin; the most bitter, brutal prejudices can develop from less than zero; and the most deathless assertions can be harvested from next to nothing.

When I was ten, my mother established me as the envy of the schoolyard when four members of Brazil’s 1970 World Cup squad signed the back of a Nana Mouskouri concert ticket for her. And not just any old four. Tostao! Brito! Fontana! Piazza! They didn’t charge her for the privilege, either, or then recant grimly murmuring, Better not. You might sell it on eBay later.

Four Brazilians on the back of a 1970 Nana Mouskouri concert ticket.

Simpler times. Happier times. And hopeful times, although Brazil’s subsequent World Cup triumph only bore out what I already knew through the magic of those autographs. I had absolutely no doubt that any group of players who could squeeze their names onto one side of a two-by-two inch piece of paper would certainly be capable of performing miracles on a soccer pitch.

You may agree with this example. You may disagree with it. Perhaps you have four of the defeated Italian side’s signatures on the reverse of a Paint Your Wagon ticket, and will go to your grave convinced that all four of the goals your heroes conceded that sunny Mexican afternoon were the result of dubious decisions and freak wind gusts.

Convinced, in the same manner that the viewing audience for the 1986 World Cup remains divided over whether or not Argentina would have won the entire competition had Diego Maradona not been possessed by the spirit of a volleyball professional during the quarterfinal encounter with England; and that of the 1966 event still debate whether or not the third goal conceded by the West Germans really did cross the line.

They believe it in the same way that future author Nick Hornby and his friends once believed that if they purchased, and then bit the head off, a confectionary sugar mouse before a Cambridge United game, then threw the rest of the sweet into the path of an oncoming car, the U’s would win. (It worked, too. Thus protected, Hornby wrote in Fever Pitch, United remained unbeaten at [home] for months.)

They believe it as fervently as Birmingham manager Barry Fry believed he could lift an old gypsy curse on the club’s home stadium by urinating in all four corners of the pitch. As trustingly as Laurent Blanc believed that kissing his goalkeeper’s bald head improved the French national side’s hopes of victory at the 1998 World Cup (and that worked, too—they won the whole thing). Or Romanian striker Adrian Mutu believed that by wearing his underpants inside out, he stymied the evil curses that were regularly flung at him by jealous enemies.

All of these are very valid beliefs, and they demand our consideration. Because, unless you are staring at nothing more stimulating than an unadulterated list of results, there is very little about soccer history that has anything to do with reality, and not much more to do with what actually happened.

It is all about personal perceptions, which is how your favorite team could be relegated to the lowest level of park soccer and still be the greatest eleven ever to walk the turf, while the runaway champions of the Copa America are just a bunch of cheating expletives.

It is about rabbit feet and gypsy curses, lucky hats and muddy pitches.

It is about some sneering Billy Big Bananas stepping up to the spot to take the penalty that will send his club or country into triumphant ecstasy, and hoofing the ball into the stratosphere, while neutral viewers around the world howl with bladder-bursting laughter. Especially if he falls over as well. And extra-especially if he then bursts into tears.

It is about Norwich City going into the final game of the 2013–2014 season knowing, as the BBC website put it, that all they needed do to avoid relegation was to beat Arsenal, hope West Brom lose against Stoke, and manage a seventeen-goal swing in the process. And the supporters who believed they could do it.

It is about a coach declaring there are no easy games in football, when what he really means is except for our next one, which will be a stroll in the park. And then coming a cropper as the penniless underdogs give his millionaire superstars a ninety-minute cookery lesson. On the menu tonight, humble pie.

It is about former Fulham owner Mohamed Al Fayed insisting that the side’s relegation was all down to the removal of a statue of a pop singer named Michael Jackson. I warned him, Al Fayed said of his iconoclastic successor. I said ‘You will pay with blood for that.’ [And now] he’s been relegated and if he wakes up [and] asks for Michael Jackson again and I’ll say ‘No way.’

It is about the owner of Welsh giants Cardiff City changing the team’s colors from blue to red because the latter is considered lucky in his native Asia; and Don Revie discarding Leeds United’s blue and yellow for the all-white of Real Madrid, because he considered them the best team in Europe.

Which is interesting because, at the time of writing, fifty years on, Real Madrid still are the best team in the world. Leeds, on the other hand . . . not so much. Although they do still play in all-white. But Cardiff no longer play in red, after relegation proved that sometimes a lucky color isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Particularly when the majority of your supporters, who didn’t much fancy the change to begin with, were still wearing blue. In January 2015, Cardiff played their first game in traditional colors in almost three years—and they won, 1–0.

See? Soccer is a game of opinions, theories, postulations. Shot through with forthright erudition and swivel-eyed lunacy. Littered with dates and data, heroes and villains, fat cats and failures. And that’s probably the best summation of this book’s contents that one can come up with.

Soccer is a global game, and the text will reflect that, not only in the histories it tells, but in the examples it offers to illustrate wider points, and in the minutia mined to chart certain paths. As an Englishman writing in the United States, it is inevitable that those two countries will dominate the narrative, just as they probably, through a combination of environment and exposure, dominate the interests of the majority of readers. But even narrow-minded parochialism knows when to pull its nose out of its own belly button, and so we will meet some of the world’s greatest players, and cheer on its greatest teams, although they may not always be the same players and teams that other authorities claim are the greatest.

We will visit stadia that possess the sanctity of cathedrals, and handle trophies worth their weight in gold, although again, they may not be the stadia or the trophies that transfix millions of viewers on satellite and the Internet.

In a modern world delineated by the demands of high finance, it is very easy to believe that the entire soccer universe comprises a mere handful of stunningly wealthy, sponsored leagues, a smattering of lucrative highly branded tournaments, and a dozen different clubs, all of them owned by an oligarch of some sort, and all playing at a stadium named either for a bank, an airline, or a law firm. First FAQ of the book: Is that true? No it isn’t.