Soccer Politics / The Politics of Football

Picture this, if you will, for a moment: a five-year-old boy named Gelson Fernandes arrives with his parents from the Cape Verde islands in the town of Sion, in Switzerland. From an Atlantic island of the coast of Africa, the family has moved to a beautiful but snowy town perched under glaciers in the French Alps. There, as he grows up, the boy shows a talent for football, and ends up training with the local academy, and beginning a career in Professional football that takes him from the modest club of FC Sion (where his father has a job as the groundskeeper) to the French club of Saint-Etienne, and onto the Swiss national team. Not known either for its impressive diversity or, for that matter, for scoring goals in World Cups, Switzerland manages to get into the World Cup, draws into a group with the much trumpeted and heavily-favored Spanish. And, in the midst of a rather crazy game, Fernandes plows through a dislocated Spanish defense, the brilliant Casillas and Pique piled on the ground around him, to score the one goal of the game. Cries of disbelief resound across the world, the Spanish, dejected, rush of the field, and Switzerland may just have a new national hero.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/2MLHEmrMD8Y" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]


The Swiss, like many Europeans recently, have gotten into a bit of whirl about immigration (to say the least). They voted to ban the construction of minarets on Mosques this past year, for instance. Might we gently suggest to them that, having profited from it so joyfully in this particularly case, they might look at things in a different light? It’s probably too much to ask. It is true, though, as a Swiss friend reminds me, that members the far-right anti-immigrant party are often among the Swiss team’s most fervent fans. Now they somehow have to figure out how to think about the fact that what will perhaps go down as Switzerland’s most remarkable international sporting victory was secured by an immigrant.

And so, mixed with our disappointment about seeing the brilliant Spanish team so unwound, we can at least revel in the fact that one of the great upsets of this World Cup was secured by a Swiss-African, who grew up in the Alps and came to shock the Spanish, and the world, in South Africa today. He may have been right to stick out his tongue, briefly, as he ran, disbelieving, in celebration.

There is a phenomenon in Spain, one that is on the lips of commentators of the Primera División all over the world, one that tinges any match involving Spain’s two biggest teams, Real Madrid and Barcelona: villarato.

When I hear the word uttered on GolTv, on ESPN, even on the Fox Sport family of networks, it quickly becomes clear that the depth of this conspiracy is not that evident to those whispering its sinister name.

The Barcelona blog totalBarça is one of the few sites out there with a good run-down of the theory. To make a long story short, the Madrid press, spearheaded by Marca and their trusty rival/adversaries at AS, have perpetuated the idea that the past six years have witnessed a vast, secret plan by RFEF (the Spanish football association) President Ángel María Villar to damage Real Madrid and boost Barcelona by influencing referees.

The theory goes that because Barcelona’s President Laporta, notorious target of the Madrid press, supported Villar at a time when he was being pressured to step down by a number of big teams, including Real Madrid. The reward for Laporta’s support is the favoritism of referees, disciplinary committees, scheduling, etc.

The extent to which the conspiracy theory has been spread is a testament to the massive (and often meddling) influence of Marca and the Madrid press in general. Those of us who have coffee when we are in Spain (that would be 99% of us; the other 1% still go to the café and drink hot chocolate or orange juice, etc) know that there is virtually no watering hole, lunch counter, kiosk in the country that is not dominated by the Madrid daily. They are on the radio, in print, and of course, online, winning the game the most effective way possible: through an unending barrage of content, which always trumps quality in their aesthetic.

Barcelona-based daily, and main opposition (alongside El Mundo Deportivo) to Marca and AS, SPORT, has launched a counter-campaign, featuring a t-shirt that exclaims: “Villarato? What balls!” The t-shirt, pictured here alongside the aptly selected  t-shirt commemorating last season’s 2-6 complete arsewhooping visited upon Madrid’s hide with little to no referee assistance in their own shell-shocked Bernabeu.

Naturally, one great loophole in the theory would be how to explain the atrocious performances by Madrid’s players in Spain and Europe that led to Barcelona running away with the spoils (including a number of drubbings administered by Barça upon their eternal rivals). Another would be that Real Madrid actually won a couple of league titles right after the alleged bust-up between Villar and his enemies.

Beyond the conspiracy theory is this lurking idea of the Madrid media. MARCA has had some truly outlandish features in the past days, including a new video diary by their director, Eduardo Inda, which features him pouting and crying over spilled milk on a variety of topics. Most recently, it has been an anti-Manuel Pellegrini campaign in which the daily has been publishing any possible news to discredit the Madrid coach.

A recent Guardian article points out the obvious: that Pellegrini is and always was a scapegoat at a club where there is a coaching change on average once a year in the past 24 years. Indeed, for anyone who has followed the travails of the Madrid giant in the past few years, it has become clear that role of coach has become one of sacrificial lamb. Even coaches winning titles (Vicente Del Bosque, Fabio Capello) have been axed unceremoniously (Del Bosque for “not fitting the image” of young, cosmopolitan brand during the first Florentino Perez era) after winning the Spanish league. In Del Bosque’s case, he won two Champions’ Leagues and was still fired; before him, Juup Heynckes won their 7th Champions’ League before getting the boot.

