FIFA’s response to past corruption scandals and willingness to award World Cup hosting rights to violators of the group’s human rights standards illustrate the organization’s rejection of meaningful change that would hold the group accountable. So do FIFA’s repeated, mostly cosmetic, reforms aimed at pacifying public and commercial clamouring for change.

The scandals and for FIFA’s Human Rights Policy and Code of Conduct are “only the of football’s problem iceberg. An extended troubleshooting list includes antiquated governance structures, growing financial imbalances, and inadequate safeguards for athletes, just to name some of the most pressing issues,” said law professor Jan Zglinski in a recent 26-page academic paper.

Mr. Zglinski argues that, potentially, Europe, a leader in regulating sports, and particularly soccer, as a sector of the economy, could emerge as the sport’s white knight.

Europe’s growing push for oversight

Should the EU force FIFA to reform? In doing so, Europe would deliver a body blow to FIFA and other international associations’ fictional assertion that sports and politics are separate rather than Siamese twins joined at the hip.

The European Commission would be in good company with multiple countries, including France, Spain, , , South Korea and Australia, seeking to regulate aspects of soccer governance in recent years, such as transparency, gender parity, athletes’ rights and sports integrity.

Britain, one of the world’s few countries to have rather than engage in public-private partnerships that outsource the management of the essential resource, may go the furthest with parliament debating a that would create an independent regulator with powers to oversee football finance, club ownership and fan engagement. The bill would likely model the regulator on the Water Services Regulation Authority, or Ofwat, Britain’s water supervisor.

The notion of a regulator goes to the core of the elephant in the room: the inseparable relationship between politics and sports that can only be overseen by an , and the adoption of a code of conduct.

While largely self-serving, international sports associations initially saw their refusal to acknowledge and police the relationship as a way of fending off government interference that would limit their autonomy.

Britain’s proposed regulator would institutionalize oversight of soccer associations but would stop short of explicitly empowering it to challenge their insistence on the fiction that sports and politics are separate.

Similarly, European debates on various ways to step up the regulation of sports associations, including FIFA, fall short of clearly addressing the elephant in the room that enables corruption, disregard of human and other rights and a lack of transparency and accountability.

Even so, various options under discussion would de facto, if not de jure, shatter the sports associations’ clinging to a fiction by imposing greater governmental scrutiny and/or regulation.

The options include greater scrutiny of FIFA and others’ conformity to EU market and competition rules, changing the nature of the European Union’s cooperation with soccer stakeholders or following Britain’s example by enacting a European Sports Act that would hold sports associations to minimum governance standards.

The standards, Mr. Zglinski suggests, could involve requirements for free, fair and regular elections, term limits for executives, representation of those stakeholders, who, at best, have a limited voice in decision-making such as women, players, clubs and fans, enhancing players’ and women’s rights and imposing adherence to adopted human rights standards, and rules to avoid conflicts of interest, possibly by in FIFA’s case, the group’s regulatory and commercial functions.

The myth of sports without politics

Any steps Europe may take would be applicable in the European Union only. Nevertheless, they would likely reverberate globally and strengthen critics who deplore the incestuous relationship between sports and politics, like in the case of Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia has spent billions of dollars to put the kingdom on the sports map, despite its abominable human rights record, and develop sports into a sustainable sector of the economy as part of a Saudi endeavour to wean the kingdom off its dependency on oil exports.

Saudi investments and lobbying have garnered the kingdom hosting rights for multiple Asian sports tournaments as well as the 2034 World Cup. “Allowing Saudi Arabia to make all these deals is a clear indication that there is human rights assessment,” said Abdullah Alaoudh, director for countering authoritarianism at the Middle East Democracy Center (MEDC).

Saudi Arabia has imprisoned since 2017 Mr. Aloudh’s father, Salman al-Ouda, a prominent, albeit controversial, religious scholar. FIFA’s evaluation of the Saudi World Cup bid classified the kingdom’s human rights record as a .

A global impact beyond Europe

Against the backdrop of a wave of European litigation challenging aspects of FIFA and European soccer body UEFA’s governance, European sports ministers last year the need for EU action. The ministers called on the Commission to protect solidarity and other principles of “values-based sport,” including democracy, equality, openness, sporting merit and social responsibility.

Recent litigation has challenged the legality of FIFA rules regarding premature contract termination, restrictions on free movement and competition, the implementation of sports arbitration, the status of transnational soccer leagues and the expansion of the Club World Cup, which risks compromising players’ health.

Mr. Zglinski advocates for European legislation as the most effective means of imposing reforms and democratizing sports governance. “Even if the prospect of the EU regulating football more extensively might not seem like the perfect solution, it may well be the least imperfect solution,” Mr. Zglinski said.

“The EU has the potential to positively influence sports governance at a global scale. This is important 
 in light of the fact that the most powerful federations governing the game, including FIFA and UEFA, are located outside the Union. EU action can be designed so that it applies to non-EU actors, as exemplified by the Digital Services and Markets Acts, which regulate the conduct of Big Tech companies regardless of where these are based,” Mr. Zglinski added.

Like many international sports associations, FIFA and UEFA are headquartered in Switzerland.

By adopting legislation, the EU would call a halt to FIFA and other associations’ failure to protect their most vulnerable stakeholders resulting in, for example, the displacement of communities in South Africa and Brazil to make space for the 2010 and 2014 World Cups, faulty labour practices involving workers constructing World Cup facilities and the Asian Football Confederation’s to honour a court’s condemnation of its disregard for a woman’s right.

“Change in sports governance rarely comes voluntarily—it requires external pressure
 Football governing bodies have shown themselves to be incapable of governing the game in a democratic, fair, and socially responsive manner,” Mr. Zglinski said

“Their actions have harmed players, clubs, fans, as well as communities across the globe. Therefore, reform is imperative,” he added.

[ first published this piece]

[ edited this piece]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔčÏ’s editorial policy.

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Non-Americans may not know the meaning of an executive order: It is an official directive issued by the President to federal agencies and departments and has the force of law. The ban on transgender athletes is US policy, but its effects will be felt everywhere. A number of sports organizations, including those that govern swimming, golf and even chess, have already banned transgender women from competing in female events if they have passed through male puberty. The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), the US’s governing body for collegiate sports, reacted immediately, banning transgender women from competing in women’s sports.

Inclusivity and the World Cup

But FIFA is sure to challenge Trump’s ruling. The National Women’s Soccer League () is the top-tier professional women’s soccer league in the US and operates under the jurisdiction of the United States Soccer Federation (USSF), which is a member of FIFA. As one of the world’s major sports governing bodies to have pledged themselves to inclusivity and against discrimination, FIFA will be deeply compromised by the transgender ban. The NWSL currently permits athletes to participate in accordance with their gender identity, provided their testosterone levels are within typical limits for female athletes. The guidelines will presumably be superseded by the new restrictive provisions.

That’s only one of FIFA’s difficulties: equally as vexing is its commitment to holding its quadrennial World Cup competition in the USA, Canada and Mexico. FIFA faced criticism for granting hosting rights to the 2034 World Cup to Saudi Arabia, where homosexual relations are outlawed and punishable by law. The criticism will seem mild compared to the condemnation that will surely follow if FIFA remains silent on Trump’s prohibition, which seems to undermine every feature of FIFA’s credo. Some will argue it is hypocritical to stage an event that symbolizes inclusivity in a territory where inclusivity is now sneered at.

Trump’s common sense

Since becoming president, Trump has ordered an end to federal government diversity efforts, including some dating back to Lyndon Johnson, and may expel transgender people from the US military. Trump diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies for the collision of a commercial jet and military helicopter that killed 67 people just outside Washington in January. It was his “common sense” assessment rather than an evidence-based evaluation. The same common sense informs much of Trump’s early initiatives. On his first day in office, he signed an order calling for the federal government to define sex as “only male or female” on reproductive cells. This should be reflected on all official documents, such as passports.

Even the title of the transgender order echoes Trump’s version of good sense and sound judgment: “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports.” Anything other than Trump’s understanding is dismissed as dogma or fanaticism: an earlier Trump order the insistent title, “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government” and prescriptively instructs the federal government to remove “all radical gender ideology guidance, communication, policies, and forms.”

All this jars with global trends that have affected many parts of the world since the rise of the #MeToo movement. Common sense, at least as Trump defines it, is a kind of knowledge that seemed perfectly serviceable 40 or 50 years ago.

Women’s football — an LGBTQ+ platform

Over recent years, FIFA has positioned itself as a champion of inclusivity, drawing short of activism but relaxing its strictures of mixing the association football it governs with social, cultural and political affairs. For example, following the killing of George Floyd in 2020 and the ensuing protest, FIFA sanctioned football players to take a knee in shows of support for Black Lives Matter before games. Its effective elevation of the women’s game to the most popular female sport in the world has drawn admiration.

Women’s football is arguably the most effective crusader for LGBTQ+ rights in the world, perhaps eclipsing Stonewall, ILGA World and Outright International (remind yourself what the T in LGBTQ+ stands for). FIFA has symbolized its commitment by endorsing players and sometimes whole teams who wish to display their loyalties by wearing rainbow colors. Both female and male teams have worn rainbow armbands and shoe laces to exhibit their moral positions. Football as a sport stands squarely on the right side of history. It is barely imaginable that FIFA will stray to the other side.

What will FIFA do next?

World sport has no uniform policy on transgender athletes. The eligibility rules are different for different sports and in different countries. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has a laissez-faire framework that allows for sports-specific eligibility criteria. It, too, will be challenged to respond to Trump’s initiative, but not nearly as much as FIFA. Association football has managed to steer clear of major controversies. The organization’s existing gender verification regulations, established in 2011, simply that only men are eligible to play in men’s competitions, and the same applies to women. In 2022, following policy changes in other sports, FIFA announced it was reviewing its gender eligibility regulations in consultation with expert stakeholders. No updated policy has yet been published. In the absence of explicit guidance from FIFA, some leagues developed their own policies. Spain, for example, a team comprising only transgender players.ÌęÌę

Now, FIFA must confront Trump’s ban and decide whether or not to oppose it. It’s conceivable that American teams could face exclusion from international tournaments if US sports organizations are unable to field teams that comply with more inclusive international rules. But this is massively complicated by the fact that games at the 2026 FIFA World Cup are scheduled to take place in the USA, as well as Canada and Mexico. A robust response would be to threaten to rearrange games scheduled for New York, Dallas, Atlanta and elsewhere in the USA. But it would be a logistical nightmare and, in any case, media groups would protest. Ridiculous as it seems, FIFA could disqualify the US team from the competition. Trump himself would probably intervene and threaten FIFA.

FIFA can hardly avoid becoming involved in the furor. It will express misgivings about the ban and emphasize the organization’s continuing commitment to inclusivity. It may allow individual players or entire national teams to stage protests or articulate their disagreement with the order. It could even endorse some sort of protest at the World Cup, though this is unlikely. In 2022, England team captain Harry Kane was prevented from wearing a rainbow armband, presumably to avoid embarrassing Qatar, where the World Cup tournament was being held. FIFA clearly did not wish to upset the tournament hosts.

Monstrous dilemma

Yet, if FIFA needed to bare its teeth, now is the time: Transgenderism is likely to be the single most intensely debated issue in sports over the next decade or so. The arguments on both sides are persuasive: Women complain the hard-earned advances they have made in sports since the 1990s are under threat because athletes assigned male at birth are allowed to compete against natal females. Athletes who have experienced gender dysphoria and transitioned in a way they feel reflects them intellectually and emotionally complain they are excluded from competition or forced to compete in a hybrid class. For example, The New York City Marathon a non-binary division for runners who do not identify as either men or women. There are other variations in other sports.

FIFA faces a monstrous dilemma. It would probably love to reassert its position as sport’s most enlightened, progressive and reformist governor. But the first of 104 games that will comprise the next World Cup will take place on June 11, 2026, so any threats are bound to appear empty.

The next women’s World Cup is not until 2027. There is likely to be change between now and then, but if there isn’t and the ban remains in place, the USA will not have a team in Brazil: It will either withdraw voluntarily or be disqualified. Women’s football is more activist and a lot less conciliatory than its male counterpart and will use Trump’s ban to dramatize the transphobia it opposes, along with any other form of bigotry.

[Ellis Cashmore’s new book (with Kevin Dixon and Jamie Cleland) will be published in March.]

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔčÏ’s editorialÌępolicy.

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Possible overtones?

Invited to respond, Argentinean President Javier Milei and Vice President Victoria Villarruel shrugged and said Fernåndez was just being truthful. Aurélien Tchouaméni and several other players on the French national team are of Cameroonian descent. Ousmane Dembélé is of Senegalese, Mauritian and Malian descent.

Days later, football fans in Argentina were repeating the chant. Fernández was investigated by association football’s world governing organization, FIFA, which has prioritized the fight against racism in the sport. The players can be suspended for up to 12 matches if the chant is found to be racist.

Is it racist?

I asked a Spanish-speaking friend for a translation of the comments, and he confirmed the above is accurate. He reckoned the chant had racist “overtones,” meaning it implied that to be properly French, you had to be white. I accept there were overtones. I also accept that the verse was derogatory and insulting to France’s black players. But I am still not convinced this is racism. Then again, racism itself changes.

The myth of race

In 1950, UNESCO published a significant titled “The Race Question.” This report was one of the first major efforts to expose the scientific invalidity of race as a biological concept. It concluded that “for all practical purposes, ‘race’ is not so much a biological phenomenon as a social myth.”

Despite its mythic status, no one doubted the devilish concept’s potency. “Racism” referred to thoughts and theories predicated on the validity of “race” and the corresponding assumption that the human population was divided naturally into a hierarchy, with whites permanently at the top.

“Racialism,” on the other hand, described language or behavior that reflected those beliefs. So, racialism, or racial discrimination as it was often called, was obviously much more damaging to groups conceived as lower in the purported hierarchy. Anti-discrimination laws and policies were designed to manage racialism rather than educate people.

During the 1980s, the terms racism and racialism converged in academia, public discourse and policy discussions. “Racism” increasingly described both the belief in racial superiority and the resultant discriminatory behaviors. The focus shifted to recognizing that racist beliefs and actions were part of a larger, interconnected complex of injustice and subjugation.

Institutional racism

The term “institutional racism” was first used by Stokely Carmichael (later known as Kwame Ture) and Charles V. Hamilton in their influential Black Power: The Politics of Liberation. Over time, the term became closely associated with the ±«°­â€™s report on the death of Stephen Lawrence, published in 1999. In this case, was defined as “the collective failure of an organization to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their color, culture or ethnic origin. It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behavior which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people.”

According to the report, institutional racism is not only about overt acts of racism but also about the more subtle and systemic practices that lead to unequal treatment — what are now known as microaggressions. Institutional racism and plain racism were soon used interchangeably to mean widespread discrimination.

The parameters have shifted so that the concept of “race” is no longer germane. In 2018, for example, many people from felt they were discriminated against on the grounds of national identity. Under the ±«°­â€™s , these concerns could be considered justified. The Welsh were a “protected group.” The defining feature of racism, in this conception, is not “race” but vulnerability to discrimination.Ìę

The Boy Who Cried “Wolf”

The benefits of categorizing racism in this way are many. Groups that have been treated wrongfully or prejudicially, be that presently or historically, are protected by law and can use the emotively powerful claim of racism in their defense. Offenses motivated by a victim’s supposed ethnicity, nationality, religion, sexual orientation, disability or similar characteristics are now grouped collectively as hate crimes. The defining characteristic is the perpetrator’s intention, not the victim’s attributes. A claim of a racist attack on a cisgender, fully abled, while male heterosexual has merit.

But there are dangers, the most obvious one captured by the phrase “cry wolf.” The fable of the tricksy shepherd boy who playfully misleads people with false cries of, “Wolf!” is illuminating. When a wolf actually does appear, others are so used to the boy’s stunts that no one takes notice. Repeatedly claiming “racism” calls attention to an unpleasant and widespread presence, but may also devalue such claims. The enlargement of the concept to cover all manner of discrimination tends to trivialize racism in the form it once had.

Racism has disfigured America’s history from the 17th century and Europe’s from the 1950s. It has provoked slave uprisings, riots, protest marches and other forms of civil disobedience. Torture, mutilation and death have been its grimmest byproducts. To cluster these sins under the same rubric as microaggressions against the Welsh lessens their significance in the eyes of many.

Racism in the FernĂĄndez case

I am certainly not condoning the behavior of Fernández and his teammates. It was not just careless, but wrongheaded, pernicious, arguably defamatory and possibly malicious. France’s black players were subject to abuse on social media following their World Cup defeat to Argentina in 2022, so these kinds of irresponsible deeds can have consequences. But was it racist?

Fifty years ago, no. Thirty years ago, still no. In fact, in 1998, France won the FIFA World Cup with a multicultural team that included Zinedine Zidane, Patrick Vieira, Lilian Thuram and Marcel Desailly, among others. Had Fernández’s video been released then, it likely would have been ridiculed and dismissed as a case of “sour grapes.” But today we err on the side of assuming malignancy.

The impact of racism has been diluted by our eagerness to recognize it in any situation in which hatred of particular groups is involved. This is not a bad thing and in a great many instances, there has been a racist component buried among other sordid motivations. Yet the danger lies in spurious attributions. Some offenses, even hate crimes, are not impelled by spurious beliefs about race and should be treated as conceptually distinct.

None of this excuses Fernández et al. But perhaps we should laugh at their idiocy and childlike attempts to make fun rather than dignify them — which is what we do when we endow them with serious motives.

[Ellis Cashmore is the editor of]

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔčÏ’s editorial policy.

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“Undeniably, yes,” its defenders would answer, gesturing to the way in which the sport unifies people of diverse backgrounds and with totally different characteristics. They might also note how football has brought prosperity to areas of the world that might otherwise remain deprived. And brought not just entertainment but an unusual type of gratification to populations that lack other forms of reward. I made this point recently on BBC Radio4’s Moral Maze (you can listen).

Football has other virtues: it encourages camaraderie, teamwork and mutual respect. In recent decades, the sport has encouraged and promoted the participation of groups that have traditionally been marginalized or excluded from mainstream sports and, indeed, society. As well as women, football integrates disabled people and, unlike many other sports, has no restrictions on transgender players.

The Magic and the Dangers of Football

The anguish of being a football fan is this: everything else in life is unexciting and sublunary by comparison. Football fans are used to this. Going to a game means to be transported beyond the range of normal experience and, for two or more hours, feeling exalted and newly alive. Other sports offer similarly thrilling sensations but without the added exhilaration, the fieriness or the occasional delirium. Paradoxically, many of the features of football’s unique formula are unwelcome outside the stadium and, often, inside too. Football’s is an edgy, hostile environment, where fury, antagonism and belligerence are natural elements: they combine agreeably but dangerously. We wouldn’t want them all of the time. Life would be too treacherous. For a couple of hours, though, danger is fine.

Street Grit and Messi Magic Lead Argentina to Glory

The passion football fans feel is unparalleled. A heavyweight title fight, the Super Bowl, an Olympic track final, and a few other sports events provoke an intense arousal among fans, but football’s pleasures are unique. That’s because of its history. Football was never supposed to be a sport: its origins lie in annual struggles between pre-industrial English villages or neighborhoods. The skirmishes were arranged confrontations involving physical conflict, weapons and injuries. Over time, rough-hewn rules gave the battles order, and eventually they were refined into football. There were a great many variants, but, by the end of the nineteenth century, just two remained: association football and rugby (which itself was divided into two codes).

The distinction between players and spectators didn’t exist in more primitive forms of what became association football and, even after the formation of the Football Association in 1863, observers were probably invested, as we’d say today. In their heads, the club they were rooting for was their club: owners were merely custodians. As the sport spread to continental Europe and Central and South America, the proprietorial sensibility spread, as did the feverish atmosphere. And ugliness too.

The violence associated with football was an outgrowth of the attachment fans felt for their clubs. Fighting was simply part of the continuum of normal behavior. It disappeared briefly and understandably after the Second World War, but recrudesced in the 1970s. While there are still violent undercurrents at football games anywhere in the world, they remain that—below the surface. The reason for this is the gentrification of the sport that started in the early 1990s. Before then, few games were televised live, players’ earnings were relatively modest and fans were raucous. Then, TV networks created subscription channels and clubs became content providers rather than bastions of local pride and gateways to community tradition.

Football appeared to become a different creature. Fans’ inclinations changed, though without being sanitized. Racism is one of the sobering reminders that, for all its modernizations, football’s regressive features will not die easily. Their persistent presence continues to haunt the game and issues reminders that traditions, even the lamentable ones, are like clumsy thieves— they leave fingerprints.

