FC Basel ultras at Stade de Suisse Wankdorf, Bern, home of BSC Young Boys. The latter won on penalty kicks in the Swiss Cup semi-finals, April 2009.

Photo credit: Michael Mohr on Flickr

Poster in Zurich, Switzerland, by the Swiss Milk Marketing Board.

Photo credit: Jim Walshe on Flickr, via the Pitch Invasion Photo Pool.

This is the last in a series of brief and miscellaneous perspectives on the World Cup groups and nations (here’s

Has anyone else ever been fooled by the title of Ryszard Kapuściński 1991 book The Soccer War?  The first time I stumbled across it many years ago, before I had learned of Kapuściński’s fame as a writer and journalist, I assumed it was about soccer causing, or maybe solving, a war.  That sounded good.

It turns out, however, that the title of the book comes from one essay about a four day war between Honduras and El Salvador; a war that was ostensibly sparked by the result of 1970 World Cup qualifiers.  Other essays in the book address topics having nothing to do with soccer: the murder of Patrice Lumumba, torture in Guatemala, Turkey’s contest with Cyprus, the Nigerian civil war, etc..  It turns out, despite the almost completely marginal role of soccer, to be a damn good book.

Returning in a 2010 World Cup preview to The Soccer War, and remembering how little of it actually had to do with soccer, seems appropriate to a consideration of Group H (matching Honduras with Spain, Switzerland, and Chile).  Thanks both to the story of the brief 1969 Honduran war with El Salvador and the story of its 2010 qualification for this World Cup—which apparently “helped to heal Honduras” after a traumatic political struggle in 2009—the Central Americans seem to be exhibit A in the power of sport over politics.

What’s more, South Africa is a nearly perfect host for such stories, given the well-known ways in which sport created some sense of national unity in the delicate days after the end of apartheid.  In the famous words of Nelson Mandela, “Sport has the power to change the world. It has the power to unite in a way that little else does. It speaks to youth in a language they understand. Sport can create hope where once there was only despair. It is more powerful than governments in breaking down racial barriers. It laughs in the face of all types of discrimination.”

But with all due respect to Mandela, we should all know that the power of sport is more complicated than that.  Power can be used for good or for ill, and it always derives from a complex nexus of social forces.  Take, for example, how Kapuściński concludes his essay on the Honduras-El Salvador “soccer war”

The soccer war lasted one hundred hours.  Its victims: 6,000 dead, more than 12,000 wounded.  Fifty thousand people lost their homes and fields.  Many villages were destroyed….

These are the real reasons for the war: El Salvador, the smallest country in Central America, has the greatest population density in the western hemisphere (over 160 people per square kilometer).  Things are crowded and all the more so because most of the land is in the hands o fourteen great landowning clans…For years a part of the landless poor has been emigrating to Honduras, where there are large tracts of unimproved land…In the 1960’s, unrest began among the Honduran peasantry, which was demanding land…Relations between the two countries were tense.  Newspapers on both sides waged a campaign of hate, slander and abuse, calling each other Nazis, dwarfs, drunkards, sadists, spiders, aggressors and thieves.  There were pogroms.  Shops were burned.

In these circumstances the match between Honduras and El Salvador had taken place.

The “soccer war” was not about soccer; it was about poverty, inequality, and xenophobia.  In Central America in 1969 soccer was the spark that ignited a war, but in other contexts soccer may hide or obscure related social problems.  With Switzerland, for example, it has been interesting to watch how xenophobic politics such as banning minarets gets negotiated with the fact that their national team depends heavily on immigrants (with players of Turkish, Albanian, Congolese, Spanish, and Serbian descent set to appear in South Africa, to say nothing of the more dramatic mix on the Swiss U-17 World Cup champions).  Likewise, for all its dramatic success using sport to unite a diverse nation, South Africa still hasn’t figured out a game that can dampen fears of Zimbabwean immigrants imagined to be a threat to employment or Nigerian immigrants imagined to be a threat to safety.

So while a nation like Honduras may gain some relief from its political problems through this rare trip to a World Cup, soccer will not solve those problems.  In some cases it may even exacerbate them.

That doesn’t, however, mean we can’t enjoy the soccer with a reasonably clear political conscious.  In fact, a Time magazine article with thoughts from a representative of the Honduran left-wing “resistance,” suggests that even the country’s political radicals won’t miss the games:

“Yes we are going to support the team, especially the men in the resistance. It would be a lie if I said we were not,” says feminist activist and opposition organizer Gilda Velasquez. However, she warns, soccer is an “unhealthy distraction” — an “opiate used by the media to keep the country happily asleep.” Mindful of the soporific peril, she adds: “The most we’ll do is watch the game for 90 minutes, but we won’t watch the ads.”

