Soccer Politics / The Politics of Football

The U.S. Men’s National Team’s loss to Honduras on February 6 generated a small wave of surprise and recrimination. Coach Jurgen Klinsmann has come in for criticism for showing either a lack of respect for Los Catrachos or a bit of naïvete by playing a young defensive line with no cohesion. The surprise stems from the fact that while the Estadio Olimpico has been a difficult test for many national teams in the recent past, it has not been so for the United States—Honduras’ only home loss in the past two World Cup campaigns (2006/2010) was to the United States, which had won three straight in San Pedro Sula prior to Wednesday.

In fact, the loss should—and has been—put into context: away matches in the CONCACAF Hexagonal are always difficult, often due to the atmosphere in the host country. Typically, away teams confront sleepless nights defined by raucous crowds outside their hotels, see offensive graffiti on walls lining the route to the stadium, and face heaps of abuse—batteries and bags of urine, according to Jozy Altidore—at the hands of local fans. Matches themselves are scheduled to maximize the home team’s advantage.  For Wednesday’s game, the Honduran government called a national holiday in order to insure a packed stadium and streets full of supporters, and scheduled the game at 3 p.m. to maximize the mid-afternoon tropical heat. This is the case for all teams that play in Central America during the Hexagonal.

But soccer—especially international soccer—is rarely just soccer. Thus, the U.S. team often engenders more hostility than others, a fact that U.S. media outlets never fail to report. In the run-up to the February 6 match, however, journalists went beyond the usual commentary on hostile crowds. Instead, they highlighted the difficulty of play in a country as dangerous as Honduras, noting the “bleak picture of life in this beleaguered Central American country.”  Another recognized that conditions in Honduras were “much worse” than the last match between the two teams in San Pedro Sula, played months after a coup ousted democratically elected president Manuel Zelaya. (Of course, social conditions tend to affect journalists much more than players, who travel to and from the field under heavy police protection and are very rarely victims of random crime, but that is another story.) Telling the U.S. audience about crime rates, however, does little more than set the scenario for the match and reinforce two-dimensional pictures of Central American nations as violent.

Just as the U.S. loss needs context, then, so too understanding conditions in Honduras can help explain why the U.S. team faces greater hostility than other opponents. Even if U.S. soccer pedigree fails to inspire fear in Central American fans, U.S. economic and political influence raises the symbolic stakes in qualifying matches. Historically, from the mid-nineteenth century filibustering expedition of William Walker to early twentieth century occupations and late twentieth century support for unpopular governments, the United States has played an outsized role in the domestic affairs of most Central American nations.

In the specific case of Honduras, the heightened emotions surrounding Wednesday’s match stem from more recent concerns. The short version goes something like this: in June 2009 Honduran president Manuel Zelaya was forcibly removed from power and flown out of the country by the Honduran military. The U.S. government reportedly knew of the coup before hand, and in the immediate aftermath blocked the Organization of American States from suspending Honduras. It further legitimated the removal of the president by supporting new presidential elections. Since the inauguration of the new, more pro-U.S. president, Honduras has become a focal point in the U.S. War on Drugs, with increased funding and training for Honduran security forces.  But this has come at a cost. Some claim that 40 percent of the Honduran police are part of organized crime syndicates, while human rights abuses under the new government have skyrocketed. Indeed, the spike in the Honduran crime rate coincides with the 2009 undermining of democracy in the country. Little wonder, then, that Hondurans relish making the U.S. team as uncomfortable as possible.

While—given the present climate—San Pedro Sula is likely the hardest place that the United States will play in the Hexagonal, the team should expect a similar treatment in Panama later this year. Even in Costa Rica and Mexico, where U.S. interventions are farther in the past and influence-peddling seems less obvious, U.S. players should expect extra hostility. Soccer aside, the United States remains the regional hegemon. For the U.S. sports media, mentioning why the U.S. team is unpopular might help fans move beyond simplistic conceptions of Central America as violent or unstable to a deeper understanding of the politics at play in an international soccer match.

Note: This post was published originally on ¿Opio del pueblo? (http://soccerinlatinamerica.blogspot.com/)

In the hinterlands of Cary, North Carolina — itself largely a vast hinterland between Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill, a place once featured in National Geographic as the ultimate suburb — sits the Wake Med Soccer Complex. There’s a slight chance you may have seen it at some point on TV — the ACC soccer tournament is played here, along with an exhibition game by the U.S. Women’s team — and an even slighter chance you have been there yourself. But it was precisely the place to be last night. It is the home stadium to the NASL Carolina Railhawks, who last night hosted the LA Galaxy in the third round of the U.S. Open Cup — our little-known equivalent to the FA Cup or the French Cup. Like these other tournaments, the competition is important because of the way it democratizes professional soccer: in the face of the capital-driven franchise model of the MLS, it offers lower-division teams a sliver of a chance to make a mark. Which is what, throughout the country last night, they did — defeating 7 out of 14 MLS teams in various games played largely in small stadia like Wake-Med.

We got there shortly before kick-off, and settled in on the spanking new north end of the pitch — literally spanking new, in that it has been rushed to be opened to accommodate the sudden surge of fans who wanted to come see Railhawks vs. Galaxy. It was a record-setting night at the stadium: almost 8,000 spectators, the largest crowd ever. Towering above the stadium, meanwhile, is an unfinished section — which to my mind will simply have to be dubbed “the Hawk’s nest” once it opens — that will provide a wonderfully precipitous view of the pitch when it’s opened later this year. The Railhawks are a good team — they won the NASL Championship in 2011, and have a roster of exciting players largely from the U.S. but also from Togo and South Africa. They’ve got a devoted group of “ultras,” the Triangle Soccer Fanatics, who created a great atmosphere last night — complete with smoke-bombs, vuvuzelas, streamers, clever chants, and behavior that got them a (very light) chiding from the sympathetic security guards.

North Carolina can honestly claim it’s place among the heartlands of U.S. soccer, thanks largely to the deep history of UNC’s women’s soccer program, but also to the strength of UNC and Duke’s men’s teams and a rich and lively amateur soccer scene throughout the year. But it’s not that often we get bigger professional or international games played around here. As of last year, the Gold Cup starting having some games in Charlotte — drawing large crowds of fans of the Mexican and Salvadorean teams, but flying almost entirely under the radar of local sports coverage, as the Gold Cup often tends to. (The evening also provided an opportunity for the defection of Cuban players, in the wake of a 5-0 clobbering by Mexico that night). But there’s a lingering sentiment that, given the local passion for the sport, we might deserve a bit more.

So it was that when the Railhawks made it into the 3rd round of the U.S. Open Cup to face the LA Galaxy, a buzz spread through the Triangle soccer community. A tiny sequel to what Grant Wahl has termed “The Beckham Experiment” played itself out here, as people rushed to buy tickets for the game hoping to see a few stars on our modest local pitch. As it turned out, there would be no Beckham, or Donovan, or Keane — all of them either unfit or called up for international friendly matches — but rather a team of Galaxy reserves. But Beckham did his part, in the end, getting fans there and mobilized for what turned out to be an exciting match that peaked in the second half with two dazzling, goal-producing runs by the talented Ty Shipalane. David Fellerath provides a nice annotation and video of the match here. They earned a place against Chivas USA (one of the MLS teams to survive challenges last night) next week, again at Wake-Med Stadium. And so — even though we won against an already sagging Galaxy team, and it’s reserve team at that — there was plenty of joy in those stands last night.

If you wanted to watch from afar, you had to content yourself with streaming video — what Maxi Rodriguez jokingly described as “the rarely used Sports Shaky Cam.” But last night left me feeling, once again, that we might actually content ourselves at the margins of U.S. sports culture. Though the Open Cup barely registers as a media event here, last night was a terrific evening of soccer and fandom, an intimate occasion in which the crowd and Railhawks players could build off one another, and generally enjoy the sight of the ball sailing up into the open night sky, with both very little and very much at stake.

This picture, taken on the Brooklyn Bridge on November 17th by Mother Jones reporter Josh Harkinson, is one of thousands of images generated by the Occupy Wall Street movement. The sign is at once a declaration and a question: “Something is Happening.” But what, precisely, is it? And were will it take us?

It’s now just over two months since protestors pitched the first tents at Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan, affectionately dubbed “Liberty Plaza.” I’ve found myself riveted by the daily twists and turns of this story, the way a quirky, playful idea first floated by Adbusters rapidly became an energetic movement. I’ve followed the events largely from afar, the way I follow football: watching it live via ustream channels or on youtube, discussing it on twitter, and talking about it with friends. But there are many people like me out there, I think — interested, sympathetic, active spectators. Indeed, the Occupy movement has blurred the boundaries between observation and participation. Its open, fluid, and leaderless form — often cited as a liability — is turning out to be one of its greatest strengths. It seems to me at least ideally tailored for the times, for a moment when political certainties seem increasingly dubious, and where it’s incredibly difficult to get clarity about what lies ahead for our nation. But the movement has already managed something quite important: it has sent a gentle but potent buzz through the body politic, shifting — ever so slightly — the terms of debate and the forms of political imagination available in the U.S. and beyond.

