The People’s Game: The education of a soccer fan. (Salman Rushdie, May 24, 1999, The New Yorker)
I came to London in January, 1961, as a boy of thirteen and a half, on my way to boarding school, and accompanied by my father. It was a cold month, with blue skies by day and green fogs by night. We stayed at a huge barracks of a hotel, the Cumberland, at Marble Arch, and after we settled in my father asked if I would like to see a professional soccer game. (In Bombay, where I had grown up, there was no soccer to speak of; the local sports were cricket and field hockey.)The first game my father took me to see was what I would later learn is called a “friendly” (because the result doesn’t count toward anything) between a North London team called the Arsenal and the champions of Spain, Real Madrid. I did not know that the visitors were rated as perhaps the greatest team ever. Or that they had just won the European Cup five years running. (The European Cup is an annual tournament held to determine the champion of all Europe’s national champions.) Or that among their players were two of the game’s all-time immortals, both foreigners: a Hungarian named Ferenc Puskas, “the little general,” and an Argentine, Alfredo di Stefano.
This is the way I remember the game: in the first half, Real Madrid tore the Arsenal apart. The London team was renowned for its tough defensive style of play—“Boring Arsenal” is a label it was stuck with for years—but Real Madrid went through the Arsenal’s defense almost at will, and at halftime led 3–0. Then, because this was, after all, just a friendly game, Real took off its star players and replaced them with a bunch of kids. Arsenal stubbornly kept all its first-team players on the field, and the game ended up tied, 3–3; but not even the most diehard Arsenal fans could pretend that the result accurately reflected the quality of the two teams.
On the way back to the hotel, my father asked me for my views. “Well, I didn’t think much of that English team,” I told him. “But I liked that Spanish side. Can you find out if there’s an English team that plays like Real Madrid?” Unknown to me, I had asked for the near impossible; as if, in Michael Jordan’s airborne heyday, I had asked, “Can you find out if there’s a team that plays like the Chicago Bulls?” My father, almost as much an innocent in these matters as myself, said, “I’ll ask at the front desk.” What he learned from that long-forgotten hotel clerk changed my life, because a few days later we went to watch the other famous team of North London, Tottenham Hotspur, and I lost my heart.