In most of these cases, the Madrid press has either heavily campaigned for the heads of such coaches or exacerbated atmospheres in which they were being called in to question. Despite the premise of being “civilians” in the world of football, the press has taken a hands-on approach, destabilizing teams and influencing the politics of the club. Their influence has extended even to the Spanish national team: during the Luis Aragonés era, MARCA campaigned against him, basing their argument on his refusal to call up Raúl González–favored pet of the newspaper–to the national team.

In reality, Raúl’s form had been atrocious in the qualifying campaign for Euro 2008, and it was becoming apparent that his number was up as a top-class player. He did not take part in the run-up to the tournament, yet based on an upturn in his performances near tournament time, this segment of the press rallied for his inclusion. Aragonés held firmly; Raúl was never called up again and Spain won the European Nations’ Cup that summer.

The anecdote of Raúl is a telling one; for years, the Madrid press has put him on a pedestal (at times, deservingly) for his performance, though often the impression one gets is that he is idolized by them for being a symbol of some post-Francoist Spanishness. In his appearance, his marriage to a supermodel who became a homemaker, his manners, he is a classic macho ibérico, embodying masculine traits of loyalty, devotion to the cause, etc. Former players have called him a destabilizing force, even a cancer, in the locker room. Go figure.

As MARCA continues its neo-nationalist quest to destabilize Barcelona with the villarato theory, their campaign to bring down Pellegrini speaks of another defense of “Spanish ideals.” As the Paul Wilson/Guardian article discusses, there is a desperate desire in the coffers of Real Madrid to defend the “Real Madrid Way.” This “way” has recently been to pay overblown prices–exaggerated and sky-high–for top players, cramming them in a team with no regard as to how they will play or developing a system, and demanding instantaneous success. Later, when the project fails, as it has this season, the hundreds of millions of euros are burst like a bubble and the press (and the sporting directors) scramble to find a donkey to pin the blame upon.

With the current economic crisis in Spain, few reasonable people would dare to defend the way that speculators and “investors” exerted control over the now-burst bubble that was the Spanish economy in the past decade or so. However, MARCA proves that there are people out there militantly defending the footballing equivalent of such exorbitant ways.

The British media was reporting on Sunday (here, and here for example) that fans will be paying less to watch their games at home next season.

The news comes after Ofcom, the regulatory body of the British government, announced measures forcing the TV giant Sky to lower prices perceived as threatening competition. Sky hold a veritable monopoly on football and cricket broadcasting rights; the move by Ofcom would force them to sell significantly cheaper to rival companies. The immediate effect, it is hoped, would be to drastically slash the cost of football and cricket coverage by £10, roughly 40 percent of the actual price for that variety of television programming. The two main rivals of Sky, Virgin and BT, are expected to start a bidding war to lure potentially hundreds of thousands of viewers from Sky.

The news is not without intrigue: Rupert Murdoch-owned Sky are major supporters of the British Conservative Party, currently the opposition party in England. The Conservatives hold power in many areas of British governance, and Ofcom is one of them. This places party leader David Cameron in the unenviable position of upsetting an important contributor to their political success by upholding a ruling in their detriment–it would be unprecedented to overturn the ruling (Sky is naturally expected to file as many legal appeals as possible) and could cause the party major political damage.

While the immediate effect of this would be to take less from the armchair fanatic, what does this say about the political implications of the sport? What we mean is not to measure the political “power” of a sport (for example, to enact social change or revolt), but rather to see it as a “liberal” phenomenon.

When such a sport is spread out into the world at the feet of colonizing industrialists, it comes as little surprise. From River Plate to Athletic Club, all the way to the Marinos of Yokohama or the Super Eagles of Nigeria, there are reminders of the ease with which the sport was globalized, slotting seamlessly into the cultural consciousness of many a distant place. While the original Cambridge rules have gradually been altered here and there, the idea, we like to believe, has been constant. Naturally, there have always been ball-kicking games all over the planet, but soccer as such is a phenomenon of a different world order than, say, the Aztec ullamaliztli or the Chinese Cuju.

Indeed, soccer (and here I am being deliberate with the term to distinguish it from football, whose meaning has to do with any ball-foot game) has become the global king of sports in much the same way that Coca-Cola became a drink of choice. Like Coca-Cola, soccer is better or worse depending on where you are and your tastes. You might find yourself sipping a delicious Coca-Cola in Mexico (made with real cane sugar, of course) yet not enjoy the pace of Mexican football. Similarly, you could be in England and damning the contemptibly oversweet Coke, yet being distracted from it by what you find to be a thrilling encounter in the Premier League in the dingy pub that you are sitting in.

While the smoke is coming out of Rupert Murdoch’s ears, many a British fan will sit down and drink a Coca-Cola before watching one of their freshly discounted football matches from the comfort of their well-molded sofa, knowing that the can of Coke is all the more affordable. Why not go for the two-liter next game? Invite a friend, buy some associated products like Tostitos or some sort of crisp, etcetera. Make sure to do it in your official team kit (last year’s won’t do, everybody knows you can get those for pennies in the bargains bin once the new one is introduced), and so forth.

Yet, we cannot underscore the symbolic value of the sport. While we can see it as a source of economic exploitation, we can also see it as something that is served, even created simultaneously by the consumer-spectator. Are we to believe that the world is nothing but Homer Simpsons and Peter Griffins lining up to give away their money and their freedoms? Yet would such characters be funny if there were no truth in them? We identify with them as we do with CR7 breaking out a new muscle-pose or Messi scoring a Maradona-goal every so often. And the truly buffoonish nature of our desire is revealed.

