This Post was originally published at Football is a Country. My thanks to them for permission to cross-post.

The French national anthem, La Marseillaise, is, if you think about it, a pretty nasty song. It dreams, in one of its more memorable verses, that the “blood of the impure” will “irrigate our fields.” It’s a rousing anthem, to be sure, and I myself can frequently be heard humming it to myself in advance of a match being played by Les Bleus, or as I ride my bike or do the dishes. I’ve found that it’s sometimes hard to find a French person (at least if you hang out, as I do, with too many intellectuals), who can actually sing it without irony. And yet, over the past 26 years, the question of whether a particular subset of French men – those who play on the national football team – sing the Marseillaise under certain conditions has been a rather unhealthy obsession in France (we’ve blogged about it before, when Kinshasa-born flanker Yannick Nyanga sobbed uncontrollably during the anthem ahead of a rugby match vs Australia last year).

We are now being treated to what feels to me like Act 467 of this drama. Karim Benzema, as anyone who attentively watches French football matches knows, doesn’t sing the anthem before matches. In a recent interview, asked why, he answered in a pleasingly flippant way: “It’s not because I sing that I’m going to score three goals. If I don’t sing the Marseillaise, but then the game starts and I score three goals, I don’t think at the end of the game anyone is going to say that I didn’t sing the Marseillaise.” Pushed further on the question, he invoked none other than Zinedine Zidane who, like Benzema, was the child of Algerian immigrants to France – and who also happens to be the greatest French footballer of all time, and the one to whom the team owes its one little star on its jersey: “No one is going to force me to sing the Marseillaise. Zidane, for instance, didn’t necessarily sing it. And there are others. I don’t see that it’s a problem.”

Ah, Karim, but it is a problem, don’t you see? In fact, your decision about whether to vocalize or not, as you stand in line under the careful scrutiny of cameras, about to enter into a hyper-stressful and aggressive sporting match during which your every action will be dissected and discussed, is an unmistakable sign about whether or not the true France will survive or alternatively be submerged in a tide of unruly immigrants and their descendants.

Notwithstanding the fact that, as Michel Platini has noted, in his generation no footballers ever sang the Marseillaise, and that “white” footballers – even the Muslim Franck Ribéry, who at best mutters a bit during the anthem but is much more enthusiastic in his pre-game prayers to Allah – are rarely if ever asked this particular question, even so some will continue to insist that your choice not to sing is a window onto your disloyal soul. As the Front National explained: “This football mercenary, paid 1484 Euros per hour, shows an inconceivable and inacceptable disdain for the jersey that he is lucky to be able to wear. Karim Benzema does not “see the problem” with not singing the Marseillaise. Well, French people wouldn’t see any problem with having him no longer play for the French team.”

Some genealogy is in order here. In 1996, Jean-Marie Le Pen first levied this accusation against the French team. France was playing in the European Cup, and playing well. But he was a bit disturbed by something he saw: an awful lot of them seemed, well, not really to be French. “It’s a little bit artificial to bring in foreign players and baptize them ‘Equipe de France,’” he opined. The team, he went on – with blithe disregard for the bald falsity of what he was saying, since no one can play on the French team who is not a French citizen, and nearly all of the players had in any case been born in France – was full of “fake Frenchmen who don’t sing the Marseillaise or visibly don’t know it.” When pressed on these comments a few days later, he lamented that while players from other countries in the tournament sang their anthems, “our players don’t because they don’t want to. Sometimes they even pout in a way that makes it clear that it’s a choice on their part. Or else they don’t know it. It’s understandable since no one teaches it to them.”  [For more on this, see Laurent's excellent book, Soccer Empire -- Ed]

The response to Le Pen’s 1996 comments was immediate and resounding: everyone, or almost everyone, called him an idiot. Politicians, pundits, and journalists all piled on, falling over themselves to denounce his comments and declare their love for the French team. In fact he managed to do something rather extraordinary with his comments, pushing a group of athletes – most of whom would likely have never made public political statements about the questions of race, immigration, and identity in France – to become activists of a kind.

Christian Karembeu – from the Pacific territory of New Caledonia – made a decision. “From that on, I didn’t sign the Marseillaise. To raise people’s consciousness, so that everyone will know who we are.” He knew the words perfectly, he explained. “In the colonies, everyone has to learn the Marseillaise by heart at school. That means that I, from zero to twenty-five years old, knew the Marseillaise perfectly.” But when he heard the song, Karembeu explained, he thought “about his ancestors” – indigenous Kanaks who had been drafted in New Caledonia and died on the battlefields of World War I for France. “The history of France is that of its colonies and its wealth. Above all, I am a Kanak. I can’t sign the French national anthem because I know the history of my people.”