That sounds like good advice to us all: watch the 90 minutes but don’t watch the ads.  And remember that despite grand claims about the power of the game to start or stop wars, and simplistic attempts to make national teams represent nation states, the power of an event like the World Cup is always less (and more) than it appears.

Group H: The Group of _______________

ESPN's 2010 FIFA World Cup Murals by the Cape Town-based AM I Collective

As a start to my own simplistic attempt to make statistical representations of the nation states in Group H, it seems appropriate to note that in a literal sense Group H is the Group of [Least] Death: it has the highest average life expectancy of any quartet in the tournament.  With three countries where you can expect to live to about 80 (Spain at 80.9, Switzerland at 81.7, and Chile at 78.6), along with Honduras at around 70.2 (which is not great—but not terrible for the poorest country in the tournament outside of Africa), lives here are long.

Otherwise, the trends for Group H are relatively positive but also relatively non-descript.  Beyond life expectancy, the only thing I could find where this quartet topped the other World Cup groups was for average rankings on the “Happy Planet Index.”  As they explain the Index: “The nations that top the Index aren’t the happiest places in the world, but the nations that score well show that achieving, long, happy lives without over-stretching the planet’s resources is possible.”  Out of the 143 ranked nations, having Spain at 76^th, Switzerland at 52^nd, Honduras at 10^th, and Chile at 46^th was good enough to better all the other World Cup groups on average psycho-eco sustainability.  Strangely, however, the Happy Planet Index seems to almost be biased against soccer success: of the top 20 countries only three are in the World Cup (Brazil at 9^th, Honduras at 10^th, and Argentina at 15^th).

The other somewhat obvious connection between these nations is in language: including Spain, Chile, and Honduras as primarily Spanish speaking nations makes Group H the only one in the World Cup where three group-mates share a primary language (Switzerland is an outsider with German, French, Italian, and Romansh as official languages—but still, with the exception of German, they’re all Romance Languages).  You might think that would make for potential globalized soccer connections but it doesn’t seem to.  Honduras has three players plying their trade in Italy and three in England, but zero in Spain.  Chile also has three playing in Italy, but only two in Spain (along with others in Greece, England, Russia, Mexico, Turkey, Brazil, Argentina, France, Portugal, Germany, and the United Arab Emirates).  Spain and Switzerland, perhaps needless to say, have no players working in Honduras or Chile (the only three Spanish players playing abroad are in England, while Switzerland has seven in Germany and four in Italy but none in Spain).  Despite spreading their language far and wide, the Spanish here come off as quite insular.  Nevertheless, combining the linguistic similarities with Group H having the best life expectancy of any quartet in the tournament, I’m labeling it the Group of Life and Linguistics.

Who would advance if there were any justice in the world?

In the terms of my secret formula combining soccer history and global politics, Chile has a checkered past.  Even aside from (or perhaps related to) the long reign of Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean national team is most famous in World Cup lore for violence and deception.  The Chilean’s 1962 World Cup match against Italy, known as the ‘Battle of Santiago,’ was described by David Coleman as “The most stupid, appalling, disgusting and disgraceful exhibition of football, possibly in the history of the game…This is the first time these two countries have met.  We hope it will be the last.”  Then in 1989 Chilean goalkeeper Roberto Rojas executed one of the most famous cheats in World Cup qualifying, cutting himself with a razor blade to fake injury and escape from a match at Brazil.  Chile was suspended from both the 1990 and 1994 World Cups.  They did have a decent showing in 1998—and my general feeling is that Chile has moved on and deserves another shot.  I also mostly liked the Michelle Bachelet era—having an agnostic single mother pediatrician as President is quite a statement—so in my mind Chile is in for the chance at redemption.

Spain’s checkered history bears some similarities, but is generally of a different sort.  In modern World Cups they’ve done no better than a few quarterfinals, and are usually considered classic underperformers.  But their 2008 European championship merits their co-favorite status for South Africa 2010 and I have no problem with that.  I don’t fully understand the regional politics in Spain, and am suspicious of whether Catalans such as Xavi and Puyol should have the right to obscure the Spanish flag logo on their socks, but mostly Spain seems worthy of advancing: they are in.

That leaves Switzerland and Honduras on the outs, which isn’t quite fair.  Sure Switzerland may be trending xenophobic while relying on immigrant talent on the pitch, but mostly the Swiss seem to be a pretty good example of a peaceful, thriving democracy.  And, as noted above, the World Cup just seems to mean a lot to Honduras.  But at the end of it all, if there is anything I’ve learned in putting together these eight World Cup group previews, it is that there is rarely any justice in the world.

