I think all of those who watched yesterday’s African Cup of Nations Final match between Ivory Coast and Zambia share my feeling: we were privileged to be allowed to participate in one of the more remarkable moments in modern sporting history. It was one, of course, that went largely under the radar in the U.S.: it was not aired here, there was little coverage in our press, and if you tried to grab someone excitedly on the street and shout “Zambia won!” you probably would have gotten a blank stare — though of course it depends on what street.
There is plenty to worry about with regards to African Football, as Achille Mbembe noted in a sharp interview entitled “Un tournoi de nains” — “A Tournament of Dwarves?” Yet Zambia’s victory was significant, among other things, because nearly all the players on the team are based in Africa (notably in South Africa) rather than in Europe. It was a striking contrast to the Ivory Coast team, with a star-studded roster of names familiar to anyone who watches the English Premier League. The victory should raise new questions in the long running debate about what the best way for African nations to cultivate successful teams on the international level.
Perhaps the most remarkable moment of the evening came afterwards, though. Joseph Musonda, a 34-year-old veteran of the team who knew this would likely be his last chance to play in an African Cup of Nations final, was hurt in the opening minutes of the game. He had to watch, in pain, powerless, from the sidelines for the next 2 hours. But his teammates made sure he could ultimately celebrate a victory. And his coach, Herve Renard, made sure that he could be amongst them as they prayed in thanks, honoring the generations who had brought them to this moment.
Since its founding in 1907, Al Ahly S.C. has been known as ‘the people’s club,’ representing resistance against the many forms of colonialism that have long plagued the African continent. Initially the first sporting club to allow Egyptians to join, Al Ahly remains the most popular of Egyptian teams, wearing to this day the red kits that honour the pre-colonial Egyptian flag.
It is no great surprise, then, that Al Ahly Ultras – officially founded by Mahmoud Ghandour in 2007 (who is reported to have died in Wednesday’s violent attacks) – were on the front lines of both the initial “#Jan25” uprising and the continuing movement intended to topple the Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF). Egyptians inspired by Tunisia and over 30 years of corrupt governance have utilized every resistance tactic at their disposal, including the well-organized and nearly fearless ultras.
Ahlawy are not the only ultras to make up the first line of defense against police and the military – fans of the comparatively upper-class Cairene neighborhood Zamalek’s team, Al Ahly’s longtime rivals, have also defended the ongoing revolution with zeal. It is, in fact, the truce called by Zamalek after years of bitter rivalry with Ahly in the aftermath of the devastating Port Said riots this Wednesday that symbolizes much of the complexity surrounding what the international media has largely misidentified as a “football riot.”
What happened is still unclear, though this much is known: On Wednesday, after Al Masry beat Al Ahly 3-1, attackers armed with knives and clubs stormed the pitch. Whether the armed crowds were only Al Masry Ultras or not is still being debated – after all, why attack the spectators and team members of the losing squad? Several players – Egypt’s beloved philanthropist and supporter of the revolution Mohamed Aboutrika included – were injured as they rushed into their dressing rooms (Aboutrika, shaken by theattack, has since announced his retirement from football).
At least 73 people were killed (martyred, as many observers and mourners on Twitter, Facebook and the Egyptian blogosphere have noted), and many more injured. As those under attack – mostly Ahlawy, though this type of violence rarely leaves anyone untouched – attempted to leave, it was discovered that most of the exits were locked, and the stadium lights were shut off in the midst of the chaos.
The videos coming out of the Port Said stadium are horrendous. Such violence is not unheard of in the aftermath of football matches in Egypt (or anywhere in the world, for that matter), but it took even seasoned football announcers by complete surprise.
The Ultras in Egypt do not share the sometimes-fascist roots of their counterparts in Europe. Although politics also play an incredible role in the breakdown between fans of the various teams throughout Egypt, football had been frequently utilized by Mubarak’s regime as an attempt to distract citizens from their daily oppression, as well as stoke tensions between neighborhoods, cities, and nations. But this has not always been successful.
One of the many Ahly chants routinely heard at football matches is “Down, Down With the Junta Rule!” Last year I cited Dave Zirin in a short piece discussing Al Ahly’s political history on the media blog Africa Is A Country. Zirin’s observation that Egyptian football clubs and anti-government organizations “walked together in comfort” remains a reminder of why many Egyptians – myself, a product of four generations of Ahlawy included – do not for one moment believe this is “just” football fanaticism.
The video above displays clearly the riot-gear clad security forces doing nothing while Al Ahly’s players sprint to the relative safety of their dressing rooms. This is not the first time in the last year Egyptians have seen this happen. Recall that on 28 January of last year, many were paid and armed to attack protestors in Meydan Tahrir and other gathering areas.
Mubarak and his supporters not only used this as ‘proof’ that they were in the right, but also to allege that Egyptians were ‘not ready’ to lead themselves. This moment is clear in the minds of many at a moment when SCAF has echoed these same arguments in an attempt to retain power and maintain the Emergency Law that has been in place since 1980. SCAF now promises another ‘crackdown,’ though, as usual, it does not specify what particular entity will be targeted.
Al Ahly Ultras asserted in a public statement: “[SCAF] want to punish us and execute us for our participation in the revolution against suppression. Given this and the broader public rage directed at the military for protecting and serving only itself, we must expect that SCAF will be cracking down on the very people mourning the loss of life and continued absence of their liberty in Egypt. Indeed, the protests throughout the nation that immediately followed the riot turned into all-out battles between military police and ultras. As one interviewee warned The New York Times, “They turned the biggest fan base in the country against them.”
For more details and perspectives, please read James M. Dorsey’s articles on the Foreign Policy and Time websites, here and here, as well as Egyptian blogger Issandr El Amrani’s thoughts on the LRB blog.