It’s impossible to know what will happen next: events keep unfolding furiously, day after day. But it might be worth trying to make sense of the unexpected processes at work during the past two months.

The movement found its local expression here at Duke and in Durham. Though Occupy Durham wasn’t able to set up a permanent encampment for more than a few days, protestors hold regular General Assemblies and organize other events on the main plaza in the center of the city. They created an exhibit of short personal narratives by “part of the 99%,” and hung them in the plaza for a few days. At Duke, meanwhile, a small but devoted group of students set up tents right in the center of campus, not far from the university’s iconic chapel. Today the tents came down for Thanksgiving break but the tables and chairs are still there, along with a sign that announces, cutely, “BRB” — Be Right Back. The encampment has the permission of the campus administration. The whole process has been very congenial; the students, for instance, took care not to hold assemblies when there were weddings scheduled in the nearby chapel. It has involved assemblies and a series of noontime discussions with faculty members about issues related to the Occupy movement. To be sure, Duke does have a particular relationship to camping out; each Spring, students create a small tent city where they live for several weeks awaiting tickets to the Duke-UNC game. So it would have been a glaring contradiction not to allow the Occupy protestors to do the same. Still, as Cathy Davidson has recently written in an important piece on universities and the Occupy movement, credit goes to the Duke administration for having taken a much wiser and more ethical course than many other universities in the past weeks, most notably UC Davis and Berkeley, but also Harvard.

There has been plenty of sarcasm and sneering both on and off the campus about this group; “the 1% is occupying itself!” declared one rapidly circulating photo of the encampment. But of course Duke, like any university, is a complex and diverse place, and there are plenty of students who are not particular wealthy (50 percent receive financial aid). What the Occupy movement taps into, in any case, is a broadly sense that things are not going in the right direction, that the opportunities awaiting college graduates will be much narrower than what they once expected. That is why, as one Duke student wrote, Occupy manages to scare some students, just a little bit, even as most ignore or make fun of it. Anxiety about the future — the sense that it is growing dimmer with each day — can gnaw at you. And when individual anxiety finds some kind of public, community expression, it can rapidly become a potent force. That intersection, between individual sufferings and public mobilization, is the key to any social movement.

The rapid spread of the Occupy movement, of its slogans and symbols, has been unexpected. It’s a truism of American politics that any attempt to mobilize people along class lines faces many obstacles. By declaring “We are the 99%,” the Occupy movement tried to skirt that problem, insisting on a radical inclusiveness, and even inviting the 1% along as well. But in the many critical responses to the movement bouncing around in the media and on twitter (“Get a job!” is a favorite refrain, as if the whole movement is the result of the leisure time of lazy unemployed people), you can see how challenging it is to break through established attitudes and codes.

The Occupy movement has nevertheless managed to do so, creating a new space for people to articulate a critique of the social order. The movement has become a magnet for a powerful, diffuse, but widely shared sense of deep unease about the shape of our institutions and their inability to address the pressing concerns of individuals and communities. That the anxiety and anger seems to run so deep is perhaps why the movement has generated so much concern, alarm, and especially in recent weeks, police repression.

For some time now, younger generations of Americans have been labeled cynics, experts at ironic detachment. In the face of the basic observations that have driven the movement — that financial institutions exercise a tremendous amount of control over our society and our destinies while also profiting from a remarkable level of impunity — we’ve come to expect, even embrace, a pragmatic cynicism. That’s the way it is: money talks. The political process is corrupted by money, sure, but there’s nothing we can do about it. The only solution is to work on oneself, create a persona curated especially for success in the world as it is, for success represents a certain kind of escape from the constraints placed on us by the social system. Cynicism and irony in the face of the political process are in many ways reasonable, and indeed now so well anchored in our collective personality as to be almost unexceptional; they are a daily currency of commentary and exchange.

What anchors the Occupy movement, however, is a profound refusal of cynicism. When I stopped by a General Assembly at Occupy Durham a few weeks ago what struck me (and what struck many other early observers of the movement) was the the honesty and commitment to democratic process. It was striking and moving to see a diverse group of extremely diverse people earnestly discussing matters of immediate political concern, sharing fears and hopes with strangers. In a circle, they really listened to each other, for a long time. They did not, in the end, come to much of an agreement. Meetings are frustrating, open-ended, surely annoying at times. And yet there was a palpable excitement at the fact of actively taking part in an open-ended public debate.

The “leaderless” quality of the movement, its devotion to process — exemplified in the “People’s Mic,” hand-signals, and a general disposition to facilitating public expression through costumes, signs, banners, and posters — is its key strength. If the Occupy movement has been a revelation to many it’s partly because of how well it calls attention to a profound absence in our current landscape: the absence of a public sphere that is not tied up either with government or corporate institutions (including the media). And what has been powerful about these events is seeing groups of people essentially with their backs turned to power, facing one another, speaking to one another.

Despite the earnestness, politeness, and often relatively small size of Occupy meetings and encampments, they have faced increasingly strong police action. In some places, the back and forth has been almost farcical: people at Occupy Denver, forced to take down their tents, built an igloo, which was in turn destroyed by the police — inciting a debate about the precise legal status of an igloo in a park. Later, when the mayor demanded the group elect a leader to speak to local officials, they elected a very smart looking border collie.

But the mounting reality is one of mass arrests on a scale we have not seen for quite some time in the U.S. The Tea Party rallies that began in the summer of 2009, for instance, never led to arrests or police intervention — even when protests arrived carrying guns. Going back further to the 2003 massive rallies against the war in Iraq, there were comparatively few arrests. Such rallies, of course, tended to be more conventional political marches, with permits approved in advance, often occupying public space for a delimited time. The Occupy protests, in contrast, have purposefully pushed the boundaries further by actually creating encampments and organizing smaller, mobile actions through the use of social media.

You have to go back to the anti-World Trade Organization protests in Seattle in 1999 to find something that parallels the kind of churning confrontations we are now seeing. Even that, though, was confined to one city, whereas the Occupy movement is thoroughly national. The New York Times recently noted that the total number of arrests during the last two months — over 4500 — has now surpassed the number of arrests carried out by the Iranian government during the 2009 “Green Revolution” protests. Obviously the two situations are radically different: the Iranian protests mobilized a much broader sector of the population and seemed to represented a greater immediate threat to the government. In response, the regime shot people in the streets, executed some prisoners, and tortured many others, and ultimately stifled the movement. The Occupy protests take place in a parliamentary democracy, where free speech is (mostly) protected. They are not directed against a particular government figure, and they are not organized around mass public rallies of the kind we saw in Iran in 2009 and more recently in Tunisia, Egypt, and elsewhere. Instead, they have been focused on occupations of public space, and small, rolling protests. In fact, the numbers involved have been relatively small — even in New York and Oakland — and many of the encampments across the country are quite tiny, involving dozens of protesters or even fewer.

Nevertheless, in recent weeks, police attacks on the protests have been escalating. There has been, it seems to me, an odd disjuncture between the actual challenge posed by the demonstrations and the weight of the police response. That was strikingly clear in Chapel Hill recently, when a group of protestors loosely linked to the Occupy encampment of the cities took over an abandoned building. In order to drive them out, the Chapel Hill police sent in a heavily armed swat team, as shown in this widely circulated photograph.

Such police action against the protests has, consistently during the past two months, catalyzed and oxygenated the movement. It has been crucial in transforming it from a relatively small and potentially marginal movement into something of national proportions.

What explains the often heavy-handed tactics of the police? Local governments have the option of taking a very different approach, as a few have: simply taking the encampments as a minor issue requiring some supervision. Police and city officials can cooperate with individuals in the camps to make sure there is no criminal activity, that areas are kept clean, etc. If this approach had been followed in more places, notably in New York and Oakland, the movement would likely be weaker now than it is, and may even have started to peter out.  Camping out in public places, after all, is pretty tiring work. Much of the energy of the encampments was taken up by simply dealing with the daily issues that came up — providing food, negotiating tent space, etc. And as encampments last longer and longer, such issues inevitably get more complicated and probably harder to deal with.

Instead, Bloomberg — after having initially responded relatively kindly to the occupation — ultimately decided to shut it down. The NYPD worked hard to minimize the coverage of their destruction of the encampment in Liberty Plaza — going in in the middle of the night, blocking airspace above the park to prevent images from news helicopters, and even arresting several journalists. They even smashed the computers confiscated from the site, presumably to destroy any information stormed on them. Nevertheless, videos of the raid made it out, and within two days the police and mayor were facing a rolling set of demonstrations throughout the city. Instead of ending the Occupation, the police seem now to have metastasized it, creating a situation that will probably be far more difficult to police than the largely self-governing city in Liberty Plaza was. Many are now concluding that the eviction from the park may ultimately have been a boon, freeing up the movement and spurring it on.

