Soccer Politics / The Politics of Football

The Western-most tip of Africa seemed like as good a place as any to watch the Mali vs. South Africa quarter-final in the African Cup of Nations. On Saturday, I was at the Pointe des Almadies in Dakar, a tourist stop and hang-out with a beach carpeted with black stones and hand-holding couples. On offer there were grilled fish, birds, paintings made of butterfly wings, ham and cheese crepes and beer, Bob Marley renditions — and a tiny television tuned to the match. We stood packed behind a bar watching. Everyone, as usual, was both coach and expert tactician. “Mali is leaving way too much space for the South Africans – they are fast!” “Why can’t they hold the ball?” “Only Keita is worth anything.” Some went on offence: about the South African coach Gordon Igesund: “That white man needs to calm down! He’s going to be more tired than his players!”

“Who are you rooting for?” a man turned and asked me suddenly. “Mali!” “With everything that’s happening there they need it,” he tells me. “They’re our neighbors,” another adds. We all turn back to the screen in time to see South Africa slip through the saggy Mali defense and score. Generalized hissing. “They’re going to get crushed. Crushed,” a man declares. For a while I think he’s right. But then: Keita, angling his header down for the bounce just enough to pass over the falling goalie. Stabilizing the boat.

I was in Dakar at the CODESRIA conference Afrika’Nko. Mali was on everyone’s mind. The conference was originally to take place in Bamako, but moved to Dakar because of the conflict there. Much of one afternoon was consumed by a heated debate about a statement condemning the recent burning of ancient manuscripts in Timbuktu. The signs of the intervention were visible in city, too. Wandering through the crowded center of town, I fell in behind a group of uniformed French soldiers winding their way along the street. From the sidewalk a man said to them: “Vive la France!” The soldiers looked back a little cautiously, not totally sure whether the statement was sarcastic or not. But the man seemed quite sincere, and the soldiers nodded.

During the Cup of Nations games, life in Dakar didn’t exactly stop. But it did proceed to a single soundtrack. On the upper floors of a cloth market and factory, the shops each had a small TV turned to the games. I sat in one for a while where, fed up with the French language commentary from the TV, a young man muted the volume and then cranked up the radio commentary from Dakar. In rooms nearby where men worked at sewing machines, the radio blasted the game, and there was enough time for them to dash over to a TV to see replays if something big happened. On the street, a man wandered out into an intersection, slightly oblivious, holding his phone to his head – listening to the streaming radio of the match. And each of Dakar’s often beat-up yellow taxis that drove by had the same soundtrack.

When much of a city and much of a continent is watching something, you can almost feel the collective shifting of moods. There was that moment of seeping dread, late in the second-half game of Mali vs. South Africa with the score skill locked 1-1, when everyone realized that overtime was coming, and after that, most likely, penalty kicks. But Mali’s players, and goalie, controlled the shoot-out from the beginning. Each of them went in, it seems, knowing that if there was a moment to proceed without fear and with hesitation, this was it. Gracefully, they dispatched South Africa without even needing to shoot the full five shots. The cheers were immediate and uproarious: “Mali!”

I was so deep into the African Cup of Nations that, when I returned on Monday to the U.S. and someone asked me whether I’d seen the game last night I said enthusiastically, “Yes!” But I thought they meant the Burkina Faso vs. Togo quarter-final — not the Super Bowl, which I had forgotten was even happening, and whose unfolding had barely registered in Senegal. I quickly learned the essential take-away from that event — the Beyoncé is totally fabulous — but realized that those who, here, found Burkina’s progress into the semi-final a notable historical event would be few and far between.

Tomorrow Mali goes on to face Nigeria in what is sure to be a difficult match. After last year’s amazing and emotional victory by Zambia, though, anything seems possible. And a victory for Mali in the midst of the war in the country would be a meaningful one. The conflict there has created, both within the country and among those watching and worrying from Senegal and other parts of the region, a powerful sense of dissonance and fragmentation. History is bearing down on the present: the long and complex history of Islam in West Africa, of the relationship between the desert regions of countries like Mali and the more populated cities, and of course of the history of French colonialism and neo-colonialism and the ambiguity of a population largely celebrating an intervention by France.

That there is a place, on the pitch, where “Mali” seems relatively straightforward – 11 players with one goal, though also with an infinite number of ways to reach it – is perhaps a kind of comfort. And so to is the idea that, at times like this, the game has a chance to be more than itself. At one point in the game, the one woman in the bar where I was watching pointed in surprise and wonder – above the ball, in a slow-motion close-up, you could just barely see a moth fluttering its wings.

