Does God Love Haiti? Dimitri Elias Léger on the Haitian Scorer of the Greatest Goal in US History

ANDREW KEEN: Hello, everybody. It's not really news that World Cup fever is in the air. We just did an interview with Simon Kuper, the Anglo-Dutch journalist and sports writer whose new book is appropriately called World Cup Fever. Next week we're talking to Franklin Foer, whose classic book How Soccer Explains the World — an unlikely theory of globalization — has just been reissued. And today we're going fiction. My guest is Dimitri Elias Léger, and he has a new novel out, perfectly timed for the World Cup: Death of the Soccer God. It's a novel about the 1950 World Cup. Dimitri, congratulations on the new book.

DIMITRI ELIAS LÉGER: Thank you, thank you, thank you, Andrew.

KEEN: So unlike Simon Kuper, who wrote a book about his experience attending nine previous World Cups, I'm guessing that you yourself were not at the 1950 World Cup. Is that fair?

LÉGER: No, I was not. But the story of that World Cup is extremely popular in Haiti. It's legendary — the first World Cup after World War Two — and the legend of the Haitian soccer player who brings glory to America against England is very much alive among Haitians of a certain age.

KEEN: And I'm going to try to pronounce his name. Your novel is based on some real events. A man called Joe — how do I pronounce the surname? Gaëtjens?

LÉGER: Gaëtjens.

KEEN: Gaëtjens — a Haitian footballer. You grew up in Haiti, so you're all too familiar with his story. I grew up in England, where the story of the 1950 World Cup in Brazil is dominated by a remarkable match between the United States and England — which the US won, one-nil. The English thought they were the best in the world. Of course they weren't. And the astonishing thing is that the winning goal was scored by a Haitian, this character Joe Gaëtjens. Is that as famous a story for young Haitians as it is for young English people?

LÉGER: Yes, it is. For Haitians of that generation — our grandparents' generation — it's a huge story. And our parents' generation, people born in the fifties, grew up hearing about it and passed it on. When a Haitian does well abroad, it brings glory to the whole country. He was, for a few years after scoring that very improbable goal, the most famous Haitian in the world.

I read about him before England played the US in the opening game of the 2010 South Africa World Cup, and I thought to myself: the story of a Haitian teenager who comes to New York, somehow makes it onto the American World Cup team, has a great tournament, and becomes a global star — it felt like a novel I was meant to write.

KEEN: And it connects in some ways to Franklin Foer's argument about soccer and globalization. Tell me the story of Gaëtjens and why it inspired you.

LÉGER: It was familiar on several levels. He was a mixed kid from a good family — half German, half Haitian — who was sent to America to study, not to play football. But he couldn't resist the beautiful game, ends up playing for the American team, and makes it to the World Cup in Brazil in 1950. There are wonderful details, like the fact that he couldn't tell his parents he was playing for America in the World Cup. He had to keep it secret. He wasn't even American, and he wasn't supposed to be playing football at all.

Once I saw that, I just had to imagine what his inner life was like — the conflicts, the story of a Haitian immigrant in New York City in 1950, what it's like to move from Port-au-Prince to New York City to Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and manage those travels and the adventures that came with them. It proved irresistible. I thought about this novel sixteen years ago and finally wrote it last year. I'm happy to share it with the world, because it's a great immigrant story, a great globalization story — before the term "globalization" even existed. And it's a romantic story. At a time when Haitian immigrants get a mixed reception around the world, not just in America, this story reminds you that immigrants are capable of astounding feats and bring glory to the countries they live in in surprising ways.

KEEN: There's obviously a polemical element here. As we speak, Iran is reportedly negotiating to move their World Cup matches from the United States to Mexico, given the ongoing US-Iran tensions. What's the politics of this novel? It's your follow-up to your 2015 hit God Loves Haiti, and you've put a lot of work and time into it.

LÉGER: Yes. It took ten years to write my follow-up novel, though it was an idea I had before I even wrote the first one. I suppose if there's a political angle, it's that I basically write novels that ask the question: does God exist? And if God exists, how do you square that with the poorest people on earth? Can God love Haiti? Can God love Haitians? Haitians are among the most maligned people on the planet, and have been for a long time.

My first novel looked at faith and politics in Haiti after a devastating earthquake and humanitarian disaster. This one is about a Haitian genius — a brilliant athlete whose gifts prove strong enough to impress the world. He moves from Haiti to New York, his gifts open doors, and then he goes back to Haiti and his life gets even more complicated.