Watching these events unfold, you do wonder to what extent police forces have yet to fully internalize the fact that everyone now has an iPhone, and that every single action they take will be photographed, filmed, and immediately uploaded onto YouTube. Police are used to filming protestors, in some cases for use in trials afterwards. For some time protestors have been filming and photographing police back. Still, there much more documentation of every police move now than there has ever been. If you watch a ustream of some of these protests or attend them yourself, you’ll notice that any time the police arrest someone iPhones pop out from everywhere, creating an instant archive that can be put to use immediately in the broader terrain of symbolic warfare over the meaning of the movement.

This level of instantaneous representational combat is in fact relatively new. The 2009 protests in Iran were the crucial pioneering movement in this regard, using twitter and YouTube to create an alternative narrative. It’s no accident that Liberty Park, before it was destroyed, included a large portrait of Nedjma, the woman whose shooting by Iranian police during the protests was broadcast around the world, becoming a martyr and a symbol.

Looking back, it’s clear now how the conscious production and circulation of certain images has been crucial in defining and spread the movement. The process began in earnest with this video, viewed 1.5 million times, of police pepper-spraying two young women. This video brought a sudden spike in media attention to the movement.

It continued with the arrest of 700 protestors on the Brooklyn bridge (including the striking arrest of a child, caught on video)

Nate Silver at 538 offered an analysis of media coverage that makes the point clearly:

Heavy-handed police tactics, of course, might have gotten a certain kind of analysis in the media itself that could have minimized sympathy for the movement. But the proliferation of videos made by participants or observers has played a crucial role here. The mainstream media has almost never reported incidents first. Instead, the media catches up with events after they’ve been circulated on twitter and YouTube, and then comments on them. This also means that social media has allowed protestors to themselves to shape the symbolic terrain of how the movement is interpreted. Nowhere was this clearer than with the uploading and viral circulation of the video of a former Marine Sergeant, Shamar Thomas, dressing down a long line of police officers for using violence against protestors. Now seen almost 2.8 million times on Youtube, it has become an iconic image, twisting and confronting all the usual tropes and story-lines about patriotism, courage, and the place of the military in our society.

Shamar Thomas insisted to police in New York that the U.S. shouldn’t be treated as a war zone, that there was “no honor” in battling unarmed protestors. The video of Thomas, first posted on YouTube on October 16th (in a shorter version than the above), was followed by a video of another veteran, Scott Olson. In the case of Olson, the drama was different: Olsen, who had fought in Iraq and survived, had come home to the U.S. only to be seriously wounded during clashes over the eviction of Occupy Oakland protestors on the night of October 17th. The scene of Olsen’s wounding has been re-edited and circulated in many different videos, but perhaps the most striking is the one below, which has the odd feel of a war movie — as a crowd of protestors rush out of the smoke carrying Scott Olson and crying “We need a Medic! We need a Medic!”

These events helped spur the creation of Occupy Marines, a group of veterans supportive of the movement, as a well as the general strike that shut down the port of Oakland. During that strike another veteran, Kayvan Sabeghi, was beaten up when he stood in front of a line of advancing police, saluting them at one point.

The prominent place of veterans in the such representations of the movement has been crucial symbolically. In the 1960s, returning Vietnam Veterans formed a spine in the anti-war movement. Indeed, veterans groups (led by World War II veterans) organized some very early anti-war marches at the time. The presence of veterans like Olson and Thomas in the movement helps us understand part of what is happened here. We have had more than a decade of war, involving huge mobilizations of young men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan. Soldiers and their families have carried an extremely heavy burden. They have returned to a society where — in part because of massive government deficits caused in significant part by the cost of these wars — many have found difficulties finding stable employment. As was the case after Vietnam, the after-effects of combat are taking their toll, and suicides are vying with the number of combat deaths in ending the lives of soldiers or ex-soldiers. Some veterans have seen the Occupy movement as a forum through which they can express grievances about their experiences, notably about cuts to their benefits and pensions. Because the fact of veteran involvement in the anti-Vietnam war protests often forgotten or actively obfuscated, usually replaced by the image of veterans being harassed by protestors — a process carefully analyzed in Jerry Lembcke’s book The Spitting Image – the presence of veterans in this new protest movement seems to surprise many. But it is in fact part of a long tradition (going back to the radical politics of highly-decorated Marine officer Smedley Darling Butler in the 1930s and the occupation of Washington by the Bonus Marchers) of veterans taking an active and leading role in protests movements in the U.S.

During the first weeks of the Occupy movement there was comparatively little action on college campuses. Recently, though, that has changed dramatically. The events at Berkeley have served as a catalyst for a movement that now seems poised to paralyze the entire UC system. Watching this unfold has been slightly surreal. On a campus whose self-presentation of itself involves much celebration of its days on the vanguard of the political struggles of the 1960s (you can get a coffee at the “Free Speech Cafe,” decorated with pictures of heroic students confronting the administration for the right to protest), police beat up students and a former Poet Laureate and dragged a professor by the hair. You might think the administrators at the UC system might know the history of their institutions well enough to find a way to avoid the blunders of their forebears from the 1960s. At the very least, they might have consulted with any number of their faculty for a quick primer on the way police violence spurs the expansion of student movements. In these cases, again and again, police action against small groups of protesters helped to spur and expand student movements. That happened at Berkeley during the Free Speech Movement, and at Madison in October 1967, where police tear-gassed a small demonstration right as students were going from one class to another. May 68 in Paris was triggered by the entry of police into the Sorbonne. Chancellor Katehi of UC Davis, in fact, witnessed the brutal suppression of a student strike in Athens in 1973, as she pointed out in her apology to the students today — though that wasn’t enough to prevent her from ordering police to take down the student encampment last week.

Though it’s barely been a week since the violence at Berkeley, the cascade of events since then now almost seems inevitable. Protestors at UC Davis set up a camp in solidarity with the Berkeley students. The administration sent in the police to dismantle the camp. What happened next was captured on this video. Already viewed by 1.5 million viewers on Youtube and widely shown in the mainstream media, it became an instant parable.

A remarkable mix of four different videos from the incident provides an event more vivid representation of the strange, almost surreal, set up and action by the police — the long, theatrical shaking of the pepper spray bottle, perhaps in some hope that this would be enough to make the students leave, culminating in the spraying of the students.

As of today, the situation in the UC system seems explosive: during the past years UC campuses have seen a steady set of cuts, and students increasingly have the sense that the educational opportunities meant to provide them with social mobility are being whittled away. As I write, a new, bigger occupation at UC Davis — complete with a Geodesic Dome — is underway. In New York, meanwhile, the campus of the New School is also occupied, and protests directed at potential tuition hikes at CUNY are ongoing. There are, undoubtedly, similar movements stirring on many other campuses throughout the country.

What the Occupy movement has managed to do in the past months is to produce a set of powerful symbols and narratives that both illuminate and challenge the current order. The protestors have, in a sense, drawn out the institutions of power in our society, creating dramas of confrontation that are forcing difficult but crucial questions out into the open. Those who watch the pepper-spraying at UC Davis, or the destruction of the lovingly collected and curated “People’s Library” at Liberty Plaza, are summoned to take a side. The issues the movement is seeking to address — about economic inequality, the corruption of political life, the dismantling of public institutions, the increasingly impossible to bear economic burdens placed on students — have to be tackled head on. So, too, does that fact that so many people feel left out and disenfranchised in our current social order.

The commitment to process and non-violence has been central to defining the movement from the beginning. So has the spirit of humanity, humor, and openness to various perspectives and projects. Maintaining that approach will be crucial if the movement is to continue to have an impact on our public debate.

One of the most powerful illustrations of the the moral possibilities movement took place at UC Davis, documented in the video below. There, the discipline and commitment of the student protestors in the face of the police has shamed the administration. Their dignity in the face of violence makes it clear that something really is happening, and that the future may, finally, be in good hands.

My recent post on Louisa Necib has been the most visted post I’ve ever written on this blog. That’s a great testament to the burst of interest this Women’s World Cup has generated around the world. (France’s semi-final  game, for instance, attracted 4 million viewers in a country that has been very slow to adopt women’s football). But a small but significant minority of those who found their way to the article did so after typing in “Louisa Necib nude” or “Louisa Necib hot” – or in a few desperate cases, “Louisa Necib boyfriend” on a google search. Jennifer Doyle — who has, for years, written brilliantly on the topic of the representation of female athletes — reported similarly recently that the title of her blog post, “Allez les Nudes” created a jump in her blog traffic. It turns out, then, that our high-falutin’ blogs are partly being sustained by people looking for naked pictures of female soccer players.

In 1999, Brandi Chastain famously (or infamously) posed naked — though demurely covered with soccer balls — in a series of photographs published in Gear magazine. The photographs were partly an attempt to get attention for the Women’s World Cup team, and they generating tremendous debate at the time about the merits and consequences of such a strategy. That, coupled, with the famous “bra” moment at the end of the 1999 World Cup final, generated a memorable controversy at the time.