Yesterday produced horrific images of bloodshed. Today began with some striking gestures of solidarity, such as the one pictured here by @Sarahcarr of banners of two rival clubs — Zamalek and El Ahly — sewn together.
But as a write, there are new clashes in Cairo, where protestors are blaming the military regime for the deaths. Many commentators have been arguing that what is going on is about politics, not football, and of course on some level that is true. But what is also clear in Egypt is that football and politics are so intertwined in this story that there is almost no way to untangle them.
It’s now just over two months since protestors pitched the first tents at Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan, affectionately dubbed “Liberty Plaza.” I’ve found myself riveted by the daily twists and turns of this story, the way a quirky, playful idea first floated by Adbusters rapidly became an energetic movement. I’ve followed the events largely from afar, the way I follow football: watching it live via ustream channels or on youtube, discussing it on twitter, and talking about it with friends. But there are many people like me out there, I think — interested, sympathetic, active spectators. Indeed, the Occupy movement has blurred the boundaries between observation and participation. Its open, fluid, and leaderless form — often cited as a liability — is turning out to be one of its greatest strengths. It seems to me at least ideally tailored for the times, for a moment when political certainties seem increasingly dubious, and where it’s incredibly difficult to get clarity about what lies ahead for our nation. But the movement has already managed something quite important: it has sent a gentle but potent buzz through the body politic, shifting — ever so slightly — the terms of debate and the forms of political imagination available in the U.S. and beyond.
It’s impossible to know what will happen next: events keep unfolding furiously, day after day. But it might be worth trying to make sense of the unexpected processes at work during the past two months.
There has been plenty of sarcasm and sneering both on and off the campus about this group; “the 1% is occupying itself!” declared one rapidly circulating photo of the encampment. But of course Duke, like any university, is a complex and diverse place, and there are plenty of students who are not particular wealthy (50 percent receive financial aid). What the Occupy movement taps into, in any case, is a broadly sense that things are not going in the right direction, that the opportunities awaiting college graduates will be much narrower than what they once expected. That is why, as one Duke student wrote, Occupy manages to scare some students, just a little bit, even as most ignore or make fun of it. Anxiety about the future — the sense that it is growing dimmer with each day — can gnaw at you. And when individual anxiety finds some kind of public, community expression, it can rapidly become a potent force. That intersection, between individual sufferings and public mobilization, is the key to any social movement.
The rapid spread of the Occupy movement, of its slogans and symbols, has been unexpected. It’s a truism of American politics that any attempt to mobilize people along class lines faces many obstacles. By declaring “We are the 99%,” the Occupy movement tried to skirt that problem, insisting on a radical inclusiveness, and even inviting the 1% along as well. But in the many critical responses to the movement bouncing around in the media and on twitter (“Get a job!” is a favorite refrain, as if the whole movement is the result of the leisure time of lazy unemployed people), you can see how challenging it is to break through established attitudes and codes.
The Occupy movement has nevertheless managed to do so, creating a new space for people to articulate a critique of the social order. The movement has become a magnet for a powerful, diffuse, but widely shared sense of deep unease about the shape of our institutions and their inability to address the pressing concerns of individuals and communities. That the anxiety and anger seems to run so deep is perhaps why the movement has generated so much concern, alarm, and especially in recent weeks, police repression.
For some time now, younger generations of Americans have been labeled cynics, experts at ironic detachment. In the face of the basic observations that have driven the movement — that financial institutions exercise a tremendous amount of control over our society and our destinies while also profiting from a remarkable level of impunity — we’ve come to expect, even embrace, a pragmatic cynicism. That’s the way it is: money talks. The political process is corrupted by money, sure, but there’s nothing we can do about it. The only solution is to work on oneself, create a persona curated especially for success in the world as it is, for success represents a certain kind of escape from the constraints placed on us by the social system. Cynicism and irony in the face of the political process are in many ways reasonable, and indeed now so well anchored in our collective personality as to be almost unexceptional; they are a daily currency of commentary and exchange.
What anchors the Occupy movement, however, is a profound refusal of cynicism. When I stopped by a General Assembly at Occupy Durham a few weeks ago what struck me (and what struck many other early observers of the movement) was the the honesty and commitment to democratic process. It was striking and moving to see a diverse group of extremely diverse people earnestly discussing matters of immediate political concern, sharing fears and hopes with strangers. In a circle, they really listened to each other, for a long time. They did not, in the end, come to much of an agreement. Meetings are frustrating, open-ended, surely annoying at times. And yet there was a palpable excitement at the fact of actively taking part in an open-ended public debate.
The “leaderless” quality of the movement, its devotion to process — exemplified in the “People’s Mic,” hand-signals, and a general disposition to facilitating public expression through costumes, signs, banners, and posters — is its key strength. If the Occupy movement has been a revelation to many it’s partly because of how well it calls attention to a profound absence in our current landscape: the absence of a public sphere that is not tied up either with government or corporate institutions (including the media). And what has been powerful about these events is seeing groups of people essentially with their backs turned to power, facing one another, speaking to one another.
Despite the earnestness, politeness, and often relatively small size of Occupy meetings and encampments, they have faced increasingly strong police action. In some places, the back and forth has been almost farcical: people at Occupy Denver, forced to take down their tents, built an igloo, which was in turn destroyed by the police — inciting a debate about the precise legal status of an igloo in a park. Later, when the mayor demanded the group elect a leader to speak to local officials, they elected a very smart looking border collie.
But the mounting reality is one of mass arrests on a scale we have not seen for quite some time in the U.S. The Tea Party rallies that began in the summer of 2009, for instance, never led to arrests or police intervention — even when protests arrived carrying guns. Going back further to the 2003 massive rallies against the war in Iraq, there were comparatively few arrests. Such rallies, of course, tended to be more conventional political marches, with permits approved in advance, often occupying public space for a delimited time. The Occupy protests, in contrast, have purposefully pushed the boundaries further by actually creating encampments and organizing smaller, mobile actions through the use of social media.
