How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization by Franklin Foer Page A
Authors: Franklin Foer
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our middle fingers and use them as batons to ironically conduct their taunts.
Rangers wins the match three-two, and there’s only one explanation for the outcome: Celtic’s sluggish and sloppy back line of defense. That fact doesn’t interfere with the explanations I overhear for the defeat. “Give a goddam Orangeman a whistle. . . .” Another man refers to referees as the “masons in black.” Of course, grousing about refereeing is a bedrock right of sports fans.
Why blame the team that you love when culpability for defeats can be easily transported elsewhere?
Celtic fans are a special case. They don’t just believe that referees try to ruin them. They believe that they’ve definitively proved the phenomenon. The case against the “masons in black” has been made on the op-ed pages of broadsheets and in the pages of the Glasgow archdiocese’s newspaper, and, most elaborately, by a Jesuit priest called Peter Burns. Basing his study on several decades’ worth of game accounts in the Glasgow Herald, Father Burns found that referees had disallowed sixteen Celtic goals, while denying Rangers a
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE PORNOGRAPHY OF SECTS
mere four. Celtic had 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
Rangers wins the match three-two, and there’s only one explanation for the outcome: Celtic’s sluggish and sloppy back line of defense. That fact doesn’t interfere with the explanations I overhear for the defeat. “Give a goddam Orangeman a whistle. . . .” Another man refers to referees as the “masons in black.” Of course, grousing about refereeing is a bedrock right of sports fans.
Why blame the team that you love when culpability for defeats can be easily transported elsewhere?
Celtic fans are a special case. They don’t just believe that referees try to ruin them. They believe that they’ve definitively proved the phenomenon. The case against the “masons in black” has been made on the op-ed pages of broadsheets and in the pages of the Glasgow archdiocese’s newspaper, and, most elaborately, by a Jesuit priest called Peter Burns. Basing his study on several decades’ worth of game accounts in the Glasgow Herald, Father Burns found that referees had disallowed sixteen Celtic goals, while denying Rangers a
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE PORNOGRAPHY OF SECTS
mere four. Celtic had 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
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