Why Football Has a Racism Problem and How to Solve It

Codes of Silence

Football is not alone in harboring sex offenders, though the number of horrifying cases of in recent years invites speculation on how long this kind of exploitation has been going on and whether the sport has employed a code of silence. It is not alone in this respect and many other sports, including gymnastics, swimming, athletics, basketball, and hockey, have been embarrassed by their failures to protect children and adolescents.

Another code of silence is thought to suppress gay male players, who typically wait until their competitive careers are over before declaring their sexual inclinations. In so doing, they perpetuate the myth that football culture is homophobic and intolerant of LGBTQ+ concerns. The women’s game is exactly the opposite. Indeed, women’s football has developed into a for gay rights. Reality differs from myth: 95% of fans are decidedly not homophobic and most would prefer gay male players to come out. My own research in and confirms fans reject the popular characterization of football culture but suspect there are obstacles. They conjecture coaches, managers, agents, and football club owners prohibit gay players from being honest. Their reasons for doing so remain opaque, but probably derive from concerns (however unfounded) about the market viability of openly gay male players.

It could be argued that a different sort of code of silence operates in the administrative offices of football too. Certainly, the staggering amount of corruption revealed in recent years indicates that many senior officers of FIFA, the sports’ governing organization, were loyal to an oath of ŽÇłŸ±đ°ùłÙĂ  for decades, aware of countless bribes and kickbacks but unwilling to blow the whistle. As the sport commercialized, the rights to host and broadcast major tournaments became valuable and were pursued with the kind of zeal associated with the most tenacious players. But while players’ fouls were visible to all, administrators’ dishonesty was barely perceptible, at least to those who were not involved.

A sprawling dating from 2015 and still ongoing resulted in scores of convictions, imprisonments and resignations. The awkward question of whether the corporatization of football had brought with it dishonesty was answered. It was like lifting a rock to discover the insect life beneath it. The creepy-crawlies were football’s officials and politicians. And just think: players who were prone to fouling were often called “dirty.”

I’m not naïve enough to think other sports are any different: All major sports respond to the clink of coin. This is why the most benevolent paymasters have been able to draw not only football, but golf, Formula 1, boxing and other major sports to the Gulf States. Many complain that football is selling its soul to billionaire sheikhs, but that presumes there was ever a soul to sell: Association football has been a professional sport since 1885 (baseball in the US was already professional by then), so the sport has always been more about lucre than love (the word “amateur” is from the Latin “amator”, meaning “lover”).

Like practically everything else that brings pleasure, including gambling, junk food, social media and TV-binging, football secretes harm. When reminded of this, everyone looks away. At least fans do. For them, football is like nothing else on earth: the joys it brings overpower everything. To others, it’s one of many pointless distractions that take people’s minds off of the things that really affect their material lives. And for still others, it is a once-great sport, now made presentable and incorporated into the entertainment industry.

They’re all right. If football had been a uniformly good force, it wouldn’t have had its thumping impact on cultural history. It’s the doubtfulness that keeps people ruminating. While people are thinking, talking and philosophizing, the sport stays at the fore. The instant they stop, football becomes just another sport.

[Ellis Cashmore is co-editor of.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔčÏ’s editorial policy.

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“This organization is an organization that clearly wants to fight against racism, as it already has done.” Javier Tebas was referring to La Liga Nacional de FĂștbol Profesional, Spanish football’s governing organization, of which he is president. His declaration was a response to the Brazilian player VinĂ­cius JĂșnior’s stunning claim, “ is normal in La Liga.”

It was a predictable statement after a public dispute between Tebas and Vinicius: The player’s assertion that the Spanish league “belongs to the racists” was met with “La Liga has worked and will continue to work against this behavior of xenophobia and racist comments in stadiums.” Vinícius later called on sponsors and broadcasters to put pressure on the league to make changes. The results of this remain to be seen.

Spain is not completely alone in the 30 or so European football playing countries that lie east of Poland. have rightwing and nationalist leanings and Inter Milan’s black Belgian player Romelu Lukaku was targeted by racist abuse in Turin recently. But racism has largely disappeared from western football. At least, from football crowds. In England, Tottenham’s South Korean forward was the subject of a racist online video. The sources of online content are notoriously difficult to trace and it’s doubtful that the originators of this or other hateful messages circulated online are sports fans: More likely malevolent geeks who want to bring sports into disrepute.

History of Football Racism

The persistence of racism in association in football is one of the most perplexing anachronisms in sports, or any other sphere of society for that matter. Like the game itself, the practice of abusing black players has its origins in England. In the late 1970s, the appearance of dozens of black players enraged many white fans who reacted by hurling bananas, grunting like apes, and screaming epithets. The players were the children of Caribbean migrants who had settled in the UK in the aftermath of the second world war (often known as the “Windrush generation,” after the name of the first vessel to have arrived in England from Jamaica in 1948).

It was unexpected: at various intervals in history, black players had appeared in English football without incident, and the Afro-Brazilian player PelĂ© was acknowledged as the best in the world. But, coaxed by far right political movements, many fans were reminded that football was created by white men, watched by white men and run by white men. Blacks were uninvited guests. I recall talking to (1958-2018), who played for West Bromwich Albion and other clubs in the period. He told me how he learned to “absorb,” as he put it, the near-continuous abuse and somehow used it to motivate him.

Vile as it was, the racism was intelligible: White fans resented the intrusion of people they considered interlopers in a sport they and their forebears built and owned. Or at least felt they owned. There were underlying conditions too: Unemployment was prodigiously high in Britain in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In 1981, a barely believable 31% of employable under-18-year-olds were out-of-work. Far right groups blamed ethnic minorities, of whom Caribbeans and their descendants were about half (total number in UK population about 500,000, or less than 1%).

Theories of Racism

Theories of racism differ, but most are predicated on competition for scarce resources, including jobs, accommodation, healthcare and education. There is nothing inevitable, less still natural about racist antagonism, and rivalries over resources are arbitrarily created from convenient markers. Migrant status, visible appearance, language, cuisine, and patterns of worship serve as metaphorical signs of enemies. What appears to be conflict emanating from spurious “racial” differences has more prosaic origins.

Racism, in common with other cultural practices, is volatile: It’s like fire — a blast of wind and it spreads uncontrollably and unpredictably. That’s what happened after football fans around the world discovered English fans’ extraordinary way of barracking players. Once started, fires take on a life of their own. Racism died down in most parts of Europe by the late 1980s: The emergence of so many illustrious black players in the sport’s top leagues silenced abusive fans in most of western Europe, though not in the east.

Football in places like Ukraine, Poland and Russia today is, in terms of cultural diversity, about where Britain was in the mid-1980s. Unlike Britain and other western European nations, which have endured the tortures of the damned trying to extirpate or even just manage racism, eastern European countries regard racist abuse just like other forms of football taunting based on physical appearance. They don’t seem to grasp the severity of their abuse. Or, if they do, their governments don’t.

I won’t labor the history of racism in football. Suffice it to say that somehow it has survived in a world where black lives matter and multiculturalism has been elevated to sacrosanctity. Survived, that is, in certain forms. As I argued earlier, the form popular in most European countries is via social media and this means sports fans are not necessarily involved. The shouting has gone. Suppressed perhaps, but, as long as racism isn’t expressed in behavior (verbal and nonverbal), its effects are manageable. We’ll have to accept that Eastern Europeans will take longer to catch up. But that still leaves us with Spain. Why is it such an outlier?

Almost 20 years ago, Spain’s national team manager Luis AragonĂ©s described Thierry Henry, a French player, as “ [black shit].” The manager was widely condemned, but the fact that a person of such seniority felt comfortable casting such a foul slur made football wonder if the Spanish were out-of-step with the rest of Western Europe. The recent misadventure suggests they still are. Perhaps Spain, with its various regional cultures and languages, including Catalan, Basque, Galician, and Valencian, has assimilated or at least learned to live with strains and enmities related to identity and regional autonomy, particularly in Catalonia and the Basque Country. One of the effects may be to have desensitized the Spanish to the pain occasioned by divisive language.

Sledgehammer-To-Crack-A-Nut

So, what should be done? We can’t get into people’s heads and change their thoughts. But we can prevent them from talking and acting in a way that gives open expression to those thoughts. And, when they do, we should punish. The USA’s National Basketball Association (NBA) opted for the sledgehammer-to-crack-a-nut strategy when, in 2018, it hit Los Angeles Clippers’ owner with a $2.5m fine and an order to sell the club. Sterling had acknowledged during an interview with NBA investigators that he had made disparaging remarks about black people. The governing organization’s response appeared to be disproportionately punitive, but have you heard of any racism in basketball lately? (I’m not being naïve: it still manifests every so often: Kyrie Irving recently said crowds treat black players “like they’re in a.”)

Football has to make clubs culpable for their fans’ behavior. It already does this to an extent: Closing stadiums or parts of stadiums for periods and fining clubs indicates that governing organizations are prepared to lay blame at the door of clubs. Yet the penalties are hardly on par with the NBA sanction. Expulsion from a major European competition, double-digit points deductions and multiple transfer window freezes might ram home the message. These kind of chastisements would quickly translate into a cogent message for fans: Do it again and you’ll get more of the same! We would never hear another peep. And, if some errant sheep in the flock mouthed a racist remark, fellow members of the crowd would soon muzzle them.

This is suppression rather than resolution. It’s a reasonable ambition, not an unattainable or fanciful hope. I’ve learned over the years that thought control doesn’t work: Behavior control is altogether more practicable. It’s the paradox of football that the globally inclusive game is riven with a bigotry that should have been stillborn or, at least, died in the 1980s. In many parts of the world it has, but its persistence, especially in Spain, is a particular embarrassment. It’s a wonder football’s corporate sponsors like Coca-Cola, adidas, Toyota and Qatar Airways haven’t grown uncomfortable with the residual presence of racism and pressured governing organizations to crush it. Television networks too might have flexed their muscles and urged stiffer penalties for offending clubs — though, of course, they wouldn’t want to lose marquee clubs, or ratings would fall.

Racism will be crushed for sure. It remains a question of time: Football will, at some point, realize that the sledgehammer is a crude, heavy, powerful instrument designed to break rocks. Some nuts are tougher than others: For example, macadamia nuts have an extremely hard shell that requires significant force or specialized tools to crack open. A sledgehammer has more than enough force to crack that. The time for education and persuasion is over: football must now start hammering.

[Ellis Cashmore is co-editor of]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔčÏ’s editorial policy.

The post Why Football Has a Racism Problem and How to Solve It appeared first on 51łÔčÏ.

Earlier this year, France’s professional football organization called for all players from its top leagues to wear shirts with rainbow-colored numbers to express support for The International Against Homophobia, Transphobia, and Biphobia. refused and chose not to play rather than show solidarity with the inclusivity signaled by the special day.

Personal Beliefs

A year ago, the Paris St-Germain football player Idrissa Gueye declined to play in a match rather than wear a rainbow symbol in support of LGBTQ+ rights. The then club manager Mauricio Pochettino said only that missed the game for “personal reasons.” Gueye was born and raised in Senegal, where about 97% of the population are Muslim and homosexuality is illegal and punishable by prison sentences of up to five years. It is also in Qatar, the home of Paris St-Germain’s owners. Last year’s men’s World Cup was staged there, of course.

Among the players who declined to participate this year was Zakaria Aboukhlal, who plays for Toulouse and was born in Morocco, another Muslim country, where against Islam is a punishable offense and same sex relationships are legally prohibited. “Respect is a value that I hold in great esteem,” wrote on Twitter, explaining his refusal to participate in the day of celebration. “It extends to others, but it also encompasses respect for my own personal beliefs. Hence, I don’t believe I am the most suitable person to participate in this campaign.”

It seemed a measured response and contrives an answer to a question that has so far not been asked: Is inclusivity inclusive? It sounds like a pun or some other form of wordplay, but it conveys an uncertainty about one of today’s most momentous cultural trends: Does inclusivity undermine the very groups it seeks to embrace?

Civic Unity vs. Individual Liberty

Every right minded person agrees inclusivity is desirable: We can never right history’s wrongs, but we can at least equalize conditions in a way that ensures no repetition. This policy aims to provide equal access to opportunities and resources for groups that have historically been oppressed. By promoting understanding, challenging stereotypes and encouraging empathy, it’s possible to create spaces where diverse populations can come together, engage in respectful dialogue and live and work together.

The trouble is: certain groups that have been subordinated sometimes oppose the policy of inclusivity. Muslims are one such group. They have no particular interest in contributing toward building a society in which LGBTQ+ groups are accepted, integrated, respected and treated as equals. Understandably so: The Qur’an stipulates that homosexuality is sinful.

Muslims have faced discrimination, sometimes known as Islamophobia, and continue to do so. They assert their right to believe homosexuality is a sin. Religious freedom is as much a human right as anything we can conceive. So, how do we respect both Islam and groups it deems sinners and so unworthy of respect? Squaring this circle requires us to distinguish between cultural inclusivity and individual rights.

The philosopher John Rawls (1921-2002) considered what conditions need to be satisfied in order to achieve what he considered a just society.  Balancing social good against the protection of individual rights and liberties was the key. It seems rational to preserve basic liberties, such as freedom of speech and assembly, as well as ensuring equality of opportunities. No rational person would willingly sacrifice these in pursuit of something as indeterminate as the social good, but Rawls entertained the possibility of civic unity amid a diversity of worldviews. He argued that curbing the liberties of an intolerant group that intended to harm the liberties of others may be justified. But what if the intolerant and potentially harmful group is one that’s been denied equal treatment? And what if the group’s apparent intolerance is based on a religious mandate. In other words, the group’s unwillingness to accept views, beliefs and behavior that differ from its own derives from its commitment to a faith. One answer to the question came via a case in England in 2010.

A Christian owner of a bed-and-breakfast in England refused a double room to a gay male couple. The owner insisted that it was against her religious convictions to let two men share a bed. A court concluded she unlawfully discriminated against the couple. Her appeal was supported by the Christian Institute, a national charity that defends the civil liberties of Christians. She lost her appeal. The word inclusivity was not in the popular vocabulary at the time, but the import of the court’s decision was clear: Her religious beliefs, no matter how fervently held, provided no justification for her action, which breached Britain’s equality law and was therefore harmful, in the sense it had an adverse effect on particular groups. The verdict portended the arrival of inclusivity, prioritizing the social good over religious beliefs.

The Mailed Fist

Inclusivity describes the endgame fought for over the decades by those who oppose racism, sexism, homophobia and many other forms of bigotry that have blighted society. But it’s an ideal: Desirable and perfect but unlikely to become a reality. The cracks appeared in the late 1970s when Louis took over the leadership of the Nation of Islam, a predominantly African American organization advocating black economic independence and separatism. Farrakhan denied allegations of antisemitism, sexism and homophobia but used the phrase “Satanic Jews,” prompting the uncomfortable recognition that belonging to a group that had been disparaged historically did not prevent someone reiterating the disparagement of others.

Similarly, women who railed for decades against sexism, or to use a more current term, misogyny have, in recent years, been accused of bigotry when they’ve opposed the induction of transgender women into institutions traditionally reserved for biological females. It’s hardly surprising many women have responded angrily to the appearance of transgender females in sports competitions, , shelters and bathrooms designated for women. But the logic of inclusivity is irresistible. Women’s groups will flail, but inclusivity bears the feelings and ideas of our times and, when necessary, reveals a mailed fist inside its velvet glove.

For example, in England, some football crowds voiced their disapproval of the Premier League’s introduction of taking the knee before games. The gesture was to signal the sport’s alignment with Black Lives Matter and demonstrate football’s fight against racism. Thus it was consistent with the inclusivity project.Ìę When fans remonstrated, they were instantly denounced as racists. In fact, much of the resistance to the gesture was based on the manner in which a symbolic display had replaced a genuine fight against racism. In other words, it seemed . But honest criticism of a ritual that advertised football’s embrace of inclusivity was condemned. Personal beliefs were crushed, along with alternative perspectives and criticism that would have been considered valid in previous decades.

Coercive?

Inclusivity distinguishes the early twenty-first century from previous epochs. It is an unquestioned, incontestable and unassailably virtuous ideal. It is also a juggernaut of secular culture that will overwhelm everything. It aims to provide acceptance and equality by persuasion and, if need be, by force. And this is why the recent disagreement in French football is worth scrutinizing. Dismaying as it sounds, this case suggests that a policy designed to protect and enhance the experiences of previously marginalized communities will surely engender clashes with individuals who solicit respect for their beliefs, especially when those beliefs are based on religious scriptures. Ten or fifteen years ago, their solicitation would have been heard and considered. Now, it’s likely to be ignored. Religious beliefs and rights will be subordinated.

I’ve spent much of my professional life researching, writing about and opposing racism, sexism and other bigotries, so I instinctively approve of inclusivity. I also subscribe to cultural relativism, meaning that I don’t believe in absolutes: knowledge, truth and morality exist in relation to society, culture and historical contexts. “Live and let live” is my favored proverb: tolerate the beliefs and behavior of others in order that they’ll tolerate yours. Inclusivity chimes with that. But only if it’s discretionary and refrains from compulsion. European football’s instruction rather than suggestion to its players seems coercive, controlling, even tyrannical. A display of solidarity is just window dressing if some of the participants are performing under duress. It may be a way of promoting one of the great policies of our age, but it’s also misleading.

A different way of pursuing inclusivity is to recognize that cultural differences are not always reconcilable. We just have to tolerate them and prevent them from promoting harm to others. Tolerate is an old-fashioned verb but one worth reimagining: Allowing, accepting or even just enduring with forbearance beliefs and practices we don’t like seems a mature approach. Persuasion often works, but, when it doesn’t, coercion is no alternative: it’s more like a tacit admission of defeat.

[Ellis Cashmore’s latest book is .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔčÏ’s editorial policy.

The post Has the Rainbow of Inclusivity Now Become a Tyranny? appeared first on 51łÔčÏ.

A Herculean Dilemma

Thomas Bach is, I believe, a virtuous man, but he’s learning that it doesn’t pay to be too pious when running an international sport. As President of the International Olympic Committee () he faces a Herculean dilemma. He recently entertained the possibility that, in spite of widespread bans on Russian and Belarusian athletes across the spectrum of sports, he may allow competitors from those countries to appear at next year’s Olympics, in Paris. Even airing the prospect has forced him into a tight spot: “We [IOC] have been by the Russian side of being agents of the US, and we have been accused by the Ukrainian side of being promoters of war,” he despairs.

Like any right minded head of a global sporting organization, Bach is prioritizing the interests of sport over geopolitics—though he must be painfully aware that the two are inseparable. He should, in my opinion, be praised for designating human athletes as of paramount importance and creating the conditions under which over 400 highly trained, motivated and committed individuals are given the chance to compete. (At the Covid-delayed Tokyo 2020 Olympics, the Belarusian team was 96-strong. 335 Russian athletes were obliged to compete under the rubric “Russia Olympic Committee” due to doping violations.) Chances are he will leave no stone unturned in his effort to incorporate Russian and Belarussian in the games, under a neutral flag or no flag at all. .

But Ukraine is understandably angry at Bach’s softening position on Russian and Belarusian athletes and threatens to the Paris Olympics, complicating Bach’s situation and raising doubts about the impartiality of the IOC and its ability to make a decision that will satisfy all parties. Countries that align or support Ukraine will feel the pressure to express their solidarity. The USA and Canada would be—perhaps already have been—encouraged to join a boycott. Several, if not all, western European nations would feature, as well Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. In addition to NATO countries, both Australia and New Zealand have condemned Russia and provided humanitarian aid to Ukraine. There are 206 National Olympic Committees affiliated with the IOC and it’s conceivable that an Olympic boycott could include over 30 nations. Individual athletes may be free to compete as neutrals (i.e. not representative of their countries).

Quite apart from the removal of some of the most powerful nations in sport, the IOC would almost certainly face the wrath of broadcasters, several of which will refuse to screen the tournament if their home nation is not involved. The most important of these is, which in 2014, acquired the exclusive broadcast rights to the Olympic Games from 2022 through 2032 for a total cost of $7.75 billion. This agreement includes the broadcast rights to next year’s games, as well as the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles.

Sports Boycotts in History

Sports boycotts are not uncommon. Over 60 countries, including the USA, China and the then West Germany  refused to participate in the 1980 summer Olympics in Moscow in protest at the Soviet Union’s incursions in Afghanistan. The boycott didn’t lead to an immediate withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan, though its proponents argued that it heightened international attention and put pressure on the Soviet government. In retaliation, the Soviet Union led a boycott of the next Olympics, held in Los Angeles. Cuba, North Korea and East Germany (as it was) joined the Soviets, though only 13 nations in total abstained. The retaliatory boycott served to present the USA with a showcase for its athletic talent and American competitors dominated the tournament.

The boycott of South Africa during apartheid, beginning in the 1960s, is usually offered as an example of how politically effective boycotts can be. The argument is that the boycott helped to isolate South Africa and increase international pressure on the apartheid government to end discriminatory policies. The boycotts are widely credited with playing a significant role in bringing about the end of apartheid in the early 1990s. It’s an appealing justification,  but there is no evidence that the boycott had any tangible effect: Its impact was largely symbolic. (The South Africa boycott was not maintained by all. For example, New Zealand’s rugby team continued to play South Africa, as did the Australian cricket team. Several other countries, including England, Ireland and Italy, sent teams to South Africa.)

Workable Solution?

Bach can gauge the pushback to the admittance of Russians and Belarusians from the reaction to the recent decision of the International Fencing Federation () to allow fencers from Russia and Belarus to return to international competitions. Over 300 fencers, including 9 medalists from the last Olympics in Tokyo, signed insisting that the FIE and the IOC should not allow Russian and Belarusian fencers to compete while the Ukraine conflict persists. Olga Kharlan, the Ukrainian Olympic gold medalist, was especially forceful: “I want to perform at the Olympics. But as a citizen of Ukraine, I can’t even imagine how to stand next to representatives of the Russian Federation.”

Wimbledon will also be of interest. The tournament has reversed its ban on Russian and Belarusian athletes, who may now compete as neutrals in the tennis tournament. The WTA and ATP organizations, which run the women’s and men’s professional tours and which calculates the rankings to determine qualification for the Olympics, described the Wimbledon decision as “a which protects the fairness of the game.”

The position of Russia in football is unclear: It retains its membership of UEFA, the European governing organization, despite being banned from playing. There is talk that Russia could relinquish its membership and join the Asian Football Confederation. This may encourage UEFA to review its position. Russian football brings with it lucrative broadcasting contracts.

Bach’s Crapshoot

But the Olympics is like no other sports event and Bach will need to gamble. The easy choice is to maintain the status quo though this will jar with Bach’s ideals. My guess is that Bach will opt for the crapshoot and welcome Russians and Belarusians back, but with the kind of provisos he has recently outlined (see below). Then what? Ukraine will bail out for sure. It will also urge the other  30 countries that are members of NATO to follow suit. Poland, a member of NATO since 1999 and strong supporter of Ukraine’s independence and territorial integrity, will be first to follow, then other NATO members will be wringing their hands. 206 countries sent teams to the Tokyo Olympics, so losing the 31 NATO countries would be damaging but perhaps not terminally.

What about France? A founder member of NATO, along with the USA, Canada and 9 other nations in 1949, France withdrew from NATO’s military command structure and pursued an independent defense policy in 1966. The 2024 Olympics are scheduled to take place in Paris from July 26 to August 11. The Paralympic Games will follow from August 28 to September 8, also in Paris. Unthinkable as it is, a NATO boycott would lead France into the impossible and unprecedented position of boycotting its own Olympics.

Such a perverse prospect will not be in Bach’s calculations at the moment, but it will loom larger as we approach next July. Bach has made it signally clear that, while he doesn’t favor the expulsion of Russia and Belarus, he will accept the decisions of the IOC’s member sports on whether or not to allow competitors from these countries. Ultimately though the IOC has the final say on whether a qualifying athlete can enter the Olympics and that means Bach will have to wrestle with his conscience. My guess is that he will allow Russians and Belarussians but respect bans if individual sports, like track and field, insist on exclusion (there is no chance will allow Russians or Belarusians, as Lord Coe recently made clear).

If my suspicion is right, we will witness the most controversial preamble to an Olympics in history—and I am not neglecting those politically-charged tournaments I mentioned earlier. Boycotts have a self-perpetuating quality, each withdrawal adding pressure on others to pull out.  NATO countries who have supported Ukraine will be taxed with making one of two equally unpopular decisions: ignore Ukraine’s requests or join a boycott that will be deeply unpopular among their own populations.

The by the IOC Executive Board are:

1. Athletes with a Russian or a Belarusian passport must compete only as individual neutral athletes.
2. Teams of athletes with a Russian or Belarusian passport cannot be considered.
3. Athletes who actively support the war cannot compete. Support personnel who actively support the war cannot be entered.
4. Athletes contracted to the Russian or Belarusian military or national security agencies cannot compete. Support personnel contracted to the Russian or Belarusian military or national security agencies cannot be entered.
5. Any such individual neutral athlete, like all the other participating athletes, must meet all anti-doping requirements applicable to them and particularly those set out in the anti-doping rules of the international federations.
6. The sanctions against those responsible for the war, the Russian and Belarusian states and governments, must remain in place, meaning no international sports events organized or supported by an international federation or national Olympic committee in Russia or Belarus. No flag, anthem, colors or any other identifications whatsoever of these countries displayed at any sports event or meeting, including the entire venue.

[Ellis Cashmore’s latest book is.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔčÏ’s editorial policy.

The post Are We Now Heading for Another Olympic Boycott? appeared first on 51łÔčÏ.

In a viral video, Carragher that Messi has a better goal record than Ronaldo. Furthermore, Messi is a playmaker who can run a game. He “can take you to a place where you can’t actually believe what you are seeing.” The affable and insightful Lineker believes that Messi “is the greatest player to have ever played the game.”

In Maradona’s Shadow

Until recently though, Messi was never quite loved in his native Argentina. He was seen as a Barcelona man who never gave his heart and soul for the national team. Messi was always compared unfavorably to another diminutive left-footed player who was the love of the nation: Diego Maradona. In the 1986 World Cup, Lineker scored six goals and won the Golden Boot, the award for the top scorer. Yet this was Maradona’s tournament. He scored five goals and made five assists. Argentina beat Germany 3-2 in the final.

One match from that 1986 World Cup defines Maradona. He was both devil and god in the space of a few minutes. England faced Argentina in the quarter finals on June 22 at the Estadio Azteca in Mexico City. Maradona knocked the first goal in with his hand. It has come to be known as the “hand of God” goal and still many in England. In their eyes, Maradona cheated, which he most certainly did.

Four minutes later, he would go on to score the “goal of the century.” Maradona collected the ball in his own half, spun around and left multiple English players trailing in his wake. He dribbled past world class players and dummied one of the great goalkeepers to knock the ball into the empty net. That moment still lives on as a moment of pure footballing genius. Messi was expected to provide such moments of magic for Argentina and deliver the World Cup, which he failed to do until Sunday, December 18, 2022.

Maradona: A Devilish Argentine Saint

The two goals of Maradona capture not only the man but also his nation. Argentines have long treated football both as love and war, and, as we know, all is fair in love and war. Argentines play football with precisely this spirit. 

In 1978, Argentina hosted the World Cup. To this date, there are suspicions that the military dictatorship then ruling the country played dirty. At the time, the best player in the world was Johan Cryuff and the best team was arguably the Netherlands. Cryuff never showed up because a 1977 shook him up. Spain had just become a democracy after General Francisco Franco’s death and some insinuate that this incident might have been engineered by the Argentine military junta’s dirty tricks department. 

At the time, this regime was rounding up people by the thousands and killing them. A titled Power, Corruption & Lies recounts how the Argentine government manipulated the 1978 World Cup in every way possible to ensure that the home nation won. It is for good reason that Esquire this tournament “the dirtiest World Cup of all time.”

Eight years later, Argentines celebrated Maradona’s 1986 hand of God moment as revenge for defeat in the 1982 Falklands War. This war began when Argentina’s military junta invaded what they called Islas Malvinas. The British controlled these islands in the South Atlantic and called them the Falkland Islands. Argentine generals launched this invasion to divert attention from a terrible economy and mass unrest. Capturing these islands from the imperialists who had seized them would have boosted the regime. This was supposed to win the military kudos for their patriotism and revive their sagging fortunes. Instead, this 1982 misadventure led to bitter defeat and national disgrace. Maradona’s two goals, one deceitful and the other sublime, were seen as sweet Argentine revenge.

Ghosts of the Past

Like many other countries, Argentina is deeply tortured by its past. Once Argentina was the promised land. Waves of immigrants flocked to this New World nation. As in Canada and the US, European immigrants slaughtered indigenous peoples. Very few of them are left in the country. Even more than the US, Argentina practiced ethnic cleansing of the indigenous population.

Argentina was similarly ruthless with . About 200,000 arrived on the shores of the RĂ­o de la Plata in the early colonial days. By the end of the 18th century, one-third of the population was black. Today, hardly any of them remain. Argentines of blacks, packing many of them off to neighboring Brazil.

Jorge Luis Borges is called the nation’s greatest writer and, in the eyes of many, its soulkeeper. In 1975, he famously , “This country has no tradition of its own.” He went on to say: “There’s no native tradition of any kind since the Indians here were mere barbarians. We have to fall back on the European tradition, why not? It’s a very fine tradition.” Note that his grandmother, Frances Anne Haslam, had come from Staffordshire, England. In 1920 Borges turned 21. By then “over half the population of his native Buenos Aires had been born in Europe, the result of a vast wave of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century immigration.”

Argentina’s self-conscious European identity puts them in a strange position. They look down on other South American nations, which are far more mixed race, with contempt. However, they are not exactly Europeans either. An Argentine friend once remarked, “We are an odd people. We have a superiority complex vis-à-vis other South Americans and an inferiority complex vis-à-vis the Europeans.”

The Rosy Future Turned Into a Nightmare

For all the slaughter of the natives and the elimination of Africans, Argentines did not become like the Americans. In 1913, Argentina was the world’s 10th richest country. The future seemed bright. After all, European immigrants in a fertile land were bound to create el paradiso.

With the fertile Pampas, the majestic Andes and the beautiful Buenos Aires, Argentina has few excuses for failure. An October 2019 Australian observes that Argentina can produce food for 400 million people (its population is just over 46 million). It has the world’s second largest shale gas reserves and fourth largest shale oil reserves. Argentina also has the third largest reserves of lithium and large quantities of gold, silver and copper. 

Instead, Argentina has become the biggest borrower of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Pakistan negotiated a $6 billion bailout and is with IMF officials over the release of the latest $1.1 billion tranche to pay for imports and service foreign debts. In contrast, Argentina got a $44 billion bailout and has just spent $1 billion for “,” depleting its “scarce” foreign exchange reserves. The IMF has warned Argentina but the country has a history of on its international sovereign debt.

How Argentina Can Rebuild Its Economy

If there was a World Cup for a country that blew it, Argentina would be in the fray. Unlike Canada, Australia or New Zealand that started at similar levels of economic development in the early 20th century, Argentina . The country was unable to develop industry or stable institutions. Military coups, tumultuous electoral fraud, erosion of checks and balances, and the rise of populists like Juan PerĂłn condemned Argentina to chaos. Today, 17 million people—43% of Argentina’s population—are living below the . If the economic crisis continues, this percentage could rise to 50%. 

Just as Maradona’s drug abuse and dissolute lifestyle destroyed him, political incompetence and economic mismanagement have turned Argentina into a basket case. 

Football, a Religion: Saint Messi Floats Above Pope Francis

For a country that has spectacularly lost the plot for a century, football is a religion that offers salvation. Foreigners who visit the country are taken aback by the primal passion the game excites. Hollywood actor Matt Damon has been to many sporting events but he says, “the craziest thing I have ever seen without a doubt is a soccer game in Argentina.” Armed police, barbed wire and no-man’s land between warring fans of rival sides are all par for the course.

When Argentina won the World Cup last year, an estimated two million people in the city center. They gathered around the city’s iconic obelisk designed by Argentine modernist architect Alberto Prebisch. The sea of people around the 67.5 meters tall icon was heaving with joy and relief. After many bitter years of disappointment, Argentina had finally won the World Cup a third time. Unlike 1978, this one was not rigged by a murderous military regime. Unlike 1986, there was no hand of God dodginess on the way to victory.

Of course, the Dutch team might complain that the referees favored Argentina in an ill-tempered match. The French and many others did not like Argentine goalkeeper Emi Martínez’s gamesmanship in throwing the ball away during the penalty shootout. On the whole though, Argentina won this World Cup fair and square. Manager Lionel Saloni, unsung hero Ángel di María, late bloomer Martínez and magical Messi eventually scripted a fairy tale.
Pope Francis is an Argentine and a football fan. Unlike Brazil, Argentina has not fallen to evangelicals. Catholicism is still dominant. An Argentine pope is a matter of great pride to the country. Yet the favored son of this Europeanized New World Catholic paradise lost is Messi. He has delivered what the nation most wanted. With inflation hitting , poverty rising and an already grim economic crisis worsening, Saint Messi and his loyal foot soldiers have given Argentina something to smile about.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔčÏ’s editorial policy.

The post Street Grit and Messi Magic Lead Argentina to Glory appeared first on 51łÔčÏ.

Fans were even more enraged in 2005 when the American Glazer family bought the club. Some even started a rival club and transferred their support. They’ve never been satisfied the Glazers are suitable custodians of a club fans believe is rightfully theirs. Now, they’re concerned the Glazers will sup with the devil and sell to the emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, who already owns the club Paris Saint-Germain via a company called Qatar Sports Investments.

THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH

Mighty Presence

The objections are now familiar to anyone vaguely familiar with sports. Gulf States, enriched by their reserves of oil and gas, have, over the past decade established a Middle Eastern control over many sports. The sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia underwrites the LIV golf tour. Bahrain hosts a Formula1 grand prix. The International Cricket Council has moved its headquarters to Dubai, the most populous city in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). And, as if anyone hadn’t noticed, Qatar has recently staged football’s most prestigious event, the FIFA World Cup—and done so successfully. will host football’s Club World Cup later this year.

In England’s Premier League, both of Manchester United’s local rivals— and—have been bought. The former is owned by City Football Group whose majority shares are owned by Mansour bin Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, the deputy prime minister of the United Arab Emirates and a member of the ruling family of Abu Dhabi.  Newcastle United was recently purchased by the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia. The Newcastle buy-out was challenged by many fans, though the opposition appears to have softened now that the club’s on-field fortunes are improving.

The objection to the encroachment of Middle East interests on sports that have traditionally been dominated by the West is not based on xenophobia. Well, not totally. Territories in that part of the world are not so vigilant in observing what many other parts of the world regard as fundamental human rights, particularly when it comes to groups. Homosexuality is outlawed and, in some parts, an imprisonable offense. There are places where it is punishable by death. Women’s status differs from country-to-country, but nowhere is there equality of access or opportunity comparable with the West’s.

Sports Fans Say Qatar Has Now Politicized the World Cup

Where’s The Harm?  

Now, a cynic might ask: since when did football fans become so self-righteous? Or did they always secretly harbor a strong sense of right-and-wrong, and were just not enraged enough to express their sense of morality? Until those Gulf States, with their “medieval” cultures started muscling in on that pure, unsullied and wholesome pursuit once the preserve of English gentlemen and, more recently, the proud property of the masses. Sports is too virtuous, too honorable, too undefiled by the sins of the world to be corrupted by those primitive Arab states where being able to quote the Quran counts as enlightenment.

But wait: let me offer a counterweight. Think about the meaning of sports: a pernicious biosphere where human effort is squandered in the futile pursuit of artificial objectives that have no benefit, material or otherwise, in the real world. Sports competitions are as trivial as they are purposeless. Sports’ only point is to satisfy individuals’ self-serving desire to surpass others. The more successful sportsmen and sportswomen are egotistical plutocrats whose money derives from the financial reserves of media behemoths. OK, sports events might once have been innocent tests of physical proficiency in a number of set challenges, but now they have morphed into an industry analogous to, if not contiguous with, showbusiness.

Fine, you might reply: So, where’s the harm? Again, I have an answer. Obviously, the physical injuries are commonplace and an expected byproduct of intense training and competition. And the long-term damage to the health of athletes and fans alike is an unfortunate, if inevitable, consequence of rivalries that might once have been friendly but are now warlike. Concussion and other forms of brain injury, sometimes permanent, are now seen as collateral damage in many sports. 

The End of the Extraordinary Abramovich Era

Activities that were designed to test the limits of human capability have become the means by which to extend those limits. Cyclists, swimmers, and track and field athletes habitually ingest substances in their efforts to enhance their competitive performance and break boundaries. Athletes from practically every other known sport, to some degree, use licit or illicit pharmaceuticals in their efforts to maximize their physical potential.  Sport’s injunction to give one’s best appears quaint and unworldly: win-at-any-costs is more congruent with today’s ethos.

Hypocrisy

Sport’s harmful effects extend beyond the physical: at a cultural level, its fierce and destructive onslaught on traditional citadels has been unsparing. Here the less visible, yet arguably more profound consequences of sport have turned every one of us into sports fans of some hue. Racism surfaced in sports in the late 1970s and, while it has diminished in the West, it flourishes in the sports of countries like Hungary, and other Eastern European democracies. Women have been pushed out of sports for most of its history and have only in recent years managed to compete in most major sports.

Unbelievable as it sounds, child abuse is an ungovernable wrongdoing in a variety of sports. Making the practice more pernicious is the fact that perpetrators are always the people charged with the responsibility for the welfare of young athletes.

What of the beautiful game itself? For decades, mired in corruption, bribery and miscellaneous other forms of venality, the world’s governing organization has operated like a private feudal fiefdom dispensing preferential treatment to anyone with sufficient funds and insufficient scruples to grease the right palms.

Qatar Will Change the World Cup Forever

And remind yourself: this is the same sport, indeed the same institution, that voices objections on grounds of morality whenever Middle Eastern interest in a club or a tournament surfaces. There’s a word that describes the practice of upholding high moral standards but having standards of one’s own that fall some way below: hypocrisy. It is endemic in western sports.

Sports were once thought to serve as a source of moral inspiration and maybe they were. But only a fool would ignore the deeply malevolent effects of their presence today. Over the next week or so, we’ll witness dutiful devotees of football protesting the growing influence of the Gulf States in their sport. They will almost certainly be genuine in their disapproval. But even a moment’s self-reflection will remind them that the sport they hold in such reverence is not only futile, arbitrary and wasteful, but a vile, unprincipled, rapacious, fraudulent and hopelessly corrupted environment in which decency is in short supply. How can Middle-Eastern owners possibly make it worse? Ellis Cashmore’s latest book is “.”

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔčÏ’s editorial policy.

The post Why Don’t Football Fans and Arab Sheikhs Love Each Other? appeared first on 51łÔčÏ.

What England’s Premier League Did for Football

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I thought of this shortly after Roman Abramovich bought Chelsea Football Club in 2003 and launched the most extravagant spending splurge in the history of sport. In his first year in charge, his total spending in the player transfer market equated to of the entire Premier League’s expenditure on players. Was this man trying to prove he could buy anything he wanted?

The club was easy: Already deeply in debt (£60 million — around $79 million), Abramovich just paid off the creditors and took control of Chelsea. Then he assembled the strongest playing squad available. The cost of the transfer fees plus salaries far outweighed the club’s income, and in his first five years, Chelsea posted losses of £447 million — a sum that sounds less fantastic today than it did in the 2000s.

Money, Money, Money

Chelsea, at the time of Abramovich’s arrival, was a club of comparable size to, say, West Bromwich Albion. The clubs had similar histories of achievements, comparable fan bases and stadiums. Chelsea was not included in the original elite when plans for the Premier League were formulated in the early 1990s. Abramovich commissioned the transfer of players such as Didier Drogba (in 2004), Andriy Shevchenko and Michael Ballack (both in 2006), signaling that no player was too big — or too expensive — for Chelsea.  

The rewards were abundant. Chelsea won the Premier League in the 2004-05 season, losing only one game under the management of Jose Mourinho, and this was but one of a total of 21 trophies, including five Premier League titles, two UEFA Champions League triumphs and a FIFA Club World Cup championship. Chelsea became one of the most garlanded clubs in the history of the Premier League and could lay a legitimate claim to being the best team in the world for long periods in recent history.

If Abramovich’s project was something like that of Magic Christian’s protagonist, it worked like a charm. Actually, Abramovich didn’t need Prospero-like charms — all he needed was money. He spent lavishly and luxuriated in the rewards. But the costs were prodigious. Last year, for example, Chelsea £145.6 million. Abramovich made good on the money, as he has done since he took over, by making deposits in the holding company , which technically owns Chelsea FC, and which Abramovich owns outright.

Abramovich never explained his profligacy. He didn’t give interviews and seemed to prefer anonymity. I was once asked to divine Abramovich’s motivation and answered by comparing his ownership of Chelsea with his love of art. He has a formidable collection that includes Bacon’s Tryptych, for which he paid $86.3 million. “He has the means to possess things he loves,” I said. “He might have bought Chelsea as a trophy at the outset, but he seems to have formed a loving attachment.”