Group H – Some Stats

Our tifo video series rolls across from Belgium to Switzerland, and we find ourselves in Lausanne, a small French-speaking city perhaps best known as the headquarters of the International Olympic Committee.

Swiss club FC Lausanne-Sport, founded in 1896 and successful for their first half-century, haven’t won the league championship for other forty years.

Their supporters’ group Blue-White Fanatic Kop (BWFK) take their name from Lausanne’s colours, and their English spelling and use of Kop is indicative of their formation in the 80s, when the influence of English support on the continent was considerable.

The group recently celebrated their twentieth anniversary, and decided to mark it with a pre-game display translating roughly as “united for twenty years”. It’s fairly spectacular, despite the rather noticeably empty stands.

Photo credits: Remozill, webguruAT on Flickr

Photo credits: webguruAT, machopaul, stadtwanderer/randonneu r_urbain on Flickr.

Are you at Euro 2008? Add your photos to the Pitch Invasion photo pool on Flickr.

Derby Day

It’s never just a game. It’s never just three points.

Grasshoppers Club Zürich are not having a great season, and it’s made all the worse when they are forced to play their home matches in the stadium of their arch rivals, FC Zürich (FCZ).

The Hardturm, home to Grasshoppers since 1929, shut its gates in September 2007 (photo from last game below) to make way for the Stadion Zürich due in 2010. In the meantime the multisports club must play its home games in FCZ’s Letzigrund, recently developed for the Euro 2008 finals.

On Sunday night over 14,000 witnessed 7th place Grasshoppers beat title-challenging FCZ 2-1, their first win in seven over the city rivals. The victory was made all the more sweet as it seems the majority of the crowd was made up of “away” fans (though of course in their own stadium). ‘Hopper fans celebrated as the infamous Südkurve could only look on and wonder why they weren’t celebrating a home victory at the Letzigrund.

Derby day in February 2007:

Tragedy

One shouldn’t be fooled by the thought of Swiss football as neutral. Political leanings aside, the Swiss national team qualified for the World Cup 2006 in an extraordinary group where everyone kept drawing – of the top four teams in the group, only one team lost a match. At the World Cup itself they went out without conceding a goal, losing on penalties in Cologne against Ukraine.

However, the club scene is anything but placid. On the final day of the 2005-6 season, FCZ were trailing league leaders FC Basel by three points. The end of season showdown at Basel’s stadium (St. Jakob Park, below) looked sure to be heading the home side’s way when a 93rd minute winner sealed the title on goal difference, sparking riots.

About 30 seconds after the final whistle had been blown, dozens of attendees of the match who supported Basel stormed the pitch. These hooligans started attacking the Zürich players and officials who tried to flee into the changing rooms. FCZ’s Romanian defender, Iulian Filipescu, was attacked numerous times. A flare was also thrown at him, fortunately narrowly missing its target.

In the aftermath of celebrations, a 29-year-old FCZ fan Roland Maag attempted to quell a dispute among his own fans in the streets. Maag was hit, knocked out and remains paralysed to this day.

It was this story that drew a friend and I to Zürich in July 2007 to watch FCZ take on Bayer Leverkusen in a benefit match for Roli Maag, who was wheeled out to the 2,700 strong crowd at the Hardturm, weeks before the doors were closed forever. An agreeably warm summer afternoon reminded all those present of the best and worst of being a football fan. Posting in an internet café that evening, I wrote on the messageboard for FCZ fans:

“…but FCZ was great, we enjoyed it, drunk beer, ate sausage and looked at the lovely girls at Lake Zürich…”

Fast forward to Sunday evening, Grasshoppers having defeated their arch rivals, a victory that will be remembered all through the three-month winter break in Switzerland.

Reading the Grasshoppers match thread on the same FCZ messageboard I wrote on months ago, I notice the signature of one of the posters. It’s the comment I made months ago:

“Originally posted by JoeW:

Aber FCZ war geil, wir haben es genossen, Bier getrunken, Wurst gegessen und die zürische Mädel am Zürichsee bermerkt.”

It’s sometimes worth remembering the effect football can have. One tourist’s throwaway comment can become a mantra for a lifelong fan. One second can turn a runner-up into a champion. One celebration can become a nightmare.

Photo credits: Dreamer7112; Nelson H.,

More FC Zürich after the jump.

Photo collage:

The same two teams at it again in 2006, with some ugly scenes at the end: