The Cat's Meow: European Fields, the Landscape of Amateur Football (van der Meer, Kuper, 2006)

In The Cat’s Meow, I hope to discuss whatever football related films I have seen or books I have read, with you, my readers. These particular books or films do not have to be very recent. If you have seen or read the film or book on hand, please tell me what you thought of it in the comments. Tips are also very welcome.

Today’s edition of the Cat’s Meow is about European Fields, by Hans van der Meer. It’s a Dutch publication, but that really shouldn’t be any problem for any international readers because it’s a photo book. It has a small Dutch introduction, by Simon Kuper, but after that, the universal goodness begins.

In European Fields, van der Meer attempts to recapture an image of football that he believes was lost with the increased global media attention payed to the sport. So like Zidane: a 21st Century Portrait, it offers an entirely different perspective on the game. Not a new one, mind you, but one that we all used to know and love but then lost sight of when every game started being captured by dozens of cameras.


Hans only has one camera, and his trusted ladder to work with. He’s scoured the European amateur football fields and positioned himself somewhere along the pitch and then waited. He waited for a moment, but not necessarily the most action packed situation. Sometimes it’s just a lonely keeper surveying the field, trying to retrieve the ball from a nearby moat, or a minute of respectful silence before kick-off in Spain. In most pictures, van der Meer integrates the football field with the landscape surrounding it and then present it as one.

So European Fields is an ode, really. Van der Meer himself declares wanting to find football ‘as far away from the Champions League is possible’, and he succeeds. Every month, one of his photographs was displayed in the now defunct Dutch magazine Johan, and it was eventually put on exhibition in Rotterdam’s Boijmans van Beuningen Museum.

I got this book for my last birthday and I show it to everyone who I don’t mind thinking of me like the football nut I am. It shows football in its absolute simplicity, its honesty and its grassroots beauty.

My personal favourites: page 24, Budapest, and page 19, Loumarin (France)

Europese Velden at Bol.com
ISBN # 9074159877

The Cat's Meow: The Last Yugoslavian Team (Janic, 2000)

In The Cat’s Meow, I hope to discuss whatever football related films I have seen or books I have read, with you, my readers. These particular books or films do not have to be very recent. If you have seen or read the film or book on hand, please tell me what you thought of it in the comments. Tips are also very welcome.

Today’s Cat’s Meow just proves show sharp and on top of things I really am. Nothing gets by me unnoticed. I’m like a cat.

A very lethargic, sloppy cat.

Today’s subject of the Cat’s Meow is a documentary that was released in 2000, and it’s called ‘The Last Yugoslavian Team’. It’s a Dutch production, made by Vuk Janic, who himself hails from Sarajevo. It details, as one might expect, the last generation of players from Yugoslavia, the so called ‘Chileans’, after their victory in the youth world cup in 1987 in Chile. And it manages to do so in a very beautifully paced, objective manner.

That last part is especially striking. Janic hails from Sarajevo, but does never judge or somehow favourably portray the players who are as well. Equal, if not more, screen time is given to players from other regions, and Janic solemnly collects their statements and presents the viewer with the possibility to construct their own viewpoint out of all these different stories about the same subject. The story shifts from the first matches between Croatia and Serbia, or Former Yugoslavia, footage material and interviews, and as such it has a very clear structure that fills you in on almost everything you need to know.

Janic incorporates all the known landmarks of the story. The Youth World Cup of 1987, the legendary footage of Boban attacking a policeman and the exclusion from the 1992 European Cup all feature, as they should. But he also provides you with a perspective of the inner workings of a team in this rare situation and the effect it has on both the players and their immediate surroundings. Boban, for one, became a staunch nationalist for the Croatian cause. Others, like Mijatovic, try to avoid the topic whenever possible.

Football is often given as an example of how a country can unite behind a single cause, like in Cote d’Ivoire during the last World Cup. It is seldom mentioned how it can also have the exact opposite effect, as becomes evident by the footage of an entire stadium of people booing their own national anthem.

Another very powerfull moment in the documentary which I think deserves special mention shows the Bosnian people, considered the last people who had faith in the union of the republics, after 'their' team advanced in the 1990 World Cup. Their cries of 'Yugoslavia! Yugoslavia!' resemble similar outburts of joy in other countries, but there is an almost desperate tone in their voice.