Even if he did start with a testable hypothesis, the club became more a passion than a project.  He ran Chelsea Football Club not as a business in the conventional sense, but more like a charitable foundation or an endowed college with only one benefactor.

Prised From His Grasp

And now it is over: Abramovich has had the club he created prised from his grasp. He won’t appear at Stamford Bridge again and will probably never again set foot on English soil. The British government, as we know, has invoked powers to freeze his assets (of which Chelsea FC is one; the may be another), forced him to put the club on the market and denied him access to the proceeds of the sale. He has set the asking price of £3 billion, presumably reflecting the money he has sunk into the club over his tenure, but he won’t see a penny of it. (The pertinent is the Economic Crime Bill, which was rushed through Parliament in early March.)

We shouldn’t underestimate how much pain he must be feeling as he reads about the bids for his club. Negotiations are being handled by US merchant bank Raine. Abramovich himself is not allowed any input. As an aside, Abramovich has not committed a criminal offense and is guilty only of having “links” (whatever they may be) with Russian President Vladimir Putin or his regime. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson , “There can be no safe havens for those who have supported Putin’s vicious assault on Ukraine.” Abramovich has consistently historical associations with Putin and has done so for at 11 years.

As I write, a shortlist of bidders for the club is being considered by Raine. Eventually, the preferred bidder will be selected and — extraordinarily — will then be screened by the government. Paradoxically, the only bidder that would be likely to continue Abramovich’s munificence was a group from Saudi Arabia, which has withdrawn, presumably sensing tenders from that part of the Middle East would not be received favorably at the moment. The others are consortia — associations of several companies.

Whoever buys Chelsea will not need due diligence to realize they will have to hemorrhage money, at least for the immediate future. The club has been promising to break even since at least 2009, when then-chief executive Peter Kenyon the club would be “self-sustaining” by 2010. It hasn’t come close. Will new owners persist with the lose-money-to-win-trophies approach?

Football’s Land of Milk and Honey

It’s not inconceivable that a consortium could introduce dramatic downsizing over the next three or so years, allow existing contracts to expire, trade prudently in the transfer market and perhaps model itself on , a football club owned since 2010 by Fenway Sports Group Holdings, which also owns the Boston Red Sox of Major League Baseball.

If so, transfers on the scale of the ÂŁ97.5-million Romelu Lukaku deal in 2021 are likely to be a thing of the past for Chelsea. There may also be some surprise departures to lighten the wage load.

Lionel Messi’s move from Barcelona to Paris St Germain came as a bolt out of the blue last year; at least, till the full extent of Barcelona’s debt came to light. The club owed about ($1.1 billion) and Messi’s salary was reputed to be over €50 million. (The ill-fated European Super League was not motivated by greed, as was widely reported, but by the will to survive. Most of the clubs in the original project are ravaged by and presumably thought the league offered a route to liquidity.)

The next owners of Chelsea FC will not bring the inexhaustible supply of money Abramovich did. They will be legally bound to honor existing agreements, so players like Lukaku, who earns ÂŁ16.5 million per year, and N’Golo Kante, who gets ÂŁ15 million, will be paid for the remainder of their contracts. But the club is unlikely to offer salaries of this size in future.

More likely, the new owners will introduce some kind of internal salary cap. Arsenal has long operated with a wage structure. Other clubs without benefactors typically try to keep a lid on their salaries. Manchester City is owned largely by the Abu Dhabi United Group and spends with the kind of improvidence associated with Abramovich. Whether Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund will turn Newcastle United into another Chelsea remains to be seen. But Chelsea’s new owners will almost certainly take a more businesslike approach.

UEFA, football’s governing organization in Europe, may complicate life for Chelsea’s new owners if it restricts clubs’ spending to of their income. Back-of-an-envelope calculations suggest Chelsea has typically spent more than the whole of its yearly income on transfers and salaries. Even if it expects income of, say, £400 million, the club will have to exercise self-restraint unheard of during the Abramovich era. Presently, wages alone are thought to be .

The Chelsea case presents an insight into English football’s rise over the past 30 years. In 1985, England’s clubs were banned from European competition for five years (six for Liverpool) due to violence amongst supporters. Since their return, they have grown to dominance. This is due in no small part to Abramovich. After his takeover, international entrepreneurs enthusiastically bought into Premier League clubs and introduced the kind of money that brings bargaining power in the transfer market. Today, owners include investors from the United States, the UAE, China, Thailand, Egypt and Iran.

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England has become football’s land of milk and honey. Love him or loathe him, Roman Abramovich is sport’s latter-day Abraham. He has instigated a revolution. At a time in history when sport’s integration into the entertainment industry was almost complete, Abramovich took Chelsea from a respectable but ordinary English football club to one of the world’s foremost names in sport and a brand thrumming with elan and glamor.

A rapacious capitalist to some, a tyrant’s accomplice to others and a moral nightmare to a few more, Abramovich remains, without doubt, the most influential presence in football over the past 20 years. People may not approve of what he’s done, but the effects — good or bad — of his breathtaking foray into sport will be felt for decades to come.

*[Ellis Cashmore is co-editor of .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔčÏ’s editorial policy.

The post The End of the Extraordinary Abramovich Era appeared first on 51łÔčÏ.

Is the European Super League Such a Terrible Idea?

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Violence, racism, decaying stadiums, an indifferent population and two full-scale tragedies had contributed to football’s degeneration. In 1989, when yet another calamity visited the sport in the form of the Hillsborough disaster, football’s crisis deepened. The sport seemed in terminal decline. (Hillsborough was the name of the stadium in Sheffield where 94 football fans died — three more passed away later — after too many spectators were admitted.)

Revolution

Thirty years ago this week — February 20, 1992, to be precise — English football changed dramatically. When the clubs in the First Division announced they were leaving the Football League, they could have had no conception they were starting a revolution that would turn the debilitated game into the most popular, marketable, glamorous, culturally diverse and arguably most valuable sports competition the world has ever seen.

The inaugural season started on August 15, 1992, with 22 clubs making up the newly branded Premier League. The original plan was for ITV to screen the games of England’s leading clubs — Manchester United, Arsenal, Liverpool, Tottenham Hotspur and Everton (Manchester City and Chelsea were not among them) — but this was revised to a more equitable arrangement.

Earlier, in 1990, Greg Dyke, then a senior executive at London Weekend Television (an affiliate of the ITV network), pledged financial support for a breakaway from England’s Football League — this being an assembly of clubs split into four divisions — with revenue distributed among all member clubs.

The proposal was for a different structure in which the leading teams formed a self-contained alliance — independent of the Football League — and which would generate its own revenues, especially from the media, without any responsibility for sharing with the 87 clubs outside of the new entity. The Premier League was designed to operate under the auspices of the Football Association and would preserve the system in which the teams that finished the season at the bottom of the top tier would be relegated to the division below, while those at the top of the second tier would be promoted into the new league. But the key difference was that the elite would not share income with lesser clubs.

Sky’s Bid

ITV had presumably not expected a rival bid from Sky television, which, having launched its telecommunications satellite in 1989 and started transmission, had endured punishing losses.  So, when Rupert Murdoch’s TV station bid an unheard of ÂŁ304 million ($407 million today) for the rights to screen the new competition, it seemed not so much audacious as suicidal. It sounds absurd now, but there was a suspicion that non-terrestrial television might have been a flash in the pan.

Murdoch’s calculation was simple: Football fans would pay a monthly subscription in exchange for live games. Back then, live games were a rarity. Football clubs were historically opposed to screening games live for fear that their attendances would slump. That didn’t happen. In fact, football became an exemplar for market-oriented sport: it fashioned a commodity, created a new demand for it and offered it for sale.

Sky’s fortunes turned. Subscriptions rose so sharply that it soon became the ±«°­â€™s leading digital platform with revenues of over ÂŁ1 billion. In 2018, it was acquired by the American company Comcast in a deal valued at ÂŁ30 billion. At the time, Sky had 27 million subscribers.

Today, Sky no longer has exclusive rights to Premier League games. The European Union obliged it to share with other broadcasters. The present also includes BT Sport and Amazon Prime, expires in 2024-25 and is worth £5.1 billion. Retro-indexed to inflation, this would have been about £2.3 billion in 1992. The boards of directors of the clubs (they didn’t have outright owners) were probably astonished at Murdoch’s seemingly over-generous bid. None of them would have imagined how the value of English football would spiral upward as a result of Sky’s initiative.

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Buoyed by their new largess, the clubs refurbished their grounds (or stadiums, as most prefer to call them today), rendering them safe and family-friendly. To this end, the traditional standing areas, known as terraces, were removed and replaced with seats. Now, ironically, standing sections — or “safe standing sections,” as they are known — have been reintroduced.  

The lavish endowment also bankrolled the arrival of new players, often from overseas leagues that couldn’t match the salaries available in England. Eric Cantona was an early beneficiary, joining Manchester United in early 1992. Others included Tony Yeboah, Patrick Vieira and Ruud Gullit, black players who silenced any residual racist chants and comments leftover from the 1980s. In the mid-1990s, David Beckham personified the league moving seamlessly between sports and entertainment, acquiring a then-unique status as an all-purpose celebrity who could endorse practically any consumer product and guarantee increased sales.

Roman Abramovich

But the most influential figure in the Premier League was not a player, but a Russian oligarch, who, in 2003, decided he wanted to buy a football club in what was then emerging as the most fashionable sports competition in the world. Roman Abramovich bought Chelsea Football Club, then about ÂŁ80 million in debt. He made good on the debt and, over the next 18 years, splurged ÂŁ2 billion on transfers, that is, the amount paid to clubs to release players from contracts.

Following Abramovich’s example, moneyed business leaders from outside the UK began buying Premier League clubs, usually without any hope of breaking even. Despite the media and sponsorship income, clubs managed to hemorrhage money, mainly because of extravagant player salaries.

After the 2021 takeover of Newcastle United by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, there were 14 (of 20) top-flight clubs in overseas owners’ hands. Chelsea lost last year, Manchester City , mainly because both teams spent so much on transfers and paid high salaries; COVID-19 contributed, of course — the clubs lost income from spectators. Having benevolent owners means the clubs now operate less as businesses, more as foundations (like endowed colleges or charities).

Proponents of grassroots sports despair at the manner in which what was once a working-class game played by factory teams and supported by industrial workers has been hijacked by international plutocrats. Their intention has never been to cultivate local talent, but to attract the world’s most glittering names. Last year, Chelsea paid £97.5 million to Inter Milan for Romelu Lukaku. In 2016, Manchester United forked over £89 million for the services of Paul Pogba. Both players’ salaries are £12-15 million per year. Some argue this squeezes out aspiring young local players. Others suggest it inspires them.

Losers

What of the clubs that remained in the Football League, now rebranded as EFL? They were cast adrift and left to face the full brunt of market forces. Practically every club in the three divisions that make up the EFL struggles financially and many have declared themselves insolvent. There is little chance they can prosper outside the Premier League. Hence, their aim is to secure promotion. Ironically, these clubs might have benefited if the ill-fated European Super League, which attracted interest from several leading Premier League clubs, had taken off.

At the start of the 20^th century, money was, for many, a pestilence that would destroy the core value of fair play. Today, it could be argued that it was English football’s savior. Like every other professional sport — and all major sports are now professional — football has been embroiled in corruption, doping, violence and other activities that have despoiled sport’s central precept. All had their sources in money. Yet money is arguably the prime mover behind every single development in contemporary sport, and that is especially true in English football.

The Premier League is emblematic of recent developments in sports. It thrums with avarice, ruthlessness, triumphalism and an indifference to the collectivist principles that originally brought football into being.

*[Ellis Cashmore is co-editor of .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔčÏ’s editorial policy.

The post What England’s Premier League Did for Football appeared first on 51łÔčÏ.

The Relationship Between Football and Populism

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There’s not a country on earth where citizens will not know the name of at least three football teams, wear club regalia and watch, play and bet on football. Around 3.5 billion people some part of the 2018 World Cup, with 1.12 billion watching at least one minute, according to FIFA, the sport’s global governing organization.

With over , football’s faithful following is comparable to that of a major religion, like Christianity (2.38 billion) or Islam (1.9 billion). But, unlike religions, football, like other sports, isn’t expected to make pronouncements on torture, gay rights, labor exploitation, freedom of expression or any of the other moral issues of the day. The trouble is, it does.

Global Society of Inclusion

Football’s moral philosophy seems clear. FIFA expressed its two key directives in its , “Making Football Truly Global: The Vision 2020-2023” as “Fight against Racism and all other forms of discrimination” and “Protect human rights.” To demonstrate its sincerity, in June 2020, England’s Premier League approved football players taking the knee before games to showcase a committed opposition to racism in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd by police in the US.

Other major sports organizations, including the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the National Football League (NFL) in the US, steadfastly refused to allow the gesture, recognizing it would compromise the traditional stance on political and partisan actions. Football was one of the first to adopt a “” to the controversial ritual and remains an enthusiastic supporter despite objections, some from black players. Other sports have grudgingly accepted kneeling, largely as a result of pressure from players. The NFL finally its position last year and the IOC prior to the .

Football continued without compunction. “We remain resolutely committed to our singular objective of eradicating racial prejudice wherever it exists, to bring about a global society of inclusion, respect and equal opportunities for all,” a affirmed in August. “The Premier League will continue to work with our clubs, players and football partners to bring about tangible change to remove inequality from our game.” Yet two recent developments suggest that practical considerations complicate principles.

Eighteen months ago, an attempted takeover of Newcastle United by a consortium collapsed after the Premier League decided that, had the deal been allowed to proceed, Saudi Arabia would have effectively become the club’s owner. The Gulf state would be subject to the league’s . Failure to pass the test means potential buyers can be stopped if they’ve committed an act in a foreign jurisdiction that would be considered a criminal offense in the UK — even if the act is not illegal in their home territory.

The original potential buyers pulled out, the popular assumption at the time being the killing of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018. It was widely reported that Saudi agents were responsible for the murder.

However, it appeared that the real stumbling block was Saudi Arabia’s apparent involvement in a television network that streamed Premier League games. Qatar-based broadcaster beIN Sports had spent billions to acquire territorial rights for the games, but Saudis “” its license and suspended its channels in 2017. Reduced to basics, the deal stalled because of money. So, when the dispute between Qatar and Saudi was settled earlier this year, the deal was revived.

Sportswashing

The completed sale of Newcastle United Football Club to the Saudi Public Investment Fund, which lists as its chair Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who is widely thought responsible for ordering Khashoggi’s murder, has horrified and disgusted critics. Amnesty International has that Saudi authorities are “sportswashing their appalling human rights record with the glamour of top-flight football.” Sportswashing is an attempt by odious political regimes to clean up their international image by associating themselves with prestigious sporting events or competitions.

Amnesty that Saudi Arabia regularly violates human rights in various ways, including using torture as punishment, banning freedom of speech and expression, and subjugating women. The Saudi government denies claims of rights abuses and claims its apparent excesses are designed with national security in mind. Presumably, the Premier League — and perhaps football generally — accepts this.

Saudi Arabia’s Gulf neighbors, all of which have questionable human rights records, have already acquired top-tier football clubs: Qatar Sports Investments owns Paris Saint-Germain; Sheikh Mansour, an Abu Dhabi royal, owns Manchester City. Qatar is scheduled to host next year’s FIFA World Cup.

The timing of the takeover is hardly propitious. In Saudi Arabia, women have essentially the same legal status as children, having to rely on husbands or male relatives to make nearly all decisions in their lives. Much of the workspaces in the territory are gender-segregated. In 2019, Saudi was rated the fourth most dangerous place in the world for gay travelers by magazine, which reported that the country “implements the death penalty for consensual homosexuality under their interpretation of Sharia law.”

Football ostensibly lauds freedom, equality and open-mindedness while indulging insular regimes that encourage practices it officially denounces. In the 1970s, Commonwealth countries prohibited sporting contacts with South Africa, then operating a constitutional racial segregation policy known as apartheid. The Gleneagles Agreement, as it was called, effectively closed down South African sport. Non-Commonwealth nations showed solidarity by supporting the ban, which was relaxed only at the end of apartheid in 1990. No one has dared suggest a comparable ban on the Gulf states.

Freedom or Dereliction of Duty?

But this isn’t the only dilemma football has faced in recent weeks.

West Bromwich Albion player is among an unknown but probably sizeable number of professional football players who are opting not to get vaccinated against COVID-19. Robinson is worthy of attention because he’s contracted COVID twice, survived (obviously) and presumably decided the dangers of the virus are less significant than the potential side effects of the vaccine.

He isn’t, as far as we know, a QAnon affiliate, doesn’t subscribe to any known conspiracy theory and has not aligned himself with anti-vaccination campaigners. He enjoys the support of some teammates and not others. He is 26 and is probably expecting to play competitively for another 10 years, maybe more, if he avoids injury. His decision has drawn the ire of Liverpool manager , who says that footballers “are role models in society.” Currently, 16 to 29-year-olds are the most vaccine-hesitant demographic in the UK and elsewhere; Klopp is 54.

We can only use educated guesswork to divine the reasons so many professional athletes choose not to vaccinate. Their bodies are, in a sense, the tools of their trade and they have presumably made a cost-benefit calculation, recognizing that, given the brevity of the development and trialing of the vaccine compared to other pharmaceuticals, the medium-to-long-term side effects are unknown and, without the benefit of a time machine, unknowable at present.

In the US, the National Basketball Association (NBA), when confronted with a similarly reluctant percentage of players, compelled them to get vaccinated or face suspension without pay. The order worked: 95% of NBA players are now . Football’s governing organizations have eschewed this approach. FIFA instead issued a saying that “We encourage Covid-19 vaccinations.”

Depending on your perspective, this is either an admirable defense of freedom of choice or dereliction of duty. Those who believe the latter are maddened by football’s indecision, if that’s what it is. They consider public health a priority over personal freedom.

If FIFA had blocked the Newcastle takeover, people would probably accuse football of favoritism, pointing to the Manchester and Paris ownerships. If it followed the NBA mandate, people would accuse it of restricting freedom of choice. But football’s own piety invites these criticisms. Other sports see no need to make their moral philosophy so public, at least not as ostentatiously or in such a self-congratulatory manner. Why does football?  

No sport has struggled so painfully and for so long with racism, nor has any sport witnessed spectator violence on a comparable scale or duration. Bribery and corruption were once commonplace in boxing, but a 2015 expose revealed football’s epic history of venality and led to the removal of FIFA president Joseph “Sepp” Blatter.

Child abuse was once thought to exist only in gymnastics, but a recent found that it has been in football since at least the 1970s. Australia’s female players have recently of a” culture of sexual harassment.” 

No other sport in history has been as as football or, alas, manifested so many pernicious, multiform wrongdoings. Football constantly struggles to map its way out of a maze of malevolence. Its visible attempt to occupy the moral high ground is perhaps football’s attempt to place itself above suspicion, making its morality clear to everyone. It’s a bold move, but one with serious drawbacks. It puts football’s hypocrisy in plain sight.

[Ellis Cashmore is a co-editor of .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔčÏ’s editorial policy.

The post Can Football Find a Way Out of a Moral Maze? appeared first on 51łÔčÏ.

With the backing of JPMorgan Chase, the merchant bankers, the clubs involved in the ESL could double the income they currently receive from UEFA Champions League or the Europa League. Their profligacy would no doubt mean that they still end up broke, but that’s their problem. The rest of the football world would keep on turning.

Rebel Alliance

Imagine this: The 12 founding members of the European Super League — England’s Manchester United, Manchester City, Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea and Tottenham Hotspur, Spain’s Real Madrid, Barcelona and AtlĂ©tico Madrid and Italy’s Juventus, AC Milan and Inter Milan — recruit a further five or so clubs to form a league of 20+ teams and initiate a self-contained competition, screened via Amazon Prime, Netflix, Facebook, Disney+ or Sky (now owned by US media company Comcast), or possibly shared among them all. UEFA, Europe’s governing federation for association football, is furious, condemns this “rebel” alliance and instructs its affiliated organizations, including England’s Premier League, to expel the relevant clubs from domestic competitions.

This leaves the Super League clubs to devise a format that will guarantee about 40 or so games per year, every one broadcast or streamed live, with playoffs and a final championship game, possibly in Qatar or somewhere else in the Persian Gulf. Subscription channels are set up and, with advertising and sponsorship, the clubs claw in a total of, say, €4 billion ($4.8 billion) per season — roughly twice the amount they could expect from the Champions League, provided they get to the knockout stages. You can understand the temptation.