You have to go back to the anti-World Trade Organization protests in Seattle in 1999 to find something that parallels the kind of churning confrontations we are now seeing. Even that, though, was confined to one city, whereas the Occupy movement is thoroughly national. The New York Times recently noted that the total number of arrests during the last two months — over 4500 — has now surpassed the number of arrests carried out by the Iranian government during the 2009 “Green Revolution” protests. Obviously the two situations are radically different: the Iranian protests mobilized a much broader sector of the population and seemed to represented a greater immediate threat to the government. In response, the regime shot people in the streets, executed some prisoners, and tortured many others, and ultimately stifled the movement. The Occupy protests take place in a parliamentary democracy, where free speech is (mostly) protected. They are not directed against a particular government figure, and they are not organized around mass public rallies of the kind we saw in Iran in 2009 and more recently in Tunisia, Egypt, and elsewhere. Instead, they have been focused on occupations of public space, and small, rolling protests. In fact, the numbers involved have been relatively small — even in New York and Oakland — and many of the encampments across the country are quite tiny, involving dozens of protesters or even fewer.
Nevertheless, in recent weeks, police attacks on the protests have been escalating. There has been, it seems to me, an odd disjuncture between the actual challenge posed by the demonstrations and the weight of the police response. That was strikingly clear in Chapel Hill recently, when a group of protestors loosely linked to the Occupy encampment of the cities took over an abandoned building. In order to drive them out, the Chapel Hill police sent in a heavily armed swat team, as shown in this widely circulated photograph.
Such police action against the protests has, consistently during the past two months, catalyzed and oxygenated the movement. It has been crucial in transforming it from a relatively small and potentially marginal movement into something of national proportions.
What explains the often heavy-handed tactics of the police? Local governments have the option of taking a very different approach, as a few have: simply taking the encampments as a minor issue requiring some supervision. Police and city officials can cooperate with individuals in the camps to make sure there is no criminal activity, that areas are kept clean, etc. If this approach had been followed in more places, notably in New York and Oakland, the movement would likely be weaker now than it is, and may even have started to peter out. Camping out in public places, after all, is pretty tiring work. Much of the energy of the encampments was taken up by simply dealing with the daily issues that came up — providing food, negotiating tent space, etc. And as encampments last longer and longer, such issues inevitably get more complicated and probably harder to deal with.
Instead, Bloomberg — after having initially responded relatively kindly to the occupation — ultimately decided to shut it down. The NYPD worked hard to minimize the coverage of their destruction of the encampment in Liberty Plaza — going in in the middle of the night, blocking airspace above the park to prevent images from news helicopters, and even arresting several journalists. They even smashed the computers confiscated from the site, presumably to destroy any information stormed on them. Nevertheless, videos of the raid made it out, and within two days the police and mayor were facing a rolling set of demonstrations throughout the city. Instead of ending the Occupation, the police seem now to have metastasized it, creating a situation that will probably be far more difficult to police than the largely self-governing city in Liberty Plaza was. Many are now concluding that the eviction from the park may ultimately have been a boon, freeing up the movement and spurring it on.
Watching these events unfold, you do wonder to what extent police forces have yet to fully internalize the fact that everyone now has an iPhone, and that every single action they take will be photographed, filmed, and immediately uploaded onto YouTube. Police are used to filming protestors, in some cases for use in trials afterwards. For some time protestors have been filming and photographing police back. Still, there much more documentation of every police move now than there has ever been. If you watch a ustream of some of these protests or attend them yourself, you’ll notice that any time the police arrest someone iPhones pop out from everywhere, creating an instant archive that can be put to use immediately in the broader terrain of symbolic warfare over the meaning of the movement.
This level of instantaneous representational combat is in fact relatively new. The 2009 protests in Iran were the crucial pioneering movement in this regard, using twitter and YouTube to create an alternative narrative. It’s no accident that Liberty Park, before it was destroyed, included a large portrait of Nedjma, the woman whose shooting by Iranian police during the protests was broadcast around the world, becoming a martyr and a symbol.
Looking back, it’s clear now how the conscious production and circulation of certain images has been crucial in defining and spread the movement. The process began in earnest with this video, viewed 1.5 million times, of police pepper-spraying two young women. This video brought a sudden spike in media attention to the movement.
Heavy-handed police tactics, of course, might have gotten a certain kind of analysis in the media itself that could have minimized sympathy for the movement. But the proliferation of videos made by participants or observers has played a crucial role here. The mainstream media has almost never reported incidents first. Instead, the media catches up with events after they’ve been circulated on twitter and YouTube, and then comments on them. This also means that social media has allowed protestors to themselves to shape the symbolic terrain of how the movement is interpreted. Nowhere was this clearer than with the uploading and viral circulation of the video of a former Marine Sergeant, Shamar Thomas, dressing down a long line of police officers for using violence against protestors. Now seen almost 2.8 million times on Youtube, it has become an iconic image, twisting and confronting all the usual tropes and story-lines about patriotism, courage, and the place of the military in our society.
Shamar Thomas insisted to police in New York that the U.S. shouldn’t be treated as a war zone, that there was “no honor” in battling unarmed protestors. The video of Thomas, first posted on YouTube on October 16th (in a shorter version than the above), was followed by a video of another veteran, Scott Olson. In the case of Olson, the drama was different: Olsen, who had fought in Iraq and survived, had come home to the U.S. only to be seriously wounded during clashes over the eviction of Occupy Oakland protestors on the night of October 17th. The scene of Olsen’s wounding has been re-edited and circulated in many different videos, but perhaps the most striking is the one below, which has the odd feel of a war movie — as a crowd of protestors rush out of the smoke carrying Scott Olson and crying “We need a Medic! We need a Medic!”
