British Soccer Fans, Kicked Again

LONDON

Last week, globalization hit Manchester, England. Specifically, an American businessman who owns the Tampa Bay Buccaneers bought Manchester United, the world's most famous and richest soccer club. Malcolm Glazer has no known interest in either the city or the sport (his son Joel is said to be a soccer fan, but is not known ever to have attended a game). Tampa Bay is 4,300 miles from Manchester, and it seems unlikely that the new owners will be spending much time in the clubhouse.

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.