“Didier Drogba delivered a long and passionate eulogy to the European Cup as Chelsea finally secured their holy grail.” — The Sun, 21 May 2012

The Champions League final between Chelsea and Bayern was written, it seems now, purely to allow Didier Drogba a form of poetic catharsis worthy of fiction or film. The fact that Chelsea won was itself a kind of oddity, for throughout the game it seemed the most unlikely of outcomes. But as he had against Barcelona, Drogba became the master of the unruly and the absurd: none of what the other team did, not of the great passing and possession and continual shots on goal, mattered in the end. Just Drogba did, his head and then his foot.

I’m not a Chelsea fan, and watched the game with a fervent Chelsea-hater (learning that there is a tight kinship, down to color-coordination, between that and our local North Carolina tradition of deep, bilious Duke-hating). But I’ve got a soft spot for Drogba — his goals, and his goal celebrations, and the moments like this one where he performed a few steps from the “Drogbacité” dance (given the accent on the end, this would translate into English as “Drogbacity”) on this video (posted and commented on by Sean Jacobs at Africa is a Country).(For the full musical experience, watch the video of the song by Shazaku Yakuza)

But I am a fan of spontaneous, charismatic, oration — or at least of the idea of it. So it was that reading about Drogba’s post-victory performance suddenly redeemed the whole thing for me. After all, if a money-soaked, increasingly corrupt, time-devouring, and often seriously disappointing football culture should do anything, it should produce moments like this one:

Drogba, draped in an Ivory Coast flag, danced around the trophy on the pitch. But it was in the locker-room afterwards that he celebrated by transforming the trophy into an interlocutor, and his teammates into rapt, shouting, spectators.

As the Daily Mirror reported: “Why have you avoided us, eluded us, for so long? Why have you punished us so much?” asked Drogba… “For all these years you have flirted with us, tempted us, then run away. We thought you would come to us at Anfield twice, but you did not listen. Then in Moscow, you made us believe you were ours but turned your back, refused to let us touch you. Against Barcelona, again, you tortured us, made us want you even more, made it even harder. And even tonight, you hurt us first. Made us suffer. Made us fear it would be the same again, the late goal, the penalty kick, until the end. And now, at last, you belong to us.”

Though he had spoken at first to the trophy like a long-sought after lover, in the end, Drogba turned it into a religious object. As The Sun reported, he ended “his amazing 15-minute performance by bowing down to the cup and offering a prayer of thanks.”

The Guardian offered this summary: “The improvised eulogy touched upon everything from previous near-misses to a theatrical chronology of the evening’s events: from unexpected European debuts to defensive resilience, late headed goals to penalty heroics. The testimony was interspersed with a regular refrain that implored, with knees bent in mock worship of the silverware: ‘Why did you elude us for so long?’ ‘He was dancing on the table, praying to the cup,’ said the chairman, Bruce Buck. ‘It was almost a religious experience.’

We need, clearly, to call an emergency symposium of specialists in public oration — gathering Classicists who can speak to us about ancient Greeks and war with Ethnomusicologists who have studied West African griots — to write a proper analysis of this performance. (So far, perhaps the best description of the match, and Drogba’s role in it, has been written precisely in an ancient epic register.) For now, let’s just content ourselves with wishing that we had been there to see that brief sanctification.

This journey began in Abidjan, but much of it took place somewhere else — in, or on the edges of, French society. Drogba was sent by his family to life with his uncle, professional footballer Michel Goba, when he was five years old. His family eventually migrated to France in the midst of the austerity and political turmoil of the 1990s. As Adekeye Adebajo has written in a review of books on Drogba, his time in France was one of isolation. In speaking about his adolescence, Drogba referred to the Guinean novelist Camara Laye’s story of the painful exile of a student in France in the 1950s. His father, who had managed a bank back home, took menial jobs and the family lived in a cramped banlieue apartment in an area with many other African immigrants. “Didier’s teenage years in France were cold, lonely, and largely friendless,” writes Adebajo, defined by a sense of “sociocultural dislocation” for which football provided “some solace.”

Drogba’s followed his uncle’s path into professional football, playing in the 2nd division for several years before battling his way to Olympique de Marseille, and from there to Chelsea. He had — and still has — many ardent fans in France’s banlieue neighborhoods, where people remember his story. In a horrifying 2008 video shot in the banlieue of Montfermeuil, the  journalist collective Rue 89 documented a police beating of Abdoulaye Fofana. It took place during a France-Tunisia football match, which was being played not far away in the Stade de France. Fofana was watching the game when the police burst into his apartment, claiming he had thrown a fire-cracker at a passing patrol. They dragged him down the stairs, beating him all the way. As the video ends with an interview of his shocked family, you can see that his living room was covered with posters of soccer starts, including Zidane and, prominently behind the television, Drogba.