The prominent place of veterans in the such representations of the movement has been crucial symbolically. In the 1960s, returning Vietnam Veterans formed a spine in the anti-war movement. Indeed, veterans groups (led by World War II veterans) organized some very early anti-war marches at the time. The presence of veterans like Olson and Thomas in the movement helps us understand part of what is happened here. We have had more than a decade of war, involving huge mobilizations of young men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan. Soldiers and their families have carried an extremely heavy burden. They have returned to a society where — in part because of massive government deficits caused in significant part by the cost of these wars — many have found difficulties finding stable employment. As was the case after Vietnam, the after-effects of combat are taking their toll, and suicides are vying with the number of combat deaths in ending the lives of soldiers or ex-soldiers. Some veterans have seen the Occupy movement as a forum through which they can express grievances about their experiences, notably about cuts to their benefits and pensions. Because the fact of veteran involvement in the anti-Vietnam war protests often forgotten or actively obfuscated, usually replaced by the image of veterans being harassed by protestors — a process carefully analyzed in Jerry Lembcke’s book The Spitting Image – the presence of veterans in this new protest movement seems to surprise many. But it is in fact part of a long tradition (going back to the radical politics of highly-decorated Marine officer Smedley Darling Butler in the 1930s and the occupation of Washington by the Bonus Marchers) of veterans taking an active and leading role in protests movements in the U.S.
During the first weeks of the Occupy movement there was comparatively little action on college campuses. Recently, though, that has changed dramatically. The events at Berkeley have served as a catalyst for a movement that now seems poised to paralyze the entire UC system. Watching this unfold has been slightly surreal. On a campus whose self-presentation of itself involves much celebration of its days on the vanguard of the political struggles of the 1960s (you can get a coffee at the “Free Speech Cafe,” decorated with pictures of heroic students confronting the administration for the right to protest), police beat up students and a former Poet Laureate and dragged a professor by the hair. You might think the administrators at the UC system might know the history of their institutions well enough to find a way to avoid the blunders of their forebears from the 1960s. At the very least, they might have consulted with any number of their faculty for a quick primer on the way police violence spurs the expansion of student movements. In these cases, again and again, police action against small groups of protesters helped to spur and expand student movements. That happened at Berkeley during the Free Speech Movement, and at Madison in October 1967, where police tear-gassed a small demonstration right as students were going from one class to another. May 68 in Paris was triggered by the entry of police into the Sorbonne. Chancellor Katehi of UC Davis, in fact, witnessed the brutal suppression of a student strike in Athens in 1973, as she pointed out in her apology to the students today — though that wasn’t enough to prevent her from ordering police to take down the student encampment last week.
Though it’s barely been a week since the violence at Berkeley, the cascade of events since then now almost seems inevitable. Protestors at UC Davis set up a camp in solidarity with the Berkeley students. The administration sent in the police to dismantle the camp. What happened next was captured on this video. Already viewed by 1.5 million viewers on Youtube and widely shown in the mainstream media, it became an instant parable.
A remarkable mix of four different videos from the incident provides an event more vivid representation of the strange, almost surreal, set up and action by the police — the long, theatrical shaking of the pepper spray bottle, perhaps in some hope that this would be enough to make the students leave, culminating in the spraying of the students.
As of today, the situation in the UC system seems explosive: during the past years UC campuses have seen a steady set of cuts, and students increasingly have the sense that the educational opportunities meant to provide them with social mobility are being whittled away. As I write, a new, bigger occupation at UC Davis — complete with a Geodesic Dome — is underway. In New York, meanwhile, the campus of the New School is also occupied, and protests directed at potential tuition hikes at CUNY are ongoing. There are, undoubtedly, similar movements stirring on many other campuses throughout the country.
What the Occupy movement has managed to do in the past months is to produce a set of powerful symbols and narratives that both illuminate and challenge the current order. The protestors have, in a sense, drawn out the institutions of power in our society, creating dramas of confrontation that are forcing difficult but crucial questions out into the open. Those who watch the pepper-spraying at UC Davis, or the destruction of the lovingly collected and curated “People’s Library” at Liberty Plaza, are summoned to take a side. The issues the movement is seeking to address — about economic inequality, the corruption of political life, the dismantling of public institutions, the increasingly impossible to bear economic burdens placed on students — have to be tackled head on. So, too, does that fact that so many people feel left out and disenfranchised in our current social order.
The commitment to process and non-violence has been central to defining the movement from the beginning. So has the spirit of humanity, humor, and openness to various perspectives and projects. Maintaining that approach will be crucial if the movement is to continue to have an impact on our public debate.
One of the most powerful illustrations of the the moral possibilities movement took place at UC Davis, documented in the video below. There, the discipline and commitment of the student protestors in the face of the police has shamed the administration. Their dignity in the face of violence makes it clear that something really is happening, and that the future may, finally, be in good hands.
Of all the moments in the surreal Manchester City vs. Manchester United game today,there is one that will probably stay rooted in our imaginations for at least a little while: Balotelli’s cheeky question: “Why Always Me?” after his first goal. Like many of the most fascinating moments in football, this one was at once funny and irritating, appropriate and trangressive.
As soon as I saw this, my head began to spin as I tried to imagine Balotelli’s thought process. Going into a game against Manchester United, of course he badly wanted to score. And he had his reasons for thinking he might: if he’s a little arrogant, he has his reasons, and self-confidence no doubt helps him play the way he does. Other players also have t-shirts concocted in preparation for scoring, sometimes with political or social messages: “Sympathize with Gaza,” in one famous case in Egypt, or “Paz in Villa Kennedy,” as Edouardo once requested to those in his violence-torn neighborhood back in Brazil.
But how did Balotelli decide on that particular message? It can be seen, after all, as fairly obnoxious. Having a shirt printed up in preparation of scoring is already a sign of arrogance, of course, but the usual tactic is to balance that out by having a message that isn’t about how awesome you are. Like Messi wishing his mom happy birthday, sweet wonderful son that he is. He got a yellow card too, but the gesture was unimpeachable.