In the case of David Cameron (sorry, soccer fans, no relation to Avatar), he is balanced in a position that reveals this dialectical nature of the soccer phenomenon. On the one hand, refuse to stick your neck out for a very wealthy and powerful supporter in Murdoch. On the other, you fear the reprisals of a multitude that you can never quite trust to be completely complacent.

While in some cases soccer has been a protagonist in military wars (as in El Salvador, Algeria, Angola, or even in the hard-hitting hooligan era of 80′s England), the news today is about a bidding war. The hostilities are between large media conglomerates jostling for size in, as the cliché goes, “an increasing global world.” The interventions of a Liberal institution to offer a minimum degree of protection to the constituents of government.

What is most clear though, is the hope that watching English football becomes easier for those of us who have less important addictions. Is this the dawn of the era of a new Fandom-political citizenship?

Tags: bt, Coca-Cola, England, football, ppv, rupert murdoch, sky, soccer, TV, virgin

On paper, the upset of a regular top-4 side like Villarreal by strugglers languishing near the bottom of the rather unglamorous Spanish second division seems impressive. Real Club Celta de Vigo, from the rapidly growing and impossibly gray industrial city of Vigo, are currently in 14th place in segunda, just 4 points from the drop zone. [let's not forget that demotion from the 2nd division means wallowing in the entrails of the infamous segunda B, veritable quagmire of further ignominy]

Villarreal are in themselves a curious story. The town they are based in, Vila-Real, barely has 50,000 inhabitants (compare that to Vigo’s population of nearly 500,000). Their stadium, El Madrigal, has a remarkable capacity of 25,000 people. Imagine: if the stadium were to sell out at any time, that would represent 50% of the populace of the town. I could just imagine the Camp Nou filled with 800,000 spectators, whistling at their team for failing to connect 24 passes in a row, or for not signing the latest Dutch successor to Cruyff…

Despite their unlikely size, the team from Vila-real has been a staple in recent European competitions, stopped only by Arsenal in the semifinals and another time in the quarterfinals of the Champions’ League. Some of you might recall Eeyore-like midfielder Juan Roman Riquelme’s infamous penalty miss: the color flushed out of his face and he appeared like he was about to vomit for the entire run-up to the failed spot kick. Had he scored the kick, we might have seen another all-Spanish final pending the outcome of extra time (Arsenal went on to lose to Barcelona).

A big reason for their continued success has been the retention of key players, despite losing some big names to bigger teams. Despite losing Pepe Reina, for example, to Liverpool, they replaced him with a more-than-qualified Diego Lopez, a backup at Real Madrid, and made a handsome profit in the process. Similarly, Diego Forlán’s absence has been readily filled by Giuseppe Rossi, Italian international striker, and Nilmar, a current Brazilian international. This is a team that was able to offload their biggest star ever, Riquelme, who was blacklisted by then-coach Manuel Pellegrini. Perhaps their biggest blow was losing their Chilean coach to Real Madrid; this season started horribly for them, as they adjusted to the coaching change. Since then, going into the winter break, the team has reorganized under Ernesto Valverde, and the proof was in their impressive 1-1 draw with Barcelona just over a week ago.

Celta, on the other hand, had a much more illustrious past in the Primera (I refuse to use the improperly anglicized “Primera Liga,” the “First League,” because it makes no sense, and is not what the league is called in Spain: la Primera División). The team earned the nickname “Eurocelta” for their exploits in Europe in the early 00′s, knocking out some big teams in the UEFA Cup, while at the same time playing some of the best football in Spain. Big names came and went for Celta as well. Santiago Cañizares once tended goal for Celta. Michel Salgado was the hometown boy before also being snapped up by Real Madrid. The great Claude Makelele made his name playing in Vigo (not to mention wrecked his first Ferrari there). [on a side note, this brings us to the growing issue of major stars wrecking Ferraris and other overpriced sports cars. Cristiano Ronaldo, Rio Ferdinand, Karim Benzema (TWICE now!)]

In contrast to Villarreal, we can’t say that Celta were wise about replacing players in a profitable fashion. The team, overextended in European competition and at home, was finally broken by a lack of top-class players and a relatively successful yet taxing Champions’ League campaign and went down to Segunda that same season. And things haven’t looked much better since. Likewise, the city of Vigo worries about its industrial bases. The fishing industry, Vigo’s biggest, looks tired amidst worries about overfishing, dwindling fish stocks, higher oil prices; the car industry [Citröen sponsor Celta and have one of Europe's largest factories in Vigo] is equally important and imperiled.

With all the talk of the financial crisis, we can think about the idea of the club being a bad business; Soccernomics, a recent book by Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski, discusses this issue in detail, raising questions about just why people continue to invest in this money pit of a sport. Owners are a beleaguered bunch, they emphasize, and considering the heavy crisis already being felt by many small team owners, debt-ridden and struggling to make a profit, things have gotten worse for even big teams in European leagues. A recent Guardian article points out that a team like Manchester United is disastrous on many levels, with dubious administration and massive debts that look like they might go unpaid.

For the small team, one explanation is provided as to why people continue to invest in soccer: it is a cultural institution that provides thrills and joy, heartbreak and defeat. Celta beating Villarreal won’t turn the tides of minnows struggling against the current of the global marketplace; such a victory does, however, vindicate the idea that “anybody” can win, though we shall see how far this fairy tale goes for the celestes in 2010. As I consider them my hometown club, having witnessed the glorious “EuroCelta” years, a part of me wants to not be deceived by false hope!