Meanwhile, back in the relative mundanity of the domestic leagues of England, the hitherto garlanded Premier League has lost its luster and is forced to consider an amalgamation with its less distinguished cousins in the English Football League (EFL). In desperation, they cobble together a new competition called the English Premier League and split it into four divisions, each of 20 teams, with three rounds of playoffs similar to the National Football League (NFL) in the US. Broadcasters are not prepared to pay the ÂŁ1.19 billion ($1.66 billion) per annum that Sky in the UK currently pays the existing Premier League, but that was declining anyway and the chances were that the top English division was bracing itself for 2022 when the contract concluded.

But the newly-designed EFL has a novel idea: It will revert to a pre-Premier League type of cash distribution and allocate broadcast monies more evenly and in a way that keeps the financially weaker clubs afloat. This is actually how association football began: It wasn’t a devil-takes-hindmost affair with the richer clubs striving to enrich themselves while leaving modest clubs with potentially smaller fan bases to run to rack and ruin.

In this scenario, commercial television ventures into the new competition and reaps rewards in the form of surprisingly encouraging viewing figures, which lead to advertising revenues and eventually a virtuous spiral upward. Clubs do not receive as much money as they used to in the old Premier League, but the poorer relatives get a share of the spoils and are able to survive and, in time, prosper.

Barcelona or Wolves?

Running parallel to this is the European Super League. Fans of the “Big Six,” as England’s top clubs from London and the Northwest are known, are more than willing to shell out £100 ($140) per game at their home stadiums and take out a subscription to watch other games on their screens. They can also treat themselves to a game in Madrid or Milan whenever they fancy.

Do fans of Rochdale or Walsall envy them? Not a bit. The joy of sport is in the competition, true. But it’s also in the disappointment, disillusionment and despondency as much as the jubilation, joyfulness and pride. The rivals actually don’t matter as much as everything else, including the camaraderie, the arguments and the money won and lost on gambling. In sport, the journey is much more important than the destination.

Does it matter to the Walsall fan that their team is playing Wolves and not Barcelona? Hardly. Wolverhampton is about 30 minutes away and a Black Country derby holds more value than a game against Barcelona, which, after all, is about a thousand miles removed from the West Midlands.

Cricket, Tennis and Boxing

It’s a scenario that is unlikely to materialize. Both and have navigated through similar crises and emerged better off. The so-called “rebels” usually made it impossible for their sport to maintain the status quo and propelled democratizing measures. Boxing has lived with several, often competing governing organizations but still survives. It does so because, like other major sports, it lets television or other media platforms call the shots.

Football’s de facto leaders are already the media. Its de jure leader is FIFA, the global governing organization, which has, in recent years, become shorthand for corruption. The rebel alliance of the European Super League is not exactly challenging an honorable and robust body that commands the respect of the world. So, in a sense, the breakaway clubs may be pushing at an open door.

There would be complicated legal entanglements. FIFA or UEFA could disqualify those who play for ESL clubs from ever transferring to clubs in the traditional sphere of football. They could also ban them from playing in the World Cup, the European Championship and other international competitions, including perhaps the Olympics. A rebel organization would probably respond by arranging its own equivalents.

If cricket and the other sports that have contended with similar secessions provide precedents, the traditional governing federation typically accommodates the new impulses. This is more difficult to entertain in football’s structure. England’s Premier League, for example, would find it practically impossible to allow a half-dozen elite clubs to have their own way and play in a league totally separate and outside its jurisdiction. No doubt, JPMorgan and the broadcasters have forewarned the clubs of the possible consequences.

FIFA would be mocked if it stopped ESL players from competing in the World Cup. Imagine a World Cup without the world’s best players. Football’s governors have a serious predicament.

Is the European Super League a Threat?

So, the question remains: Will the “Big Six” and their European counterparts go it alone? It is a risk, but the pickings are indeed rich, and as they stand — believe it or not — the clubs need the money.

For instance, between 2004 and 2013, Chelsea over £670 million and only recorded a profit in one year: £1 million in 2011-12. Chelsea lost £96 million in 2018-19, but while it made a profit the year prior, the club depends on transfer fees and, of course, the benefaction of its owner, Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich. If Chelsea and the others were so flushed with cash, they wouldn’t contemplate such a dramatic and potentially hazardous change that could turn them into sporting pariahs (as were in the early 1980s).

UEFA has eed to revamp the Champions League’s structure into a single league format, with a knockout stage as its climax. Clearly, the sums haven’t impressed the breakaway clubs. UEFA can probably table a revised deal, but consider this: Association football, while by far the most popular sport in history, must surely be close to saturation point. Fans can watch football 24/7 — literally. Every game, even those of limited significance, is shown on screens. There has never been a sport that keeps giving like this.

The European Super League clubs have been shamed without kicking a ball. The condemnation is sure to continue. Were the “Big Six” to leave or be expelled from English domestic competitions, it would be in disgrace. But memories are short in sport and, within a year, we would think of the ESL as we do with cricket’s Indian Premier League: a different, slightly more exotic competition that pitches the best players in the world against each other, but poses no threat to the domestic sport. In this case, the exotic competition could leave the domestic game in a healthier shape than it is now.

*[Ellis Cashmore is the co-editor of .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔčÏ’s editorial policy.

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To millions around the world, football is a religion. Countries bicker and fight to host the World Cup. Organizations like FIFA rise and fall in the face of never-ending corruption scandals. The last thing anyone might associate “the beautiful game” with is the unpredictable world of politics.

To investigative journalist James M. Dorsey, however, the millions of fans who worship the sport are exceptionally integral to this world. Their loyalty, unity and devotion to football clubs are part of the larger architecture of politics and authoritarian regime resilience in the Middle East.

Having spent the last four decades covering ethnic and religious conflict and major events of the 20^thÌęcentury in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America, Dorsey’s recent endeavors have proved to be more academic as a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, and co-director of the Institute of Fan Culture at the Julius Maximilian University of WĂŒrzburg in Germany.

His chief focus has been his widely acclaimed blog, , and aÌęÌęof the same name, which explores how football has shaped Middle Eastern politics and vice versa.

This link became explicit in the form of the Arab Uprisings in 2011, which Dorsey explains in his blog and book about how Egyptian ultras—hardcore football fans who have had tense relations with the police and the regime since the late-2000s—Ìęthe uprising against former President Hosni Mubarak. They protested military ownership of football clubs by mobilizing thousands, using flares, songs, graffiti andÌę. While these acts of organized demonstrations were clearly a show of genuine support of football teams and Egypt’s football league, they were still a threat to the regime.

In the years that have followed, ultras in Egypt have been labeled as “terrorists”Ìęand Ìęby President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi and his administration.

If that was not already an indication of how pronounced a political role football seems to have in the Middle East,ÌęÌęand the controversy behind Qatar’s World Cup 2022 campaign and labor “reforms” should be compelling enough as evidence that football has become an important platform for citizens to voice socioeconomic and political concerns on and off the pitch.

In this edition ofÌęÌę51łÔčÏÌętalks to James Dorsey about football, politics and the role of ultras in Egypt.

Shu-Wen Chye: You began your career as a journalist, and you have an immensely impressive career—having covered the 1973 Yom Kippur War; the Iranian Revolution; the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; the wars in Bosnia, Kosovo and Serbia—just to name a few events. What made you focus most of your primary research on football and politics?

James Dorsey:ÌęPure opportunism. I would like to tell you that I recognized the value of football as a prism in the 1980s when I accompanied the Mexican national team on its first ever tour of the Middle East. I saw then the importance of football for all the things I have written about since and write about today. I just didn’t connect the dots. The penny dropped when a friend of mine, an established writer, phoned me after I wrote a piece in 2010 about the politics of why Middle Eastern and North African nations were not well-represented in the World Cup in South Africa. I was looking, at the time, for a way of looking at fault lines in the region; a way that would not simply be from the point of view of another analyst who differentiates him or herself by the way he or she dots Is and crosses Ts.

Yet even then I would have said there is no way I would be using football as a prism five years later. The viability of the prism, I realized in the course of the last few years, is the fact that football more than in any other part of the world has been a consistent factor in the development of the region for more than a century.

Chye:ÌęYou co-established a research center called theÌęInstitute of Fan CultureÌęat the Julius Maximilian University of WĂŒrzburg. Tell us more about the institute, and how it has helped to bringÌęthe role of soccer fans in sustaining and toppling autocratic regimes into mainstream academic and media discussions.

Dorsey:ÌęThe institute was initially founded with a focus on soccer fans in Germany but, propelled by events in the Middle East and North Africa, as well as in eastern Europe and Latin America, it has significantly broadened its focus.

While it is the only institute of its kind, given that most research is done by a variety of scholars in a host of different institutions, its existence comes at a time that there is a greater scholarly focus on fans in general—i.e. not just sports fans, but also, for example, music and film fans. Much of the research on fans is haphazard, that is to say it is individual scholars often putting out very good research. The institute, alongside other initiatives like a network of fan researchers in Europe, is an attempt to bundle research and establish synergies.

Chye:ÌęYou have written much about the transformation (or lack thereof) of Egyptian ultras in the last five years. What do you foresee happening under Sisi over the next year or two?

Dorsey:ÌęThe risk in Egypt is that repressive government policies—that leave no public space uncontrolled and have kept stadiums closed to the public for much of the past four and a half years—[could] further radicalization, particularly of activist youth. Soccer fans have historically been a driver of protest in Egypt, and that is true for student and neighborhood protests in the last two years since the rise of Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.

Flickr

In the debate, how Egyptian soccer can return to “normal” and deal with the ultras [has] so far carried the day. Scores of ultras are in prison or on the run. Legal efforts to ban the ultras as terrorists have, so far, failed. Nonetheless, the regime cannot afford to tolerate the ultras as a force.

Chye: Another topic you have written extensively about is the Qatar World Cup in 2022, the corruption and the high number of deaths of foreign workers. Has the US Justice Department’s charges against Sepp Blatter and other FIFA officials in May 2015 influenced the status of the campaign against it?

Dorsey:ÌęThe US charges have not, at least not yet. More immediate is the Swiss legal investigation that is specifically focused on the awarding of the 2018 World Cup to Russia and the 2022 tournament to Qatar. Depending on how the US investigation develops and whether the Justice Department decides to identify unidentified co-conspirators mentioned in the indictments or actually moves to indict one or more of those co-conspirators, it could.

Chye: You’ve done comparative pieces on the relationship between football fans and authoritarian governments in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Do you think that more research should be done to compare these two regions?

Dorsey:ÌęThere is no doubt a treasure trove of research to be done, particularly with regard to Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia and Myanmar. It is something I have started to look at.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔčÏ’s editorial policy.

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is struggling with groups linked to a banned nationalist party. The movements in question are at the forefront of racist, anti- incidents. These include a militant soccer fan group, which was responsible for violent clashes in July during a UEFA Europa League match in Belgium between Israeli club Beitar Jerusalem and Charleloi SC.

Two government investigations of —the soccer club’s notorious fan group that openly supports Kach, a banned party founded by Meir Kahane, an extremist rabbi who was assassinated in 1990—took on added significance after Israel’s internal security service, Shin Bet, said it had no grounds to ban Lechava (another Kach support group) on the grounds of terrorism.

Shin Beit’s decision and the investigations have moved to center stage amid racist and discriminatory attacks such as the home that killed an 18-month-old baby, Ali Dawabsheh. The wave of incidents also include the stabbing of participants in a gay pride parade by a Jewish ultra-Orthodox repeat offender, as well as allegations that Israel discriminates against its dark-skinned Jewish citizens—particularly those who trace their roots to the Horn of Africa.

Israel responded to the firebombing of the Dawabsheh family’s home by authorizing Shin Bet to employ “special interrogation methods” in cases of Jewish perpetrators of political violence that, until now, were generally reserved for Palestinian detainees. These measures allow for Jewish suspects to be put into administrative detention without trial—another punitive act that in the past was largely applied to Palestinians.

Israeli leaders have condemned the firebombing as an act of terrorism and are keen to stop elements of the Jewish underground from threatening the fabric of Israeli society by escalating Israeli-Palestinian tensions.

Israel also wants to ensure that racist incidents do not pour grist on the mill of the growing boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement, which seeks to isolate Israel internationally, or revive efforts by the (PFA) to get FIFA to suspend Israel’s membership to the soccer body on the grounds of racism.

While FIFA has bigger fish to fry with its major corruption scandal, it agreed in May to establish a committee to monitor Israeli progress in addressing Palestinian concerns, in exchange for the PFA dropping its suspension demand. The committee is supposed to regularly report back to FIFA’s executive committee.

Israel’s success in defeating the PFA effort is instructive in judging its overall effort to combat racism, as well as resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. When the chips were down, Israel proved that it could muster the political will to take steps it had earlier rejected on security grounds.

In talks with FIFA President Sepp Blatter in May, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu proposed giving Palestinian players special identity cards and placing sports liaison officials at crossings between Palestinian areas and those under Israeli control to ease movement. Netanyahu further suggested a special escort service between Gaza and the West Bank to allow soccer players to cross between the two Palestinian territories.

A visit this week to Gaza by a West Bank team constitutes the first time Israel has allowed the passage for a competition match in 15 years. It appears to be a step toward implementation of Netanyahu’s promises. A further indication will be whether the Gaza team, Al Shejaia, will be allowed to travel to the West Bank for the return Palestine Cup matchÌęon August 9Ìęagainst Hebron’s Al Ahli. The winner would play in the next Asian Football Confederation (AFC) Cup.

The Gaza match was originally scheduled forÌęAugust 3,Ìębut it was postponed untilÌęAugust 6Ìębecause Israel had, according to the PFA, blocked Al Ahli’s travel. Palestinian officials said that if Israel followed through on Netanyahu’s promises, it could lead to reunification of the Palestinian league.

A Wake-Up Call For Israel?

While soccer racism was not raised by Blatter at the time, the two Beitar- and La Familia-related investigations could also be part of the Israeli effort. The investigations potentially suggest that Israel will seriously tackle racist soccer fans.

The IFA, the only Middle Eastern soccer association that, at least nominally, has an anti-racism project, has until now done little more than slapped Beitar’s wrists for refusing to hire Palestinians who rank among Israel’s top players or discipline its militant fan base.

La Familia regularly raises the Kach flag, most recently in the July incident in Belgium, where it fluttered next to the Israeli flag. The incident sparked outrage in Israel because it tarnished the Jewish state’s image. Kach was banned in 1994, after it endorsed the killing of 29 Palestinian worshippers in the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron by a member of the Jewish Defense League, a Kach predecessor.

Earlier this week, Shin Bet arrested and put into administrative detention Meir Ettinger, the 24-year-old grandson of Rabbi Kahane. Ettinger, who is believed to be a leader of a Kach-related radical settler youth underground, has denied allegations that he was responsible for the torching of the landmark Church of the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes on the Sea of Galilee in July.

“The truth must be told—there is no terror organization, but there are a whole lot of Jews, a lot more than people think, whose value-system is completely different than that of the High Court or the Shin Bet, and who are not bound by the laws of the state, but by much more eternal laws, true laws,” Ettinger wrote in a blog post days before his arrest.

In a manifesto in 2013, Ettinger declared:

“The idea of the rebellion is very simple. Israel has many weak points, many issues which it handles by walking on eggshells so as to not attract attention. What we’re going to do is simply fire up these powder kegs. The aim is to bring down the state, to bring down its structure and its ability to control, and to build a new system. To do it, we must act outside the rules of the state we seek to bring down 
 At the end of the day, the goal is to shake up the foundations of the state until we have a situation in which Jews must decide whether they are part of the revolution or part of the repression.”

In July, two members of Lechava were sentenced to prison for torching a school operated by Hand in Hand, an organization that operates schools attended by both Israeli Jewish and Israeli Palestinian students.

Israel has yet to make any arrests related to the firebombing of the Dawabsheh family’s home. Ettinger’s youth group, which is believed to be made up of adolescent offspring of Jewish settlers in the West Bank, is suspected of responsibility for the attack.

“Every society has its radical fringes. But today we need to ask ourselves: What is it in the public atmosphere that allows extremism and extremists to walk freely in broad daylight?” Israeli President Reuven Rivlin asked at a rally to denounce the firebombing.

Writing in Al-Monitor, Israeli journalist Shlomo Eldar noted that the attack had been “made possible by the ineptness of the Israeli law enforcement agencies in the [occupied] territories as well as the patent and outright discrimination against Palestinians in favor of the settlers.”

How the Israeli government handles not only of the underground, but also other militant anti-Palestinian groups like Beitar Jerusalem’s La Familia will serve as an indication of whether the firebombing and the soccer brawl in Belgium constitute a wake-up call for Israel.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔčÏ’s editorial policy.

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Embattled FIFA President Sepp Blatter unwittingly put his finger on two fundamental issues that underlie a corruption scandal that has rocked world soccer governance: the fiction that sports and politics are separate, and hypocrisy that distorts legitimate debate about Qatar’s successful but controversial World Cup bid.

Speaking to German newspaper Die Welt am Sonntag, Blatter asserted that the French and German governments had pressured their national soccer federations to vote in favor of the Qatari bid. His self-serving remarks were likely intended to deflect responsibility as authorities investigate his controversial stewardship of FIFA.

Nonetheless, in doing so, Blatter implicitly admitted that the notion of international sports federations being separate from politics was fiction—a fiction that has allowed the federations to play politics with impunity.

Blatter hypocritically disavowed responsibility for sub-standard conditions of migrant workers in Qatar, despite FIFA’s self-declared “humanitarian values” and mission “to improve the lives of young people and their surrounding communities, to reduce the negative impact of our activities and to make the most we can of the positives.”

The FIFA president noted that German companies had employed migrant labor in Qatar on the same terms that have become a major issue since the awarding of the World Cup long before the Gulf state had moved into the firing line of human rights and trade union activists, as well as Western critics of the FIFA decision.

“Look at the German companies! Deutsche Bahn, Hochtief and many more had projects in Qatar even before the World Cup was awarded,” Blatter said, referring to German railways and a major construction company.

In effect, Blatter was laying bare an attitude expressed explicitly by his equally embattled general secretary, Jerome Valcke, that FIFA prefers to work with dictatorships. “I will say something which is crazy, but less democracy is sometimes better for organising a World Cup,” Valcke told the BBC in 2013. He added that FIFA expected to have far less problems with the 2018 tournament in Russia than it had with last year’s competition in Brazil that sparked mass protests.

Blatter’s comments have implications both for Swiss and American investigations into soccer corruption that involve the Qatari World Cup bid, as well as the debate about Qatar. Western criticism of Qatar’s labor regime that puts employees at the mercy of their employers is justified, but only gained momentum once opponents of the Qatari bid jumped on the bandwagon.

The fact of the matter is that human rights groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, alongside Western media that have long—albeit intermittently—reported for decades on abominable labor conditions in Qatar and other Gulf states, were effectively voices lost in the wind until Qatar won its 2022 bid.

That does not absolve Blatter or FIFA of their responsibilities to adhere to the soccer body’s values, particularly at a time that international sports associations are paying increased lip service to human rights. Nor does it give Qatar wiggle room to escape making good on promises to substantially reform, if not abolish, its notorious labor kafala (sponsorship) system.

What it does do is put the burden of responsibility for a onerous system that has indebted and indentured generations of migrant worker as much on Western governments and corporations as it does on Qatar. It also highlights the need to distinguish in the debate about Qatar between legitimate criticism and opportunistic attacks that are driven by ulterior motives.

Michel Platini

Blatter’s acknowledgement of the German and French pressure highlights the need for international sports to acknowledge that their ties to politics are intrinsic and need to be embedded in a structure that monitors and governs that relationship. It also underlines the fact that soccer governance’s corruption problems are twofold: financial, the focus of the Swiss and US investigations; and political, a problem that is as much the preserve of democracies as it is of autocracies.

France’s interference was documented two years ago in a lengthy expose in France Football. The magazine detailed a meeting—engineered by then-French President Nicolas Sarkozy—between Michel Platini, a former French star who heads European soccer body UEFA; then-Qatari Crown Prince Sheikh Tamim bin Haman al-Thani, who has since become his country’s ruler; and a representative of French soccer club, Paris Saint-Germain. The three-way deal cut at that meeting involved Platini agreeing to vote for the Qatari bid in exchange for Qatar acquiring the French club, creating a French sports channel and investing in France.

Platini, a potential candidate to succeed Blatter, who has resigned and is acting as a caretaker until FIFA holds presidential elections sometime between December 2015 and March 2016, has been haunted since by his decision to switch his vote from the United States to Qatar in the crucial 2022 World Cup vote.

In a separate interview with Die Welt am Sonntag, Platini suggested that he would not stand as a candidate in the upcoming FIFA election.