Not Balotelli’s style, though. This was all about Balotelli, performing being Balotelli, at the ultimately moment of Balotelliness. And though probably his teammates didn’t really mind — hopefully they have a sense of humor — it’s a bit of rib towards them. Like, how come I’m always the one who scores, instead of the rest of all y’all? What’s up Kun, Nasri? Don’t have any goals in you? Why Always Me?
That Balotelli might think this, quietly to himself as he hugs his teammates and thanks them for assisting him in scoring, is not that surprising. You can imagine it crossing Rooney’s mind, or Messi’s mind: dude, why am I the awesomest out here, always? But that you would plan, in advance, to publicly make the point is pretty striking. So, too, is the fact that, although he knew you would get a yellow card, he clearly didn’t care. What’s a little card, waved in the air by an impotent referee, compared to the memorable glory of that celebration, of trying to make it just a little bit eternal, rather than just one more goal in the stream of club play? He was, at that moment, just a little Maradonesque — charmingly so.
It’s striking, too, because while in retrospect the showing of the t-shirt can fit firmly into one of the more remarkable drubbings in recent football history, at the time Balotelli could not have known that this would happen. Even if he was convinced that his team would win, I doubt that in his wildest dreams he would have predicted a 6-1 victory. And in fact instead Chicharito and Rooney could well instead have combined to come back and defeat Manchester City, in which case his t-shirt would have ended up seeming a little off. Instead, of course, we were able to watch two groups — the Manchester City fans in the stands of Old Trafford, and the players on their team — express some of the most pugnacious self-satisfaction I’ve seen on display in a long time. The t-shirt was just the beginning of a long, long game at Old Trafford.
There’s a moment in Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait when, as we watching him on the field, Zidane tells us that once in his life — and only once — he was playing and suddenly knew, in advance, precisely what would happen: that he would score a goal. He knew how he would do it, and then he did it. Balotelli’s t-shirt somehow makes us think the he had a similar certainty. That he was so well prepared for the moment is both alarming and delightful.
The thing is, there’s something rather universal about the sentiment expressed on the shirt — except that most of the time we (like Charlie Brown) repeat those words not because we’ve just had something wonderful happen to us, but the opposite. You might imagine the same t-shirt worn by some particularly beleaguered goalie: he could pull up his shirt every time some terrible defending, or worse, sent the ball streaming into his net. But the fact Balotelli took perhaps the most profound and universal of human questions “Why Me?” and turned it into a festival of self-celebration, is perhaps what makes this so memorable.
Of all the answers to Balotelli’s question I saw, perhaps the best came from Supriya Nair in Mumbai: “oh, darling. if not you, then whom?” Here’s to the strange certainty that convinced Balotelli that he would print up and wear that t-shirt. Here’s to a gesture that made us pause, for a second, this Sunday: that made us wonder, for a second, about his sanity — and therefore our own.
Early last month, senior executives from the Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA), the League Managers’ Association, the Football Association (FA), the Football League and the Premier League met with Cyrus Mehri, an American lawyer who, along with the late Johnnie Cochran and a labor economist, Janice Madden, drafted and successfully petitioned the National Football League (NFL) to adopt the “Rooney Rule,” the requirement that NFL teams interview at least one minority candidate for any head-coaching vacancy. PFA chief executive Gordon Taylor, who invited Mehri to speak, favors bringing the Rooney Rule to English football to increase the number of black and minority ethnics considered for and ultimately hired as managers.
Response to the meeting was swift and varied widely. While many agree that the number of black managers and coaches is surprisingly few, there is little agreement on how to address the issue or, as some have argued, whether any disparity exists at all. What may have been lost in the debate, however, are the clues that the decision has already been made, with the remaining point of discussion only being when and how the policy will be implemented.
Named after Dan Rooney, the chairman of the committee appointed by the NFL to review potentially discriminatory hiring practices, the Rooney Rule was ratified voluntarily by the thirty-two franchise owners in 2002. Under considerable public pressure, as well as the threat of legal action by Cochran and Mehri, the owners agreed to implement the rule the following year. The impact was immediate; within nine years, nineteen blacks had been named as head coaches for American football teams, and both coaches competing in the 2007 Super Bowl were African-American.
As early as 2003, a number of former players, such as Viv Anderson, England’s first black international, John Barnes and Luther Blissett, formed a group allied with the PFA and began petitioning for more black coaches and managers. Ten years earlier, Keith Alexander had become the first black to be appointed when he hired as manager for Lincoln City FC. But five years later, when Paul Ince became the first British-born black manager of a Premier League side, he was only the third to manage a professional league club.
While there have been 33 appointments since the 1992-93 season (apportioned amongst 17 individual managers), only two blacks are currently managing, Chris Hughton at Birmingham City and Chris Powell at Charlton Athletic. And a number of observers—within the sport, the media and amongst fans—have questioned whether the lack of black managers is a direct result of institutionalised racism.
That racism was once rife in English football is indisputable; in his memoir, First Among Unequals, Anderson wrote of bananas thrown on the pitch and hearing racist slurs when he first began playing. And though often rare now—as well as illegal in the UK—BME players have been subjected to racial abuse as recently as the 2011/12 season.
In 2008, some within the game began urging that the Rooney Rule be adopted in English football. Chief amongst those were blacks who felt they had been denied opportunities to even interview for open managerial vacancies. The most recent push for parity, however, began in earnest earlier this year.
Ellis Cashmore and Jamie Cleland, two researchers at Staffordshire University in Stoke-on-Trent, published the results of a survey of 1,000 fans, professional players, referees, coaches and managers. In their study, Why aren’t there more black football managers?, Cashmore and Cleland reported that more than 50% of the respondents believed that racism existed in football’s top ranks, and fully a third supported the adoption of a “British” Rooney Rule.