Many of the legendary French players in recent years shared Drogba’s experiences growing up in the French banlieue, notably Zidane, Makelele, Thuram, and Henry. But among those in his generation who came up through the French system, Drogba was one of the few of his calibre to opt not to play for France. Though his did play on a national French youth squad at one point, he ultimately chose the Ivory Coast as his national team. We can briefly imagine what might have been had he chosen to play for France instead — imagine the 2006 World Cup final with Drogba on the pitch (for better or worse)! “Ils auraient pu jouer en équipe de France,” — “They could have played in the French national team,” laments one website sporting a photograph of Drogba. But Drogba has expressed pride in his choice: This past February, when his team lost to Zambia in the African Cup of Nations Final — in part because of a missed penalty by Drogba — he commented that when the team returned to the Ivory Coast they were hailed and celebrated despite their loss. “We weren’t really expecting that. This country is different — they always come to see us even when they lose. I had the luck to play for the French team when I was young. But I don’t think that if I played at the senior level I would have ever gotten this kind of reception.” And of course one of Drogba’s most legendary moments came when, in 2007, he intervened into politics by using a football match to try and put an end to the civil war in the Ivory Coast.

He might have been thinking of what happened to his former Chelsea teammate Nicholas Anelka during the 2010 World Cup, when he was kicked off the team and excoriated in the press for a locker-room outburst against Raymond Domenech. Drogba spoke up for Anelka then, and soon after the Champion’s League final news broke that the next step in his journey will be to join his friend at Shanghai Shenhua in China. If that ends up happening, it will be a fascinating twist in a story that has stretched from Abidjan to Dunkirk to Marseille to London and now Shanghai.

Will Drogba ever give another speech quite as good as the one he gave in Bayern the other night? Only if the occasion arises. As one reader pointed out in response to an earlier version of this post, that occasion might be just one year away: if Ivory Coast manages to clinch the African Cup of Nations, as they weren’t able to this year. What a speech Drogba might then give to that long and painfully sought after trophy? A long and winding tale, with a long evocation of the beautiful and moving game they lost against Zambia. And what if — we can dream! — they were to go on, full of confidence, and win the World Cup in Brazil in 2014? If either of those victories happen, let’s hope someone will be prepared with a video camera in the locker-room this time — to capture Drogba hassling and adoring another trophy. It would be worth seeing the Ivory Coast win just to see that, no?

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.

Jonathan Wilson, who provided excellent coverage of the tournament, wrote this beautiful match report for The Guardian. And Peter Alegi has written a striking account of the experience of watching the game, which includes videos of the grueling and intense penalty kick shoot-out. There was a tenderness, even love, to this experience that was truly remarkable: one felt that the teams were, in a way, suffering through this moment together, and deeply. All knew that any victory would mean suffering for the other team. When Zambia’s goalie Mweene took and made a penalty kick, the Ivory Coast goalie shook his hand afterwards. And singing, prayers, looks upwards, accompanied each step of the ordeal.

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.

The historicity of the moment, of course, had everything today with the those who haunted it: the 1993 Zambia football team, nearly all of whom had perished in a plane crash just off the coast of Gabon on their way to the Cup of Nations in that year. Leigh Montville wrote a remarkable piece about that for Sports Illustrated. And you can hear the 1993 BBC report about the deaths here. A generation of Zambia’s greatest footballers was decimated. And, as Al Jazeera reported, the 2012 team prepared for yesterday’s final by making a pilgrimage to the coast to lay wreaths in memory of the dead.

As Paul Darby — a brilliant historian of African football – noted in a comment on the Football is Coming Home Blog, the contrast with what happened the day before within the super-monetized spectacle of the Premier League could not have been more striking. “A tale of two handshakes – the one that never was between Suarez and Evra and the one between Mweene and Barry during the penalty shoot out – highlighted the gulf in class between events in Libreville and planet Premiership.” It’s worth taking some time to think through precisely what the intersection of these two events means about the current state of global football, and it’s possible futures.

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.

Crossposted from Africa Is A Country.

Tags: Al Ahly, El Masry, Port Said, riot, SCAF, Tahrir, Zamalek

The coming week will presumably bring more twists and turns in the now explosive question of racism in the midst of the French Football Federation. Already, as Libération reported this morning, one high-ranking member of the Federation specifically named in the Mediapart article that broke has been suspended, and an internal investigation launched. I posted a summary of the situation and some initial reactions here on Thursday evening, and at the invitation of Mediapart (the blog that broke the story), wrote a longer reaction in French on Friday.