The political story is always in pursuit of a philosophical question: when you move around the world, what keeps you steady? Where do loyalties lie? What is loyalty when you're gifted? What is loyalty when you're wealthy? Who are you when you move between worlds and between classes and accomplish great things?

KEEN: And of course there's the question of who you are as a Haitian playing for the United States — in a game he picked up in Central Park. You ask whether God loves Haiti, but I wonder if there's also a God element in football itself. A lot of people call it the beautiful game. Do you think one reason it's called that is because it's so simple — something God himself might love?

LÉGER: That's a great question. I think one reason it's called the beautiful game is that we use hand-eye coordination for practically everything we do — every waking hour of our lives. Football is the only arena where foot-eye coordination is the dominant skill. It's such an unlikely, improbable, wondrous skill to behold. Yes, there's a magical element to it, a spiritual element. Those who saw Pelé play in Sweden in the 1958 World Cup final feel they witnessed something miraculous. People who saw Maradona play in '86 — Maradona juggling a football is the most amazing thing. Same with Zidane. When Zidane caresses a football and rolls it around, it makes no sense. It seems miraculous, because your feet are not supposed to be that graceful — not supposed to be that coordinated and in control — using only your feet to make other people miss, to score goals.

KEEN: And the God element is interesting. You bring up Maradona and that '86 game against England — another English humiliation; it seems to be the recurring story of English football, maybe the English nation. Maradona famously described his handball goal as the Hand of God. It's interesting that in the book you imply — or your fictional character implies — that the game didn't really come from England. The English always thought they invented it, but you note it may have originated in China, which adds to the global dimension that Franklin Foer describes so brilliantly. Is football the global game? Is that what you concluded?

LÉGER: It may be the only sport that has its roots in China, became commercially massive in England and Europe, and yet the best team in the world since 1950 — since the World Cup was established and the game went truly global — is Brazil: a South American country that is majority Black. It happens to be the one sport in the world where a non-European country has dominated for generations. So yes, it is the most global sport in that regard: invented in Asia, commercialized in Europe, yet mastered most thoroughly by Brazilians and Argentinians in South America.

KEEN: And of course it has a strongly musical quality, which means that the hero of your book is also a very musical character. Some of the book takes place in New York and Harlem. He meets Miles Davis and other famous jazz musicians. Is there an intimate connection in your mind between music and football?

LÉGER: Certainly between football and jazz, football and samba — the improvisational nature of footballers moving with their feet at great speed, stopping, changing, slowing down. Just watch a penalty shootout: you're watching a jazz soloist taking chances, trying to defeat the keeper. There's a huge connection. That's why football highlights work so well on YouTube — you can watch five minutes of Messi and you're watching a concerto. You could put any music in the background and you're watching an artist — a tiny guy driving around the giants of Real Madrid, the giants of Manchester United, scoring goal after goal. Messi's header against Manchester United in the Champions League final was so operatic. Football has a musical, operatic, theatrical element that is hard to replicate, because football players come in every size and every physique and still get it done.

KEEN: And they're often small — Maradona, Messi, even Pelé. We did some shows a while back, Dimitri — there was a book written about the greatest footballer in history and we had interviews with several journalists who contributed to it. The debate is always between Pelé, Maradona, and Messi. In your view, is one of them clearly the greatest?

LÉGER: For my money, it would be Cristiano Ronaldo. Because with his size and speed, he covered more of the pitch than any of those three, and he had the endurance to last longer and get more things done in more varied ways than Messi did.

KEEN: Though of those four, he's probably the least poetic, isn't he? The least musical?

LÉGER: Yes. Pelé is the most musical, and Pelé is the GOAT. Pelé was key to the sport's global popularity. That's what I discovered when I was researching my book — I thought about including Pelé as a character. Miles Davis is a character, Pelé is a character in my novel. So is Aimé Césaire, and other celebrities make cameos.

Pelé's cameo was particularly interesting because one reason Brazil became the most popular football nation in the world is that Pelé played — and was magnificent — in the first World Cup final to be televised. The first televised World Cup final was in 1958 in Stockholm, and he was sixteen years old and scored a hat-trick. And Pelé looks like a typical Haitian kid, a typical African kid — he looks like a majority of the planet's population, and that helped football explode in popularity. He also introduced the world to the bicycle kick. He made the sport look like ballet, like art, like music. He brought in the Brazilian style, the samba flair — and samba was growing in global popularity in the late fifties and early sixties, which also accompanied Brazil's great success as they won three World Cup championships in twelve years.