One of Karembeu’s teammates, the Guadeloupe-born Lilian Thuram, also experienced the event as a kind of political awakening. He made a different choice when it came to the song: he always sang it loudly, and famously off tune, often with tears in his eyes. But doing so was part of a political stance that overlapped with Karembeu’s: in the next years, Thuram became a powerful and potent voice criticizing Le Pen, and later Nicholas Sarkozy, and advocating for acknowledgment, study, and confrontation with the past of slavery and colonialism. In his retirement, he has – in a move that, to say the least, is not the usual path taken by post-career athletes – devoted himself to anti-racist education, and recently curated an exhibit at the Quai Branly outlining the history of colonial and racial representations of “the Other.”

Le Pen’s comments were also a case of spectacularly bad timing. Though France didn’t win the European Cup, a team made up of most of the same players did the unthinkable in 1998 and won the World Cup in Paris. This victory would, in any situation, have been greeted with an outpouring of joy. But thanks largely to Le Pen’s comments – and to the fact that it was Thuram and Zidane – who scored the pivotal goals in the semi-final and final, the event was greeted by many in France as a powerful celebration of a new multi-cultural and multi-ethnic nation. There was an outpouring of comments from all sides that saw, in the team, precisely the opposite of what Le Pen had suggested: a France which, thanks to the contributions of all its different peoples, of all backgrounds, had won a critical victory.

Zinedine Zidane, for instance, reflected on the World Cup victory as a moment of consolidation and reconciliation for him and his family, and more broadly for Algerians and their descendants in France, many of whom waved Algerian flags to celebrate. “There was something very moving about seeing all those Algerian flags mixed in with the French ones in the streets on the night of our victory. This alchemy of victory proved suddenly that my father and mother had not made the journey for nothing: it was the son of a Kabyle that offered up the victory, but it was France that became champion of the world. In one goal by one person, two cultures became one.” The victory was “the most beautiful response to intolerance.” He described the victory as an explicit response to Le Pen: “Frankly, what does it matter if you belt out the Marseillaise or if you live it inside yourself? … Do we have to belt out this warrior’s song to be patriotic?”

It is, perhaps, this Zidane that Benzema was trying to channel in his comments. Of course, they come at a very different time. Zidane could speak from the pinnacle of victory. Benzema speaks in the midst of a long period of relative failure on the part of the French team – the debacle of 2010, the ultimate disappointment of the European Cup last summer, and now an ongoing struggle to qualify for 2014 in Brazil. The current debate about the Marseillaise, too, is haunted by the many controversies surrounding the booing of the anthem during matches pitting France against Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco over the past years. In September 2001, after pro-Algeria fans invaded the pitch during a game against France, Le Pen once again used football as a touchstone for his political campaign, this time with more success. He announced his candidacy for president in front of the Stade de France a few weeks later, explaining he had chosen the site because it was where “our national anthem was booed.” The next year, he made it into the second round of the presidential election, forcing the French to choose between him and Jacques Chirac. The French team mobilized again, with even Zidane urging people to vote against Le Pen.

We might imagine that there is, somewhere in the Front National office, presumably some kind of little file, or perhaps a handbook, on how to take advantage of various incidents on the football pitch for political gain. And one can predict that, like Benzema, future footballers who – because of the accident of their ancestry – are be suspected of disloyalty by French xenophobes will be asked this same question again and again: “Why don’t you sing the Marseillaise?” They’ll be able to look back to find various ways to answer the question, and indeed will have quite the menu: do you politely offer a “Va te faire foutre!” with sauce Karembeu, Thuram, Zidane, or Benzema? Eventually, one might be able to offer an entire seminar on the meaning and performance of nationalism using nothing but examples from the debate about football and the Marseillaise. The field of French Cultural Studies will eventually acknowledge that Jean-Marie Le Pen has been our greatest friend over the years, a generative thinker without whom we might have little to write about.

In the meantime, on the pitch France will need all the help it can get as they are about to take on reigning World and double European champions Spain. Many fans will probably be open to the players using any form of inspiration they might need in order to score some goals and win this critical game, so that they won’t put us all through the usual torture of dragging out qualification until the last minute. (Remember the hand of Henry?)

Do they want to pray to Allah, Jesus, Zarathustra? Be our guest. Invoke their Ancestors the Gauls, channel the spirit of the founder of the World Cup, the Frenchman Jules Rimet, or call down the West African warrior god Ogun? Fine with us. At the end of the game, as Benzema has pointed out, if they’ve scored three goals and pull off a win, no one will remember what they were singing when the game began.

