How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization by Franklin Foer (adult books to read txt) 📕

won two “dubious penalties” to Rangers’ eight. “It seems reasonable to conclude,” he wrote, adopting the tone of a disinterested academic,

“that the oft-made and oft-denied charge of Rangers-favoring bias by match oªcials, at least in Old Firm games, does indeed stand up to scrutiny.” When Celtic supporters make their case, they invariably point to a string of incidents. First, they point to a passage in the memoir of a Rangers player recounting a retired referee bragging to him of preserving Rangers victories with bogus calls. Next, they recount that a player was ejected from a game in 1996 for crossing himself upon enter-ing the pitch—a deliberately provocative gesture, the referee called it.

In the mainstream press, there is a phrase to

describe these complaints: Celtic paranoia. The notion is that Catholics have imagined the crimes committed against them, have grown too attached to the idea of su¤ering. This smells of victim blaming, but the closer one examines the evidence the more reasonable the thesis becomes. Celtic fans have a predilection for dredging up ancient history and conflating it with recent events. Burns’s Jesuitical study, for example, relies on newspaper clippings from the 1960s to make the case against the Scottish referees.

In a way, this confusion of past and present perfectly captures the Scottish Catholic condition. Without question, they continue to su¤er prejudice in the present day. But when asked to give examples of the wounds inflicted by Scottish Protestants, they fall back on stories they’ve inherited from their fathers and grandfathers. To be sure, these are often devastating tales: Catholics denied jobs, shut out of universities, and prevented from falling in love with Protestant women. Western Scotland had been a place, in the words of the novelist Andrew O’Hagan, where “the birds on the trees sang sectarian songs.”

But the memories of the past are so easily accessible that they shade perceptions of the present. When commentators call for creation of a new secular school system that would abolish funding for parochial institutions, some Catholics smell the second coming of John Knox.

“We must try to be invisible or su¤er the inevitable dis-criminatory consequences,” the literary critic Patrick Reilly has fumed in response. They complained vociferously when the newly created Scottish parliament took up residence in the old Assembly Hall of the Church of Scotland. Never mind that the Church of Scotland, like the rest of mainline Protestantism, has become a bastion of bleeding-heart liberalism, racked with guilt over its anti-Catholic past. And never mind that parliament only occupied the building for temporary accommodation.

While discrimination might not exist in spades, prejudice does. Sitting in Ibrox, listening to the taunts of Rangers supporters, Catholics know for certain that some of these fanatics are members of the Scottish parliament and critics of Catholic schools. It’s hard not to be wary.

IV.

With Dummy’s Guinness-stained gray sweatshirt and blue jeans, he looks undeniably like a soccer fan. Don-HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE PORNOGRAPHY OF SECTS

ald Findlay does not. He wears a three-piece suit with striped pants and a navy jacket constructed from lush Saville Row cloth. Across his vest, a gold pocket watch chain holds a miniature crown and family keepsakes.

His Gilbert-and-Sullivan facial hair covers his cheeks and then stops at his chin. At Ibrox, they a¤ectionately refer to him as Muttonchops. In his career as one of Scotland’s greatest barristers, he evinced a melodra-matic persona to match his overwrought attire. Findlay achieved his infamy by freeing some of his hardest clients, including hooligans on both sides of the Old Firm. His flowery oratory flooded the jury box with tears.

After the match, I met Findlay at a hotel bar.

Despite a legal career filled with high-profile successes, he will always be best known for his time as the flamboyant vice-chairman of Rangers. Attending games at Celtic Park, he’d sit in the box reserved for the opposing management. He’d deliberately show disdain for his surroundings, kicking up his wingtips and placing them on the box’s polished wood. Besieged by a torrent of verbal abuses from Celtic fans, he’d take long drags on his pipe, appearing utterly unmoved. When his Rangers scored goals, Findlay liked to celebrate as ostentatiously and gleefully as possible, the only man standing and cheering amid a sea of dejection. In interviews, he’d go a step further. He made a running gag out of the fact that he didn’t celebrate his birthday, because it fell on St. Patrick’s Day. Instead, he said that he celebrated on July twelfth, the anniversary of King Billy’s triumph. In his living room, he would stage Orange marches. On a May night in 1999, his tenure at Rangers

came to an abrupt end. Findlay sang, “We’re up to our knees in Fenian Blood” on the karaoke machine, his arm drunkenly draped over a player’s shoulder. He had gathered with the rest of the Rangers club to celebrate a victory over Celtic. In his jubilation, he had repeated lyrics that Rangers supporters blare on a weekly basis, that leading lights of society had sung for generations.

Most of them, however, hadn’t been captured on a video that would be handed over to the Daily Record. On the same spring evening that Findlay raised his pint glass and damned the papists, Rangers’ darkest impulses were responsible for dark acts. Rangers fans stabbed, shot, and beat senseless three young Celtic supporters.

They murdered one and left another in critical condition.

If these events hadn’t coincided, perhaps Findlay could have defended himself in the press. But the environment wouldn’t stand for any excuses. The morning that the Findlay story broke in the paper, he resigned from Rangers management. Over the next few months, as Scottish eminences lined up to condemn him, he purchased pills and flirted with suicide. St.

Andrews University, where he had just finished a six-year term as rector, canceled its plans to award Findlay an honorary degree. The Scottish Faculty of Advocates, the body governing the nation’s lawyers, fined him 3,500 pounds.

Findlay had become the touchstone for a nation-wide debate. Delivering the keynote at the Edinburgh Festival, Scotland’s