Here, I want to spend a bit more time analyzing precisely how the curious racist logic described in the article actually works. Doing so can help us understand better the broader functioning of contemporary French racism, both in terms of it’s forms of articulations and it’s deep roots in a long tradition of colonial representations as well as stereotypes within the field of sport itself.

The discussions at the FFF apparently were triggered by the anger on the part of some members — including Laurent Blanc — at the fact that some French-born players who have received training in government-funded academies have chosen to play for other national teams. The 2010 World Cup had brought this issue home in a particularly powerful way, because as a result of some recent changes in FIFA policy as well as in a change in direction within the Algerian Football Federation, the Algerian national team was made up of a majority of French-born players. As children of Algerian immigrants, they could claim double-nationality, and therefore take advantage of the possibility of playing on football largest stage. Not only was the Algerian team packed with French-born players, but it is also effectively a home team in much of France: when Algeria and France both qualified for the 2010 World Cup in the fall of 2009, there were massive celebrations in Marseille, and others in Paris — for the Algerian team. Partly because of the way the French qualification happened — through Thierry Henry’s notorious handball — few actually celebrated it. And in South Africa, of course, while neither France nor Algeria made it out of the group stage, it was the latter team that probably made a better — and certainly more dignified — showing.

The question of where French-born players who can claim double-nationality play has a long history. It is, in fact, haunted by a very powerful historical experience: in 1958, a number of professional players of Algerian background in France left the country in order to form a national team for their own country, which was fighting for independence. Two of those players, including the legendary Rachid Mekloufi, had been tapped to play for France in the 1958 World Cup. (I tell the story of this episode, and the broader role of football in the Algerian revolution, in my book Soccer Empire). In the next decades, the Algerian federation sometimes recruited players raised in France, but they were always a minority. When Zidane was growing up in the 1980s and was invited to play for a French youth team, he accepted, later describing the decision as completely natural, since had grown up on the country. He was, at times, criticized for the decision. But most players of his generation who were invited to play for France, even when they did have other options, chose to play with the team.

That has, in fact, largely remained true. Professionally, it usually remains a better bet to play for a European team than an African one, for it provides more international exposure. To my knowledge, none of the French-born players who played for Algeria had not actually turned down an invitation to play for the main French national team in order to do so. Many, however, had played on various youth teams at one time or another, as any particularly talented footballer in France is likely to do. What has changed recently, however, is that FIFA now allows more flexibility to players: even if they have played for a French youth team, they can opt to switch and play for another country. Before, players were effectively trapped — the decisions they made as adolescents were binding. Now that is no longer true. Which means that players can test the waters, try for the French national squad, but also continue to explore the option of playing for another national team such as Algeria.

All of this is — or should be — banal enough. There are lots of people, and football players, in the world with double-nationality, with complex and crossing allegiances. David Trezeguet, for instance, a French citizen of Argentinian background, could have played for either nation. Spain naturalized Brazilian Marcos Senna specifically so he could play on the national team. Some U.S. players also face the same issues. What is particularly striking, and alarming, about the way this has been cast in France is that it is articulated as a kind of shocking treason on the part of players.

Let’s go back to what, according to Mediapart, individuals at the FFF said about this question. Doing so is of course problematic at this point: Blanc has issued a blanket denial, saying that all of the allegations are false, but the discussion was reported to the blog by someone who participated in them. So we’ll need to wait to see if we can get more clarity about whose word is more believable in this case. For now, however, I’m going to analyze the conversation as Mediapart reported it. (A good summary of the most important quotes is presented in today’s Liberation article).

When the question of players of double-nationality came up, Blanc apparently said:

“What’s happening today in football bothers me a lot. In my opinion, we have to eradicate it. And there is no connotation of racism at all in what I’m saying. When people wear the jersey of the national team at 16, 17, 18, 19, 20 years old, in Espoirs, and then after that they go play in North African or African teams, that bothers me a great deal. That we have to limit.”

Another member of the FFF then apparently suggested setting a policy of having no more than 30 percent of the players in a particular set of national academies (those most directly run by the FFF rather than professional teams) who were “able to change nationality.” In response, Francois Blacquart — the Director of Technical Education — said that actually he wanted to go further.

“The idea is to say — but not officially — in any case we’re not taking as many kids who might change (i.e. their nationality) in the future. We can mark out, without saying it, a kind of quota. But it can’t be said.”

You can see why Blacquart was the first to fall: he seems to have both insisted on a quota and on the idea that it should be hidden, carried out effectively in secret. And he had the power to put such a policy into place, since he oversees the academies in question.