Tags: Celta de Vigo, La Liga, Makelele, Pellegrini, Primera, Riquelme, Spain, Vigo, Vila-Real, Villarreal

John Turnbull, editor of The Global Game, shared with me some fascinating information about “three-sided football.” In early November, as part of the Bienniale d’art contemporain de Lyon, a tournament showcasing this unique sport was held in Venissieux, a banlieue of Lyon. The game was invented in the 1960s by a Danish Situationist artist, Asger Jorn. The goal is to subvert the antagonistic duality of traditional football by having a hexagonal field and three teams, as well as three goals. As a result, the game turns into a complex swirl of temporary alliances and understandings. Two teams can go against one, collaborating at least for a time, but also change tactics and friends as the situation warrants. And the winner of the game is not the team that scores the most goals, but the one which, through its tactics of collaboration and alliance, manages to suffer the fewest goals.

Click here to read the full rules.

Watch a news report on the recent tournament in France, with footage of the game.

The political statement embedded in the game, according to the explanation provided on Wikipedia, is as follows:

“The game purports to deconstruct the confrontational and bi-polar nature of conventional football as an analogy of class struggle in which the referee stands as a signifier of the state and media apparatus, posturing as a neutral arbitrator in the political process of ongoing class struggle.”

Who says Marxist theory, contemporary experimental art, and football can’t all live happily together?

The game has had sponsors in England and France, as well as other European countries. Clearly what it now needs is a league in the U.S. Any takers?

Perhaps cribbing the title of George Orwell’s famous 1938 account of the Spanish Civil War is a little much. But, seventy years on, with the question of the what status Catalonia has and should have within Spain still a serious issue, football has become an important battlefield in its own way. Yesterday’s victory of the Catalan “national” selection against the Argentinian team, 4-2, represents the latest chapter in this long-running story. Coached by the legendary Johann Cruyff, with a lonely, exiled, Maradona watching from the stands surrounded by opposing fans, the Catalan team shone in a town used to rallying around Barca as a symbol of town and nation. But what does their victory mean?

In an interview with So Foot before the game Jordi Casals I Vilalta, the new president of the Catalan Football Association, spoke of football and politics in the self-contradictory way preferred by sporting officials. On the one hand, he insisted that football isn’t politics, that the football association and the team they were fielding was not “a party.” At the same time, he made clear he considers the existence of the Catalan team itself a signal and a symbol of the aspiration for autonomy and independence. He declared that “when” Catalonia had won its independence, FIFA — which has not recognized the federation or the team — would allow them to play official matches, just like Spain. Indeed, he added that if the team could “help the dream of so many Catalans become a reality,” that would be a positive thing. Having confidently imagined a future independence for Catalonia and hoped that the “national” team of a nation-not-yet could help realize this dream, he then retreated once again, re-affirming that they were doing “football not politics.”

It’s fascinating to me to see how, even in a situation where football is clearly being used for political purposes, those doing the mobilization so frequently deny that this is what they are doing. Why the hesitation? It almost seems as many fear to admit the obvious, and feel compelled to re-assert that sport is not politics. Or else all officials feel an unbending pressure to conform to the dogma that sport is not politics, and to declare this as a kind of self-evident truth, even as they enthusiastically demonstrate the opposite. The very fact of organizing, and paying for, such a big-time match up, and of mobilizing players for the team, makes broader sense only in the context of a political project.

Barcelona fans take pride in the fact that their team’s jerseys are the only ones left in Europe that don’t advertise something. The subtext is that the jersey symbolizes, as the team slogan goes, “more than a club” — that it represents a region, or more: an aspiring nation. To have an advertisement on the Barcelona jersey would, the logic goes, be a kind of violation: after all, national team jersey’s don’t carry advertisements (though of course Nike and Adidas have found many ways to cross that line…). And of course the Barcelona-Real rivalry has long had, as at least one of major components, serious political overtones, something you can read about in detail in one of our Soccer Politics Pages.

The Catalan selection, meanwhile, consisted of volunteers — players who were paid nothing, and who are under no obligation to play, since unlike national teams this one does not have the FIFA-granted authority to call up players. Indeed, Arsene Wenger refused to release Cesc Fabregas from Arsenal to play, though Fabregas had expressed his with to, something he could not have done if the request had come from the Spanish federation.

In watching these events, I couldn’t help think of another case (whose story I tell in my book forthcoming book Soccer Empire) in which football was put to use in pursuit of national independence. During the Algerian war when professional players in France — two of them tapped to play on the French national team in the 1958 World Cup — vanished and re-appeared in Tunisia to form the “national” team of a nation-not-yet. FIFA was much harsher then, punishing several federations who played against the Algerian team, which nevertheless toured in Asia and the Eastern bloc as well as the Middle East for several years.

If that team worked as a political symbol, of course, it was because they were good. They won accolades, and gained audiences, through their vivid and victorious football, in the process spreading the Algerian flag and anthem, and the giving the independence movement a sympathetic and attractive face. Of course, the political contexts of Algeria and Catalonia are drastically different, and shouldn’t be conflated. It’s a different time, a different place, and obviously a completely distinct history.