And in March, during an interview on BBC Radio 5 Live, Taylor publicly signaled his intent when he said:
All I can think of is that if things don’t start to improve we’ll look at a rule that demands that clubs have to at least have a good selection and include former black players—fully qualified—as coaches. Our job is to try and get them in the first place fully qualified then there’s no excuse not to interview them, and, then, to get them involved with the interview process.
Several months earlier, the FA had replaced the FA Coaches Association with the Licensed Coaches’ Club, addressing one of the common reasons Taylor cited that is often given for the lack of non-white managers—fully qualifying candidates. Developed to ensure that coaches kept their training and qualifications current, the Licensed Coaches’ Club was also established to ensure that persons interested in coaching—at any level of the game—gained the proper qualifications.
Over the summer, the FA launched a second component of its broader initiative; an equality drive aimed specifically at promoting coaching opportunities to black and minority ethnic (BME) communities. Coach, a film produced by the FA, is specific in its intent: to increase the number of black and Asian coaches in management positions, spotlighting both the professional and grass roots game.
At the film’s premiere at Wembley Stadium, FA Chairman David Bernstein commented, “the football family recognises the underrepresentation at the top level.” “Hopefully,” he went on to add, “today is the start of redressing that imbalance.” But Lord Herman Ouseley, the Chair of Kick It Out, the PFA/FA campaign established to bolster equality and inclusion in football, addressed what is likely one of the issue’s most significant factors when he said, “it’s important that football is showing to the world in this country how it can lead.”
Because absent from many of the discussions is an acknowledgement that English football has become a lucrative global enterprise. In addition to advertising, ticket sales, naming rights and merchandising, broadcasting rights—reportedly £1,4bn/US$2,17bn for the 2012/13 international rights alone—now constitute a substantial portion of revenue for the twenty premier league clubs. The Manchester United fan base, for example, extends outside of the UK to millions worldwide, and other clubs, such as Arsenal and Manchester City, are also looking to significantly expand their numbers of international supporters.
Setting aside the debate as to whether BMEs are intentionally excluded from coaching positions, the perception amongst a significant number is that they are, and multinational enterprises must strive to avoid any hint of bias and discrimination—as well as the associated adverse publicity. Correspondingly, how English football is perceived vis-à-vis its hiring practices can have a direct impact on its revenue and profit.
Additionally, while the debate has largely been shaped around the sizeable number of black players in the league, the focus of the current PFA and FA initiatives is on British-born black and minority ethnic groups. On the March 5 Live programme, Taylor remarked:
I find it astonishing that we can import the likes of Jean Tigana and Ruud Gullit and there’s no problem, but our own lads who have grown up in this country have not been given a chance to be fairly represented.
Considering that British-born BMEs only constitute 15% of the players in the top division—with a combined average of 18% in the Football League—Taylor’s statement is worth noting, particularly given the higher percentages, which are so often quoted. (The higher figure, currently 28%, represents both British and foreign-born players.) It is conceivable, then, just as their NFL counterparts concluded in 2002, that football’s governing bodies have determined that it is more prudent to formalise its hiring practices before they are legislated.
Notwithstanding the moral and societal implications, it has become an imperative that British football reflects the sports’ diversity, both on the field and in the back office. Because in what has become a £7,7bn/US$12bn entertainment industry—one that contributes substantially to the larger economy of Britain—English Football must maintain its competitiveness as “the world’s most favourite league,” as well as its appeal to an increasingly global audience. Adopting the Rooney Rule, which is neither affirmative action nor a requirement that BME candidates be hired, may simply be good business.
After all, watching this video (shared with me by our friends at A Football Report), you can’t but want to participate in such an atmosphere (even if, like me, you wouldn’t have been allowed to). There is, frankly, something revolutionary about the scene.
I was reminded of a testing joke once shared with me by a friend — a geneticist — who asked: What if there was a chromosome that you could find in the overwhelming majority of violent criminals? What if you could isolate it, and perhaps genetically engineer people to remove that chromosome? An eerie, sci-fi, but intriguing idea. Well, he told me, there is such a thing: the Y chromosome. Take it away, and you’d reduce violent crime dramatically. The Turkish FA had the same insight, it seems: if you don’t have any men around, that solves a lot of problems.
Reading this story, I thought back to the brilliant film Offside, which shows the travails of women in Iran who want to watch football but are banned from the stadium, and so attempt to sneak in dressed up as men. (You can watch the entire film on Youtube, starting with the segment below; I highly recommend it if you haven’t seen it: was actually filmed during an Iran match, essentially under the nose of Iranian authorities who were not aware of the way the film critiqued their policies).
The mirror image offered here between Turkey and Iran, two neighbors, is striking. And the whole story has the brilliant effect of suddenly making us realize that what we think of as natural — the stadium as a largely masculine space, defined by certain forms of behavior — could be changed as easily the strange rules of the game played in the stadium itself.
An interesting story is shaping up in the CONCACAF World Cup qualifying games with two consecutive victories by Haiti. They’ve now followed up a 6-0 trouncing of the Virgin Islands with a 2-0 defeat of Curacao, and are at the top of their qualifying group.
Haitian football has, of course, been through a lot during the past years, including the death of key personnel during the earthquake, a harsh post-earthquake 9-0 loss to the U.S. women’s team in early 2010, and the quarantining of the men’s youth team in Jamaica. They didn’t make it into the Gold Cup this year. But the dreams of Haitian football are still there, always kept alive by the shared memory of the nation’s one appearance in the World Cup, in 1974, and of a particular goal made by Manno Sannon against Italy in their first game.