There’s a lot going on here, of course. First of all, how are trainers recruiting kids who are 12 or 13 supposed to know how might be likely to “change” nationality in the future? (That formulation itself is telling, since in fact such players don’t change nationality, they usually simply apply for double-nationality, based on the background of their parents, while remaining French). One doubts that they would carry out extensive interviews with parents and children about their future citizenship plans. In practice, you can see what this would really mean: those who, because of the color of their skin, their religion, their names, strike French coaches as potentially foreign, would be subject to discriminatory treatment. There would be an additional barrier to their entry into an academy or their promotion: they might be good, but wouldn’t a “white” French players who will have no choice but to stick with one national team better?

Here is how conversations that I’m sure seemed logical — even honest and lucid and responsible — skid into the realm of racist fantasy. If the next Nicholas Anelka or Thierry Henry or Lilian Thuram or William Gallas — all of them of French Caribbean background (i.e. from the French departments of Guadeloupe, Martinique, or French Guiana), therefore French citizens with no option but to play for the national team — was trying to get access to a football academy under these proposed conditions, would their particular family history save them? Or would the color of their skin condemn them? As importantly, though, in what universe can one imagine it as just and ethical that a coach employed by the French government to work in an academy should get to divine what a twelve-year-old kid might someday do, and make decisions about their qualification based on such an attempt to look into the future? What this all comes down to is that, effectively, a large group of young players who — in many cases precisely because of conditions of racial exclusion and discrimination — are trying to get access to professional football would be deemed potentially disloyal, in advance, and therefore refused one of the few opportunities they might otherwise be granted.

There is also a kind of strange folly here, too, because access to academies is presented as a huge privilege. No doubt a small number of youths who go through these academies are able, in part thanks to their training there, to embark on careers as successful footballers. But the vast majority never do. If they don’t do well enough they are quietly dropped. In the meantime, they have usually moved away from their families — often at a tremendously young age — and placed all their hopes in the “Espoir” of professional football. It is a tremendous risk, and it takes young people away from other pursuits. It is all to the advantage of the French Federation, which gets to cultivate and select players out of a large pool. But it is no picnic for the young players. And that some of them, at some point, decide that their best route to a profession in football is to play for Algeria or Senegal in an international competition seems totally reasonable.

This is not the worst of it, however. For having been treated as potential traitors in the discussion at the FFF, players — notably black players — were then accused of being at the root of the problems of French football in general. Here is where another step in the delirium took place. Laurent Blanc complained that the academies in France were all educating just one kind of player: “big, strong, powerful.” “And today, who do we have who are big, strong, and powerful? The blacks. It’s that way. It’s a fact. And god knows . . . there are lots of them.” For Blanc, what was needed was a “recentering,” that would follow “other criteria, with our own culture.” What, precisely, did he mean? He explained by inference. “I’ll cite the example of the Spanish: they don’t have this problem. . . . The Spanish have told me: We don’t have a problem. We don’t have any blacks.”

What is going on here, with a bit of obfuscation but little subtletly, is an age-old racist assertion: that black athletes are “strong” and “big” but are not tactically intelligent, while white players bring intelligence to the game. In the U.S., these stereotypes circulate most clearly in debates about black quarterbacks (as well of course of coaches) in football. The members of the FFF comfortably seem to have made an extravagant and mystifying jump, unhinged not only from the most basic of human ethics but also from any actual observation of the history or present of French football. But racism, especially when it has been naturalized and spread around freely as it increasingly has been in official circles in France during the past years, has a way of becoming “common sense,” bulldozing and reshaping reality in order to fit it’s assumptions.

In the hallowed halls of the FFF, then, a group of powerful white men had determined that French football had to be saved from a group of potentially treasonous young men. If their projected disloyalty wasn’t bad enough, they also — these men argued — were holding France back. They might be “big, strong and powerful” but didn’t understand the game, and needed to be pushed aside to make room for players who could follow “our culture” on the field.

This is at once fascinating and nauseating is because it so well condenses the broader operations of racist through in contemporary France. What is striking, though, is how much blindness and forgetting has to go on to make any of these assertions possible. That men who have devoted their lives to football were able to do such violence to the principles of the sport is a testament to how powerful the distortions of racist thought are. The danger, of course, is that this thought presents it’s practitioners with so many routes of escape, some of which I’m sure we will see being used in the coming week. After all, like many people about to emit racist statements, Blanc apparently began his comments by pointing out that there was “nothing racist” about them — perhaps a sign that, somewhere, he knew that precisely the opposite was true.

