Soccer Politics / The Politics of Football

“Years have gone by and I’ve finally learned to accept myself for who I am: a beggar for good football. I go about the world, hands outstretched, and in the stadiums I plead: ‘A pretty move, for the love of God.’ And when good football happens, I give thanks for the miracle and I don’t give a damn which team or country performs it.”
- Eduardo Galeano

They are calling them el generation de fenómenos – ‘the generation of phenomenons.’ On the night of July 1, 2012, in Kiev, the most talented generation of footballers that Spain has ever produced – or, perhaps, will ever produce – fashioned their most lucid performance. With their destruction of Italy by four goals to nil, the largest margin of victory in a European or World cup final, Spain has become the only team to defend successfully the European Championship, and the first international side since the Uruguay teams of 1924, 1928, and 1930 to win a hat-trick – tres tantos – of consecutive major tournaments.

Spain, the perennial underachievers have become perennial world-beaters and record-setters. Much has been made of the fact that the cycle that was set in motion when Spain defeated their bête noire, Italy, on penalties in 2008, a team that they had never previously beaten in tournament football, has now come full circle. Italy has been beaten again, and with panache.

Spain’s recent dominance of world football has been so staggering that we must rouse ourselves from the enchanted state that their mesmeric play is capable of inducing and remind ourselves of its unreal reality: Spain have not so much as conceded a goal in a knock-out game since Zinedine Zidane scored a break-away solo effort in their 2006 World Cup quarter-final against France. Or to put it another way, as Rob Smyth has observed, “Iker Casillas’s net has been untouched for sixteen and a half hours.” Spain’s extraordinary cycle has been defined not only by their inventive and artistic football, but also by their impregnability.

Yet, it is not for achieving their record-setting triptych of victories that Spain 2008–’10–’12 now assumes a place in the pantheon. Hungary 1953, Brazil 1970, Holland 1974, Brazil 1982: football’s immortal sides are not mere winning machines, but the workers of miracles. Last night, Spain’s miracle was to play at a level of such audacious incisiveness, married to an impregnability approaching perfection, that, as Pablo Neruda might have put it, it were as if the moon and the stars lived in the lining of their skin. If it was not quite as astounding as Barca’s 5–0 destruction of Real Madrid in 2010, the spectacle of the condemned Italians chasing Spanish moon-shadows was both exquisite and cruel.

That the Italians had sight of goal on occasion only exacerbated the cruelty of the joke: as if the cat-like Casillas would ever be beaten! Denied agency, Spain’s adversaries became mere victims: the harder Italy chased, bravely competing for territory and possession, the more stretched they became and the more hopeless their cause. By half-time Spain were two goals to the good.

Jonathan Wilson has argued that Pep Guardiola’s final season at Barcelona became like a Greek tragedy – the hero aware of his destiny yet unable to prevent it. This final’s narrative arc also took on something of the hue of Greek tragedy: Spain compelled Italy to chase the game, creating the conditions in which Italian defeat would be fulfilled by their desperate attempts to avert it. The theme of Italy’s defeat had been scripted through the ages: Aeschylus and Sophocles, Yeats, Mann, and Conrad. Italian defenders strained and stretched sinews, contorted their bodies (to breaking point in the cases of Giogio Chiellini and Thiago Motta), pressed and continued to chase, but Spain’s prodigies created or discovered space where none seemed to exist, stretching, manipulating, and piercing defensive lines, seemingly at will. Such exquisite mastery sears itself in the memories of aficionados forever.

The aesthetic aspect of Spain’s sublime technique and dazzling collectivity is consummate evidence with which to buttress Lilian Thuram’s contention: “Footballers can be like artists when the mind and body are working as one. It is what Miles Davis does when he plays free jazz – everything pulls together into one intense moment that is beautiful.”

Intense moments of beauty in which fantasy and reality blur: Xavi’s perfectly measured pass for Jordi Alba in full-flight, inviting the left-back to return to earth to score a goal I had only thought possible on a Playstation; the balletic quality of an Iniesta body-swerve; the high-speed smuggling of the ball through, between, around, and away from Italians all night long; the sublime improvisation inherent to what Xavi calls “mig-toc” – “half-touch” – tiki-taka that maps the coordinates of a beautiful and unrelenting dance: ‘there is only one ball and you shall not have it.’

With Spain’s near flawless performance in Kiev, the argument about the identity of football’s greatest team just got more complicated.

Tags: European, Spain

On Sunday afternoon, I rode the metro up from my place in the thirteenth arrondissment to Belleville, in the northeastern part of Paris, to take in the Algeria-Slovenia match in a neighborhood with a large Algerian population. Almost as soon as I emerged from the station onto the wide Rue Belleville, I met Ben, an Algerian immigrant whose parents were French, and his son Ilias. They were selling the green and white jerseys of the Algerian national team, both draped in Algerian flags themselves. Ilias predicted a 2-0 Algerian win; Ben thought 1-0.