KEEN: Yes — '58, '62, and 1970, perhaps their greatest team of all, when they won in Mexico.

LÉGER: The interplay between justice and sports is a tough concept. Wealth helps most of the time dictate who wins. Football is uniquely unjust in the sense that anybody could win a World Cup final — anybody can win a single game. The wealthiest team doesn't always win. The wealthiest country doesn't always win. The favourite nation doesn't always win. And that's one of the things that makes football the most enduringly popular sport in the world. Anything can happen in one match: Germany beat Brazil seven-one in Brazil. Brazil has lost World Cups on home soil twice, and yet went on to win six other times in six other countries.

The France-Argentina World Cup final in 2022 was one of the most beautiful football games ever played. Argentina nominally won, but really both teams won — it was as close to a draw as you could get. When I meet fellow France fans who watched the game together, we still grip each other's arms talking about it. Argentina dominated, France came back, Argentina scored again, France came back and scored again, and then overtime and penalties. Football gives everybody a chance in a way that most other sports don't, and that's what makes it artistic and poetic.

What I try to do in my novel is bring out the poetic nature of football in the same way baseball and tennis have been written about in great novels. And I wanted to have a go at that — to show that because football is unpredictable, because the feet and the head can only do so many things, anything can happen. It's more art than it is chess, more art than science, determining who's going to win.

Remember the 2014 World Cup final in Brazil: Germany barely beat Argentina one-nil, in the hundred-and-sixteenth minute, and the man who scored came off the bench. So yes, football has an element of chance, an element of art, that gives anybody a fighting chance. The US showed it against England in 1950, and the most unlikely game-winner came from a Haitian immigrant who wasn't even American. England was so heavily favoured that the BBC didn't even send a reporter to cover the match. They told their reporters: stay in Rio — the Brazil game matters, the US game won't amount to much.

KEEN: And remember, this was played in Belo Horizonte, the sixth-largest city in Brazil, in a brand-new, relatively small stadium, the Estádio Independência. The provincial setting is also nicely ironic, isn't it?

LÉGER: Yes. And I spent three weeks in Brazil researching the book.

KEEN: Did you go to Belo Horizonte?

LÉGER: I was in Belo for two weeks. I walked the pitch. I tried to imagine how the players spent their off days, what you'd do in your free time in Belo, so I could picture what the players were doing between matches. It's a small city, a beautiful city, a quiet city — the least internationally famous Brazilian city. But it proved to be the place where one of the greatest miracles in sports ever happened: the US beating England.

KEEN: Yes, it's a wonderful story. You know, there haven't been that many good novels about football. One of my favourites is by the Anglo-Hungarian writer Tibor Fischer — Under the Frog — which is in some ways a book about the 1954 World Cup and the Hungarian defeat at the hands of the Germans. The Hungarians had arguably the greatest team of the era, just as the Dutch did in 1974, and both were beaten by Germany. Are you familiar with the Fischer book?

LÉGER: I am.

KEEN: What other books impress you? What reading informed this novel?

LÉGER: Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby.

KEEN: Yes, I know that one.

LÉGER: It's a great book about being a mad football fan. And it happens that Hornby and I are both Arsenal supporters.

KEEN: Oh, you are? I've not heard of them. What is Arsenal, Dimitri? Is that a disease?

LÉGER: They are currently in first place in the Premier League — nine points clear of Manchester City — and moving through the Champions League.

KEEN: I'm not familiar with them.

LÉGER: They've been around for a bit, and quite snake-bitten. But right now they're beating Bayer Leverkusen to advance in the Champions League. A famously snake-bitten club that plays beautiful football and seems to be on the verge of greatness this spring. So Fever Pitch is one of the books I turned to — it captures football madness very well.

KEEN: And of course Fever Pitch triggered a whole fashion for football writing in England — it was never considered an art form before Hornby's book made it one.

LÉGER: Massive bestseller, endlessly rereadable, and it captures the madness of being a football fan even when your team is terrible. And also Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace.

KEEN: That's about tennis, isn't it?