Haiti lost that game 4-1 and didn’t get out of the group stage: but no matter, Sannon was and is a national hero: one mural portrayed him alongside Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Che Guevara and Fidel Castro in a pantheon of Caribbean heroes. Might a new set of heroes emerge from the national team’s current roster? Already, fans have been delighted by the recent games, a needed respite and challenge to the discouraging news that surrounds them.
Meanwhile Laura Wagner, our intrepid Haiti football correspondent, contributes this narrative of her attempt to see the game with her friends Claudine, G-Love, and a new friend named Jean:
Claudine, G-Love and I arrived at the stadium at about 1:30 pm for the 3 pm match, just as the rain began to pour. We stood for some time under a street merchant’s tarp, where we bought a little bottle of cheap Roi de Coq rum and chatted as the rain poured down. Fans wearing Haitian flags and red and blue jerseys streamed down the street, lined with tarp-and-sheet-metal homes, beauty salons, and businesses. While G-Love ventured off to try to by some more tickets from scalpers, I went and checked out the line, and was stunned to find that it stretched all the way from the stadium entrance up past the Ministry of Public Health.
“We have to go stand in line,” I told Claudine. She put a plastic bag over her hair, and off we went.
This was smart thinking, as it turned out. After the rain let up, people moved en masse into the line. It stretched from Rue de l’Enterrement all the way up Rue O. Durand, up to the Champ-de-Mars.
At least standing in line was not boring. It was, rather, an active process requiring constant engagement and vigilance. People wedged their way into any gap in the line, so everyone had to “kole” against the people next to them. Claudine was pressed against me, while I was pressed against a chubby middle-aged guy in a red T-shirt.
“I’m all up against you and I don’t even know your name,” I told him.
He smiled, displaying a gold tooth. “I’m Jean.”
“Pleased to meet you. I’m Laura.”
The line moved incrementally. Vendors hawked water, sodas, ice cream, conch in spicy sauce, fried plantain chips, Haitian flags (both on sticks and in bandanna form), red-and-blue banners with “Haiti Chérie” on them (five gourdes apiece), fresh coconuts, hot dogs, and so on. “What do you want to eat when we get inside?” I asked Claudine. Wet from the rain, I was thinking hopefully of a cold beer and a bag of salty plantain chips. Claudine, G-Love and I bought Haiti flag bandannas, which we tied around our heads.
A smallish man appeared to our right. “The back of the line is no good for me,” he said in a quiet reasonable voice. “Let me in here.” We all squished together again, immediately and instinctively, to firm up any gaps between people.
Claudine laughed. “For whom exactly is the back of the line good, monchè?”
Soon after, we began to notice a lot of police cars, and people began to say that Martelly’s entourage would be arriving any moment. Sure enough, within seconds the president appeared on foot, wearing jeans and a blue T-shirt and flanked by armed bodyguards. People cheered and shouted “Martelly!” He waved and headed toward the stadium.
A woman walked down the street, clad head-to-toe in the Haitian flag. Her head was wrapped in a Haitian flag scarf. Her dress consisted of two flags. Her earring were flags. Even her umbrella was red and blue. I stopped her to pose for a photo.
A bunch of foreigners went straight to a metal gate alongside the main entrance and seemed to get in expeditiously and without hassle. I was curious about these foreigners and their badges, and how one might get this VIP-blan access.
We moved closer to the stadium, glacially. As we got closer, we saw men breaking the fence and sneaking through. A bunch of people in line decided this seemed like a good idea, and hopped out of line to try this new tactic. Claudine and I stayed in line.
In the end, we, and possibly thousands of others, never made it into the stadium. As people on the streets said, “Our tickets died in our hands.” There was so much upheaval and so much shoving that they locked all the entrances to the stadium and began beating people back with police batons. We don’t know if too many tickets were printed, or if there were counterfeit tickets on the street, or if simply too many people pushed their way in ticketless, but in any case, an awful lot of people who paid for their tickets never made it into the game. We stood outside as we heard the crowd erupt in cheers with each goal, and bitterly wondered what was going on. Among that crowd were soccer fans who had gone without food so that they could buy those tickets — those ultimately useless tickets.
As the dezòd mounted and it looked like violence was likely, Claudine and I split. We found a restaurant with a TV on Rue Capois and watched the second half of the game there. “Pòdyab Îles Vièrges” we said, sipping our drinks and eating banann pese in peace. “Poor things.” 6-0 is a pretty sad score. We were happy not to be at the stadium.
Haiti’s changes of qualifying for the World Cup are, of course, pretty slim. They’re at the top of the group now, and might well hold their position there against Antigua, but the Round 3 of the qualifiers will pose a more serious challenge.
Still, these two victories are nevertheless something significant, and suggest something might be afoot worth following with the team. Last year at the World Cup I saw a few Haitian flags carried and displayed during the games in South Africa, and I know plenty of Haitian fans who would consider it about the highlight of a lifetime to go watch their team play in Brazil in 2014. There would be a nice symmetry to it if, forty years after Sannon’s goal, that happened. If there’s a bit of justice in this world, maybe it will.
There was something oddly consuming about the dullness of today’s France-Romania European Qualifying match. It was played in Bucharest, in front of a packed and energized crowd of Romanian fans, who understood that this was probably the pivotal moment in the country’s attempt to get to the European Cup next year. The legendary, shiny-headed Howard Webb was officiating, lending the match a weighty air. The two national anthems were sung with an unusual verve and passion by snappily-dressed performers — the match commentator exclaimed that Edith Piaf couldn’t have done better with the Marseillaise, and I came away humming the Romanian national anthem thanks to the rendition given by the enthused, tuxedoed singer.
The contrast between the care given to the performance of the anthems and that given to the pitch upon which the match was played, however, was a little startling. It was as if the two teams had been condemned to play on some dusty pitch behind an elementary school in Durham. Clods of grass and dust shot up with pretty much any tackle, and you could almost see Ribery and Benzema stumbling around on the uneven pitch. The French team played well given the circumstances, slowing the game down, keeping possession, showing a tactical calmness and precision that was a relief to see — compared, at least, to the various scenes of panic, disarray, and incoherence that French fans have learned are always possible.