Ben directed me to a local dive about a quarter mile down the boulevard, called the Cafe Hotel de Paris, where he was sure there would be a good Algerian crowd. There was, about forty men crammed onto wooden chairs in the back room of a small cafe. The game was about to begin, and it was displayed on a small TV in the corner of the room. The place was dimly lit, but I could make out photos of the Algerian squad covering the walls, as well as one older photo, which I was told showed the 1970 Algerian club team CRB.

The mood in the room was lively and expectant. The men, and they were all men between about twenty-five and sixty-five, chatted loudly in Arabic. I bought some tea and took a seat in the middle of the group. Soon, two young Europeans, a Frenchman and a Czech, walked into the cafe and sat next to me. We got to talking and agreed the US team had not played half bad the night before. “Are you French?” the Czech asked me. “Worse,” I said, “I’m American.”

The first half was excellent, though of course scoreless, the Algerian team keeping control of the ball with touch passes in the defense and quick runs up top. At halftime we all went out front of the cafe and smoked. The Algerians were in exalted moods. I talked with Abbes, the Algerian-born owner of the bar. I asked him how he was feeling, and he told me, “I am proud to see my country in the Cup. It’s been twenty-four years since we’ve been here. This is grandiose for us, a good surprise.”

We went back inside as the second half began, and the game quickly turned dismal–a Serbian goal, an Algerian red card, and the game was over. Afterwards, I hung out in the front room of the cafe for a while and commiserated. Most of the men took a philosophical attitude towards the result (as one reminded me, “Football, it’s not an exact science”), but others were less forgiving (Brihimi Zacharias, a college student I later played pick-up soccer with, reported, with only slight sarcasm, “Today, I am ashamed to be an Algerian”). During the game, the Algerian fans had chanted at crucial moments, sprung from their chairs with close calls, and maintained ironic grins until the end–more detached than the open, or perhaps exaggerated, investment in the match that characterizes American fans, but more collective and animated than French fans.

In the aftermath of the loss, I was interested to know whether the Algerians would also be supporting other teams in the World Cup. They would, they said immediately. Abbes liked Italy; others liked Brazil; a young man with a thin face named Mohamed Meghrici was rooting for Argentina, though he reported he was not a “Messian.” They all said they were proud of their country, and would support it before any other, but that they were general fans of the sport as well and followed many of the good teams.

By their country, they had all meant Algeria, though, so I asked, would they support France in the World Cup as well? “Of course,” Abbes responded, to general assent. “Pourquoi pas?”

My second post to the “Pilgrimages” Blog is up, this one on how France is the Caribbean team in this World Cup.

“When the French team takes the field against Uruguay, and later against Mexico, history will be lurking. In 1924 and 1928 the Uruguayans famously took the Olympic football competition by storm, leaving a lot of Europeans wondering, “Where did these guys come from?” One of the starters in that Uruguay team was José Leandro Andrade, the descendent of slaves, who was feted as a star in Paris.  Uruguay’s victories inspired  Frenchman Jules Rimet – former coach, World War I veteran, mediocre but passionate footballer and head of FIFA – to create the first World Cup. That tournament was held in 1930 in Uruguay. The kick-off game, on July 13^th, was a France-Mexico match-up, which France won.

Eighty years later, the French team that has travelled to South Africa is in some ways itself a Latin American team. . . .” Read article @ Pilgrimages Blog

My first piece is up at Chimurenga’s Pilgrimages Blog:

“In Port-au-Prince there stands – or at least there stood, before the January 12^th earthquake devastated much of the city – a mural depicting four great nationalist heroes of the Caribbean: Toussaint L’ouverture, Che Guevara, Fidel Castro and Emmanuel Sannon. If you don’t recognize the last name, you are not alone, for Sannon’s presence among this group might at first seem a little odd. He’s not a legendary revolutionary hero, but rather a legendary football player, beloved by Haitians but little known outside the country. Although Sannon had a great professional career in Haiti as both  player and coach, he is best remembered for one illuminated moment on the football field. In 1974, Haiti reached the World Cup, for the first and so far only time in its history. In the group phase, Haiti faced Italy, a team against which no side had scored a goal for a long time. Yet, early in the game, Sannon burst forward, taking the Italians by surprise, and slid a beautiful goal into the net.”

Read the rest of this post at Pilgrimages…

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Yesterday I did an interview for the “How We Got Here” podcast of BBC’s The World, available here. I talk about my book Soccer Empire, about Zidane, Thuram, and the 2006 World Cup, and about my hopes for this tournament.