Times have changed since then for U.S. women’s soccer. But with the drama of the World Cup suddenly over, it might be worth asking how issues of sexuality and representation played themselves out in this tournament — particularly in the U.S. and France — and what that might mean for the future of women’s sports.

In the past days a flood of people have effusively praised the U.S. women’s national team. That’s a beautiful and just thing, and hopefully will end up producing at least some devoted new converts to women’s soccer. Some commentators have moved beyond calls for equality for women’s sport, insisting that female athletes are actually superior to men in crucial ways. We seem to be long way from the representation of Women’s soccer as it briefly appeared in the best sports series in recent years, “Friday Night Lights”: in the figure of a slightly crazed, mystifyingly angry female coach bandying a deflated soccer ball and demanding to know why she couldn’t get any funding while the football team got all of it. Though of course, as a number of more wary commentators have been noting all along,  all this enthusiasm may prove fleeting: it remains to be seen whether the profound inequality in the funding given and media attention paid of women’s sports gets addressed. Many seem eager to burden the U.S. women’s national team with the burden of converting a nation to soccer. But the reality is that if anyone is to blame in the comparative marginalization of the sport, it’s a soccer federation that has never given it as much support as it deserves, and a media that doggedly refuses to foreground women’s soccer even as they feed us a steady diet of mediocre spectacle from other sports.

Much of the explosion support for the team is very straightforward and simply enthusiastic. But there’s also been plenty of more coded twitter-love showered on the stars of the U.S. team — a quick search will turn up any number of amorous declarations, requests for marriage, links to photographs with descriptors like “hot!”, and banter — variously charming and smarmy — about the comparative sexiness of players. Today, @Futfanatico wondered what to make of the various marriage proposals proffered to Alex Morgan on her facebook page.  One response was pretty clear: “I think it’s creepy + pathetic.” There is similar chatter surrounding the French team, and I assume other teams as well. Some of the marriage proposals were made in a much more public way.

Crushing on athletes is, of course, itself an energizing and widespread sport. And the objectification of athletes — sexual or otherwise — is chronic and institutionalized. The endlessly entertaining and clever site, Kickette, excels at providing gregarious coverage focused largely on the sexiness of various football players. Princeton English Professor Jeffrey Nunokawa, who has recently been profiled in the New Yorker for his series of remarkable Facebook essays, considers Fernando Torres perhaps his greatest muse. And, as one visitor to this blog noted pointedly in a comment on an earlier draft of this post, there are certainly many women also gazing at and admiring the stars of the World Cup, and some who — at a WPS game in New York just after the tournament — publicly proposed marriage to Alex Morgan.

But as the World Cup wound down, the inimitable Sepp Blatter, head of FIFA, declared: “A great thing about the women’s football is they don’t cheat. It might not be the same in their other lives.” The statement, which I’m sure he and those who will rush to his defense in the coming days consider innocuous and amusing, is not only further proof — as if any such proof was needed — of just how geriatric, corrupt, and out-of-touch FIFA’s ruling class is with the sport they purport to represent. It’s also an important reminder of how thoroughly embedded sexism of various forms truly is within sporting institutions. And in a world structured by patriarchal power and discourse, sexual objectification doesn’t work the same way in both directions. That much is clear when you read certain pieces about the World Cup, of the “We’re guys and this is how we are, and if we poke fun at ourselves we’re allowed to be sexists” variety that occupies an important place in the sports blogosphere.

As Brandi Chastain did in 1999, some in France this year  tried to put the sexual attractiveness of players to use in campaigns to gain attention and support for women’s football. French photographs featuring nude players — including striker Gaëtane Thiney –  sought to pull in viewers with sultry, seductive photographs and then, in the corner, admonished them: “Is this what it’s going to take for you to watch us?” In a very different vein, photographer Sandrine Lambletin also made a set of photographs of players, including Louisa Necib and Elodie Thomis.

The situation in France is very different from that in the U.S. on so many levels, as the recent Dominique Strauss-Kahn case has illuminated. And women’s football is much better supported and established here than in France. But I’m curious to hear how people view the experience this roller-coaster World Cup, the sudden shift from general indifference to passionate and patriotic attention, the marketing campaigns, twitter conversations, and everyday discussions surrounding the team. What difference does it make that the athletic heroes of the moment are women? How different is the situation today than it was in 1999? Should we celebrate progress and simply enjoy the fact that these athletes are finally gaining the attention and adoration they have long deserved? Does the adoration, by men and boys, of women’s players represent something “wicked cool and a big step forward in gender relations,” as one writer has put it? Or does all of this just cover up how far there still is to go in the struggle for true sporting equality?

A tremendous game today: the polar opposite of U.S.-Brazil, and indeed of France-England, but as riveting in it’s way. That was a relief, since I’m not sure I could have handled the kinds of emotional ups and downs that this past weekend delivered. Tonight, instead of the drama of confusing calls and the absurdity of penalty kicks, we had a clean, flowing game, one won through determined and brilliant play-making by the U.S. France played well, and indeed dominated possession, but in the end couldn’t convert their technical brilliance into goals. We’ll get to see them play once more, against Sweden, this Saturday, where they’ll battle for third place.

France go brought a dynamic and exciting kind of play to the pitch that no other team in the tournament really did. My hope — and I realize it’s a somewhat utopian one — is that the success of the French team in this World Cup will help prod the French Football Federation to do more to train and support women’s players, and will help the expansion of the women’s professional leagues as well. The players on the team have, for a moment, become celebrities in France, drawing many people disgusted and alienated by the problems with the men’s team back to football. As I told Marco Werman on “The World” today, that will only be meaningful in the long-term, of course, if it helps spur on institutional and cultural changes that open more doors for the women’s game. I’m rather pessimistic about how much the leadership French Football Federation — which has shown itself to be remarkably sclerotic institutionally, and indeed prone to bouts of blame-the-victim racist delirium — will actually respond to that call. But one can hope that, as was the case in the U.S. after 1999, the grassroots support and development of French football — coupled with a furthering commitment on the part of the fine French academy system — will contribute to the continuing rise of French women’s football.

More broadly, in a France shaken up by the Dominique Strauss-Kahn scandal, which raises profound questions about gender, power and politics in the country, the symbolism surrounding the French women’s team is important. The question of gender equality in France is a fascinating one: while socialized medicine and excellent state-subsidized childcare provide an advantage for women, in terms of the division of domestic labor, salaries, and workplace politics, the country actually lags behind the U.S. and many other Western European countries. This could well be the time for younger women in France to begin to take on a political and social that remains oddly patriarchal. The players on the French women’s team have not, so far, taken political positions of the kind for which Lilian Thuram is famous. Yet it was significant that today, as Jennifer Doyle pointed out, the anti-discrimination statement read by the French team included a mention of homophobia — which the English-language statement read by the U.S. team didn’t explicitly. I’m not sure who wrote that statement, and whether the players or the coach were at all involved — it may simply be a federation product — but it’s intriguing. In addition to the question of whether this team’s run might help push women’s football ahead in France, there is also an interesting question about how the players who have gained some notoriety this summer may end up acting as public figures, media symbols, and perhaps even political voices. France is in desperate need of fresh thinking right now, and it would be interesting if women’s sport could at least contribute to a shift in cultural mores and public discourse around gender.

Whether any of this comes to pass, we are left with the tremendous the joy of watching players like Delie, Necib, Abily, Thiney and Bompastor, of seeing French football at it’s best, for once. For that, we have those players — and their poetic, and slightly hazy coach Bini — to thank. We will get to see them once more, in the third place match, before they head home.

In this game, though, the U.S. certainly proved itself superior, not always in technical skill but in the overall handling of the game, and of course in finishing those goals. Sometimes semi-final matches in World Cups are a disappointment, but this wasn’t. And now the U.S. will face another blue-clad team, Japan, the revelation of the tournament and clearly a daunting foe, as Germany and Sweden have already learned. It promises to be one more fascinating match. Already, though, I feel a twinge of regret that, after today, there will only be one more game left in this transporting World Cup.

Of all the things that impressed and elated me about the play of the U.S. team yesterday against Brazil, one might come as a bit of a surprise. It was this: during the waning minutes of the game, before Rapinoe’s cross and Wambach’s brilliant header, at least two players did their best to draw penalty kick calls against Brazil. It’s always dangerous and highly subjective to try and make clear distinctions between a legitimate fall and a dive in football.  People can, and frequently do, engage in discussions of almost Talmudic proportions about this — and I won’t say I know for sure. But I will say this: if they were dives, as I’m sure many Brazilian fans believed they were, and if one of them had led to a penalty kick and a goal for the U.S., I would have been delighted.

As it turns out, the U.S. got a goal in a much more elegant and satisfying way. But I mention this here as we look ahead to the semi-final game against France because I see it as one of the truest signs of how terrific and skilled this team is. They used all the tools at their disposal yesterday, brilliantly and victoriously.

