To Those Paying Attention, Peace Claims Are Laughable

Any day now, Lars Gustafsson can expect the telephone to ring at his Swedish home. When he answers, it will probably be Jay Leno or David Letterman on the line, inviting him to make a quick trip to the United States.

After all, men with Gustafsson’s sense of humor are not easy to find.

Gustafsson’s gift might have gone unnoticed had it not been for a letter he wrote the other day to the Norwegian Nobel Committee in Oslo.

In it, he suggested--presumably with a straight face--that soccer be considered a candidate for the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize because of its role in promoting understanding among nations.

The Norwegians must have fallen about laughing.

Soccer?

A game whose box score all too often includes not just the teams and the goals but also the dead and the injured?

Very funny, Lars. Soccer for the Peace Prize? Get serious.

But Gustafsson, a Swedish politician, was not joking.

“Soccer has and will continue to play an important role in the global arena, when it comes to creating understanding between people,” he wrote.

Hmmm.

It must have been that same sense of understanding that in 1969 caused El Salvador to invade neighboring Honduras after their bitter World Cup qualifying series. The ensuing battle has been known ever since as the “Soccer War.”

Gustafsson pointed to the 1998 World Cup match between Iran and the United States in France as an example of how two countries, otherwise in conflict, can find common ground, at least for 90 minutes on a soccer field.

He also might have reminded Nobel voters that North and South Korea, technically still at war, fielded a joint team at the FIFA World Youth Championship tournament in Portugal several years ago.

But such examples are not common. The deeply nationalistic passions that the game engenders mean that soccer, rather than bringing people together, just as often divides.

Sometimes, though, good humor prevails.

In 1982, for example, Scotland and the former Soviet Union played a World Cup match in Spain. The encounter was concisely summed up by some witty Scots with a banner that proclaimed the match “Communism vs Alcoholism.”

That brought a smile, but very often the expression in the stands--and especially outside the stadiums--is a snarl.

Rioting by hooligan fans has become commonplace at major events such as the World Cup and the European Championship. A small minority of the 203 soccer-playing countries gets involved in these unpleasantries, of course, but the level of violence has escalated over the past quarter-century and, in some minds at least, soccer and hooliganism are synonymous.

The sport is played year-round and worldwide, which means that negative headlines are likely to crop up frequently.

Only last weekend, for instance, Argentine police fired rubber bullets and sprayed tear gas in the stands in Buenos Aires to quell fan unrest, while their Italian counterparts fought running battles with fans in the streets of Milan.

Peace in our time? No way.

The fact that soccer is a multibillion-dollar industry increases the tension, not only among fans but among nations as they vie for the honor--not to mention the financial windfall--that comes from hosting major tournaments.

The bitterness surrounding the vote last summer giving Germany the 2006 World Cup over South Africa spilled over into the political arena, with charges of bribery and corruption leveled on all sides.

“The politics involved make me nostalgic for the Middle East,” Henry Kissinger said after he had lost in a similar bid to get the United States to host the 1986 World Cup.

Sport as a substitute for war has long been an appealing notion, but decades of bad blood between countries will take more than a few soccer games to heal.

Every time England plays Germany, the jingoistic English tabloid press has a field day dredging up World War II comparisons, many of them unprintable here. Argentina and Brazil teeter on the brink every time their national teams square off.

Even close neighbors who share the same language--well, sort of--find a yawning chasm between them when it comes to soccer.

“As we came around the corner from the 18th green,” former Scottish standout Denis Law wrote in his autobiography, “a crowd of members were at the clubhouse window, cheering and waiting to tell me that England had won the World Cup.

“It was the blackest day of my life.”

But Gustafsson seems to ignore such sentiments. For him, it’s all sunshine and flowers. He even suggests that FIFA, world soccer’s governing body, might be the one to accept the Peace Prize on behalf of the sport.

But it was only a few days ago that FIFA was threatening clubs with draconian punishment if they did not crack down on rampant racism by their fans. FIFA’s leaders also have been at each other’s throats recently over the issue of player transfers.

“All that I know most surely about morality and the obligations of man, I owe to football,” Albert Camus wrote in 1957.

That was then; this is 2001.

There is a story that tells of Sir Neville Henderson and Herman Goering sitting together watching England play Germany in Berlin in 1938.

The English were well on their way to a 6-3 thumping of the Germans when Henderson turned to Goering, offered him his binoculars and said, “What wonderful goals. You really ought to take a closer look at them.”

Goering’s reply was not recorded, but it is safe to assume that his thoughts at the time were not as peaceful as Gustafsson might have preferred.

Perhaps it’s time Gustafsson took a closer look at soccer before mailing any more letters to Oslo.