I would recommend this documentary to any and everyone with even the slightest interest in one of the most striking collisions between sports and politics. I have heard from some people it is rather hard to come by, so I do not have any problems providing you with a link where you can see it for free. Having said that, it really deserves better than being watched on Google Video.

The Last Yugoslavian Team - Janic, 2000.

The Cat's Meow: Zidane, a 21st Century Portrait (Gordon, Parreno, 2006)

In The Cat’s Meow, I hope to discuss whatever football related films I have seen or books I have read, with you, my readers. These particular books or films do not have to be very recent. If you have seen or read the film or book on hand, please tell me what you thought of it in the comments. Tips are also very welcome.

After Zinedine Zidane was sent off in the world cup final, the image of his slow descend into the catacombs of the Olympiastadium in Berlin made one thing very clear to many; nobody, at this particular point in time, could have possibly felt more lonely than Zidane. Because being alone is not just about being deprived of company. It is also about being deprived of understanding. And nobody, at that point, understood why Zidane was walking by the cup which was made by one of his compatriots and named after another.

In the months after, the thirst for insight was only partially quenched. The semi-apology, the countless hours of punditry and journalism that were devoted to it. Nike mocked the Adidas star in a commercial. But for the multimedia frenzy of attention that followed the incident, nothing provided a better insight than Zidane, A 21st Century Portrait. It is a film by Scottish filmmaker and, above anything else, it reveals one thing about Zinedine Zidane.

Zidane loved being alone.

The seventeen cameramen positioned especially for this film during Madrid’s home game against Villarreal received very simple instructions: follow Zidane. For almost ninety minutes, he can be seen (and heard) dragging his feet over the pitch, and all of a sudden it all becomes very clear. On the pitch, like while walking into the catacombs minutes before the final whistle of a world cup final, Zidane prefers to be alone, even when among eighty thousand football fans and twenty-one of his collegues. On the pitch, he does not need company. On the stairs towards the tunnel, in the last moments of his career, he did not need to be understood.

The Cat’s Meow: Once In A Lifetime, the Extraordinary Story of the New York Cosmos. (Crowder, Dower, 2006)

Right. I hope this will eventually turn into a running feature. In The Cat’s Meow, I hope to discuss whatever football related films I have seen or books I have read, with you, my readers. These particular books or films do not have to be very recent. If you have seen or read the film or book on hand, please tell me what you thought of it in the comments. Tips are also very welcome.

Once in a Lifetime details the story of the Cosmos from its humble beginnings in the late sixties towards its eventual glitter and glamour induced demise in the mid-eighties. This in itself makes the film an interesting document for those of you to whom this period in North American Soccer (uhm…sic.), remains a bit of a mystery.

The film focuses largely on the efforts of media tycoon Steve Ross and his efforts to establish football as a legitimate sport in the United States. Realizing this would take quite the spectacle to do so, Ross embarked on a mission to bring in one of the most spectacular player of all time; the recently retired Pelé.

From there on out, Once in a Lifetime is, above anything else, a detailed account of a power struggle within the New York Cosmos. All the main players, except for Pelé, have their say over who or what eventually killed of the Cosmos. Some say it was de facto president/forward Giorgio Chinaglia, others say it was the weight of the NASL collapsing on itself. The emphasis on this particular part of the organisation of the Cosmos draws attention away from the broader rise to popularity of football in the United States during this period.

One particularly interesting story is about the arrival of Brazilian legend Carlos Alberto, which coincided with the New York Blackout. “As light came back over New York City, the Cosmos where everywhere”, Matt Dillon narrates. There are obvious reasons for this explosion of interest – Franz Beckenbauer and Carlos Alberto to name two – but the exact cause of this apparent overnight boom of infatuation with football is never truly explained.

However, even while sporting an at times annoying Seventies aesthetic – yes, we get it: seventies music and those cheesy colourful titles - this documentary does successfully convey what the Cosmos have actually meant for football in the United States. Not only at the time they dominated both the league and fan attention, but also in the long run. So while it misses out on giving a more complete impression of the state of U.S. football at the time, it does shows the roots of modern United States football. It may provide more questions than it answers, but at the very least it’s one of the more interesting and crucial pieces of the puzzle.