We had an interesting discussion here last Wednesday on this topic. You can link to the audio of the presentations at itunes-u here: The first two (by me and Achille Mbembe) focus on football in Europe and Africa, and I highly recommend Achille’s intervention, starting at about 15 minutes. He thinks and talks about football a lot, but hasn’t presented on it in an academic context very frequently.Video of the event will be up shortly and I’ll post a link of that here when I can.

And here’s a short summary of the event by Duke Today.

Achille and I will be doing another event specifically on the South Africa World Cup in early November here at Duke.

Courtesy of the blog From a Left Wing, here’s some engaging footage of the celebrations in Ghana after the World Cup victory over the U.S.

Two days after the World Cup final, the whole event seems slightly surreal. I’m returning from South Africa today, having survived on my last day here a gauntlet of baboons and a march up a gorgeous mountain, after arriving on the 26^th of June just in time to see Ghana beat the U.S. I’ve had the privilege of watching seven games, including the Cape Town semi-final and the final in Johannesburg. I’ve come to know and love the vuvuzela — and, yes, I’m bringing one home to blow at Duke soccer matches this fall. It was rapture on many levels, and now it’s passed.

Critics of the World Cup and the enthusiasm it inspires often insist on the fact that for all the talk of football creating understanding, toleration, and communication, this global tournament is ultimately a brief moment, even a fantasy, with little broader impact on structures of oppression and domination. They point out the ways in which the tournament actually reproduces those structures in many ways. All of this is right, to a point, and yet misses the point as well. For the World Cup is what it is precisely because it is slightly out of time, and out of place in the world.

As I arrived at the final I saw all around me the same expression I was wearing: a slightly dazed, blissful grin that said simply “I can’t believe I’m here.”

The last game was both frustrating and riveting. I went into it already partial to the Spanish team, whose play had elated me when I saw the Spain-Paraguay game in the stadium and during the Spain-Germany game a few days later, which I watched in a seaside restaurant on the Cape peninsula. But I appreciated Holland too, for the Uruguay-Holland game in the Cape was an amazing game, flowing and performative, fascinating and strangely calming to watch live. My sympathy for the Dutch evaporated rapidly, though, during the final. They had clearly decided – the coach basically admitted as much – that they were not as good as the Spanish, and that they had to play a kind of anti-football, using physical confrontations and fouling as a tool of the trade.

In a sense you can understand this, and yet it was probably the wrong choice. Had they done otherwise, they might have come even less close to winning, but they also could have left a very different mark with their final appearance. To see both teams playing all out in the flowing way they are capable of would have been a massive gift to all of us. Instead, we were pissed off for most of the match. Fans booed the referee, and there was and is widespread complaining about him, but in a sense he was put in a relatively impossible situation by the play itself. As the game slipped through overtime, I couldn’t believe we were about to live what to me was the ultimate nightmare: a final between two great, unique teams, determined by penalty kicks. Then: Iniesta arrived, saint and savior. Along with much of the stadium, I exploded at that goal, hitting the seat, jumping up and down, screaming to heaven. It was an astounding finish.

Here’s a few moments from the final you might have missed, as I’m not sure they showed up on TV. First, when Sepp Blatter came onto the field, he was roundly booed by much of the stadium. It was interesting and little mysterious. There are certainly many reasons to boo FIFA, and yet we were also all there to watch the show he had put on.

It’s true that many of has just spent nearly an hour in lines waiting for food only to find out that it had ran out, thanks to FIFA’s idiotic insistence at having only it’s own franchise sell a tiny menu of bad food, rather than allowing local vendors who would have supplied us (as they did outside the stadium) with delicious grilled meats, rice, and a panoply of other foods. Instead, I got – seriously – a hotdog (hallal lamb, its true) without a bun in a paper bag. Happily, though, everyone was so psyched to be there that our wait in line turned into a jovial exchange about where we were from, the World Cup, South Africa, and the absurdity of our situation. (Conversations in the packed men’s bathrooms were similarly jovial.) Maybe the boos came from hunger? They were repeated at the time of the presentation of the trophy, loudly. The referee was also booed, which I found a little appalling actually. Booing Blatter seemed fine to me, and yet its motivations still puzzle me a little.

The other moment that I don’t think was broadcast was a nearly-successful attempt by a streaker to actually get to the World Cup as it sat on display before the game. He came bursting onto the field, trailed by several guards, and as he approached the Cup he pulled something out of his pocket. I thought at the time it was a bag, as if he was planning to stick the trophy in a little bag… and go where, exactly? But someone later gave me a better explanation for the prank: he had a little red velvet hat that he wanted to put on the Cup so that, just for a moment, it could be wearing what a little Spanish hat: he wanted, effectively, to claim the Cup for Spain proactively.  He almost did it too except that one of the officials in a suit stepped in front of the Cup and gave a nice block which sent him sprawling on the ground. Later, when the Spanish ran around the field with the trophy, another man also tried to get to the Cup. My recommendation to both would have been to do what I and many other tourists did: buy a nice replica of the cup, made out of beads and wires by South African artisans, for a reasonable 200 Rand.