German newspaper Die Zeit disclosed in June that Germany had lifted an arms embargo against Saudi Arabia and sold the kingdom arms to persuade the Gulf state to vote for its successful bid to host the 2006 World Cup. The government also persuaded German corporations to invest in Thailand and South Korea as part of its World Cup bid. “Germany’s action may have been legal but it did not quite live up to what is believed to be the spirit of sports,” the newspaper said.

Its understated comment is true for all aspects of the crisis engulfing soccer governance, and it serves as a yardstick for what it will take to put soccer’s house in order.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔčÏ’s editorial policy.

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There’s money in women’s football, but not much of it, so you might need an extra job.

You have to be your own biggest fan because media coverage is minimal. And you’d have to listen to suggestions like wearing tighter shorts to attract a bigger audience.

You’ll be playing on artificial turf, suffering burns and bruises. The goals you score, even if they by far outnumber those of male strikers, will receive next to no recognition.

Women’s football is a game of resilience, perseverance and self-assurance. And that is what makes it a beautiful game.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔčÏ’s editorial policy.

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While medieval girls and women played and were entertained by a variety of bat and ball games, the earliest specific association I know of comes from a mid-15^th century poem. This was a satire by the prolific East Anglian monk John Lydgate. In it the poet enlarged upon the attractions of “my fair lady.” She wore a green hood and had two small breasts squeezed together so they appeared like a large “camping ball” (East Anglian dialect for football).

Spectators

By the 16^th century, women’s involvement in football had moved beyond associations between their breasts and the ball, to a spectator scene. The most famous 16^th century female football spectator was Mary, Queen of Scots.

In the 1970s, a ball made of leather and inflated with a pig’s bladder was discovered in the rafters of the Queen’s Chamber, Stirling Castle (Mary’s residence). It is now proudly displayed in the Stirling Smith Art Gallery and Museum. It is to be “the Oldest Football in the World,” although archaeologists at Winchester have dug up two leather balls (roughly the size of modern tennis balls) that are about 500 years older.

In June 1568, having abdicated and fled to England, Mary watched a football match on a “playing-green” somewhere between Carlisle Castle and the Scottish border. The game involved about 20 of her retinue, who played for two hours “very strongly, nimbly and skilfully, without any foul play offered, the smallness of their balls occasioning fair play.”

Unsuitable players

The 16^th century English physician John Caius (pronounced “Keys”) recommended a number of vigorous sports and pastimes to improve health—but not football. Although he discouraged men from playing football because they were likely to get their legs broken, it’s interesting that Caius suggested women take up bowls as suitable exercise. Football, he appeared to have thought, was not suitable for women.

The playwright James Shirley had one of his comic characters express a similar sentiment: Women were unsuited to football because they were too light and knocked down too easily. At first glance, this seems to contradict other evidence. For in a pastoral “dialogue between two shepherds” the Elizabeth courtier and poet Sir Philip Sidney has a mother recall a time “when she, with skirts tucked very high, with girls at stool-ball plays.” (According to some sources, however, this was written by Sidney’s sister, Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke.)

This, however, was not the “violent” men’s game of that name, but perhaps what was sometimes called “balloon ball”—batting a large inflated ball back and forth, much like modern volleyball. Alternatively, Sidney may have meant a bat and ball game popular with young women of the period. A diarist even recorded that at Oxford on Shrove Tuesday 1633 women played stool-ball and men football.

© Shutterstock

The 18^th century

So we come to the earliest indisputable reference I’ve found to a woman participating in a football match. It comes from a contemporary newspaper account of a match played on Shrove Tuesday, February 23, 1773.

The game involved married gentlemen playing against bachelors in Walton, a village in Yorkshire. After more than an hour’s struggle, with much pushing to the ground and several broken shins, the married men were in trouble. Until, that is, a bold woman “seeing her husband hard press’d, entered the field to his assistance.” Instead of being intimidated by the “superior strength” of her opponent she, “like a true Amazon 
 pursued the ball, and soon determined the victory.”

Just over 20 years later, a doctor from Inveresk in Midlothian noted some peculiarities about the women of his parish: “their manners are masculine.” Nor did this surprise him, since these “fishwives” did the same work as the men. Besides playing golf frequently, there was an annual Shrove Tuesday football match between the married and unmarried women.

Because the married women were said to have always emerged victorious, a few modern commentators have speculated—when it was fashionable—that the game’s origin was a fertility rite. But there’s no evidence to confirm this.

Victorian Lady Footballers

Finally we come to the British Ladies’ Football Club, formed in 1894. This was the brainchild of Nettie Honeyball and Lady Florence Dixie. Nettie saw it as a business opportunity and was keen on turning young middle-class women into professional footballers. Florence, on the other hand, used her privileged background to speak out on a range of topical political and social issues, including family planning and suitable women’s attire.

Following an advertisement to recruit teams, a match was played between the North and South in north London on March 23, 1895. A crowd of more than 10,000 saw the North win convincingly 7-1. But press coverage was largely negative. There was “tut-tutting” about the supposedly unfeminine kit, while the North’s tricky left-winger, Miss Gilbert, was unkindly nicknamed “Little Tommy.”

Further exhibition matches were played around the country, yet the novelty soon wore off. In the long-term, this initiative failed to establish an officially sanctioned league. The Football Association (FA) actually banned women’s football for a time.

So it’s clear that women’s football has a long and often repressed history. Thankfully we’ve since moved on. Women’s football is encouraged in schools up and down the United Kingdom, and this World Cup in Canada promises to be the biggest ever.

Yes, the women’s game is still regarded with less interest than men’s football. But that’s largely for historical reasons. With the ball finally rolling in the right direction, however, all eyes are now on the women equalizing with the men.

*[This article was originally published by .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔčÏ’s editorial policy.

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Embattled President Sepp Blatter has spun the world soccer body’s crisis as a public relations and reputation management issue, and a problem caused by individuals rather than a crisis resulting from financial and political corruption embedded in FIFA’s culture. In doing so, he has given a blank check to interested soccer administrators to conduct business as usual, instead of ensuring that their organizations do not confront a crisis similar to that of FIFA.

Despite the arrest of seven of his associates in Switzerland ahead of possible extradition to the United States, Blatter has yet to acknowledge that his group has structural corruption issues that need to be addressed. Blatter’s approach is being followed by associates elsewhere such as Asian Football Confederation (AFC) President Sheikh Salman bin Ebrahim al-Khalifa.

The AFC, like CONCACAF, its counterpart in North and Central America and the Caribbean, and CONMEBOL, the South American Confederation, faces potentially serious questions regarding the integrity of its awarding of broadcasting and marketing rights to sports marketing companies and broadcasters. US legal proceedings have forced CONCACAF and CONMEBOL to revisit their commercial arrangements with their marketing partners.

Blatter and Salman have, however, showed little inclination to introduce structures that would replace their rule by patronage, a system that ensured the FIFA president’s re-election despite multiple corruption scandals on his watch, with one that holds out hope for transparency and accountability. One model would be the Dutch Postcode Lottery, which rakes in similar amounts of money each year, but distributes funds through a separate and independent foundation.

Salman, much like Blatter, has refrained from discussing the need for internal reviews and investigations. He has instead opted to ensure that the AFC’s skeletons remain closeted. The AFC president congratulated Blatter on his election victory, which he helped make possible by committing Asia to support the FIFA president, who faces questioning by Swiss authorities.

Blatter’s election may have bought Sheikh Salman time, but like the FIFA president, pressure on the head of the AFC to clean up his organization rather than act as if there are no potential time bombs is likely to mount as US and Swiss legal proceedings progress. The US investigation has already prompted, according to the BBC, two British banks to launch internal reviews to establish whether they were used for payments related to the US indictments.

© Shutterstock

Moreover, former FIFA Vice President Jack Warner, who turned himself in to police in Trinidad and Tobago after his name appeared among those indicted in the US, has suggested in the past that he has the evidence that could bring FIFA’s roof down. Warner released in 2011, in a shot across FIFA’s bow, an email from FIFA General Secretary Jerome Valcke asserting that had bought its 2022 World Cup hosting rights.

Afraid that Warner would endanger Qatar’s success, disgraced former FIFA Vice President and AFC President Mohammed bin Hammam bought the Caribbean’s silence, according to The Sunday Times, with a $1.2 million bribe. Warner no longer has anything to lose, and he could follow in the footsteps of his sons, Darryl and Daryan, who have turned into state witnesses in the US.

The Sunday Times focused its reporting on FIFA and Qatar based on millions of documents that are believed to have been obtained from an AFC server. It is unclear what secrets about the AFC may be buried in those documents.

The Audit

However, a 2012 audit by PricewaterhouseCooper (PwC), whose recommendations have yet to be acted on, questioned a $1 billion master rights agreement (MRA) with World Sport Group (WSG), a sports marketing company headquartered in Singapore, a beacon of anti-corruption. WSG failed to squash reporting on the audit with legal proceedings against this author, when the Singapore Supreme Court ruled against the company in a 2013 landmark verdict.

Salman was not in charge of the AFC at the time of the audit, which focused on bin Hammam’s financial management of the group, but his record since coming to office in 2013 is hardly stellar in terms of transparency and accountability.

The national has centralized power within the AFC and manipulated the group’s elections in May to ensure that Kuwaiti Sheikh Ahmad al-Fahad al-Sabah would get a seat on the FIFA executive committee, which could position him to succeed Blatter in 2019, when the FIFA president’s current terms ends.

Like Salman, Ahmad is a staunch supporter of Blatter and one of international sports most important power brokers, who reportedly worked the corridors to ensure that the FIFA president would defeat his reformist challenger, Prince Ali bin al-Hussein.

Since coming to office, Salman has buried the PwC audit that questioned the fact that the WSG contract had not been tendered or concluded on the basis of financial due diligence; that it does not detail $250 million in direct costs, nor give the AFC auditing rights; and it may be undervalued. The audit further noted that WSG had not been required to provide a bank guarantee to the AFC or allow the Asian body to review the company’s financial data.

“We understand from AFC management that although the AFC has made repeated requests to WSG to provide a breakdown of direct costs, to date this has not been provided. WSF [World Sport Football Ltd, a company associated with WSG] have cited that they have no legal obligation to provide this information,” the 2012 audit said.

The audit further noted two payments to bin Hammam by a WSG shareholder, totalling $14 million. The audit, which was limited in scope and resources, said that “no direct evidence has been identified to confirm a link between the payments purportedly for the benefit of Mr Hammam and the awarding of the MRA.” The audit raised similar concerns about an eight-year broadcasting rights agreement with Qatar’s Al Jazeera network.

“We have been unable to get clarity as to why third parties, some of whom appear to have some connection to WSG, are paying Mr Hammam large sums of money. As stated above, although it is believed that these funds were for Mr Hammam personally, we cannot discount that these funds were intended for the AFC,” the audit said.

The audit warned that bin Hammam’s financial management potentially put the AFC at risk of having been used as a vehicle for money laundering, bribery and sanctions busting related to Iran and North Korea.

Salman’s only known action related to the PwC audit was the suspension of AFC General Secretary Dato Alex Soosay in May, following this author’s blog — and since the Malay Mail disclosed a video-taped and written statement, in which AFC Finance Director Bryan Kuan Wee Hoong disclosed that Soosay had asked him to tamper or hide any documents related to the general secretary that could be of interest to the auditors. Kuan’s allegation suggested that others within the AFC had been involved in bin Hammam’s financial management of the group.

In a statement at the time, the AFC appeared to be seeking to deflect attention from the PwC audit by saying that the investigation of Kuan’s allegations were related to a “FIFA investigation.” Kuan’s allegations were never reported to FIFA. In the tape and in his written statement, Kuan left no doubt that the incident was related to the PwC audit.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔčÏ’s editorial policy.

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FIFA’s annual meetings are normally formulaic affairs where everything goes to plan: grand speeches are held; pats on the back are summarily dished out; and, most importantly,ÌęFIFA President Sepp Blatter gets what he wants. This year’s annual congress, currently taking place in Zurich, looks like it will be different.

On May 27, in the early morning, several members of FIFA’s powerful executive committee wereÌę from their lodgings, the salubrious Baur au Lac hotel in Zurich, and arrested with a view to beingÌę to the United States on corruption charges. Blatter was not arrested and he is “not involved,” said a FIFA spokesman.

According toÌęUS , the charges range from racketeering to money laundering and appear to largely center round theÌęaffairs of CONCACAFÌę— one of the six regional bodies that come together to govern the world game — and how their officials dealt with marketing rights, advertising contracts and media deals surrounding a number of CONCACAF tournaments.

Intriguingly,Ìęthe US Ìęalso mentioned the bidding process to host the 2010 FIFA World Cup.ÌęSwiss authorities have electronic data and documentsÌęfrom FIFA’s head office in Zurich as part of a probe into suspected “criminal mismanagement and of money laundering in connection with the allocation of the 2018 and 2022 football World Cups.”

FIFA spokesman Walter de Gregorio has tried his best to see the positive in the drama of rich and powerful men being hauled from their beds and threatened with serious charges. HeÌę reporters: “This for FIFA is good. It is not good in terms of image or reputation, but in terms of cleaning up, this is good 
 It is not a nice day, but it is also a good day.” He also said that Blatter, although relaxed, “is not dancing in his office.”

In terms of FIFA, allegations of corrupt practicesÌęare clearly new. Jack Warner, a long-time member of the FIFA executive committee and the principle mover and shaker in CONCACAF — the Confederation of North, Central America and Caribbean Association Football — resigned in 2011 amid a number of corruption allegations, which he has vociferously denied. FIFA ceased internal investigations following his “self-determined” resignation. “The presumption of innocence is maintained,” a release from the organization . Meanwhile,ÌęWarner himself Ìęto a witchhunt against him.

Flickr

FIFA has done what many organizations facing fundamental corruption and governance challenges try to do: reform themselves without doing anything about the culture within which the new institutions are set. Defining, let alone changing, culture might well be described as akin to pinning blancmange to a wall. But awareness of the need to follow rules and regulations — and to be transparent about how decisions are made, how resources are allocated and how allegations of inappropriateness are going to be dealt with — are nothing but the basics.

In June 2011, FIFA launched a governance reform process. The notions of transparency and zero tolerance were, so it was announced, to be at the core of a new institutional framework. FIFA, coaxed and cajoled by the respected Swiss legal expert Mark Pieth,Ìęintroduced a two-tier ethics committeeÌęto that the actions of FIFA officials corresponded to the highest moral and ethical standards.

Blatter Battered

FIFA’s inability to deal with the negative fall-out from the bidding for theÌę2018 and 2022 World CupsÌęlaid bare how ineffective these processes were. Failed anti-corruption attempts are indeed littered with the corpses of impressive-looking oversight bodies, and FIFA, it quickly became clear, was failing spectacularly.

FIFAÌędidn’t independent thinkersÌęenough to allow them to ask difficult questions — it didn’t feel secure enough to bring in genuinely transparent procedures. This is not the terrain for effectively tackling deep-rooted processes of corruption.

The events in Switzerland may indeed prove to be a watershed moment. The sight of FIFA officials being arrested, and the prospect of more and more evidence about the culture that pervaded FIFA becoming apparent may well force the organization to change.

As head of FIFA, Blatter must recognize that the old ways of doing things are out-of-date and, indeed, wholly inappropriate. It is what he does that will be the defining feature of not just the rest of this FIFA annual meeting, but also how the organization moves to tackle corruption.

Football is not now a game played by a few kids in back streets — it is an outsized, cut-throat global business, and it needs to be regulated. As things stand, that isn’t happening. Only when transparency, accountability and a preparedness to allow genuine external oversight are the watch-words of all FIFA’s activities will skeptics really start to believe in the organization again.

*[This article was originally published by .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔčÏ’s editorial policy.

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’s Equal Employment Opportunities Commission (EEOC) has demanded that , a racist soccer club, retract recent statements that it would maintain its policy of not hiring Palestinian players due to opposition from the team’s militant, racist fan base.

The demand comes as Israel is fighting an attempt by the Palestine Football Association (PFA) to get the Jewish state suspended from . The PFA charges that Israel hinders the development of soccer by obstructing the travel of players between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as well as abroad.

Senior Israeli soccer officials are in Europe this week for talks with FIFA President and Michel Platini, the head of UEFA, in a bid to block the PFA effort. They counter the Palestinian assertion by insisting that the Israel Football Association (IFA) has no say in Israeli security policy.

The PFA effort is part of a broader campaign by President ’ Palestinian Authority to pressure and isolate Israel following the failure of peace talks. The Palestinians have since joined multiple United Nations organizations, including the International Criminal Court (ICC). FIFA was the first international group to recognize Palestine as far back as 1998.

An Israeli law firm the Israeli-Palestinian battle in international organizations with a petition to the ICC, which calls for an investigation on PFA President Gen. Jibril Rajoub over alleged war crimes during the Gaza War in 2014.

It is hard to assume that the demand by the EEOC is not in part related to the battle over Israel’s status in FIFA, given that the commission has not acted in the past against Beitar Jerusalem, the only top flight Israeli soccer club to have not hired Palestinian players, even though Palestinians rank among the country’s top performers. Beitar’s nationalist ideology is embedded in its name, a reference to the Jews’ last standing fortress in the second century Bar Kochba revolt against the Romans.

Even though the IFA is the only Middle Eastern soccer body to have an anti-racism program, it has slapped Beitar Jerusalem on the wrist but always stopped short of investigating the club’s persistent racism. Beitar, which has long enjoyed the support of Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and other prominent right-wing personalities, has the worst disciplinary record in Israel’s Premier League.

Zaur Sadayev

In 2013, Beitar’s rabidly anti-Palestinian, anti-Muslim La Familia support group sparked rare national outrage, when it unfurled a banner asserting that “Beitar will always remain pure,” in protest against the club’s brief hiring of two Muslim players from Chechnya:ÌęZaur Sadayev and Dzhabrail Kadiyev. It was the group’s use of language associated with German National Socialism that sparked outrage against its consistent racism.

Nonetheless, La Familia operates in an environment in which racism, racial superiority, bigotry and double-standards — and little sincere effort to address these issues, which undermines Israel’s projection of itself as a democratic state — emerge from the country’s soccer pitches.ÌęWriting in Soccer and Society, Israeli scholar Amir Ben-Porat warns:

“The football stadium has become an arena for protest: political, ethnic, nationalism, etc 
 ‘Death to the Arabs’ has thus become [a] common chant in football stadiums 
 Many Israelis consider the Israeli Arabs [Palestinians] to be ‘Conditional Strangers,’ that is temporary citizens 
 Contrary to conventional expectations, these fans are not unsophisticated rowdies, but middle-class political-ideological right-wingers, whose rejection of Arab football players on their team is based on a definite conception of Israel as a Jewish (Zionist) state.”

Coach Guy Levy

Responding to comments by Beitar Jerusalem Coach Guy Levy, IFA President Ofer Eini said: “[His] words are not appropriate and their racist scent certainly doesn’t contribute to Israeli soccer and Israeli society. As a coach and an educator, it would have been better had he avoided comments which can serve those who want to divide Israeli society.” Eini did not include any potential punitive action against Beitar in his statement.

The EEOC and the IFA took issue with a statement made by Levy in a radio interview: “It doesn’t matter that this is the right time; it would create tension and cause much greater damage. I won’t find any player from the Arab sector who would want to. Even if there was a player who suited me professionally, I wouldn’t bring him, because it would create unnecessary tension.” Levy said that opposition by La Familia, whom he praised, meant he would not sign Bibras Natcho, an Israeli international soccer player and a Circassian Muslim, as it would stir unrest among the club’s supporters. “My job is to coach the team, not to educate anyone,” Levy said.

Natcho, a CSKA Moscow midfielder, asked Levy on Twitter: “What would happen if a European coach would have announced that he doesn’t want a Jewish player on his team?”

EEOC Commissioner Tziona Koenig-Yair claimed that Levy’s comments constituted “suspicion of racism in contravention of the law prohibiting discrimination based on nationality, among other things in acceptance to employment.”

Levy’s assertion that Palestinian players would not want to play for Beitar, presumably due to the explicit racist chants — and attacks — against Palestinians and Muslims by La Familia, was belied by Mohammed Ghadir, a Palestinian striker, who in 2011 said he wanted to play for Beitar but was rejected. “I am well-suited to Beitar, and that team would fit me like a glove. I have no qualms about moving to play for them,” Ghadir said at the time. The EEOC and the IFA failed to step in. In a commentary on Ghadir’s case, Haaretz columnist Yoav Borowitz :

Wiki Commons

“An extraordinarily courageous Arab player has stood up, and fearlessly indicated that he is not afraid to play for Beitar. The Jerusalem squad did not assent to his request — not because he lacks sufficient talent, but because he is an Arab. This is a mark of Cain for Beitar Jerusalem and its fans, and also for the city of Jerusalem, the state of Israel and its legal system, the IFA and also for the media, which continues to cover this soccer team. Day by day, we reinforce and popularize this loathsome form of racism.”