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/)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

            Over the last 20 years European soccer has gone through an exciting but dangerous period of global expansion.  When Rupert Murdoch’s Sky TV signed the English Premier League to a $115 million television rights deal in 1992, he set the European club sport on a terror of worldwide expansion.  The Spanish Empire of the 1700s is the only conquest that rivals the expansion of European soccer.[1]  With the additional capital, individual clubs could grow.  More potent, though, was the exposure the clubs garnered worldwide through the advent of technology.  This exposure turned community institutions into global brands that have been wielded with a capitalist’s fist.  The dangerous part is that this expansion has gone unregulated.

In European soccer, regulations are largely non-existent.  Thus it is a utopia for any ambitious owner to attempt to lead their club to the apex of European soccer, the UEFA Champions League.  Many clubs have attempted to attain this goal by building a team full of talent.  Clubs have used modern financial instruments such as leveraged buyouts and excessive amounts of debt.  They have given their plans fancy names such as the “Galacticos Project.”  This sometimes-dangerous process of building a talented team is where regulation is lacking in protecting European club soccer.  In 2009, UEFA did a study of the 655 European soccer clubs and learned that half of them ran a deficit the previous year.[2]   The lack of financial regulation has recently allowed several soccer clubs to go into bankruptcy because they could not pay their creditors.  In response to such occurrences, there is increasing pressure to implement some financial regulations to help protect the solvency of the world’s game.

This post will first investigate how the idea of Financial Fair Play (FFP) was created.  I will examine what some European Leagues already do to curb financial delinquency.  The post will then gloss over concerns skeptics have of the new regulations before delving into how the regulations are structured and how they will be governed.  This will be followed by questions pertaining to how UEFA will be able to achieve their desired goals that FFP is supposed to achieve.  Finally, it will discuss critiques and suggestions meant to improve the current FFP model.

Introduction to FFP

Financial Fair Play is the brainchild of UEFA president Michel Platini.  Mr. Platini did an October 2009 interview with the Wall Street Journal just a month after the UEFA Executive committee accepted the idea of Financial Fair Play.  In it he said, “’I was a leader on the field,’ Mr. Platini, 54, … ‘Now, I should be a leader for the game. To me, it is a game — with many, many things attached.  It has to remain a game, or nobody will save it.’”[3]  His goal is to protect the game of soccer and level the playing field so all can compete equally.

Platini admitted to spending extensive time with sports franchises in the United States to learn how they were so successful, for he claimed they weathered the financial crisis in 2008 better than anyone else.[4]  The reason American sports leagues weathered the crisis so well is due to the uniqueness of the leagues.  “The main role of the leagues (MLB, NFL, NBA, and MLS) within this framework is to implement rules aimed at furthering the collective interest of the teams in achieving joint profit maximization.”[5]  At the highest level of each league, the team owners and commissioner work together to succeed together as a league rather than destroy one another.  This is done by strategically placing teams, sharing revenue, and imposing restrictions on labor markets to ensure competiveness.  These are aspects that are innate to American sports ideology but would not work in the free capitalist markets of European sports.

The French and German soccer leagues already have a form of financial governance.   France’s Lige 1 has the Direction Nationale du Controle de Gestion (DNCG) that oversees every club’s financials and has the power to levy appropriate sanctions on clubs that do not protect the financial sustainability of their club.  Germany’s German Football Federation requires each team in the DFB to apply for a license each season that allows them to compete in the league.  The license application is based on the financial solvency of the clubs.  These regulations do not guarantee that every club will be exempt from financial troubles, but they do protect the entire league from spiraling into a debt-funded competition.  These regulations have protected the French and German leagues from the widespread financial follies that have plagued the English Premier League, Spanish La Liga, and Italy’s Seria A.
Financial Fair Play will be based on the DFB policy of issuing licenses to clubs, which will allow them to participate in UEFA sponsored competitions.  The FFP regulations have been set out with six goals in mind.

1. To introduce financial discipline
2. Decrease salary and transfer fee pressure
3. For clubs to compete within their revenues
4. Long term investment in youth academies
5. To protect the long term viability of club football
6. For clubs to settle their liabilities with creditors on a timely basis[6]

The way Financial Fair Play will work is that over a five-year period soccer clubs will be required to slowly balance their books.  The implementation process was expanded to give clubs more time to comply and the 2012-13 season is the first year that introductory regulations will be in place.  The five-year process will ease clubs towards a balanced budget.  So, in theory, at the conclusion of the five-year period they will only be allowed to spend as much as they make.   The hope is to end the frivolous spending that often runs clubs into extreme debt.  The two chambers of the Club Financial Control Body will regulate this process.[7]   The CFCB will have the power to expel clubs from UEFA competitions if individual clubs do not make the appropriate actions to adhere to the new regulations.  Mr. Platini has repeated that FFP is a provision soccer clubs have asked for.