Watching the scenes of elation on the field after the game was spell-binding. I knew that this was a massive moment for Spain, for its history of regional conflict, for its construction as a nation. There’s a book to be written about that – perhaps our contributor Joaquin Bueno will be the one who writes it – and about the theatre on the field, during which Puyol and Xavi paraded with a Catalan flag in the midst of the celebration of Spanish victory. There was also something gut-wrenching about watching the Spanish receive the trophy while the Dutch team sprawled and wandered in desperation at hearing the words no football team ever wants to hear: “runner-up.” Van Brockhorst, whose amazing semi-final goal against Uruguay was along with Tshabala’s first goal probably the best of the tournament, looked particularly dejected.

Then we all hobbled home, through the Johannesburg night, and woke up in a totally different world.

In South Africa, the last few days have seen an outpouring of discussion of precisely what the legacy of all of this is. For at least four years, even more, the country has prepared to host an event that lasted a month. Now that event is over, and the question is what, precisely, it actually was, and what it did. It was, by all accounts, a huge success, indeed a vindication. The many fears recycled especially in the European media for years evaporated. Instead visitors had an incredible experience overall. Even the fans behaved: indeed, last night on the news a British official even boasted that not a single English fan had been arrested for bad behavior – a miracle of sorts!

To make that happen took a massive effort, of course, and also some juridical innovations. South Africa set up special “World Cup” courts with rapid sentencing for any who committed crimes during the tournament, a unique “state of exception” that apparently the Brazilians are already interested in learning about from the South Africans in preparation for 2014. But there was also a massive campaign whose message to South African citizens was that they were essentially all responsible for making the Cup a success. Throughout the tournament, as crime rates remained low, people joked constantly that the criminals turned out to be patriots too, politely putting off their activities while the eyes of the world were on South Africa.

Today, however, one of the major stories in South Africa surrounds rumors that, now that the World Cup is over, there will be attacks against immigrants from outside Africa in the country, as there were in 2008. Many are already fleeing the country, while the police force is mobilizing to respond to such attacks. A few acts of looting of foreign-owned stores have already taken place. But it’s not clear precisely whether the rumors reflect reality or, as is so often the case, are in the process of creating it. On the news last night, some township residents lamented the departure of foreigners, who own many convenience stores that are now shuttered, making it more difficult and expensive for residents to get food. This crisis will be a major test: if communities, and the nation as a whole, can protect foreign residents and prevent violence, it will suggest that something has indeed changed.

The structures built for the World Cup meanwhile, most importantly public transportation systems that were long-needed but never completed, will present another test. If they can be maintained as safe and efficient transportation, that will be one immediate, and daily, legacy from the World Cup in South Africa.

What, meanwhile, do all those who watched games, near and far, take from this. That is the toughest question to answer. We disperse, individually carrying this massive collective experience. We’ve glimpsed an alternative space, one composed of people from all over sharing a common story, full of absurdities and twists and turns, random and even futile but yet perfect because it is common. We’ve come like pilgrims looking for something, but perhaps return not precisely sure what we’ve found.

Video: World Cup 2010: Into Africa – Goal Diggers | The Daily Show | Comedy Central

A brilliant piece on the “First African World Cup!”

Tags: dailyshow, southafrica, WorldCup

Football, we learned last night during the Ghana-Uruguay game, is the most effective tool for mass torture every devised by the human race. A vast majority of the over eighty thousands fans in the stadium, and millions of viewers throughout the world, were left speechless and unwound by what we saw unfold. For me, it was a little bit like reliving the final of the World Cup in 2006, with an early euphoria followed by an equalizer, then a game dragging on and on into penalties, with Gyan’s missed shot at the last minute playing the role of Zidane’s head-butt as the dramatic and decisive instant of the night. The sorrow, the indignity, the sense of unfairness of it all was too much to even contemplate. For many people throughout the world, the Cup essentially ended yesterday with the elimination of Brazil and Ghana. For all those who hoped, for a brief time, that this would be the year for an African team to go further than any had before, the remaining games seem somehow sapped of meaning.

