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 If you’re expecting a book about football in Eastern Europe to be full of unpronounceable names, cynical chain-smoking coaches, crumbling stadiums, resurgent hooligan culture and nearly unstoppable corruption then you’d be right. But you can also throw in sublime players, clubs and rivalries drenched in layer after layer of complex history, endless insight into the rest of life in the region and a tiny ray of optimistic sun that somehow, almost impossibly, never stops shining. You’ll find all these things in Jonathan Wilson’s Behind the Curtain: Football in Eastern Europe, a superb, endlessly enjoyable study of the game in post-Communist Eastern Europe.
Wilson goes country by country, starting in Ukraine, circling his way from Poland down to the Balkans, then across to the Caucasus before ending up in Russia. Wilson was the Eastern European football correspondent for the website onefootball.com and now writes a weekly column for the Guardian, among others. He’s got a rolodex of contacts a mile long in the region and interviews and meets with one important figure from the region after another, taking in their views on the past, present and future of the game. His depth of knowledge of the region is phenomenal, not just in a football sense but also when delving into politics, economics, culture, and (last but not least) the local booze. So many good stories come back, like the Azerbaijan-England qualifier when the rain turned horizontal, the whims of the region’s various dictators and their effect on the game, the difficulties of football during the war in Bosnia, the complex story of Russian icon Eduard Streltsov. The list just goes on and on.
A couple of interesting things kept popping up. First, the rivalries. Intense, bitter rivalries that are an equal in ferociousness with almost any rivalries anywhere. And often it is difficult to explain exactly why there is such a rivalry and how it has come to be so “hot”. Some are rooted in long-term ethnic or political disputes but some seem to have evolved out of nowhere, like Dinamo Zagreb-Hajduk Split or Croatia-Slovenia. It may be that rivalries are just part of the lifeblood of the game, as important as the slaloming run of a Maradona, the tactical genius of a Cruyff or the youthful enthusiasm of a Messi. As one Slovenian coach said, “If rivalries don’t exist we have to invent them”.
[I apologize for the lack of quotations in this article. The day I finished the book I managed to leave my backpack in a New York City taxi cab. Besides this book I also had The Far Corner, a book about football in the North East of England. I’d waited six weeks for it and had it all of one day. Sometimes I really don’t know what to do with myself.]
Another thing that kept cropping up was the fate of the game in many of the ex-Soviet republics like Georgia or Armenia. In many of these countries one club had reigned supreme and acted as a focal point for point of nationalist sentiment. When Dinamo Tbilisi played Spartak Moscow or Dinamo Yerevan played CSKA Moscow it wasn’t just two clubs competing in the Soviet championship. It was Georgians or Armenians against Russians, matches overloaded with political symbolism. This dynamic was the be-all, end-all for these provincial flagship clubs. With independence their importance and value plummeted and they now putter along in national championships of terribly low standard with minimal crowds. Where these clubs go from here is very unclear.
I find it hard to say anything negative about the book. I am huge fan of these kind of regional or country profile books and it certainly holds its weight alongside Morbo, Tor!, Futebol and similar others. If there is any kind of drawback, it is that it left me wanting so much more. One chapter to explain Russian football? One chapter on the entire ex-Yugoslavia? It’s just not enough. I could devour an entire book of similar quality for each country. Hopefully that lies somewhere in Wilson’s futures.
Behind the Curtain: Football in Eastern Europe
By Jonathan Wilson
256 pages
Orion Publishing, 2002
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