The Club’s Origin

Beitar was founded in 1936 by members of the Beitar movement established in 1923 in Latvia as part of the revanchist Zionist trend. Beitar’s founder, former Ukrainian war reporter Ze’ev Jabotinsky, hoped to imbue its members with a military spirit.

The club initially drew many of its players and fans from Irgun, an extreme nationalist, paramilitary Jewish underground that waged a violent campaign against the pre-state British mandate authorities. As a result, many of them were exiled to Eritrea in the 1940s. Many of La Familia’s members are supporters of Kach, the outlawed, violent and racist party that was headed by assassinated Rabbi Meir Kahane. La Familia frequently displays Kach’s symbols.

Beitar’s initial anthem reflected the club’s politics, glorifying a “guerrilla army racist and tough, an army that calls itself the supporters of Beitar.” That spirit still comes to life when fans of Beitar Jerusalem meet their team’s Palestinian rivals. Their support reaches a feverish pitch as they chant racist, anti-Arab songs and denounce the Prophet Muhammad.

Beitar’s matches often resemble a Middle Eastern battlefield. The club’s hardcore fans — Sephardi Jewish males of Middle Eastern and North African origin, who define their support as subversive and against the country’s Ashkenazi establishment — revel in their status as bad boys. Their dislike of Ashkenazi Jews of eastern European extraction, rooted in resentment against social and economic discrimination, rivals their disdain for Palestinians.

The failure to seriously confront La Familia has entrenched Palestinian perceptions of an Israeli society that is inherently racist. Ahmed Tibi, an Israeli Palestinian member of parliament, has laid the blame for La Familia’s excess at the doorstep of Israeli political and sports leaders: “For years, no one really tried to stop them, not the police, not the club, not the attorney-general and not the Israeli Football Association.”

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔčÏ’s editorial policy.

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Legal and diplomatic battles in United Nations (UN) organizations and international sport associations are likely to shape Israeli-Palestinian ties following ’s electoral victory.

The contours of the coming battles are emerging on soccer pitches even before Netanyahu forms his cabinet. A campaign to suspend membership of world soccer body FIFA has arisen, while an Israeli law firm has initiated a petition for the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate Major Gen. Jibril Rajoub, the Palestine Football Association’s (PFA) president. Rajoub is accused of committing war crimes during the Gaza war in 2014.

A statement on theÌęPalestinian association’s Ìęsought to win support for a PFA resolution, calling for the suspension of its Israeli counterpart, the Israel Football Federation (IFA). In the statement, Rajoub said the move was designed to force Israel and the IFA to:

1) Lift all restrictions on the free movement of Palestinian players, staff and officials within Palestine, defined as both the and the , as well as on the import of soccer equipment;

2) Removal of all obstacles to the development of Palestinian soccer;

3) The banning of soccer clubs belonging to in the West Bank from playing in IFA competitions, a demand that goes to the core of disputes over occupied territory between Israelis and Palestinians;

4) Take firm action to combat racism in Israeli soccer, a reference to Beitar Jerusalem FC, the only top Israeli club that refuses to hire Palestinian players and whose fan base is overtly racist. The IFA, the only Middle Eastern soccer association to have launched an anti-racism campaign, has repeatedly penalized Beitar, but it has stopped short of cracking down on it.

© Shutterstock

The Palestinian campaign that has been building up for several years is embedded in a strategy that seeks to achieve recognition of Palestinian statehood by and membership in the United Nations, while at the same time isolating Israel. The strategic effort has gathered steam with the recognition of Palestinian statehood by various European countries and the acceptance of Palestine by different UN bodies, including the ICC, since last year’s breakdown of US-sponsored peace talks.

“It is clear that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will form the next government, so we say clearly that we will go to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, and we will speed up, pursue and intensify” all diplomatic efforts, Palestinian peace negotiator Saeb Erekat told Agence France Presse.

Several years of failed attempts to negotiate a solution to Palestinian soccer problems stemming from Israeli policies have forced soccer’s top global executives to undergo serious pressure to act against Israel.

In June 2014, FIFA President averted a for sanctions against IsraelÌęby creating a committee to oversee efforts to address Palestinian grievances and report back to FIFA within six months. The committee handed back its mandate in December after failing to negotiate a solution, according to the PFA.

UEFA President Michel PlatiniÌęrecently the IFAÌęthat Rajoub, a former Palestinian security chief with presidential ambitions, planned to not only petition FIFA, but also UEFA, the European soccer body. “This time it is serious,” Platini was quoted as telling the IFA’s UEFA representative, Ali Luzon, saying that several European associations would side with the Palestinians, “even if you are right.”

Israel has been grouped in Europe since the 1990s, after Arab soccer associations forced its expulsion from the Asian Football Confederation.

Platini and FIFA Secretary General Jerome Valcke have previously argued that there were no legal grounds on which to act against Israel, given that obstacles to the development of Palestinian soccer were imposed by the Israeli military rather than the IFA.

That argument has been called into question by the Palestinians, who argue that the IFA is an arm of the Israeli state — a charge that matches Israeli allegations against the PFA in the complaint against Rajoub. The Palestinians bolster their claim as the IFA, like the military, is regulated by Israel’s State Comptroller, and that it is allegedly funded to a significant degree by the Israeli government.

In the latest report of alleged Israeli transgressions, the Palestinians charge that IFA demands for the PFA to “operate through the formal channels of the state of Israel” violated FIFA statutes, which stipulate that its members manage their affairs “independently and with no influence from third parties.”

© Shutterstock

The report further argues that the IFA’s failure to take a stand against Israeli policies, which inhibit the development of Palestinian soccer, makes it difficult for the PFA to exercise its rights and fulfill its obligations in accordance with the statutes.

In a shot across the Palestinians’ bow, Shurat HaDin, Israel Law Center — which in February convinced a US jury to order the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and President ’ Palestine Authority to pay $218 million to American families of victims of two Palestinian bombings more than a decade ago — petitioned the ICC to investigate Rajoub on charges of war crimes.

The petition asserts that Rajoub — wearing another of his many hats as deputy secretary general of Fatah, the largest Palestinian faction in the PLO headed by Abbas — was aware, abetted and endorsed rocket and mortar fire from Gaza on largely civilian targets in Israel during the conflict in 2014.

Relying on media reports, the complaint seeks to establish Rajoub’s guilt by association based on his own statements and those of other Fatah members. “Our decision is resistance in the occupied territories in order to bring an end to the occupation [using] all forms of resistance,” the complaint quotes Rajoub, who spent 17 years in an Israeli prison, as saying. It further quotes him as praising the armed resistance in Gaza.

Shurat HaDin failed to answer questions about the complaint, despite repeated promises to do so. Those questions included why the law firm had singled out Rajoub and didn’t included in its petition other senior Fatah officials, including those it quotes in its complaint.

By identifying Rajoub as a Jordanian national, it is unclear as to whether the law firm had deliberately ignored the fact that Palestine was joining the ICC as a state rather than an entity or political grouping, both of which would not be eligible for membership.

By design or default, the complaint not only serves as an early indicator of likely diplomatic and legal battles to come, but it also seeks to undermine the credibility of Rajoub, who is believed to be a potential candidate in a future Palestinian presidential election.

If successful, this could strengthen another potential candidate and arch rival of Rajoub, Mohammed Dahlan, who is widely viewed as a US, Israeli and Emirati favorite. Dahlan, a former head of Fatah in Gaza who sought to overthrow the territory’s Hamas rulers with American and Israeli backing, currently serves as an advisor to United Arab Emirates Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔčÏ’s editorial policy.

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The announcement by Vice President that he will challenge the world body’s four-time president, , in later this year has turned the poll into a battle for the group’s future. A vote for the prince is at least a vote against the FIFA president, following multiple scandals, and more likely a vote for change.

With his announcement following months of canvassing of FIFA members to assess his chances of winning an uphill battle, Prince Ali has positioned himself as Blatter’s foremost challenger. And that is where the problems start. Former diplomat and FIFA executive JĂ©rĂŽme Champagne — like Prince Ali, a reformer — has already declared himself a candidate, while ex- football association President Harold Maynes-Nicholls, another proponent of change, is believed to be considering putting himself forward. A four-candidate battle risks Blatter benefitting from the reformist vote being split among his three opponents.

During his four years as FIFA vice president and membership of the executive committee of the Asian Football Confederation (AFC), Prince Ali has built a track record of achieving reform, with his successful bid to change soccer rules to allow female Muslim players to wear a culturally acceptable headdress that meets safety and security standards; a resolution by the 13-member West Asian Football Federation that groups Middle Eastern soccer associations to put a woman’s right to play on par with that of a man; his ability to pick his battles and forge alliances; his emphasis on grassroots through the Asian Football Development Project (AFDP); the introduction of corporate social responsibility into deliberations between business and soccer in the ; and his stand against corruption and in favor of greater transparency and accountability.

FIFA President Sepp Blatter © Shutterstock

In doing so, Prince Ali has made both friends and enemies. The difficulties he is likely to face in the upcoming electoral battle were evident at the AFC congress in Sao Paulo on the eve of the 2014 . The congress voted in favor of a proposal by AFC President Sheikh Salman bin Ebrahim al-Khalifa to automatically make the AFC president the FIFA vice president. The decision effectively terminated Prince Ali’s position as elected vice president when his term ends later this year. The congress voted in favor of Sheikh Salman’s proposal, even though it had earlier rejected the notion.

While Prince Ali was key in creating the basis of the banning for life from involvement in professional soccer of former FIFA executive committee member and AFC President , he failed in getting the Asian group to act on recommendations of an internal audit conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) to possibly file criminal and civil charges against the disgraced official and renegotiate, if not cancel, the AFC’s $1 billion master rights agreement with -based World Sports Group. The burial of the audit by Bin Hammam’s successor, Sheikh Salman, serves as another indicator of resistance to change within Asian and world soccer governance.

Prince Ali is likely to be able to count on the support of a majority of members of UEFA, the European soccer body, whom he enlisted to help the AFC streamline some of its operations, as well as reformist segments of Asia, including , , and Singapore. He is further well-positioned to garner support from the United States and a number of other associations in the Americas. The Middle East and are likely to split their vote between Blatter and Prince Ali, with a number of autocrats favoring the status quo. Prince Ali potentially will enjoy support from FIFA sponsors, who worry that Blatter and FIFA’s sullied image could reflect badly on them. , the airline, and have already announced that they were ending their sponsorship agreements with FIFA.

FIFA World Cup 2014 © Shutterstock

For the Sake of Soccer

At age 39, Prince Ali is the youngest serving official on FIFA’s executive committee. A half-brother of Jordanian King Hussein and a brigadier general in the Jordanian military with a long-standing passion for soccer for the sake of soccer, Prince Ali has been involved in the game since his twenties when he became president of the Jordanian Football Association, which he has turned into a model for associations elsewhere in the region. Fluent in , English and various Circassian languages, he has also demonstrated sensitivity to minorities in a region that has become increasingly intolerant of the other.

Prince Ali’s announcement of his candidacy, a reflection of his personality and approach, suggests what his emphasis is likely to be should he win the election. He said he had decided to run because the time had come to “shift the focus away from administrative controversy and back to sport” — a reflection of his emphasis on soccer rather than on the power that comes with high office in FIFA. Prince Ali said his vision of FIFA was one of a “service organization and a model of ethics, transparency and good governance.”

Like Champagne, who welcomed electoral debate with Prince Ali, the Jordanian said his campaign would be “focused on ideas to strengthen and improve FIFA. The headlines should be about football, not about FIFA.”

It is hard to take issue with Prince Ali’s vision and track record. He is, however, likely to discover that electoral victory does not automatically open the door to reform. No doubt, Prince Ali would bring a different tone and style to FIFA and a renewed emphasis on the game rather than exclusively on the business of the sport. But it will take all his communication and negotiation skills to counter vested interests in world soccer governance.

If there is one area where Prince Ali may tread cautiously, that is the incestuous relationship between sports and politics that is nowhere more prevalent than in the Middle East and North Africa. Nonetheless, insistence on adherence to FIFA rules and regulations by national associations would go a long way in reducing political abuse of the sport. Inevitably, that insistence will have to be part of any effort to ensure transparency and accountability within FIFA.

James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies as Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, co-director of the Institute of Fan Culture of the University of WĂŒrzburg and the author of the blog,Ìę, and a forthcoming book with the same title.

51łÔčÏ is a nonprofit organization dedicated to informing and educating global citizens about the critical issues of our time. PleaseÌęÌęto keep us going.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔčÏ’s editorial policy.

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Another game, anotherÌę. That’s the allegation against Uruguayan Luis Suarez, anyway, who has been accused of sinking his teeth into an opposition player. For theÌęÌętime.

But a mid-game nibble on an Italian player’s shoulder is nothing compared to football’s ugly past. There is a blood-red thread running through the early history of the beautiful game. From kickabouts with the heads of defeated enemies to stabbings, players getting kicked unconscious, mass brawls and broken bones, football rightly once had a well-earned reputation as “nothing but beastly fury and extreme violence,” as it was described by 16^th century diplomatÌę.

Severed Heads

About the time of the French Revolution some footballers from Kingston upon Thames were taken to court for participating in a riotous game on Shrove Tuesday. Their defense was that, in the distant past, a Viking raid had been defeated by townsmen. The invaders’ captain was killed and his head kicked around like a football. The judge accepted that the Kingston footballers’ game was an “” — and acquitted them.

This was of course a legend. But on the eve of the English Civil War, a Catholic missionary priest was hung, drawn and quartered in Dorchester. The local butcher botched the job and the priest was put out of his misery by decapitation. A mob then got hold of the head and used it as aÌęÌęfor several hours. Exhausted by their entertainment they eventually put sticks in the eyes, ears, nose and mouth, and then buried it near the body. They didn’t stick the head on the town gate because they feared an outbreak of plague — possibly as divine retribution for their actions.

Fatalities and Serious Injuries

Coroner’s inquests are a good source for telling us how football players were killed. Interestingly, in many cases, the verdict was death by misadventure. Framing these incidents as accidents suggests players knew the risks involved.

Yet on some occasions men were also plainly murdered: perhaps in the heat of the game or perhaps using football as cover to settle longstanding quarrels. So we hear of players dying from a knee to the belly, a punch to the breast, and being pushed or tripped to the ground. One had his nose and face smashed in by a quarter pound stone. Another was stabbed in the upper arm and died the following week from infection. Several died from running onto sheathed knives.

Like the wild Irish, I’ll ne’er think thee dead‹,ÌęTill I can play at football with thy headÌę

– John Webster

And in one late 16^th centuryÌęÌętied up with witchcraft, we learn of old Brian Gunter of Berkshire drawing his dagger and using the pommel to smash two men’s skulls. They died within a fortnight.

that constituted part of the everyday business of various secular and ecclesiastical courts can also reveal a great deal about the dangers of football. Thus on February 25, 1582, at a game in Essex, an attacker collided so violently with the man guarding the goal that the goalkeeper was knocked unconscious. He died that night.

Then there was the 17^th century aristocrat who passed out from a blow to the chest during a game played against another lord and his servants. Three months later he was bedridden. The cure: a pipe full of tobacco. The smoke got in his lungs and he soon vomited up bits of congealedÌę.

Other players merely escaped with broken legs. Sometimes they recalled their injury had been sustained at a celebratory game, usually played after a baptism or wedding. One laborer complained that he had lost his livelihood from a football-related injury. But another claimed to have been miraculously cured when he saw King Henry VI in a dream.

Brawls

Football’s potential for riotous behavior was constantly noted by authorities. On occasion, games were just pretenses to attack others from different communities.

Our best evidence for these social tensions comes from fights that marred regular “town and gown” matches. Hence,Ìęaround , Cambridge University players were picked on by some townsmen of Chesterton. The latter provoked a quarrel and then began hitting the students with staves they had hidden in the church porch. When the scholars appealed to the local constable to keep the peace, he ignored them and cheered on the townsmen. Desperate for their lives (one student was chased by a spear-wielding servant) they ran away.

At medieval Oxford meanwhile, a student playing ball in the High Street was reportedly attacked andÌęÌęby Irish students.

Accidents

There were other ways to die. One 14^th century Londoner got out of a window to retrieve a ball trapped in a gutter. He slipped and fell, and died from his injuries.

Equally unfortunate were the men who one January Sunday in 1635 played a game on the frozen River Trent near Gainsborough. During a scuffle the ice broke and eight were drowned — much to the satisfaction of Henry Burton, a puritan moralist who used this as an example of God’s judgment on Sabbath breakers.

Disapproval

Unsurprisingly, football was frequently condemned. One hostile 15^th century observerÌęÌęit as “more common, undignified, and worthless” than any other game he had witnessed, especially since it seldom ended without injury or accident. Weighing up the pros and cons, a 16^th centuryÌęÌęalso felt football wasn’t worth the risks. A healthy, well-exercised body wasn’t much use with a fractured shin or broken leg.

The lastÌę, however, goes to an Elizabethan pamphleteer named Philip Stubbes. Football, he protested, should be considered a “friendly kind of fight” rather than a game or recreation; a “bloody and murdering practise” rather than a good-humored sport or pastime. Nothing good came from it. Only “envy, malice, rancour, choler, hatred, displeasure, enmity” and who knew what else.

Can the same be said of today’s football? Well, thankfully we have rules. But still, football retains a violent streak, as Suarez and his contemporaries constantly remind us. Thank goodness for theÌę.

*[Ariel Hessayon does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.ÌęThis article was originally published onÌę. Read theÌęoriginalÌę.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔčÏ’s editorial policy.

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With the FIFA World Cup underway, there are many out there who have no idea about the history of this long-loved sport. If you love football, you’re probably only aware of its history from recent times. But football has a long, gruesomely violent and hugely interesting past. And so begins a tale of how a violent peasant pastime became a multi-million pound industry.

Traces of football’s history go way, way back. The Greeks had a game calledÌę, which seems to have involved athletes hurling and catching a ball (there is a marble relief of this in the National Museum in Athens). This game may have been a precursor of the Roman gameÌę, where a small, hard ball was thrown among a throng of players divided into teams.

In the 9^th century in Britain, a monk recorded how every year on Shrove Tuesday the youth of London “would go into the fields to play at the famous game of ball.”

Unlike expensive courtly pursuits such as jousting, these games required no specialized equipment and were thus open to all social classes. The innovation of a goal (usually a prominent local landmark) may have derived from the chivalric “passage of arms,” a military exercise in which a group of knights attempted to defend the gate of a castle or town from attack.

Mob Football

The first unambiguous reference to football in England is a writ for preserving the peace in London (dated April 13, 1314), which notes the “great uproar in the City, through certain tumults arising from the striking of large footballs in the public fields.” That football could lead to serious injury or death is borne out by the records. In 1321, for example, one player died from wound sustained after accidentally running onto a sheathed knife.

Yet despite a succession of royal proclamations promoting archery and a statute of 1409-10 forbidding laborers and servants from “playing at the Balls,” this “common, undignified, and worthless” game remained ever popular.

So what now? No salary caps and unlimited transfer fees mean that in England there’s nothing to prevent the richest clubs from buying not only the best established players, but also many unproven kids — stars in the making who aren’t yet old enough to vote.Ìę

Football was also entertaining; a spectator sport in the making. The dangers of the game, however, remained. Civic authorities in 17^th century London, Manchester, Grimsby and Clitheroe banned football playing in the streets, fearing broken windows and tumults.

They were not being alarmist, as a riot instigated by football players in the fens only a few months before the outbreak of the First English Civil War demonstrated. Another disturbance became a prelude to the Second Civil War: unhappy that Christmas had been abolished, rioters at Canterbury used a football match to attract an unruly crowd to their cause.

In the 18^th century, the rules we now recognize on the pitch today began to emerge. At one match, it was determined that “two men will not be allowed to engage one only.” Similarly, at a game played at Ditchingham in 1741, there were judges whose job was to settle “all differences that may arise.” By the late 18^th century, members of the aristocracy, keen to have a healthy work force, began organizing matches — often in concert with local publicans. Prizes in the form of hats were provided for the winners (losers tended to receive stockings).

Public School Rules

From the late 18^th century and through into the 19^th century, increased concern for public order, tighter labor discipline, the enclosure of land and migration to the cities led to an erosion of popular customs. Football was not immune from these changes.