The night began very differently. The atmosphere in the city was electric yesterday, with everyone in South Africa seemingly behind Ghana, and the flags and emblems of the country everywhere. The symbolism of it all was, of course, great. Fifty years ago Ghana’s independence began the wave of decolonization on the continent. In 1966 Ghana’s president, Kwame Nkrumah, led a boycott of the World Cup by African nations unhappy with the fact that only one of he sixteen berths in the competition was reserved for either an African team or an Asian team. The boycott was successful, and set in motion a long process through which African countries have gained more power within FIFA. The South African World Cup was in some sense the culmination of that long process. To see Ghana advance to the semi-finals, which no African country ever has in the World Cup, would have been a fitting and inspiring confirmation that things have changed, and that they can change, in the world of football.

Of course, there was reason to be cautious. Though Ghana was the last of the African teams in the tournament, it is a young team and weakened substantially in its striking power by the absence of Michael Essien. They had played well against the U.S., but had seemed less convincing in the group phase and only advanced thanks to the loss by Serbia to Australia. They might pull it off, we all knew, but it was going to be tough.

For the game, however, most had thrown caution to the wind. You could find a few small Uruguay flags to buy on the way in to Soccer City, but mostly it was every kind of merchandise in the colors of Ghana. Fans from all over the world decked themselves out in Ghana scarves (I picked up a rather handsome one!), Ghana hats, Ghana gloves, Ghana face paint, and waved small and large Ghana flags. There were of course groups of the famous stalwart Black Star fans as well. Everyone knew what the right outcome was, it seemed. And as the game began, it seemed like Ghana was in a position to win. They played beautifully. They were exciting to watch. The charged the goal, seeking openings in the tough Uruguayan defense, and seemed technically superior in many of the encounters. And then came Muntari’s goal.

The rest of the story is I can not quite bear to run through. But that it so happened that Uruguayan striker Suarez, pushing the ball out with his hands, prevented a Ghanaian goal, and that what football can offer in response is a penalty kick. And that it fell to Gyan, a young player who on a team with Essien had come to bear the burden of Ghana’s attack, to take that penalty, and who under the pressure hit the bar. And that the burden of the loss falls on him rather than on the Uruguayan who cheated. And that this, it seemed, simply devastated the team, which was not able to rally effectively during the penalty kicks. And that all of the urging on, the beautiful cacophony and integrated vuvuzelas of the crowd, the millions of prayers, among them mine, repeatedly spoken during the match, that all of that led to what it did is unbearable. To watch Gyan, sobbing uncontrollable, consoled by his teammates on the pitch, was – like the entire match – purely gut-wrenching.

Last night, I went through several possible responses. The first, and certainly the most reasonable, is simply to forever swear off football. This has several advantages. After all, we’re the ones who let it into our lives, who let it torture us like this, and we have the power to politely show it the door and ask it to take its leave. We would save a lot of money and time, and could devote ourselves to nobler causes of all kinds, or to the pleasures of gardening or spending time with family. It’s a good option overall, and one I’m seriously considering following.

One can also, of course, consider that often proposed response, which is to put it in perspective. On the long walk back to the busses from Soccer City, surrounded by a lugubrious atmosphere among the fans, I tried to take consolation remembering all of the World Cup matches that had similarly been determined by the heinous crime against humanity that is the penalty kick shoot out: Germany-France 1982, for instance, when Platini’s generation of French players perhaps came closest to winning the World Cup. Gyan takes his place among many generations of excellent players who have suffered what he did yesterday. And, unlike some of them – like Roberto Baggio in the 1994 final against Brazil – he is still young, and he and his teammates have much ahead of them that will perhaps come to surpass, if never erase, this memory.

You can, of course, go into a World Cup match agnostic, divided, watching out of curiousity what will happen, happy with any outcome. The problem, of course, is that I wouldn’t trade anything for having been fully there last night, part of that crowd, sharing in each gesture of the Ghanaian team. It has been a long time since I have experienced that much stress during a game. During the penalty kicks, like a kid watching a horror movie, I literally sat down on my chair with my head in my hands, unable to watch. But I could count on the sound of eighty thousand people to tell me what was going on. I knew when things looked up, briefly. And I knew we had lost when, in the stadium, after hours of constant and intense noise, there was nothing but the sound of tens of thousands of sighs. The whole experience was both unbearable and irreplaceable. And, in the end, it was probably best to have company, to hug friends afterwards, to commiserate with looks as we walked out, to try and marshall a few enthusiastic chants nonetheless.

Right now, besides writing this out and then thinking of other things, I think the best solution – one that is, after all, the only approach to surviving in life with some sense of balance and joy – is perhaps to hold on tightly to a particular time from last night, that stretch of minutes between Muntari’s goal before half time and Forlan’s goal in the second half, the time when there was the buzz of hope (always tempered by an undercurrent of fear, of course), the time when what is now impossible briefly seemed possible.