The game had a few brief flashes of interesting play, but they usually ended in some lunging shot off to the side of the goal or a play petering out in the midst of clods of dirt and flying grass. A tussle left Evra’s shirt torn, and it looked slightly piratey and glamorous hanging around his neck. When Samir Nasri was substituted in the 75th minute, after having been kept along with Malouda on the bench for most of the game, you could see him kind of listening to what Laurent Blanc was telling him, while members of the French coaching staff yawned behind him. By the end, between increasingly labored bursts of patriotic song from the Romanian crowd you could almost hear the sounds of tens of thousands sighing as they watched their teams run petering out. They booed and hissed at the end of the game, and it was a depressing sound, since it wasn’t clear against whom it was directed: the Romanian team for failing? The French team for allowing them to? Or just the damned world for being the way it is?
During the game, in one corner of the pitch, a gauntlet of black-clad, SWAT-teamish police with nifty headbands stood at the ready, as if at any moment they might have to burst onto the field with machine guns in a last ditch effort to save Romania’s chances, or maybe to save football itself from oblivion or meaninglessness.
Across the continent, Belgium offered up it’s classic, drippy cold weather to the visiting U.S. men’s team, along with a slightly humiliating stew of a 1-0 defeat. Since I was born in Belgium, I took some joy in the victory — it’s been a long time, I’ll be honest, since I’ve even seen the Belgian team play, and I came away looking forward to doing so again. Still, all in all one didn’t end the game feeling particularly excited about anything.
As of Friday, August 12, the AFE (Spanish Footballers’ Association) union resolved to strike for at least the first two matchdays of the Spanish professional football season.
Their reason is a crisis in Spanish football related to the credit bust that, thus far, has left at least 200 players in First and Second Divisions owed €50 million in wages.
Furthermore, the players are standing against the increasing incidence of their colleagues’ wage payments being delayed, sometimes for months. What’s more, they are demanding stricter oversight from Spanish football governing bodies to prevent such situations from occurring.
The way they see it, Spanish football should be looking more in the way of countries such as Holland or Germany, where club team spending is much more controlled. They even point to the Premier League, where a team like Portsmouth, declared insolvent, is punished with relegation.
In contrast, in Spain football teams have been juridically ignored regarding their spending and labor practices. To highlight the situation: Zaragoza owes its players millions from last season, yet have already signed eight new players, one of whom cost €8.6 million. Players, bound to contracts, are unable to escape the situation, and, furthermore, since there are no legal provisions to punish the nonpaying clubs, are forced to stay on since they haven’t been paid and their only hopes of getting payed are by staying put.
While many have mocked the idea of football players being slaves, one can also understand the bad positions that teams often put players in. Imagine, a young man gives up his schooling with the idea of being a professional footballer. He does so with the idea of building a career, and focusing every bit of energy on it. Yet the shelf life of an average player is shorter every season; the reality is that football is only a solid career until one’s early thirties, when the body gives out.
At this point, the situation for Spanish players is such that there is no guarantee that they will even get the financial benefits of that career. What’s more, the boom in the Spanish football industry, parallel to the boom in the economy firmly tied to real estate speculation and excessive spending, has seen teams spending exorbitant sums on players–many of them quite bad–from all over the world. The past 15-20 years have seen a global expansion in the game–via TV rights and merchandising–that has favored cosmopolitan teams with universal appeal.
Now, with the burst of the bubble and the drastic slashing of banking credit (not to mention the possibility of increased regulation), many teams are beginning to look like sinking ships. Very expensive ships with no life rafts.
What’s more, since credit has dried, very few teams are able to get any, and we could have guessed that those with that luxury are Real Madrid and Barcelona. Both teams continue to sign players left and right, paying high wages and enjoying the profits of their all-encompassing appeal in every corner of the world.
In many ways, it’s becoming a two-horse race; a look at revenues in Spain, compared to similar charts for league titles in the last ten years, shows that there is one Real Madrid, one Barcelona, and a field full of also-rans.
In a Spain (and a Europe) in which the common people are being forced to swallow “austerity measures” (cuts to social spending and increased taxes), that makes the idea of the football business somewhat more ridiculous. While small and medium businesses in Spain, still a strong economic force, are finding their credit to be cut, they see a sector of the Spanish economy not bound to the same basic rules. Solvency, spending what one can afford to pay, paying one’s employees.
And yet, the press, while highlighting the strike (though not so much its financial implications), still warms up to the idea of the start of the new season, not to mention the Fabregas saga. The nationalistic Madrid-based papers (especially AS and Marca), as well as the Catalan dailies (such as Sport), have also given these lastly mentioned stories much more prominent attention.
At the same time, as the 15-m movement against the austerity measures continues to be vociferous in Spain, El Pais also featured an article about former Sporting Gijón footballer Javi Poves, who quit the sport for “ethical reasons,” motivated by his anarchist political beliefs.
The 15-m, short for “15th of May,” protestors have been staging nonviolent protests since May against what they view as governmental and corporate irresponsibility in the economic crisis. They demand, among other things, accountability and the upholding of workers’ rights.
And interesting bedfellows the two groups, footballers and protestors make, at least in terms of our discussion here. As the football season approaches once again, so do we get closer to finding more about the true depths and consequences of the global economic crisis. Football, more than ever, parades the fantasy that all is well, that the world is in order, and that the best team wins, again and again.
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Why I won’t be using the term NUTMEG in football again. Wiki dispels the notion the term derives from the never present Tony Nutmeg of Leeds United, and in citing Brain Granville and other football scholars suggest the term probably came from nutmeg export business where unscrupulous traders slipped wooden replicas into sacks and barrels. […]