Interestingly, the French imperial orbit provides us with a few other more contemporary comparisons that might, in fact, be more useful. On the one hand there is New Caledonia, a Pacific territory that is still part of France but has a fairly autonomous administrative situation and seems to be well on the road to full independence. FIFA has already admitted New Caledonia, whose football federation is now independent from the F.F.F. (French football federation) of which it was once a part, and they competed this year in World Cup Qualifying matches. They didn’t make it, but perhaps one day they will — so, perhaps, we can look forward to a France-New Caledonia game down the road. Here, the independent football team has arrived at the end of, and as a result of, a larger political process that included a violent uprising against the French state, and violent repression, during the 1980s before a negotiated settlement put in place the current political process.

On the other side of the world, meanwhile — another story I tell in Soccer Empire — the French Caribbean departments of Guadeloupe and Martinique are both members of CONCACAF, and field teams in the Gold Cup. The Guadeloupean team has been noticed a great deal of late, especially in 2006 when they made it into far into the tournament under the leadership of Jocelyn Angloma, once a star of the French national team. This case might illuminate the Catalan case even better than either Algeria or New Caledonia. Although there has long been a forceful independence movement in both Guadeloupe and Martinique, today it seems highly unlikely that either island will gain independence any time soon. In part, integration into France and therefore into the European Union includes many perks and advantages, and indeed help make Martinique the wealthiest island in the Caribbean. Nationalists in the region have repeatedly mobilized football to political ends, and in a way the inclusion of the islands in CONCACAF is a kind of nationalist gesture, and the Guadeloupean uniforms, red and green, echo the colors of the nationalist flag.  At the same time, however, you might say that it is a beautiful compromise. Guadeloupeans and Martinicans, who are quite football mad, get to have their own “national” teams in the Americas, while also remaining part of the F.F.F., and indeed supplying the French team with an impressive number of its star players — including Thuram, Henry, Gallas and Anelka, to name just a few.

Maybe the Catalan selection will find a similar way forward? What if UEFA admitted Catalonia, so that they could compete in regional competitions, even against Spain? This might be an interesting way to have it both ways, just as a compromise form involving increased local autonomy without independence seems the most likely political future for the region.

Yesterday, in Barcelona, the Catalonian selection showcased effective and at times beautiful football, bringing pleasure and certainly pride to their fans. It was, among other things, a nice moment in the meeting between the “total football” once embodied in Cruyff’s Dutch team and today’s Barcelona football that Joaquin Bueno wrote about here several months ago. Whether a nation awaits, of course, is a rather different matter. But if football doesn’t make politics, it certainly shapes it. The question, of course, is precisely how. Perhaps having a Catalan “national” team on the pitch can assuage, even lessen, nationalist aspirations off of it: people can celebrate the nation in the stadium, and might worry less if they can’t celebrate it elsewhere. Or perhaps having such a team can help to trigger and condense a form of national feeling. And if there is some day — who knows? — an independent Catalan nation, people will probably look back and say that football helped pave the way.

Tags: Argentina, Barcelona, Martinique, New Caledonia, Spain

With the furor surrounding the France-Ireland game, and Thierry Henry’s decisive handball, dying down a little, it may be time to think through what just happened, and what it illuminates for us about the sport of football. After receiving a barrage of criticism, a not inconsiderable amount of it openly racist, Henry redeemed himself in some quarters with his declaration that the game should be replayed. Trappatoni, the coach of the Ireland team, made clear he didn’t blame Henry. Beckham came to his defense, seemingly a little put off by the tone of the criticism. Many wondered by Henry hadn’t immediately gone and told the referee what had happened. But, as some commentators have pointed, that seems a bit naive, to say the least. (See, for instance, the comments on Sanford Soccer net, notably those by Jackie Maniel). It’s a beautiful thought — ultimately, football wouldn’t even need referees, as players stepped over themselves to apologize one another and confess to any and all fouls — but it’s hard to imagine it coming to pass on this planet any time soon. And, as Christophe Lalo notes in So Foot, it’s also concretely hard to imagine Henry, surrounded by ecstatic teammates celebrating what was essentially a nearly-guaranteed ticket to South Africa, volunteering to the referee that there was a handball.

FIFA, however, has declared that the match will not be replayed, and the French Football Federation (F.F.F.) has declined to join the Irish Football Federation in continuing to demand a replay. Much of the vitriol surrounding the event is now being directed against the F.F.F. and the various administrators of football, including Michel Platini, who critics are calling hypocritical since they often call for fair play in football but are not willing to demand a replay of this particular game.

What to make of FIFA’s decision? It was, it seems to me, inevitable. To decide otherwise would have been to create a precedent with major consequences for the governance of football. Henry’s handball was particularly egregious and decisive, and yet it is just an extreme example of something that is a feature of many football games. Questionable calls by referees, often the result of intentional trickery or theatricality on the part of players, consistently shape the destinies of teams in professional and international play. Indeed, with rather impressive regularity, they  are often decisive in determining the outcome of games. Ask an Australian fan about the 2006 Italy-Australia game, for instance, and you are likely to get an earful about how refereeing can be cataclysmic. In the same World Cup, a convincing acting job by Henry against Puyol won France it’s 2-1 lead in the France-Spain game. Obviously some players, and some teams, are more guilty of this kind of things than others. But here’s the rub: they are often the most successful players and teams.

