I very much liked Franklin Foer's How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization. However, there is a certain Yankee puritanism to the book that, because Foer is a sensible, judicious liberal, never adequately helps explain why football fans can be such reactionary and repulsive boors. For a better explanation of the sometimes embarrassing phenomenon of fandom, British author Tim Parks described it best in that jewel of football books, A Season With Verona. He wrote: "Identity is more important than Morality. Extremism offers an excitement that moderation cannot afford."

In a similar vein more recently, Parks wrote in The Wall Street Journal,

Indeed, the fantastic comedy of the World Cup lies in the tension between the pious internationalist rhetoric and the nail-biting, hysterical, nationalist reality. The television will do everything to convince you that you are watching a harmless "feast of football," while in fact the huge revenues the game is generating depend on the mobilization of emotions that commentators take care never to mention, except perhaps to condemn a lunatic fringe of hooligans.

Football is hardly the final bastion of nationalism (just witness the collapse of the European constitution last year, and the persistence of economic protectionism in the industrialized countries), but as Parks says, it is a place where nationalism can spin splendid profits. In that sense it fits in perfectly with what globalization is supposed to promise. Quite unlike the UN, which couldn't spin a profit if it tried.