LÉGER: It's about tennis — the tedium and the occasional flashes of graceful magic in a tennis player's life. And since my novel takes you inside the player's head, inside the day-to-day life of an athlete, Infinite Jest does a great job of showing what it's like to be a world-class athlete between matches, during matches, and after. David Foster Wallace was a high-level tennis player himself, and he brought that lived-in experience into the book. I wanted to bring that kind of insight into the life of Joe Gaëtjens and the people around him.

Because loving a football player, being a football fan, is one thing. Being a football player is something else entirely — you depend on ten other players to help you score, yet you get all the glory when you do. That dichotomy, those paradoxes — I wanted to explore them. There aren't many books about sport that put you inside the skin of the athlete the way I tried to do in this book.

KEEN: And of course Haiti is the backdrop. Your first book was God Loves Haiti. This is also a book about Haiti — and about Papa Doc, the man who ran your country for many years. What's the Haitian element here?

LÉGER: Well, in real life, Joe Gaëtjens had a great World Cup, came from a fine family, went to New York, had his great World Cup, went back, played professionally in Paris, returned to Haiti, ran afoul of Papa Doc François Duvalier, and was disappeared, never to be seen again. That's what Duvalier did — he disappeared people.

KEEN: Was he envious of Gaëtjens' fame and glory?

LÉGER: In my novel, our hero follows a similar trajectory, but he actually confronts the dictator face to face at the climax of the book.

KEEN: Don't give away the whole plot, Dimitri — we want people to buy the book!

LÉGER: True, true. The interplay between politics and sport has a beautiful side, but also a very dark side. Dictators have used football — as other books have shown — to drape themselves in glory. Haiti is no different. A world-famous soccer player will, of course, trigger conflicting feelings in a dictator. And it's a recurring theme in World Cup history. Simon Kuper writes about it. We're watching it play out in America this spring with the World Cup and the geopolitical tensions surrounding it. The US president has a lot riding on this tournament — he wants it to succeed, strangely enough. Some countries will want to boycott, some will want to come. It's been a recurring dynamic in football and World Cup history since 1930.

KEEN: I can't ask you to speak for Haiti — I'm sure you wouldn't claim to — but given Trump's obsession with Haiti and what many consider a profound racism towards Haitian immigrants, what is the typical Haitian take on the tournament being hosted in the United States? And who do most Haitians follow: Brazil? France?

LÉGER: Brazil. Haitians, like most people from countries that don't regularly qualify for the World Cup, root for Brazil. Because Brazil is essentially a Black team, and if you're African or Haitian — from a country not favoured to do well — you root for Brazil. However, this year has an interesting wrinkle: Haiti qualified for the World Cup for the first time in decades.

KEEN: Oh — so they're in the tournament?

LÉGER: They're in the tournament this year. And in fact — I say "we," because, as a Haitian, the Caribbean Sea runs warm — we play Brazil. We're in the same group as Brazil and Morocco: the toughest group. But we play Brazil, which is going to be extraordinary.

Haiti's relationship with the United States is not unlike most people's relationship with the US, but the US and Haiti — we're the same age. We started from the same place. The US rejected colonialism in 1776. We beat France in 1804. But our fortunes diverged considerably over the last two hundred years.

KEEN: When you say you beat France, that wasn't in football — that was in real life.

LÉGER: That was in war. And there's a beauty in football as a way to level the playing field for ninety minutes. When Haiti plays Brazil, it's going to be like they have a chance to be Brazil. Equal footing for ninety minutes. That is profound. Haitians feel themselves worthy of any other country in the world. So when Haiti plays in the World Cup, Haitians will feel proud. They'll feel equal to Brazil for as long as it lasts. Football, and sport in general, has the quality of giving even the weakest and the poorest a fighting chance. The World Cup has been a great stage to see that play out, and Haitians will get to see it this summer.

KEEN: Well, there you have it. God will certainly be watching the tournament this summer. I think He'll probably be rooting for Haiti — certainly over the United States, and maybe even over Brazil. Dimitri Elias Léger's new novel, Death of the Soccer God, is a wonderful read. It's a short book — I read it in a couple of hours, even speed-reading — and it's written with real elegance. Dimitri has made his name with his first novel, God Loves Haiti, and this follow-up lives up to it. Congratulations, Dimitri — on everything, except being an Arsenal fan.

LÉGER: Thanks for having me, Andrew. This was wonderful.

[END]