Football is a full spectrum sport: it takes as much mental as physical agility, as much tactical sense as athleticism, and as much theatricality as forthrightness. It is notoriously, even constitutively, unfair. With glaring and frustrating consistency, referees make a huge and often decisive difference in a game, as Jacqui Melksham did yesterday. That is how the sport is structured, and it means that any decent team is constantly directing a certain amount of their energy towards influencing the referee in their favor, through words or performance.

You can lament this fact about football, as many occasional viewers of the sport in the U.S. do, dreaming up some different game in which none of this would be the case. But football as it is has, over the course of the past century, conquered the world. It’s international competitions are the largest theater that has ever existed in human history. If that is true it is precisely because it’s form — with all its infuriating unfairness — is precisely what allows the kind of unforgettable drama we watched yesterday to unfold and take hold of our imaginations.

All of this is partly to explain why the way in which the Brazilian players — and especially Marta — were booed during the game and vilified afterwords left a pall over the experience for me. There was, as Jennifer Doyle noted this morning, a “dark undercurrent” in many comments about the Brazilian team (and Marta in particular) on twitter, and an unappealing and at times gloating tone to some of the on-air commentary as well. Perhaps much of this is inevitable — sports fans are, of course, not known for the empathy towards the other team, and in the rush of a game emotions take hold. But, the morning after, it is worth thinking through precisely what happened on the field yesterday — in order to understand why the U.S. win matters so much.

The series of referee calls that ended up producing Brazil’s equalizing goals were, at the moment, totally baffling. What’s interesting in looking back at them, however, is that each of them, on their own, seems to have been technically justifiable. (I won’t say “correct,” since there’s always plenty of latitude in interpretation here.) Many in the U.S. obviously feel that the foul call against Marta was unjustified. But she was taken down while heading for what seemed likely to be a goal, and many referees would have done what Melksham did yesterday and awarded a red card and a penalty kick. Ian Darke in fact made this point on ESPN at the time. The decision was on the harsh side, but certainly within the bounds of normal refereeing practice.

It was, to be sure, a huge and shocking blow to the U.S. team. Which is why what happened next seemed particularly, excruciatingly unfair. There’s still confusion about precisely why Solo’s save of the first penalty kick was disallowed. (FIFA’s penchant for secrecy carries over to the way it organizes post-match press-conferences with referees, which are vague and almost always useless.) But it seems, at least according to some commentators, that the reason was not that Solo moved off the line (which she didn’t do) but because one of the U.S. defenders encroached into the area just before the kick was taken.

The law against encroachment is applied infrequently, and often seems a little superfluous if not absurd. But it is on the books for a reason: when a penalty kick is taken in the course of the game, the ball is still in play. If the goalie blocks it, and players from both teams can try and score a goal. The problem with a player encroaching on the area before the kick is taken is that it gives that player an unfair advantage in the scrum around a blocked penalty kick.

Last year in South Africa, during the Spain-Paraguay quarter-final match, the referee made an encroachment call — one as infuriating to Spanish fans as the one yesterday was to U.S. fans. (I was at the game, and like most people in the stadium had no idea what was going on.) In that case, Spain was given a penalty kick and scored, but it was disallowed because of encroachment by Spanish players. (In that case, to be sure, the encroachment was more blatant than it was yesterday, involving several players, as you can see in the photograph below, part of a longer discussion of the refereeing of the game). The second penalty kick was then blocked by the Paraguayan goalkeeper. If the game had gone differently — if Villa had not eventually scored — that encroachment call could well have kept Spain out of the World Cup final.

The final controversial refereeing decision yesterday came when Marta scored her second goal — a brilliant shot — after what may have been an offside by another Brazilian player. Here too, there’s still confusion — I’ve seen replays and photos (like the one below) but am still not sure. But if we wanted to start listing all the times a goal was allowed with an offside, or disallowed because an offside call that turned out to be wrong, we’d all be here for the rest of eternity. What is perhaps more significant  is that the fact that Shannon Boxx was busy lobbying the referee for an offside call was actually what gave Marta the space to score the goal — a mistake you can see clearly on the replay. It’s always better to depend on your feet than on the uncertainty of a referees’ call.

Melksham was, without a doubt, a highly interventionist referee — irritatingly so. Her style contrasted markedly with the referee in the previous day’s France-England match, who was much more low-key and hands-off. Melksham’s mistake was in failing to reach some kind of balance in the game. I doubt there has ever been a football match that was perfectly refereed, or one in which neither side had a grievance with the officiating. But the best referees establish authority and keep themselves out of the game as much as possible while still policing it. At its worst, their authority becomes overbearing, as it did yesterday. Piling on the red card plus a penalty plus not allowing a penalty after it was saved because of a what was at worse relatively minor technical violation was simply too much: it felt like a curse. Melksham seemed to be attempting to balance things out when she disallowed the first U.S. penalty kick, which was blocked by the Brazilian keeper, because she moved off the line. By then, of course, she’d lost the confidence of most who were watching, and was probably just desperate to get away from an experience that must have been quite hellish for her as well. Refereeing football, after all, is a particularly grueling job, and indeed I think it’s kind of a miracle that anybody is willing to do it. Those who do certainly deserve much less grief, and more sympathy, than they generally get.

Here’s the thing, though: in none of these cases did Marta do anything particularly egregious. Nevertheless, frustrated at the referee, the crowd in the stadium and the virtual crowd on twitter attacked her, booing her whenever she touched the ball. It’s the sort of thing that happens all the time in football, of course, and we all have our villains (I still can’t get over Suarez blocking the ball with his hand during the Uruguay-Ghana match). But to me it felt ugly and unnecessary.

The most infuriating action on the field came late in overtime when Erica ate several minutes of time — precious to the U.S., and dangerous for Brazil — with what a feigned injury. She did this in a particularly unabashed and obvious way, but it is a classic technique, one deployed traditionally in many, many games. Indeed, if the roles had been reversed and the U.S. had been up, I would have expected our team to do whatever they could to waste time — taking slow goal kicks, throw-ins, etc. Erica went too far with the tactic, and it came off as particularly cynical. But it wasn’t  outside the bounds of all sporting behavior, nor was it — as some seemed to feel — an affront to Western Civilization. It was just cynical, unappealing, desperate football. And, as several people who commented on this post have pointed out, Melksham did give Erica a yellow card for this — something quite rare. And in an interesting twist, it was during the time added to the clock to make up for that incident that Rapinoe and Wambach made their now-canonical goal.

In the midst of a game like yesterday’s, it’s easy and convenient to forget how many football matches have been shaped by refereeing as or more  egregious than what we saw yesterday. In fact, such controversies are so common that they pretty much have to be considered a core aspect of actually-existing football. It might seem ungracious to cite the most famous game in the history of U.S. women’s soccer to make this point, but it’s worth doing so. In 1999 — twelve years to the day from yesterday’s match — Briana Scurry famously stepped off the line and blocked the third penalty kick taken by China. It was a pretty blatant violation of the laws of the game, and she and others admitted it afterwords. The referee didn’t call it. That call put China one point down, allowing Brandi Chastain to win the World Cup with her legendary goal. Did we care? No. Should we? Probably not. (The truly moral course of action, presumably, would have been to forfeit the trophy after a public admission of guilty). We should be glad that, in the wild mess of football refereeing, we happened to luck out in that particular case. But do China fans have the right to feel like victory was stolen from them by a referee? They do, just as we could have blamed the referee if the U.S. had lost yesterday.

Indeed, fans of Brazil have their own grievances with the referee from yesterday’s game: as one reminded me almost as soon as I posted these thoughts this morning, I forgot to mention Carli Lloyd’s intentional hand-ball earlier in the game, which some thought deserved a yellow card — which would have gotten her expelled from the game and totally changed the dynamic at that point, presumably in favor of Brazil. Each game, in fact provides what anthropologist Christian Bromberger describes as an “inexaustible terrain of interpretation,” a kind of infinite regression into which we can all pour our analysis — and our rage — without ever coming to a clear consensus about right and wrong, fair and unfair.

It’s very satisfying to feel aggrieved, as the reaction to the U.S.-Slovenia game last year demonstrated. We in the U.S., it turns out, can do it as expertly as anyone in the world. It a useful response, and helps particularly as a form of angry mourning after a defeat. You can keep it up for decades, in fact: talk to a French football fan of a certain age about the 1982 semi-final against Germany, and they will tell you about bad refereeing.

But the crucial thing about yesterday’s game was that, while commentators in the U.S. were busy feeling persecuted and sorry for themselves, the players on the team didn’t waste their time with that. Instead, they played, and fought, and kept pushing until they finally broke through and scored. That was the key to their victory: they did what the greatest of teams to, bouncing back and pushing on, without letting the fury they must have felt get in the way of brilliant playing and clinical penalty kicks. That is what makes them a great team — one of the greatest the U.S. has ever seen.

Those skills will serve them well against France on Wednesday. The two teams come into the semi-final with a remarkably parallel experience in this tournament. They both did well in their first two group games — France with more panache than the U.S. particularly in their game against Canada — but then lost the third against tough opponents. They both went through grueling quarter-final matches and won on penalty kicks — and both showed tremendous mental strength, pulling out goals late in the game and taking their penalty kicks with cool power. They’ll both be tired physically, but mentally charged up from their victories. They have different styles of play, and the conflict promises to be riveting.