FIFA could have canceled the result of the game and ordered it played again, as they did a few years ago in the case of an Iran-Bahrain 2005 qualifying game that was bandied about as a precedent by those demanding a replay. But the furor likely instead sent FIFA representatives looking back to the 2005 decision with regret, and determined not to make the same mistake again. If teams knew that it was reasonably possible for a result to be overturned when a refereeing decision that was proven wrong had a decisive impact on the game, such appeals would obviously multiply. The Irish had pretty much an iron-clad case here, of course, but while such cases are rare they are not that rare. And there is always room for interpretation even in less clear cases. It’s well known, after all, that football fans are very good at identifying the ways in which the referee caused them to lose a game.F.I.F.A., I think, was just protecting itself, unwilling to set up an entire section devoted to hearing appeals for match replays.

While the F.F.F. can be accused of being partisan here, I’m not sure there is reason to assume the rulers of F.I.F.A. had a powerful stake in seeing France in the World Cup rather than Ireland. (Unless, that is, you believe those who claim that corporate and professional footballing interests who want to see more star players in the tournament in order to sell more shoes shape the body’s decisions). I think it is more likely that those who made this decision peered into an abyss: a place where they would regularly have to entertain requests for replays, and where people would always be able to say: but you did it for Ireland!

Then they decided they didn’t want to step off the cliff.

In the many conversations I’ve had about the handball in the past days, I’ve been reminded a bit of the incredible global conversation incited by Zidane’s “coup de boule” in 2006. With one group of friends, we jokingly decided that the handball was an act of resistance against the limited number of slots given by FIFA to Africa in the World Cup. A European team statistically has twice as much of a change of playing in South Africa as an African team, after all. There is, however, one team in Europe whose players are mostly of African descent, either from West Africa or the African diaspora in the Caribbean: France. Many of the players of the French team have, for some time, intimated that it was extremely important for them to play in 2010, not just to be in the World Cup, but to be in what is likely to be the only African World Cup for a long time to come. Maybe Henry and Gallas, both of Caribbean descent, just decided they had to get to South Africa by any means necessary? It’s hard to imagine it right now, given the low quality of play of the team in the qualifiers and the fact that Domenech, a disaster of a coach, is still in charge of the team, but maybe France will end up being a kind of representative for Africa in the tournament, as they were in the final stages of 2006 when only European teams were left playing. We’ll have to wait for December 4th to get a clearer picture of what match-ups are in store for us. While we’ve lost out on the possibility of an impassioned Ireland-England game, we can imagine we’ll be in store for a France-Cameroon of France-Algeria game. If the ghosts of empire will haunt the field in a particularly powerful way in the case of such match-ups, there will also be plenty of ambiguity there: the players of the French team whose players are largely children of the French empire, many of them children of recent African immigrants to France, and they’ll face off against teams representing former colonies many of whose members play professionally in France.

Many football fans, of course, will continue to lambast Henry,  and the event will perhaps go down in Irish footballing history as something akin to England’s loss to Argentina in 1986. Will French fans will ever find ways to celebrate the “Hand of God” of Henry the way many Argentinians do Maradona’s legendary act? Probably not. The French reaction has been largely apologetic and embarrassed — So Foot initially published a bilious and disgusted response to the whole affair as a reflection of how low France and French football has sunk — though of course French fandom and sports journalism traditionally involves an impressive amount of whining and complaining about the national team. And, as Christophe Lalo notes in So Foot, in 1986 Maradona went on, after his “Hand of God” goal, to score one of the greatest goals in the history of football, which helped some “swallow the pill” of his earlier goal. Henry, meanwhile, didn’t. Only time will tell how profoundly this incident ultimately marks his career. If he does as well this year as he did last for Barcelona, or for France next year in South Africa, many people will probably forgive and forget. Some won’t, of course, but but plenty of fans will probably come to see this as a pretty minor event in a largely spectacular career.

Unless FIFA, fans, managers and players are willing to transform football into something very different than it is today, and has been for decades, we are going to have to stick with a sport that is, often enough, totally unfair in its outcomes. What Jennifer Doyle, in discussing the Henry case, has described as the “moral ambiguity” of football is, though, a constitutive part of the sport, and indeed part of what makes it what it is — even what makes it great. Anthropologist Christian Bromberger has argued that particularly strong role the referee has in shaping destinies in football is part of what makes the sport such a powerful “terrain of interpretation,” and thus explains a significant part of the passion it arouses.

What football offers in return for the heartbreak of losing unfairly when you should have won is, however, a kind of consolation: there will always be another chance. And some day your team will probably win when it should have lost.

Robert Enke

German goalkeeper Robert Enke recently commited suicide. He was suffering from depression associated with the pressures of football and “the fear of failure.” As we have learned in this course, football is followed with extreme, sometimes fanatical passion, especially on the international level. However, while a player can become a national hero by performing well on the pitch, he can also become a national scapegoat and an object of intense derision. Clearly, there is a indescribable amount of pressure on these athletes, which is handled better by some than others. Given this incident, at what point does the passion exuded by football fans become terrible acts of malice?

This article from goal.com tells the news of a sensational Spanish player, Jesús Navas, who has been lighting up the Primera División for a few years now with Sevilla. Before this call-up, Navas had been unable to play for the national team largely due to an anxiety problem in which severe homesickness and fear of new surroundings would cause him nervous breakdowns.

