Kick back: the curious appeal of soccer's tribalism.

• Author: Wallace-Wells, Benjamin
• Position: On Political Books - Book Review

How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization By Franklin Foer HarperCollins, $24.95

I have spent each of the past three Sundays watching the European soccer championships via satellite at a small bar just south of Dupont Circle in Washington, the only establishment in the District I've found which shows these matches. Having grown up in the Bronx, I have little native interest in the odd geopolitical clashes on offer--Sweden versus Bulgaria!--but then neither do most of the 200 or so other yuppies who watch with me, and who show up to grab seats even earlier than I do. What we are watching is not so much the games themselves, whose quality has frankly been up and down, but the few European expats, pasty-faced development bankers and diplomats with soft bellies, who are accorded a momentary celebrity status, sitting at the best tables and singing obscure, off-key patriotic songs to root their elevens on. There is a ferocity to their fandom that I have not seen elsewhere in American sports, a sense that when England faces France on the pitch, two cultures really are in conflict, and the result might have something meaningful to say about which one is superior. The Americans at the bar, who outnumber the expatriates 20 to one, stand around the mom's edges like wallflowers at a junior high school dance, shooting each other geeky smiles, feeling privileged to be party to the action. Only the most imaginative of us, after all, have ever been able to invest the pennant runs of the Florida Marlins with anything approaching the same historical importance or symbolic heft.

Sportswriters of a particular liberal-sensitive cast have spent three decades patiently pressing upon their readers the demographic inevitability of soccer's conquest of the American sporting scene. First, they say, there are the participants: millions of suburban soccer kids, who will as adults lock onto the sport they grew up playing. Next, there are all those Mexicans--and other immigrants too--for whom soccer is a happy link back to their homelands. But the minor roots that the sport has established so far in America have been put down neither by the immigrant fans nor the Saturday morning shin guard posse but instead by cultural tourists like those who watch each Sunday with me, returned refugees from junior years abroad. Third- and fourth- generation immigrants, we wistfully align ourselves with working-class allegiances from the old country, looking at...