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INTRODUCTION
In anticipation of the 2006 FIFA World Cup, a travelogue written by Franklin Foer (2004) quickly established itself as a national bestseller. The author, a senior editor at the New Republic, adopts as the task of his work an 'explanation of the world'. In preparation for deriving this 'explanation', Foer did not schedule interviews with world leaders, run regressions on global economic data, or carefully read philosophical texts from days of yore. Instead, he travelled the world in search of soccer matches and the culture that enlivens them. Foer's work is not unique in its aspiration to transform 'the beautiful game' into a metaphor for life beyond the pitch. Much like baseball before it, and boxing before that, soccer has caught the attention of the intellectual classes who yearn to connect with the passions of the common man and put them into a perspective where greater meaning can be found.1 These myriad accounts, notes Bryan Curtis (2006), steadfastly shun the analytical rigour and problem-solving approach that Michael Lewis' (2003)Moneyball brought into the mainstream of baseball writing, and embrace instead an approach 'lyrical, impressionistic, [and] given to giddy rhapsodies'. They are interesting reads for even the casual soccer fan and full of compelling hypotheses, but they are all anecdote with little or no systematic theory-testing or building.
In this paper, we seek to contribute to the growing literature on the nexus between soccer and politics, in a way that is a little more Moneyball and a little less How Soccer Explains the World. At a minimum this means adopting a less ambitious agenda. In lieu of explaining 'the world', we seek to explain the relationship between Ghana's two dominant soccer clubs, Accra Hearts of Oak (Hearts) and Kumasi Asante Kotoko (Kotoko), and Ghana's two dominant parties, the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and New Patriotic Party (NPP). This relationship is one that nearly every Ghanaian has heard of, though some report it as an absolute fact and others swear it is little more than soccer lore.
The paper takes as its point of embarkation a hypothesis drawn from the aforementioned soccer and politics literature. Some soccer clubs, the hypothesis goes, represent more than a jersey and...