Collected Prose

Vermeer and Goya, in spite of Chartres and the Declaration of the Rights of Man, it’s a proven fact that scarcely a month has gone by in the past thousand years when one group of Europeans has not been intent on killing another group of Europeans. Country has fought against country (the Hundred Years War), alliances of countries have fought against other alliances of countries (the Thirty Years War), and the citizens of a single country have fought against each other (the French Religious Wars). When it comes to our own, much vaunted century of progress and enlightenment, just fill in the appropriate blanks. And lest anyone think the carnage has ended, he has only to open the paper and read about the current situation in former Yugoslavia. Not to speak of what has been happening in Northern Ireland for the past thirty years.
    Mercifully, there has been peace among the major European powers since the end of World War II. For the first forty-five postwar years, that peace was tainted by another kind of war, but since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the breakup of the Soviet Union, the peace has held. This is unprecedented in European history. With a common currency on the horizon and passport-free borders already a reality, it looks as though the combatants have finally put down their arms. That doesn’t mean they like each other, and it doesn’t mean that nationalism is any less fervent than it used to be, but for once it seems that the Europeans have found a way to hate each other without hacking each other to pieces. This miracle goes by the name of soccer.
    I don’t want to exaggerate, but how else to interpret the facts? When France pulled off a surprise victory in the World Cup last summer, more than a million people gathered on the Champs-Elysées to celebrate. By all accounts, it was the largest demonstration of public happiness seen in Paris since the Liberation from the Germans in 1944.
    One could only gape at the enormity of the event, the sheer excessiveness of the joy on display. It was just a sports victory, I kept telling myself, and yet there it was for everyone to see: on the same street in the same city, the same festive jubilation, the same outpouring of national pride that greeted General de Gaulle when he marched through the Arc de Triomphe fifty-four years earlier.
    As I watched this scene on television, I thought of the title of a book I had read earlier in the decade: The Soccer War , by Ryszard Kapuściński. Was it possible that soccer had become a substitute for war?
    Compared to American football, the European version seems rather tame, but the truth is that the history of soccer has always been steeped in violence. Legend or not, the first reference to football-playing in this millennium stems from an incident of war. In the year 1000 or thereabouts, the British were supposed to have celebrated their victory over an invading Danish chieftain by removing his head from his body and using it as a football. We don’t have to believe that story, but verifiable documents confirm that by the 1100s Shrove Tuesdays were celebrated throughout England with massive football matches that pitted entire towns against one another. Five hundred players on a side. A field that could be up to several miles long. And games that lasted all day, with no fixed rules. It came to be known as “mob football,” and the mayhem that resulted from these semi-organized brawls led to so many injuries, broken bones, and even deaths, that in 1314 Edward II issued an edict that banned the playing of football. “Forasmuch as there is great noise in the city, caused by hustling over large balls from which many evils might arise … we commend and forbid, on behalf of the King, on pain of imprisonment, such game to be used in the city in future.”
    Further bans were issued by Edward III, Richard II, and Henry IV. These kings were not just disturbed by the violence of the sport, they were worried that too much “meddling in football” had cut into the time previously devoted to archery practice and that the kingdom would not be militarily prepared in the event of a foreign invasion. As far back as the first half of the millennium, then, the connection had already been made. War and football were two sides of the same coin.
    With the development of firearms, archery ceased to be a required skill among soldiers, and by the late seventeenth century football was actively encouraged by Charles II. Standard rules were