Interestingly, there will be two models of training and player development up against one another on Wednesday. U.S. women’s soccer has long been sustained by college and university programs (notably UNC) which have produced our greatest players. In France, players take a different route: most of those on the team went through state-supported player academies, notably the national academy at Clairefontaine. In both countries, however, the existence of professional leagues has been crucial in supporting the women’s game — many of the French players are together at the leading women’s team, Lyon, and it shows in their cohesive play on the field.

Though the French players and the team in general was far less known than the Brazilians before this World Cup, players like Louisa Necib and Marie-Laure Delie have shown brilliance on the field and, alongside players like Wambach, Solo and Krieger, can lay claim to being among the great stars of the game. When they face off against the now canonized Wambach, Solo, Rapinoe and Krieger, it will — hopefully — be for another remarkable match.

Then again, maybe not. Sometimes quarter-finals are the best games of the World Cup. And there’s always the chance that a bad referee will mess everything up — or else, as Melksham did yesterday, set up the very conditions of possibility for a story of heroism and redemption that is one for the ages. For now though, between the giddy haze of yesterday’s victory and the pleasant expectation of more to come, we should remember that it is precisely the mad and infuriating form of football that delivers all of this: the sense of history, of being in precisely the right moment at the right time, of seeing things unfold as they should, as they must.

In October 2001, the national football teams of France and Algeria faced off in a long-awaited, and (at least in principle) “friendly” international game at the Stade de France in Paris. The event was trumpeted as an opportunity for reconciliation, a symbolic end to the conflict between the two countries, and an opportunity for a French nation increasingly shaped by it’s Algerian immigrant population to find peace within itself. But from the beginning, the match was something else: the stadium was packed with fans of the Algerian team, most of them French citizens of Algerian background. Many booed and whistled not just at the French national team (sparing only Zinedine Zidane), but also — loudly — at the French national anthem.

On the field, France dominated the game, and with the score at 4-1 in the second half, an Algeria fan named Sophia Benlemmane decided she couldn’t let her team lose. She stormed onto the field, holding an Algerian flag. Soon others followed, and within minutes the Stade de France was in the midst of a full-scale pitch invasion. French officials in the stands — including Prime Minister Lionel Jospin — were pelted with bottles, batteries, and coins. The teams were huddled off the field — the French player Lilian Thuram cursing at the fans who had stormed the field, declaring that they were acting stupidly and would confirm all the stereotypes people had of them. The game was stopped, and a football match was rapidly transformed into a national parable.

You can get a good feel for the event from this clip from the film Les Yeux dans les Bleus:

Soon afterwards, far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen held a press conference in front of the Stade de France. Pointing to it as a place where France’s national anthem had been booed, he declared that he was running for president, largely on a platform that promised to curtail immigration and respond to the threats posed to the country’s national identity by immigrants. For many conservatives, and indeed for many on different sides of the political spectrum, the France-Algeria game had crystallized a set of powerful fears: that Algerians and their children, and more broadly Muslims as a group, were taking over the country, showed no respect for national symbols, and were willing to behave as if they were in their own territory without regards to the laws of the Republic. Many Algerians lamented the behavior of the small group of young people who had taken to the field — who were amongst a much larger group of fans, they insisted, who were just interested in enjoying the game and rooting peacefully for their side. Commentators on the left, including Thuram, also criticized those who stormed the field, but sought to channel the discussion towards the broader social problems of inclusion and marginalization that had driven them to such an act.

I kept thinking about this incident — which I describe in more detail my book Soccer Empire — in the last days as I’ve followed the debates surrounding the Gold Cup final between the U.S. and Mexico that took place on Saturday night. To be sure, the circumstances are very different: Algerians in France have a very different history than Mexicans in the U.S., of course. And football in France is something entirely different than football in the U.S. At the same time, however, there are things about the lurking unease being expressed right now among U.S. fans — including Tim Howard’s criticism of the post-match ceremony taking place in Spanish, and a disturbing account I read this morning by one die-hard U.S. fan, Russell Jordan the head of the Davis, California chapter of the “American Outlaws” fan group, about harassment and disorganization at the Rose Bowl — that remind me a bit of the debates I’ve followed over the years in France.

Jordan’s account describes a situation in which an organized group of U.S. fans were, at times, pelted with bottles, and were surprised to find that rather than having a dedicated area of the stadium were mixed in with fans of the Mexico team. It also describes extremely limited security that seems to have left U.S. fans vulnerable. Hopefully this account will inspire others who were at the game to describe their own experiences, since it would be important to know how widespread such conflicts were. Soccer writer Allicia Ratterree, who was at the match, offers a very different account of the game, describing a little taunting going both directions between fans but a largely safe and congenial event. When I attended a Gold Cup match a few weeks ago in Charlotte, where fans of Mexico, Salvador, Costa Rica and Cuba mixed with those just there to watch a game of international football, I found the atmosphere exuberant and congenial, and friends who went to RFK later had a similar experience — though neither of those events involved a U.S. vs. Mexico match.

I live in Durham and teach at Duke, so I’m pretty familiar with intense and sometimes loathsome fan behavior. I went to the University of Michigan, and witnessed a number of basketball riots, and when was at MSU when a fan of a visiting team was brutally beaten in the streets of East Lansing. And I’ve attended matches in Europe, notably at Paris Saint-Germain, whose fans are notorious and find themselves heavily policed, with away fans penned into a sliver of space in the stadium surrounded by nets and a massive orange fence with spikes at the top of it, protected by lines of police. Which is to say that I’ve seen my share of unpleasant and at times violent fan behavior, and have no sympathy for it. I believe people should be able to go watch a sports match without being hit in the head by bottles, or spat upon.

The bad behavior of certain fans — who are always a minority — can be interpreted in many different ways. The Duke-UNC rivalry has a politics to it, of course — Duke is a private school, most of it’s students from outside North Carolina, while UNC is a larger public university — but those politics are largely subsumed and channeled into various sets of stereotypes and chants. I’ve seen UNC fans who somehow infiltrated the Cameron Crazies bleachers, and I’ve seen a fully-clad Duke fan wandering through the intersection of Franklin and Columbia streets the night of a UNC victory over Duke, in the midst of bonfires, taunting the opposing fans. I’ve never seen any physical violence, though.

What prevents the verbally rude and nasty behavior of fans we tend to accept from skidding into something worse? A combination of security and internal social control. That is one reason why the wise management of football matches in Europe depends on giving organized fan groups a dedicated space of their own, concentrated in one part of the stadium. This has two advantages — it localizes the most intense fans, and it also provides an opportunity for those groups to police themselves. Since fan groups depend on local clubs to give them access to parts of the stadium, and local clubs can refuse them that access or ban certain fans from coming, there’s an external pressure to keep things within the bounds of the acceptable.

In Pasadena on Saturday, there clearly had been no provision for the grouping of fans in particular areas of the stadium, which is one of the things that Jordan complains about. There’s a big question to be asked about why that wasn’t the case — especially since the American Outlaws group seems to have believed they had purchased tickets in a an area reserved for U.S. fans. (At the 2009 final of the Gold Cup, I remember seeing a section of the stadium packed with U.S. fans, so I assume that at times the ticketing has worked differently). But there’s also questions about why there wasn’t more security in general, since in most U.S. sports events people would be ejected pretty fast if they started throwing things. We need to get a better picture of how the whole event was managed, and the organizers of future events need to think hard — and under scrutiny — about how to improve the experience next time around.

This would all be serious enough if it were just a question of bad experiences among fans at a game. But there’s a bigger issue here: all this is unavoidably and inherently political, because of the ways in which it can all be read as a parable. It’s easy for the behavior of some Mexican fans, and the experiences of some U.S. fans, starts to stand in for a much larger set of issues. As was the case in France in 2001, there is clearly a feeling among many who have responded to this situation that there is something unfair about the fact that U.S. fans, and the U.S. team, felt like they were playing an away game in Pasadena.These feelings are compounded by the rather humiliating defeat suffered on the field itself — unlike the Algerians in 2001, the Mexican team took care of business on the field, leaving U.S. fans really demoralized, and some of what has gone on since then is obviously driven by the hurt and disappointment of that experience.

But the event is obviously a perfect opportunity for conservative and nativist commentators, who can easily argue that it proves the immigrants are taking over our society, and show no respect for us or our traditions. That is what happened in France in 2001. It is unlikely to happen in the same way here, simply because most people in the U.S. don’t really know what the Gold Cup is or what happened last Saturday, so it’s symbolic power is attenuated. The Rose Bowl is a little bit sacred, of course — it’s where the U.S. Women’s team won the World Cup in 1999 — but not quite in the same was as the Stade de France. It’s hard to imagine a U.S. politician giving a press conference in front of the Rose Bowl about the need to curb immigration — though, then again, who knows?

