When I first began reading How Soccer Explains the World I had some doubts to say the least. Surely to begin using a sport to analyze global economies and the effects of globalization would take a bit of stretching on the part of the author to say the least. Or so I thought.

As I begun to bite into the text, I was constantly stunned at how ingrained soccer is in these countries. Not to say that I was unaware that much of the world lives and dies with their teams but from what I have gathered so far, for many countries the teams representing them are ingrained in the culture and even more interestingly, the politics. I found it fascinating that those living in these countries take allegiance to a jersey to mean the same thing as allegiance to a certain mob group and that by cheering for a certain team you are unknowingly, or sometimes perhaps knowingly acknowledging that you may be targeted.

But by applying my experience with sports, I can easily see how this may be acomplished. After all, compitition between NFL fanbases can get fairly intesnse. You definetly do not want to be running through an Oakland ghetto with an orange and blue Manning jersey. Why? Because fans of a team begin to feel that their team is somehow representative of who they are and what they and their city represent. Now when you take this level of compitition, add in the fact that soccer is most often international instead of between cities and then hrow in some political instability it is easy to see how soccer can be used as an allegory to explain the world.