General FFP Concerns

Even though European clubs have asked for additional regulations, this does not mean that FFP has been met with open arms.  The biggest concern for the overall game is that FFP will create a status quo for big clubs.  Clubs will be required to operate within their revenue streams.  This clause protects clubs from over exerting themselves financially.  The flip side is that clubs with large amounts of revenue will be able to maintain their current financial dominance.  FFP inhibits smaller clubs from borrowing to fund future growth, which is normally how businesses grow.

A big component of FFP is prohibiting an owner with deep pockets to personally fund the team’s growth, but with the requirement of a balanced budget this is no longer possible.  The concern is that clever clubs will increase their revenues by signing exceptionally large sponsorship deals, sometimes with a company their owner is closely affiliated with.  Manchester City’s owner Sheikh Mansour is a Deputy Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates and four of Manchester City’s eight main sponsors are companies owned by the UAE government.  A main job of the CFCB will be to watch for shady accounting practices aimed at avoiding FFP regulations.

Other major concerns are how the actual FFP regulations will take into account the customs and tax policies of each individual league.  For example, the FFP regulations say that each club must audit their books under their own national conditions.  Well, higher taxes in certain countries will have serious ramifications for the amount clubs can reinvest in the club.  It is also very ambiguous about what can be discounted concerning certain charity payments and investments in other parts of the club.  Third party ownership is not covered in FFP and this could lead to a rise in clubs only owning a portion of a player’s rights.  This would keep the club’s initial costs low but force the club to share the future proceeds from the player’s sale with the third party.  The final concern is that some of the larger clubs are investing their excess capital in non-soccer related investments, like housing projects or a Real Madrid resort in the Middle East.  How does the return on this investment play into Financial Fair Play?  Will the bigger clubs be allowed to count their return as revenue and thus have larger budgets to invest in the team?  It is going to be a full time job to make sure that FFP creates an equal playing field from top to bottom, or if it is simply a guise of equality.

FFP Structure

As stated before the goal of financial fair play is to force clubs to operate on a balanced budget or be penalized by UEFA.  What that simply means is that clubs must make more money than they spend.  The tricky part of FFP is discerning what portions of a club’s income and expenses play into this equation.  Article 58-1 of the UEFA Club Licensing and Financial Fair Play Regulations 2012 edition states that relevant income is,

Gate receipts, broadcasting rights, sponsorship and advertising, commercial activities and other operating income, plus either profit on disposal of player registrations or income from disposal of player registrations, excess proceeds on disposal of tangible fixed assets and finance income. It does not include any non-monetary items or certain income from non-football operations. [8]

Article 58-2 follows and states that relevant expenses are,

Cost of sales, employee benefits expenses and other operating expenses, plus either amortisation or costs of acquiring player registrations, finance costs and dividends. It does not include depreciation/impairment of tangible fixed assets, amortisation/impairment of intangible fixed assets (other than player registrations), expenditure on youth development activities, expenditure on community development activities, any other non-monetary items, finance costs directly attributable to the construction of tangible fixed assets, tax expenses or certain expenses from non-football operations.[9]

UEFA has done their due diligence and clearly stated what income and expenses UEFA participants should apply in their financial statements necessary to receive a license.

Once a club has figured out what is relevant income and expenses, the club then submits a financial report stating whether the club finished with a positive balance.  Though it is not as easy as simply finishing in the green.  Article 61 states that there is an acceptable deviation of 5 million Euros.[10]  This number is subject to change for if the equity partner can supply the difference, up to a certain amount, the club is able to pass the solvency test.  As stated earlier, FFP is in a 5-year implementation process.  This process is directly felt in Article 61 because in 2013-14 and 2014-15 owners can contribute up to an additional 45 million Euros to help their club break-even and 30 million Euros in 2015-16, 2016-17, and 2017-18.  After which time UEFA will make a decision about a lower amount.

Another fact about Financial Fair Play is that the break-even requirement is also supplemented by an extended monitoring period.  This monitoring period is for the 2-years previous to the 2013/14 season and 3-years there after.  This means that clubs may have a deficit in one of the three years but, as long as they post a surplus for the aggregate of the three years, they pass the test.  So, a club can post a surplus in T-1, T-2 but not T,  as long as the reported deficit is within the acceptable deviation for all 3 years, then the club passes the break-even requirement.  This entire process is defined in detail in Article 63.