Some of this is also about the odd loneliness of the U.S. fan. Even if U.S. fans had been given a dedicated area in the stadium, they would have experienced the game as an away game — it might not have been as bad as being PSG fans in Marseille, but it would have been something along those lines. The reason that is so frustrating, of course, is that it has as much to do with the lack of a U.S. fan base as with the involvement of Mexico fans. After all, there is no real reason why there couldn’t be more U.S. fans at a Gold Cup final, except that there aren’t enough people who made the decision to buy tickets and go.

Part of what’s also going on here is simply a clash of sports cultures. Football games in Mexico, Latin America, Europe, Africa, and well pretty much everywhere are incredibly intense affairs, and frequently small groups of fans who go too far. The techniques for managing this are, of course, not always successful. And that fact tempers attendance: many of my French friends looked at me in disbelief when I told them I went to a PSG match, something they would never consider doing out of fear of ending up in a riot. In the U.S., soccer fandom is something entirely different: MLS games are pretty pleasant overall — more so than many a college basketball of football game — and of course the demographics of the game are different too. Those different expectations and habits don’t run up against each other that often — but during the Gold Cup they definitely do.

As this debate continues, it’s vital to allow things to remain complicated and avoid an easy story. (This is something Maxi Rodriguez has also emphasized in an  recent piece, along with this this post at the FBM blog.) It is the responsibility of any organization that oversees large sporting events to guarantee security to those who attend. Fans who throw things and hurt other people should, in any game anywhere, be expelled from the stadium and possibly arrested. And the long experience of fan conflict in Europe suggests some relatively effective techniques: making sure that fan organizations have access to dedicated areas of the stadium, enter separately, and that zones of contact between fan groups have enough security to prevent incidents.

We’ll be better off, however, if this doesn’t become an easy parable. There is nothing wrong with fans of Mexico — whether they are U.S. citizens, Mexican citizens, or just big fans of Chicharito — going to root for their team. There is nothing wrong with fans of the U.S. rooting for theirs. In the end, if there are more Mexico fans at the Gold Cup final than U.S. fans, that’s nobody’s fault — except for the U.S. fans who weren’t there.

Last night, after his team’s bruising defeat to Mexico in the Gold Cup final, goalkeeper Tim Howard commented (according to Grant Wahl on twitter), that it was “a f—ing disgrace that the entire postmatch ceremony was in Spanish.”

He was, to be sure, in a bad place. Howard is a world-class goalie, whose saves have — time and time again — literally saved the U.S. from defeat. But Dos Santos’ goal against him was one of the more humiliating points scored in recent footballing history. A flubbed clearance led to a dancing, twisting run, during which the Mexican player twisted around Howard — who swatted helplessly for the ball — then chipped it with absolute perfection into the top left corner of the goal.

That clip is going to be something the U.S. team is going to try hard to forget. It’s certainly also going to be the stuff of legend and laughter in Mexico for a long time. Indeed, it might end up being one of the defining moments of Dos Santos’ career as a player for Mexico.

Howard was obviously enraged, almost in tears, pounding the ground. It’s always hard to let in a goal, but this ranks up there — along with Green’s flub against the U.S. in last year’s World Cup, during a game when Howard distinguished himself brilliantly — as certainly one of the most vivid demonstrations of the difficulty of being a goalie.

It’s interesting and significant, though, that he expressed part of his anger at the language of the post-game presentation. I couldn’t actually hear that presentation — I was in a bar packed with a mix of glum U.S. fans and Saturday-night Durham partiers who had come to dance and had little idea of the drama that has just unfolded — though apparently it actually was in both English and Spanish. But Howard’s comment raises a question: what is, or should be, the language of the Gold Cup? And what, more broadly, does the U.S.-Mexico rivalry — at it’s most riveting in last night’s game — stand for? What are it’s politics?

The CONCACAF Gold Cup was first played in 1991 (replacing the CONCACAF Championship which had been played since the early 1960s, after the formation of the federation through the merging of the North American and Caribbean/Central American football federations). Except for one tournament, which was hosted jointly by the U.S. and Mexico, it has always been played in the U.S. And except for one victory by Canada in 2000, it has always been won either by the U.S. or Mexico. (That contrasts with the earlier iteration of the tournament, whose winners included a diverse group of countries, including Haiti and Costa Rica, but never the U.S.).

While the tournament has always been hosted by the U.S., however, it has long remained a relatively marginal event with U.S. sports culture. Anyone familiar with the Gold Cup knows that the U.S. often finds itself essentially playing an away game in it’s confrontations with Mexico, El Salvador, and other opponents. The audience for the 2009 Final, in East Rutherford, New Jersey, was made up of a vast majority of fans of the Mexican team. Last night in Pasadena there was a healthy presence of red and white U.S. jerseys and flags, but the majority of the crowd was rooting for Mexico. When I went to see an early game in Charlotte a few weeks ago, the crowd there — maybe 40 to 50,000 strong — was packed with ebullient and decked-out Mexico fans, though there were also groups of Salvadorean, Costa Rican and even a small number of Cuban fans. And those crowds are well aware of the fact that, in Mexico, people are watching: many bring signs with names of particular towns, even personal messages to family and friends. The Univision or Telefutura broadcasts of Gold Cup matches serve as a touchstone for transnational populations, as a site of celebration and communication across borders.

That is changing, and especially this year I had the feeling that the tournament was finally getting some of the attention it deserves. It was striking, for instance, to see a packed arena of U.S. fans watching their team take on Guadeloupe in Kansas City. (To be sure, there’s not that many Guadeloupeans in Kansas City — there aren’t that many Guadeloupeans, period, anywhere besides Paris and Guadeloupe for that matter.) For U.S. soccer fans, the Gold Cup is a tremendous opportunity to participate in an international competition on home soil, and more and more people are aware of that and eager to do so. For many that means rooting passionately for the U.S. team — like these imaginative and devoted fans photographed yesterday by Grant Wahl in Pasadena — while for others it’s an opportunity just to participate directly in a kind of event that we usually just get to watch on TV.

So what does the U.S.-Mexico rivalry stand for? Just before the game started, I asked on twitter whether people could think of international comparisons for the game. I threw out two imperfect ones: France vs. Algeria, and England vs. Jamaica. Quickly, an answer came from Carl Bromley with a better comparison: “More like England vs. Ireland.”

Part of the (quick) discussion was about how to characterize the rivalry: Is it a colonial rivalry? A border rivalry? An imperial one? What is at stake — in terms of immigration, historical memory, national symbolism — in such games? The discussion only went so far — there was, after all, a game to watch — but got me thinking last night and today about the peculiar way this particular rivalry operates. I would love to hear your comments and thoughts on this. Here are some of mine:

Football is politically at it’s most interesting when the relationship on the pitch mirrors but doesn’t reproduce the broader political relationship. It’s at it’s most riveting, I think, when players and fans sense that something larger — a reversal or a redemption of some kind — might be at stake.

The U.S. and Mexico obviously share a deep history: after all, much of the U.S. was once Mexico. Last night’s game took place on former Mexican territory. California, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona: these states were all, in the nineteenth century, conquered by the U.S. Today, no one can really imagine that there will ever a be a process of decolonization, of course: but that doesn’t mean we should think of this as a colonial history. After all, colonization can end in a certain kind of incorporation. But that history — one vividly remembered in Mexico, much less so in the U.S. — obviously shapes the debates and discourses surrounding immigration. As the old Chicano activist adage puts it: “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us.”

Immigration, of course, is the most salient question when it comes to this rivalry: today Mexican immigrants are often vilified, seen as a threat, and targeted — notably in Arizona — with increasingly draconian policing measures. The New York Times reports this morning that the U.S. has spent $90 billion dollars policing the U.S. Mexico-border in the past decades. It has become an intensely militarized place, full of high-tech machinery and patrols, and also increasingly a place of death for would-be migrants trapped between border policy, unscrupulous coyotes from the Mexican side, and the expanses of isolated desert along both sides of the border.

When Mexico plays the U.S. in soccer, these tensions are not talked about that openly, of course. But a few people, as an article by Eben Lehman pointed out yesterday, let them fly on twitter in anticipation of the game. One asked: “soo are Rose Bowl workers asking fans for green cards? if so there wont be any mexicans in attendance tonight.” Another tweeted: “Someone call immigration! I know where 90,000 mexicans will be! The gold cup at the Rose Bowl.” And those were the polite ones.

Any football match will generate it’s share of nasty xenophobic talk, and such comments were certainly extreme and — at least in public — relatively rare. Still, lurking under much of the experience of yesterday’s match, I would argue, is a discomfort with the fact that fans of the Mexican team in the U.S. feel so comfortable and passionate about rooting for their team. Tim Howard’s comment about the post-game ceremony being in Spanish hinted at that discomfort, too. In the bar where I watched the game, no one was yelling out racist epithets, exactly, though any time a Mexican player fell to the ground there was a chorus of enraged yells — “You’re a baby!” — from some who watched. That is a pretty standard part of the lexicon of U.S. soccer fandom (just as it is of other football cultures, notably in England): those guys are such actors, falling to the ground at every turn! In a way, it’s all innocent enough, but it’s never that many steps away either from other chains of stereotypes.

