ABSTRACT
Simon Kuper’s Football Against the Enemy (1994) and Jonathan Wilson’s Behind the Curtain: Travels in Eastern European Football (2006) present examples of a travel book subgenre which mixes travel narrative with sports journalism, and focus entirely (Wilson) or partially (Kuper) on Eastern Europe. As soccer travelogues, they are motivated by the encounter with the different and extraordinary and they predictably emphasize and confirm the pervasive trope of soccer as a safer substitute for war—“a way to hate each other without hacking each other to pieces” (Auster, 2001, p. 356). Both texts accordingly explore the grim aspects of the cultures and industries surrounding the Eastern European game contributing to its rich symbolical spectrum where soccer sometimes comes to stand as a symbol of global inequality, globalization, political rivalry, local mafia structures, and state corruption. Despite these staple themes with their attendant rhetorical trajectories moving between ‘debasement’ and ‘idealization’ (Spurr, 1993), both narratives offer more than just a stereotypical view of Eastern Europe and its soccer traditions as they also focus on Eastern European soccer’s beautiful aspects. This chapter scrutinizes both books’ depictions of Eastern European spaces and inhabitants through the soccer lens and tests them against the standard repertoire of orientalist ‘topoi’ and strategies of ‘othering’ of Eastern Europe as one of the ‘Orients’ where these rhetorical figures apply.