Though the game continued to be played in highly publicized contests, traditional football was in decline. At the same time, public schools, where hitherto football had been regarded as ungentlemanly and “fit only for butcher boys,” began to codify the rules of their ball games.

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At Rugby,Ìę rulesÌęthat permitted players to carry a ball were set down in 1845. Eton followed suit in 1849 withÌęÌęthat, in deliberate contrast to Rugby, forbade Etonians from handling the ball. At the universities, undergraduates brought with them the rules favored by their public schools.

After some attempts to reconcile the various codes, Cambridge produced aÌę codeÌęin 1863, which made no mention of handling the ball. These Cambridge rules were to form the basis of the code eventually adopted by the Football Association established later that year.

Passion and Professionalism

The growth of Association Football in the late 19^th century was remarkable. Amateur clubs sometimes linked to firms or churches, but more often reflecting neighborhood loyalties, mushroomed in the industrial towns and cities of the north (in the 1880s, Liverpool alone had more than 100).

Many teams built their grounds among factories and the worker’s houses, cementing the support of their local communities. By the early 20^th century, many of the largest cities had two major teams and the often intense local rivalry between these clubs was regularly played out before hordes of excited, partisan spectators that represented the largest regular gatherings in peace-time.

The sectarian-fueled passions of the 50,000 or more who regularly witnessed the New Year’s Day clashes between Celtic and Rangers found an outlet in 1909, whenÌę6,000 fans following a draw between the two teams; 54 policemen were injured, the ground damaged and virtually every street-lamp in the vicinity of the stadium destroyed.

The fierce competitiveness that drove teams toward league and cup glory accelerated the professionalization of football. Hungry for success on the pitch, teams began to recruit players from far and wide to realize their ambitions. Victorious teams, like the side that won the cup for Tottenham Hotspur in 1901, often contained no local players. Yet supporters continued to identify with the individuals that wore their team colors.

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Professional football players were perceived as working-class heroes and were paid accordingly: In 1931, the maximum annual salary of a professional footballer, including unofficial bonuses, was probably nearly ÂŁ400; a figure far higher than the average industrial wage. Transfer fees were also forever on the increase.

In the 1930s, football was still seen as cheap entertainment, but it was also big business, providing growing employment opportunities. Demand for news had created sports papers like the Saturday afternoonÌęÌęand Green’Un. Demand for food and drink benefited the catering trade. Demand for cigarettes led to the cult of the cigarette card made famous by John Player and Son. And the demand for gambling spawned pools companies like Littlewoods and Vernons.

There was also advertising; the FA Cup finalists of 1934 promoted flannel trousers, Shredded Wheat and shoe-polish. By the eve of World War II, The Times could describe football as “something like a national industry.”

The Golden Age?

In the post-war era, we have witnessed an ever-widening gulf between rich and poor clubs, where success for the elite is no longer measured by performance on the pitch but byÌę on the stock exchange.

Clubs now recruit managers from outside the United Kingdom and buy players of every nationality. In their wake have come team doctors, dieticians, sports psychologists and publicists. Players are now celebrities with agents and personal assistants. The best earn more in a week than the prime minister does in a year — and more in six weeks than a nurse will make in a lifetime of service with the National Health Service (NHS).

The spectacle we watch and read about daily is sold to us with an ever-increasing sophistication that maximizes a brand loyalty unparalleled on the high street.

Football has never had it so good, but questions remain as to the game’s future direction. Will, as some predict, the industry’s bubble burst? Will fans tire of a handful of clubs cleaning up domestically and sharing the European prizes between them?ÌęFinancial Fair PlayÌęhas to be toothless. Hardly a surprise, perhaps, given the high-stakes nature of the game.

So what now? No salary caps and unlimited transfer fees mean that in England there’s nothing to prevent the richest clubs from buying not only the best established players, but also many unproven kids — stars in the making who aren’t yet old enough to vote. And if the best indicator of where a team will finish is its annual wage bill — occasional managerial brilliance and incompetence excepted — things might get a little too predictable for fans already forced to shell out more to watch a game than they ever have before.

*[Ariel Hessayon does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.ÌęThis article was originally published onÌę. Read theÌęoriginal .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔčÏ’s editorial policy.

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In the early morning hours on January 7, Brazilian city officials arrived in the favela slum of in Rio de Janeiro to forcibly evict the families living there. In total, 12 homes, some of which still had their residents’ belongings inside, were demolished, sending tremors throughout the neighborhood. When the outraged residents took to the streets in protest, police fired pepper spray, tear gas and rubber bullets as protesters returned fire with rocks and bottles.

This particular favela is located less than half a mile from Macarana Stadium, where the final FIFA World Cup match will be played this summer.

So far, thousands of people have been forcibly removed from their homes in Rio de Janeiro. , victims of forced evictions must be relocated close to their previous homes.

But many are being relocated to the outskirts of the city, far away from their previous residences. And the compensation packages of $22,000 for families forced to relocate have been for a country where real estate prices are rising rapidly.

Unfortunately, these evictions are not limited to just Rio de Janeiro. Forced evictions are happening throughout the country, and they are only one of the myriad problems facing Brazil’s poor in the midst of its World Cup and Olympic preparations.

Who Benefits?

As the 12 Brazilian cities that will host events prepare for an influx of foreign visitors, they have launched a host of construction projects to build stadiums and improve roads, public transportation and airports.

By August 2013, after years of efforts, only half the stadiums were ready, and an estimated $3.2 billion had already been spent — a figure three times more than the original budget. The majority of that money came from the public treasury, despite from the sports minister that no taxpayer money would be used to build or rehabilitate stadiums.

To add insult to injury, after the stadiums are built, they to private firms to operate. These firms, not the Brazilian people, will reap the benefits of this enormous taxpayer expense.

The that building and rehabilitating stadiums will spur development in the surrounding neighborhoods. Even as their taxpayer dollars are forked over to private developers, officials assure the public they will benefit from upgrades to roads, hospitals and other infrastructure.

These same claims were made in South Africa during its preparations for the World Cup in 2010, and they proved to be illusory. South Africa spent $6 billion on its stadiums for the World Cup, which FIFA and South Africa’s Local Organizing Committee promised the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) by around 3%.

However, shortly after the games ended, the South African Finance Ministry revealed there was only a 0.4% boost. Out of the ten stadiums that were built or rehabilitated, nine became what are called “white elephants” — venues that are too large for local use and essentially become a waste of space and money. The Brazilian government’s audit courts found that of Brazil’s 12 stadiums were likely to become white elephants.

The controversy surrounding the stadiums just compounds Brazil’s problem of inequality.

Last summer, when the Brazilian government proposed a fare hike for public transportation in Rio de Janiero and Sao Paulo, it was met with resounding protest. Thousands took to the streets in demonstrations against the 20-cent increase in fares, soon to include the country’s failing public sector and ballooning inequality.

As always, the poor are the hardest hit: Brazilians making minimum wage earn just $313 a month, while dealing with a staggering of 6.5%. Thousands of Brazilians living in favelas have to hospitals.

But the protests showed that middle-class Brazilians are growing increasingly restive as well. At 36% of GDP, Brazil ranked 12th out of the 30 countries with the in 2011.

Yet despite exorbitantly high taxes and a booming economy, the public sector still has ample room for improvement. Brazil’s education system, for example, is performing poorly: In 2009, the literacy and math skills of Brazilian 15-year-olds ranked .

The extravagant expense of the World Cup, of course, did not go unmentioned by protesters. How could the Brazilian government spend billions on an international mega-event, while the basic needs of so many go unmet?

An Insult to Soccer

Played by 250 million people in virtually every corner of the map, soccer is the most popular sport in the world. For one month this summer, soccer fans all over the planet will don their jerseys, crowd their bars, and cheer their teams on to victory. The atmosphere will be electric in Brazil and around the world.

The host country should strive to make sure its whole population benefits from the World Cup. It is an important event and a rare opportunity for our world to come together, despite our differences to celebrate hard work and (mostly) friendly competition. However, the blatant discrimination against the poor puts the World Cup in a negative light.

Using public money to build shiny new stadiums while not investing in education or public health is morally bankrupt. Evicting people from their homes and leaving them with little to live on is a gross injustice to the people of Brazil and fans of soccer worldwide.

It is time for the Brazilian government to reevaluate its policies and priorities. Surely, government officials and FIFA officials can come together to figure out a way to have an economically sound and socially responsible event.

Home to world-class footballer Pele and the winner of five World Cups (more than any other nation), Brazil is no stranger to soccer. Die-hard Brazilian fans are known for being among the most loyal supporters in international soccer, but even they have limits. Their intense love of soccer is now overshadowed by their need for economic and social justice.

For those who love sports and justice, it may be difficult to enjoy the World Cup this summer.

*[This article was originally published by .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔčÏ’s editorial policy.

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Genevieve Zingg: Why have protests broken out in Brazil?

Felipe Machado:ÌęThe protests were originally against the 20 cent rise in bus fare. The increase caused one or two smaller protests to break out on Paulista Avenue in SĂŁo Paulo. The protests were initially organized and carried out by the free-fare movement known as the MPL (Movimento Passe Livre), a Brazilian social movement that advocates the adoption of free fares in mass transit. It’s a very young group, made up of university students, 19- and 20-year-olds, who used social media – Facebook, Twitter, and so on – to organize the protests.

The protests closed down the avenue but started to get violent. At the third protest, police started to shoot rubber bullets into the crowd. Older people, people who weren’t even part of the protest, were shot with rubber bullets. The protests were strongly repressed but instead of frightening the demonstrators, this brought more people out. People were seeing the violence and police repression on YouTube and other social media sites; seeing police blaming everything on the protestors when they were partly responsible for the damage and violence. People came out in droves, rioting against the police, and the movement spread all over Brazil.

It became something really interesting. Something curious happened. Suddenly, it became a movement not just about the 20 cent bus fare increase, but about everything that is wrong in Brazil. The government has money to invest in World Cup stadiums, but no money for healthcare, education, transportation, and public infrastructure. The protests spread very quickly because of social media and the Internet, but the MPL lost control of it. The movement has no head. The head is the Internet. It’s a very organic protest, a mix of many different groups with many different demands, a reaction to the World Cup expenditures, to the broken education and healthcare systems.

Amidst all this, amidst all the chaos, there are criminals making it even more complicated by taking advantage of it. Breaking things, setting fire to things, looting, stealing, just making everything more chaotic and difficult to control.

Zingg: Who is protesting?

Machado: It’s really interesting. There are no parties involved in this; the Workers Party tried to go into the streets and be part of the movement but they were thrown out, rejected. There is no single party involved in the Brazilian protests, and the protestors and independent citizens fight every party who tries to claim it.

Zingg: Do you think the protest will peter out or continue and leave a lasting impact?

Machado: What kind of impact is really hard to say, but there has already been one. The president, Dilma Rousseff, went on TV and invited protestors into the head of the government to talk about what’s going on. There is already an impact because she met with the MPL, the free-fare group of university students, and ceded the 20 cent bus fare rise. Kids, young kids, talking to the president. But nothing serious came of it; no fare at all is not believable; it’s too much to ask, and they left saying bad things about the president, about how she’s not prepared, not good. It’s difficult. If you don’t know who is protesting how can you talk to them?

The president had another meeting — really a symbolic meeting — with 27 governors of states and mayors of the capitals. Rousseff said she wants to hear what they want and their opinions, and proposed a pact to get together and discuss. But what can come out of a meeting? It’s 60 people in a room, really just a speech from her to them. Nothing has really come out of it yet. There is no short-term solution. She’s proposing political reform, but that will take six months to a year and next year are the elections. It’s really messy. July 1 is supposed to be a general strike, and on July 11 there will be another one. Everyone is trying to do something but no one is doing anything connected to each other. It’s hard to draw anything from it. This can weaken the country — having events, strikes, and weekly protests. It could continue until 2014, the year of the World Cup and the next presidential election. And FIFA has already said if Brazil can’t keep the players safe, they will cancel or relocate the World Cup. It’s a dark scene.

Zingg: People ascribe the failure of governance as a reason for the protests. Do you think that is true?

Machado: No party has emerged as the opposition. They are all pushed back. People who go and say they are a part of it are pushed out. But how can you transform the political system if you are not a part of it? If you are not in a party, how can you change the system? It’s hard to think of a solution without the political players. But society — the demonstrators, the protestors — they don’t want the political players involved at all. Que se vayan todos – it’s an expression from Argentina that means “Let’s get rid of them all.” And the opposition doesn’t want to push too hard in case of kick-back. Everyone is waiting to see what will happen but no one is taking any action. The government doesn’t know what to do. They can’t propose anything because there are so many demands and everything is pushed back by the people. The answer should come from society, but society is not organized enough to do anything. The MPL had the fare increase cancelled and said they are out of the protest because they got what they wanted. But then they came back in with new demands. It’s not only the young people now, it’s everyone: parents with kids are marching, old people are marching. It’s chaotic but optimistic and a little bit violent; but the majority are facing it in a positive way.

Zingg: Brazil faces a huge corruption problem. It has spent twice the amount as Germany and South Africa on the World Cup. The people have been left with the bill while contractors prosper. Do you think this issue has reached a tipping point?

Machado: The Confederations Cup is smaller than the World Cup, with only eight teams. But it created a window of opportunity for the movement. Many international journalists are here — other countries are here too, Spain, Italy, Japan and so on – and it created a window.

The World Cup didn’t start as an issue but it has become one. When Brazil was chosen as the country for the World Cup, everyone said it would be paid for by private companies, businesses, and sponsors. But then the Brazilian government lent money to build brand-new stadiums or paid for it themselves. They are spending billions of dollars on a private event which will be so expensive that it is only really for the rich, and will be very profitable for FIFA instead of Brazil. Everyone is angry that the government said at first they wouldn’t be spending public money, but then spent billions on it. It’s become a very strong issue. Brazil plays against Uruguay on Wednesday and big protests have been organized against the game and against the World Cup. It’s an important paradox that a football nation is against the Cups. Brazil is a symbol of football; football is symbolic for us. An event as big as the World Cup should be a good thing to stimulate the economy. But it has become the bad guy. Everyone is a villain and the World Cup has become one too.

Zingg: FIFA is projected to make a $1.1 billion profit from the 2014 World Cup, and has few plans to help develop Brazil’s infrastructure. What does this mean for the credibility of FIFA and Brazil’s enthusiasm for the World Cup?

Machado: The people expected spending on infrastructure, roads, better connections from airports to cities, and subways, but the government spent all the money on the stadiums and not infrastructure — FIFA demanded that. We have stadiums, good stadiums, but FIFA demanded better ones. There was no money from private companies and corporations; they invest in the stadiums, but not in infrastructure for Brazil.

Zingg: How much of a role has inequality played in triggering these protests?

Machado: Only economic inequality plays a role. I covered the World Cup in South Africa and there were hidden racial tensions, but in Brazil we don’t have that. It’s not about that. It’s only economic, against the government. They did such a bad job organizing the World Cup – the finals take place in one year and there are no new roads, just stadiums. We had good stadiums. Lasting infrastructure would have provided long-term benefits for Brazil. What will the stadiums do for us when the World Cup is finished?

Zingg: Protests have broken out in many parts of the world in recent times, the latest example being Turkey. Are the Brazilian protests part of a larger trend?

Machado: It has a connection. Every country has their own reasons, and most of them all started from very specific demands. In Turkey, the shopping mall in the square; in Brazil, the bus fare. But then everything that’s wrong comes out of the closet. You can establish a pattern in these protests — although they are very different. In Brazil, it’s very economic, similar to the Occupy Wall Street movement against the big bank systems. Brazilians like these protests because they can say what they want, but there are so many demands that it’s not as specific as other protests around the world. The unifying factor in the Brazilian protests is probably political reform. Everyone wants political reform, but that can mean so many different things to different people. Ultimately, it’s against the government’s bad investment of public money. It is a demand to rebuild Brazil.

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Saudi Arabia, under domestic and international pressure to grant women sporting rights, is creating separate stadium sections so that female spectators and journalists can attend soccer matches in a country that has no public physical education or sporting facilities for women. 

The move announced by the recently elected head of the Saudi Football Federation, Ahmed Eid Alharbi, a storied player believed to be a reformer, also comes as in the conservative kingdom.

Saudi Arabia has been slow in granting limited enhancement of women’s rights in response to demands by activists. Women in Saudi Arabia are banned from driving, travelling without authorization from a male relative, and banned from working in a host of professions. Saudi Arabia’s religious police said last month that women would be allowed to ride bikes and motorbikes in recreational areas, provided that they were properly dressed and accompanied by a male relative.

Saudi Arabia recently also announced that it would allow girl’s physical education in private schools as long as they do so in line with Islamic law. Yet, a five-year national sports plan, the kingdom’s first, which is currently being drafted, does not make provisions for women’s sports. Saudi sources say the government is also for the first time considering licensing women’s soccer clubs.

Saudi Arabia last year sent, under pressure from the International Olympic Committee, women athletes (albeit expatriate ones) to the 2012 London Olympics, the first time Saudi women competed in an international tournament. The kingdom is also under pressure from the West Asian Football Federation, which earlier this year issued guidelines to ensure that women have equal rights and opportunities in soccer.

Speaking at King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah, according to Saudi press reports, Alharbi hinted at the economic impact of allowing women to attend matches by saying that the creation of facilities for them would increase capacity at various stadiums by 15 percent. He said the Prince Abdullah Al-Faisal Stadium in Jeddah would be the first to accommodate up to 32,000 women, followed by the King Abdullah City stadium in the capital in 2014. Saudi Arabia, which enforces strict gender segregation, first announced in 2012 plans to upgrade the Jeddah stadium to enable women to enter.

Racism at Soccer Matches

Meanwhile, in the latest politically-loaded soccer incident, Al Ittihad SC of Jeddah, filed a complaint against Riyadh’s Al Hilal SC after an Al Ittihad official and fans tweeted and chanted racist remarks. Al Ittihad, which has a number of dark-skinned Saudi players, and Al Hilal are among Saudi Arabia’s top clubs.

“The last match between Al-Hilal and Al-Ittihad clearly revealed the indecency of Al-Ittihad players through two movements – one from ‘the monkey’ Fahd Al-Muwallad who did not stop proceeding when Muhammad Al-Qarni was injured in a jostle with him. Secondly, [they] did not fulfill the commitment to Majed Al-Murshidi, and did not greet or thank him,” Saud Al-Sahli, assistant director of public relations and announcer at King Fahd International Stadium in Riyadh, said on Twitter. Some Al-Hilal fans had shouted “Nigger, Nigger” during the match earlier this month. Al-Muwallad and Al-Qarni are both dark-skinned.

Saudi newspapers warned that racist incidents threaten to rekindle religious sectarianism, tribalism, and regionalism in the kingdom, in part a reference to Shiite Muslim protests in the oil-rich Eastern Province. 

“The racist and sectarian utterances of sports fans should not be punished by fines alone, as some heads of the sports clubs are immensely rich and can pay the fines against their fans without feeling any burden. There should be harsher punishments, including a ban on the fans from entering the stadiums, reducing the club’s league points or even downgrading it to a lower division,” the Saudi Gazette said in an editorial.

Members of the royal family with positions in Saudi soccer, or who own clubs, have been repeatedly in the firing line of disgruntled fans. A Facebook page entitled Nasrawi Revolution demands the resignation of Prince Faisal bin Turki, the owner of storied Riyadh club Al Nasser FC and a burly nephew of King Abdullah. A YouTube video captured Prince Faisal seemingly being pelted and chanted against as he rushed off the soccer pitch after rudely shoving a security official aside.

The campaign against Prince Faisal follows last year’s unprecedented resignation of Prince Nawaf bin Feisal as head of the Saudi Football Federation (SFF), the first royal to be persuaded by public pressure and step down in a region where monarchial control of the sport is seen as politically important.

Prince Nawaf’s resignation led to the election of Alharbi, a commoner, in a country that views free and fair polling as a Western concept that is inappropriate for the kingdom. Prince Nawaf retained his position as head of the Saudi Olympic Committee and the senior official responsible for youth welfare that effectively controls the SFF.

Nevertheless, the resignation of Prince Nawaf and the campaign against Prince Faisal gains added significance in a nation in which the results of premier league clubs associated with various members of the kingdom’s secretive royal family are seen as a barometer of their relative status, particularly at a time that its septuagenarian and octogenarian leaders prepare for a gradual generational transition.

Summing up the mood among fans and many other citizens, a Saudi journalist said: “Everything is upside down. Revolution is possible. There is change, but it is slow. It has to be fast. Nobody knows what will happen.”

James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, director of the University of Würzburg’s Institute of Fan Culture, and the author of  blog.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔčÏ’s editorial policy.

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