Part of what’s so interesting, though, about the way this rivalry plays out has to with the slightly pained and beleaguered situation of the U.S. soccer fan. When the U.S. plays in the World Cup, or in the Gold Cup, much of the discussion revolves around a rather specific question, one that would never need to be posed in most other countries: “Is this going to be good for U.S. soccer?” Fans want to see the U.S. succeed in part out of a hope that, if they do, the sport they love will gain more appreciation and strength in this country. A bad result is seen as worrisome because it seems like a step backward in the hard-fought battle to get a little respect for soccer. The thrill of victories — like last year’s World Cup game against Algeria — is the sense that of vindication it gives us as fans of this particular sport within the U.S. The terror of defeat is partly that we worry that it will confirm the idea, held by a reasonably large if steadily shrinking portion of the U.S. population, that soccer is a silly infuriating sport where we don’t win. I’ve written before that I think we should just relax a bit, and enjoy ourselves on the margins of U.S. sports culture. But it’s hard when you love and believe in a sport.

If the U.S. had won the Gold Cup last night, as it looked for a little while like we might well do, there would have been cheering and celebrating in plenty of homes and bars around the country. What there would not have been, however, was the kind of celebrations that broke out in Mexico City last night — people streaming through the streets, waving flags, and even according to Jonathan Katz burning one U.S. flag. (Here’s a nice picture he took of that celebration). Indeed, celebrating U.S. fans would probably have had to explain to many friends and family why they were in such a good mood this morning. It would have been a victory for U.S. soccer, but most people in the U.S. would not have really seen it as an important victory for the U.S. Indeed, while Chicharito and Dos Santos are household names — and in many places almost household gods — in Mexico, you can’t say the same even for Howard, Dempsey, or Donovan in the U.S.

Part of what made last night’s loss so tough for the U.S. and it’s fans is that it was, in the context of a difficult moment for the country’s men’s and women’s soccer programs, a really crucial game. In 2009, the U.S. was trounced by Mexico in the Gold Cup final, 5-0, in a game that in a way was even more embarrassing than last night’s performances. But that summer the U.S. also played in the FIFA Confederation’s Cup — having earned it’s place there by winning the Gold Cup in 2007 — and did so brilliantly. They were on their way to qualifying well for the 2010 World Cup. And in fact it seemed that Bradley had, probably intelligently, prioritized those other competitions above the Gold Cup itself.

This year, the U.S. run in the competition was fraught with difficulty. The loss to Panama was rough, and the U.S. played well against Guadeloupe and Jamaica but was also lucky those two teams were in poor form — if either Caribbean team had played at their best, the U.S. may well not have made it to the final at all this year. Last night’s game was also particularly painful because of the fact that the U.S. failed tactically to capitalize on a 2-0 lead. And the brilliant humiliation delivered by Dos Santos’ goal, which will remain the defining image of the game and probably the tournament, made the U.S. look seriously outclassed.

After shouting and running about with joy in celebration of the first two goals, the U.S. fans in the bar I was in got increasingly glum, red-faced, shouting at the TV, complaining about the Mexican players. Elsewhere in the town, I’m sure, bars were packed with elated and ebullient fans, feeling particularly vindicated by the artistry and dominance of the Mexican team. But Durham’s Mexican-American community didn’t, as far as I could see, celebrate much in public — not feeling comfortable enough to do so, perhaps. I imagine that if I was in L.A. or Chicago, things would have been different. But after the sound and fury of the game, with it humming in my head, what I found in my city is the sound that a I’ve gotten used to hearing here in the U.S. out in public after a riveting match, whether it’s won or lost: silence.

Tomorrow night, in Kansas, we’ll be able to enjoy one of those fixtures that makes the Gold Cup such a pleasure to some of us, and a rather mystifying affair to many others. Indeed, the Gold Cup competition, while it takes place year after year in the U.S., seems to largely fly under the radar for many in this country — except, of course, for fans of the Mexican national team, and for those of the Central American and Caribbean teams for whom it represents perhaps the most important international competition.

When the two teams face off tomorrow night, it will be a study in political contrasts. The United States is, well, what people in the Caribbean easily call “the empire.” Guadeloupe is a pure product of empire: an old plantation colony, now a department (the equivalent of a state) of France, but one with a complex relationship with the mother country. The presence of Guadeloupe in the Gold Cup is the result of a set of intriguing compromises. The nationalist movement in the country has long seen football as a perfect site to express the desire for independence. The political movement for separation from France has never garnered more than minority support, but it has had outsized cultural impact in both Guadeloupe and Martinique. People are proud of being from the island, and often see it as a kind of cultural nation even as it remains part of France. Having a football team, as both islands do, is a perfect way to finesse the contradiction. Guadeloupe and Martinique are not members of FIFA — unlike the French territory of New Caledonia, in the Pacific — and indeed the islands have offered a string of crucial players to the French national team (Thuram, Abidal, Henry, Gallas, just to name a few). But they are members of CONCACAF, which means they get to compete in regional competitions, notably the Gold Cup. Especially in recent years, Guadeloupe has done remarkable well in the competition. For a tiny island of a population of 400,000 — though in addition there are many who consider themselves Guadeloupean (including players on the CONCACAF team) who were born in metropolitan France to parents from the island.

But, rooted in a long and rich tradition of football on the island — one I tell the story of in Soccer Empire, and nicely outlined in a recent piece by Ian Dorward at the blog In Bed With Maradona — they bring great style and tactics to the pitch, as they showed a few days ago when they came back from a 3-0 deficit against Panama, with only 10 men, to end up 3-2. It would be a mistake, reeling from it’s loss to Panama, not to take Guadeloupe seriously. They are certainly underdogs, but they can also certainly surprise. And there’s one reason to root for them: if they made it all the way to the Gold Cup final and won, they would technically qualify to play in the next Confederations Cup. And if (this might be even more of a long shot, but we’ll see) France won the European Cup, there could — at least in principle — be a France vs. Guadeloupe game in the offing. That almost certainly wouldn’t happen — according to FIFA regulations, all Confederations Cups teams have to be members of FIFA, and Guadeloupe isn’t. But the issue would raise troublesome and complicated issues — nothing more than what FIFA deserves right now.

So it’s worth watching a game where the line up might seem, at first glance, a little surreal — in service of the principle that football is, and should always remain, a realm of uncertainty and surprise.

It’s one of funnest and most satisfying sports within the sport of football: complaining about the tedious, predictable, if not nauseating commentary foisted on us by the networks. With barely disguised pleasure, we chat or tweet our criticisms of the uninvited guests who join our football watching party. We wonder: Have these guys ever watched a soccer game? Where do they come up with the stream of absurd statistics? Who is the person next to them finding the most obscure pieces of information to pepper the commentary with? (“The last time a man with a Polish name scored a goal against a goalie from Egypt, it was 1922. The match was ended prematurely when a flock of chickens entered the field.”)

There are obviously exceptions, with some people and some matches better than others. But sometimes, I can’t believe that I’m watching the most interesting thing on earth while listening to what might be the most boring people on earth. I know it’s not entirely their fault: there are limits to what can be said, borders around what constitutes acceptably neutral sports discourse. But it largely excludes a flood of potentially interesting stuff to comment on during a match: commentary on hairstyles, rants and screeds about the referees, commentary on weird fan behavior, skewering of FIFA or some other guilty institution, polemical discussion of club, national or international politics. Maybe we have friends that we like to watch matches with who can give us this, but we can’t always watch with them in our scattered alienated late capitalist existence.

Do we really have to stay in this prison? That, my friend, is what I have been wondering ever since, during the U.S.-Argentina friendly match a few weeks back, the always astute and thought-provoking Jennifer Doyle tweeted an explosive suggestion: “We need pirate match broadcasting.”

She set me a-dreamin’.

The technology is all in place: many of us watch matches online anyway, and it’s easy enough to set up a streaming audio link on a blog or webpage. So here is what we’ll do: we turn on the network, gleefully press “mute,” and tune into one of our friends — Jennifer Doyle for international women’s football, Grant Wahl on the MLS, Liz Hottel for the pained philosophizing that is the only way to survive Arsenal matches. Once the door is opened, who knows who we will discover? It will be a free-wheeling wild west, with a cacophony of voices narrating the twists and turns of the most fascinating theater on earth. There will be no limits, nothing off-limits: they can curse, make fun of people, be mean, go on crazy tangents. If they need to call up meaningless statistics, google and wikipedia will provide as much — if not more — than what they scare up on TV. Any language, multiple languages — singing, chanting, gurgling, shouting with glee or despair.

It will be the beginning of a beautiful, revolutionary world. A football spring of sorts, a technology driven freeing of the mind from the containment of commentary as we know it.

The time has come. Are we ready?