He is a fast, intelligent, artful, and creative talent who will surely be a lively spark in the Spanish side, in addition to being a classic wing-player with an extensive repertoire of tricks up his sleeve. Navas happens to be of Romani heritage, and is one of many greatly successful gypsy players in Spain (José Antonio Reyes and Zlatan Ibrahimovic are two well-known examples).

This to me is significant, being that in Spanish football media, it has long been commonplace to refer to a player’s regional ethnicity, even when the play for the national team. We can think of the Catalan players such as Fábregas, Xavi, Puyol, and so forth who have been essential parts of the team. David Villa, Spain’s most deadly goalscorer, is commonly referred to with the Asturian nickname El Guaje. Xabi Alonso, one cannot forget when reading a game summary, is the stalwart Basque at the heart of play. The list goes on and on.

However, when it comes to gypsy players, the use of Romani nomenclature is nowhere nearly as common in the headlines. We could speculate as to the many reasons why. Looking into the history of the 20th century, we can see the Franco regime’s insistence on creating a dialectic of a united Spain composed of various concrete regions. Basques, Galicians, Andalusians, etc, combine as one Spanish nation. However, his vision, while incorporating essential elements of gypsy heritage, such as the propaganda machine’s appropriation of flamenco culture, did not necessarily name the gypsy people as a part of this dialectic, despite having been in Spain over 500 years. A very similar thing happened to a degree with negation regarding the Jewish, Berber, and Arab history of Spain, while at the same time appropriating certain exemplary symbols (think the Alhabmra or the Mezquita of Córdoba). A good example of this is the Alcázar of Toledo, its name coming from the Arabic word for fortress, where a Republican siege was defended for weeks by nationalist forces within. It to this day stands as a monument for the “will of united Spain,” though its face is that of Franco’s supporters who seized power by force and maintained it by various forms of forceful control.

In the case of the Roma, or gypsies, their reality continues to be one that is outside of the margins in Spain’s national identity. While there are successful Romani people, Navas being one of them, the word gitano still carries negative connotations, loaded with stereotypes regarding the “nature” of gypsy people. For the most part, the participation of gypsies in international football has gone unheralded, and in Spain, the profiles of such players are often accompanied by accounts of how their gypsyhood impedes their integration. Before Navas, there was José Antonio Reyes; many media sources, from Spain to England, claimed that homesickness prevented his success at Arsenal, while the common joke in Spain was regarding how he was going to learn English when he could hardly speak proper Spanish.

From Elsewhere in Spain (and elsewhere beyond… Iberia)

Portugal coach Carlos Queiroz has invited great controversy by calling up an injured Cristiano Ronaldo to the Portuguese national team for their crucial World Cup playoff later this week. CR has not played in nearly a month for Real Madrid, and his prognosis is another 3 weeks before he is in top shape. Despite this, Queiroz has intimated that he might call on him to help Portugal’s bid. Much intrigue now. For one, Real Madrid is threatening to not permit him to go. Not only would this severely irritate all of Portugal, but it would also potentially limit Portugal’s chances of being the World Cup, and subsequently prevent one of football’s biggest names from being there (oh, the marketing calamity!). On the other hand, there is some history here. Queiroz was briefly Real Madrid’s coach before being unceremoniously dumped; he remains in the Bernnabeu’s collective memory as one of their worst ever recent coaches. Plotting revenge, Carlos?

Johan Cruyff has been named Catalonia’s head football coach, a job which is ceremonious considering that 1. there is no pay and 2. Catalonia is not a FIFA-recognized team. Their games are symbolic in nature and, obviously, not official. When asked about not being able to speak Catalan, Cruyff responded jokingly that his Spanish wasn’t that great either, and that he could hardly speak even Dutch. Nonetheless, a valued (“Dutch”) icon of Catalan difference assumes his seat at the throne of the symbolic Catalan football empire.

Tags: catalonia, cataluña, cr7, cristiano ronaldo, cruyff, gypsy, navas, queiroz, Real Madrid, reyes, roma, ronaldo, sevilla, Spain

Karim Benzema, seen during his days with Olympique Lyonnais. The 21-year-old striker was sold to Real Madrid last summer for €35 million. (Wikipedia Commons)

I’m something of a latecomer to following professional club soccer. Although I played the sport growing up in Western North Carolina and have watched every World Cup final since 1990, I’ve been oblivious to the comings and goings of the top European and South American leagues—mostly due to my typically spartan television habits.

That’s all changed. I now subscribe to Fox Soccer Channel, GolTV and Setanta, and tonight, I’ll skip Game 6 of the World Series in favor of DVR replays of Aston Villa-West Ham in their midweek Prem fixture and Lyon-Liverpool in Group E of the UEFA Champions League. If I’m still awake (perhaps after watching the ninth inning of the baseball game), I might zip through Barça-Rubin Kazan in Group F of the Champions League.

One reason I’m finding soccer so interesting is that, because of its global reach and the preponderance of international competitions and freely moving players, it seems more relevant and resonant than the traditional American sports. I love a good baseball or basketball game as much as the next person, but American sports leagues are closed shops, provincial and protectionist. No matter how bad the Pittsburgh Pirates or the Los Angeles Clippers become, for example, their place in their respective “major league” is assured.

There are virtues to the socialization of American sport. The leagues are well-organized and stable, and the owners (with the significant exception of baseball) have entered in agreements that share revenue and limit spending on player salaries. And, for those who think it’s important for teams to perform in an unpredictable fashion from year to year (“parity”), the NFL and NHL offer excellent models—one that Major League Soccer seems intent upon refining further.