We have talked a great deal about political leaders exploiting key soccer victories (and losses), creating points of national honor, using soccer as a form of colonial control, or misguidedly glorifying it to the point where it acts as a veneer for a country’s deeply ingrained social and economic problems.   And Honduras is no exception: it is perhaps the most extreme example of intertwined destinies and complex historical interactions.  A coup stemming from a longstanding political crisis is dividing the country’s two rival leaders, and the leaders have been exploiting soccer – and more specifically the most recent win – as they mollify celebrations amid their own political ploys.  The ploys are aimed purely for their own short-sighted progress.

Honduras beat El Salvador on Oct. 14 and the U.S.’s tie with Costa Rica has propelled Honduras into a guaranteed spot in South Africa.

The players thought they were heading to  Tegucigalpa’s cathedral right after their win, but instead they made a “detour to the presidential palace where Micheletti has set up his government.”

“We had no idea the bus was going to the presidential palace, we thought it was headed to the church,” Turcios said.

More worrisome is the fact that the head of the national team selection committee, Ferrari, is also the owner of the largest media outlets in Honduras and a supporter of Micheletti.  It seems as though the media has not yet discovered its boundaries and is still a pivotal force in many Latin American countries.

There has been speculation that the team’s directors are actually part of the coup themselves because they see personal gains in the results.

What if this type of underhanded ploy were discovered in the United States, in a conspicuous league?  What kind of vicious reaction could it generate, and could any sort of “negotiations” fix the crisis?

Still, Honduran citizens would rather not get entangled in the political vines:

“You ask ten people what they would rather talk about — soccer or politics, nine out of ten will say soccer,” he said.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/24/AR2009102401219.html

Here is an interesting take on the ’78 World Cup in Argentina that took place under a violent military dictatorship. It highlights how FIFA can be used for political means – what should FIFA’s response be in situations like this?

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Very enthralling to see the films of the ’74 West Germany World Cup. Watching these legendary players and teams is such a different experience than it is today, in the times of HD and incredibly high frame rates. The filmic moves of Cruyff and company appear to take us to a mythical realm… who can ignore titans of the sport  such as “Der Kaiser,” Franz Beckenbauer, a pioneer in the sweeper position, or Gerd Müller, scorer of 68 goals in 60 games for West Germany as well as more than 500 as a club player. If we were to go back even further, to the first filmed matches, we’d find choppy video of fixed camera angles–goals were recorded by a camera on a tripod, by which a ball flies and you see the blurry keeper’s dive in the corner of your screen, a vague wave of fans in the background leaping to their feet. By the 50′s, we have cameras that can pan, but have trouble keeping up with the action.

Of course, players now seem faster, stronger, more clever, more powerful. Which makes me wonder: how much does the technology through which we interpret the game change the way we play it, as well as imagine it? How does this visual representation of the world’s most popular sport affect other areas of our social consciousness?

Eduardo Galeano, in Soccer and Sun and Shadow (London: Verso, 2003), provides beautiful descriptions of famous goals from footballing history. Here is one of his descriptions, and a video of the goal. What do you think of the description? Can you find clips of other goals he describes?

“It was at the ’78 World Cup. Italy defeated the home team 1-0.

The play that set up Italy’s goal drew a perfect triangle on the field, inside which Argentine defenders were left as lost as blind men in a shoot-out. Antognoni slid the ball over to Bettega, who slapped it toward Rossi, who had his back to him. Rossi returned it with a backheel while Bettega infiltrated the box. Bettega then overpowered two players and beat the keeper Fillol with a tremendous left.

Though no one knew it then, the Italian team had already begun to win the World Cup that would take place four years later.”

Galeano, 156-157

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Eduardo Galeano, in Soccer and Sun and Shadow (London: Verso, 2003), provides beautiful descriptions of famous goals from footballing history. Here is one of his descriptions, and a video of the goal. What do you think of the description? Can you find clips of other goals he describes?

“It was 1979. At Wembley Stadium, Arsenal and Machester United were battling the final of the English FA Cup.

A good match, but nothing aroused suspicions that this would suddenly turn into the most electric final of all that had occurred in the Cup’s long history since 1871. Arsenal was ahead 2-0 and the game was nearly over. The game was decided and people began to leave the stadium. Suddenly a cloudburst of goals was let loose. Three goals in two minutes: a sure shot by McQueen was followed by a pretty penetration by McIllroy, who eluded two defenders and the keeper, giving United the equalizers between the 86^th and 87^th minutes. But before the 88^th minute was over Arsenal regained the lead. Liam Brady, who as usual was the outstanding player of the game, put together the final play, and Alan Sunderland took a clean shot to make it 3-2.”  Galeano, 157

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