Professor Dubois invited me to contribute to this blog, and I think my interests will largely be in the area of business and globalization. In light of today’s game between Lyon and Liverpool (2:45 p.m., broadcast live on Fox Soccer Channel), I want to draw attention to a just-published book, “Soccernomics,” by Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski. It’s a must-read for anyone interested in understanding the business—and the future—of the game, and I expect to return to it in future posts.

One section is especially interesting and timely. In a chapter devoted to examining why most soccer clubs lose money, there are a few appreciative pages focusing on the rise of Olympique Lyonnais (OL). After the authors argue—at length and convincingly—that the business of soccer is a poor one in theory and in practice, they visit with OL’s owner Jean-Michel Aulas in Lyon, France’s second-largest city, located in convenient proximity to the Alps, to Italy, to Paris, to the Riviera.

It turns out that OL, despite being in existence for a century, has generally been an indifferently performing club  in a bourgeois city more known for food, wine and cinema than for sporting enthusiasm. During Aulas’ two decades of ownership, however, Lyon has become the 12th wealthiest club in the world in 2008, according to the Deloitte Football Money League.

There are a number of reasons for OL’s success, Kuper and Szymanski argue, and most of them have to do with Aulas’ determination to run his team like a real business. Most top clubs, despite being described as “wealthy,” are actually saddled with debt in the hundreds of millions of dollars, pounds and Euros. Liverpool takes the field in Lyon this afternoon as the world’s second richest club, with income in 2007-8 of about €351.2 million—more than twice that of OL. (The others in the top five are, in order, Real Madrid, Manchester United, Barcelona and Bayern Munich.) But Liverpool also carries debt estimated earlier this year of £350 million, while Manchester United’s debt is close to £700 million. (Note the two different monetary units in this paragraph.)

As Kuper and Szymanski explain, there’s no danger that Liverpool and Manchester United and their fellow profligates will fold. But this reckless environment does leave room for an efficiently managed if rather bloodless club like Olympique Lyonnais.

While the authors write admiringly of Lyon’s branding of such things as OL Beaujolais, OL bottled water, OL hair salons and OL taxicab services, what is particularly pertinent in light of this afternoon’s clash is the French club’s strategy on the player transfer market. Every summer and winter, the soccer press is filled with talk of high-profile transfers, but as the “Soccernomics” authors argue, these players are almost always overvalued. Aulas and his team of soccer managers, however, never pay top dollar for an established star; instead, they sign prospects when they’re in their early 20s and then sell them a few years later the minute another club offers too much money for them. Hence, Michael Essien, Florent Malouda, Éric Abidal and Karim Benzema all became superstars in their early- to mid-20s playing for OL before they were sold for big bucks to Chelsea, Chelsea, Barcelona and Real Madrid, respectively.

Aulas boasts to the authors that he has a price on all his players, and that he anticipates big sales by having cheaper replacements for his stars at the ready. Liverpool, on the other hand, is an old-fashioned, badly run club that wins championships in spite of its owners (so desperate are the Liverpool supporters that they are attempting to form their own ownership bid—an effort supported by the British government but thus far unsuccessful).

Right now, the Scousers are in a terrible run of form, having lost six of their last seven matches in all competitions and suffering escalating calls for the sacking of gaffer Rafael Benitez. The principal reason for the team’s struggles, however, is the injuries to their two of their best and most expensive players, Steven Gerrard and Fernando Torres.

A third player, however, is also mentioned in the media’s diagnostic conversations about Liverpool’s struggles: midfielder Xabi Alonso, who was transferred to Real Madrid last summer for £30 million. “If only Liverpool hadn’t sold him,” their supporters—and players—moan. But, viewed through the prism of Lyon’s business strategy as depicted in “Soccernomics,” Liverpool and Alonso were correct to take Real Madrid’s money. Actuarially speaking, the 27-year-old Alonso is at the peak of his game and his marketability. Although he gave his best years to Liverpool, he will collect his biggest checks from Real Madrid.

Where Liverpool failed was in not making adequate preparations for Alonso’s departure and not preparing for the inevitable drop in production and susceptibility to injury of the 29-year-old Gerrard, whom Lyon likely would have sold a year or two ago.

So, this afternoon’s game is a battle between old and new. It’s also a must-win for visiting Liverpool, who will play without Gerrard and without a full-strength Torres—among other hobbled squad members. Lyon, meanwhile sits in first place in the Group with nine points from three games. A win will put them through to the knockout phase early next year.

It’s hard to believe that limping, debt-ridden, dysfunctional Liverpool could be a sentimental favorite. But then, it’s also hard to love a club like OL, whose owner describes his Champions League aspirations thusly:

Aulas says it is only a matter of time before [OL] wins the Champions League. “We know it will happen; we don’t know when it will happen. It’s a necessary step to achieve a growth in merchandising.” (Kuper and Szymanski, p. 67)

Tags: Champions League, Eric Abidal, Fernando Torres, Florent Malouda, Jean-Michel Aulas, Karim Benzema, Liverpool, Lyon, Michael Essien, OL, Olympique Lyonnais, Simon Kuper, Soccernomics, Stefan Szymanski, Steven Gerrard, UEFA Champions League, Xabi Alonso