The break-even requirement is not the only stipulation that dominates the FFP regulations, though the toughest to comply with.  Article 62 lays out 4 indicators that are monitored to determine if a club is in jeopardy of being denied a license to compete.[11]  These indicators are Negative Equity, Break Even Result, Going Concern, and Overdue payables.  Break even has already been discussed and dissected.  Negative Equity is based on a net liabilities position that has deteriorated as compared to previous reporting periods.  This means that clubs must actively manage their debt to keep their debt at consistent or reduced levels that can be earnestly managed.  Negative indicator 62-3-iv protects all club employees from being denied payroll.  It means that clubs must be able to pay all club employees and other vendors it owes money to.   The final indicator UEFA uses to judge clubs is in article 62-3-i.  It is titled “Going Concern.” The indicator will be breached if “the auditor’s report of the club included an emphasis of a matter or a qualified opinion/conclusion in respect of going concern.”  This clause allows UEFA to reserve the right to expel clubs that are putting their club in dangerous waters financially, but outside of the previously stated regulations.  These are the major aspects of UEFA’s Financial Fair Play regulations that are used to grant clubs a one-year license to compete in UEFA competitions.

If a club or individual is found to be in breach of these regulations the UEFA Club Financial Control Body (CFCB) has the ability and power to levy penalties on guilty parties.  The CFCB is made up of two chambers, the investigatory chamber and the adjudicatory chamber.[12]  Members serve a four-year term with an unlimited number of terms.[13]  The Control Body adjudicatory chamber can, under article 21, warn, reprimand, fine, deduct points, withhold revenue from UEFA competitions, prohibit registration of new players in UEFA competition, restrict the number of players a club can have in UEFA competition, disqualify a club from competition, or withdraw a title or award.  Similarly, the body can warn, reprimand, fine, suspend, or ban an individual from competition.[14]  These penalties are the same penalties that have been used in the past.  What will legitimize the CFCB is the precedent they set and the equality they have among cases as they proceed with their task of defending the FFP regulations.  A key factor is that Article 28 states that prosecution is barred after five years of the incident.

The CFCB has already punished several clubs for failing to meet the FFP regulations.  As of September 11^th 2012 the UEFA CFCB imposed sanctions against 23 clubs (Index A) by withholding prize money and setting an October 15^th deadline for the clubs to prove that their finances are in order.[15][16]  UEFA has also disqualified three clubs, AEK Athens of Greece, Gyor of Hungary, and Besiktas of Turkey, from the 2012-13 Europa League Season.  These are the first of such actions, which exhibit that UEFA is deadly serious.  The problem is finding out to what degree the clubs breached one of the four indicators so as to provide a base line for comparing future decisions.

FFP Concerns

One innate problem with UEFA club football and the FFP regulations is that the tax policies throughout Europe vary greatly and can have a huge impact on a club’s final financials.  In Europe players’ salaries are all done on a net basis so that they can be compared from one league to another.  Each club must pay the players’ taxes.  These taxes can add up very quickly when you are paying a top player a net salary of 10 million Euros and the income tax rate is 50%.  Well, since his salary is net 10 million Euros, you end up paying 15 million Euros for his services.  That extra 5 million Euros is a big difference when you are competing against another club in a country with a 15% tax rate.

The top bracket in the Premier League, for example, is 50% on income above 200,000 pounds ($316,000). In Russia, for foreign nationals, there’s a 13% flat rate. In France, if President François Hollande follows through on his campaign pledge, iast will be 75% on anything over 1 million euro ($1.25 million).  What does this mean? The take-home pay of a soccer player grossing $10 million could be as little as $2.8 million in France and as much as $8.7 million in Russia.[17]

This article has it wrong, however, because many players negotiate their contracts on a net salary basis so as to avoid paying high taxes, and their club ends up footing the bill.  FFP does not address the differing tax issues.

There are also problems with the terms and language within the regulations.  Article 58 of FFP regulations was discussed earlier and, as stated, it lays out what is and is not “relevant income and expenses.”  There are loopholes in UEFA’s criteria.  In article 58-1 “finance income” is considered relevant.  That is a very vague term.  What is stopping a club from gambling on risky and complex financial instruments in an attempt to side step the regulations by classifying the gambles as “financial income” to get ahead?  Or, in another instance, to lend money to a wealthy owner’s parent company at an interest rate that is above the market rate?

Similarly in Article 58-2 “expenditure’s on community development activities” are not considered relevant expenses.  If Arsenal redevelops the area around their new Emirates Stadium, they are developing the community and reinvesting in it, but this redevelopment will surely bring a profit from the increased property values.  Where does this fit into the guidelines?  On a positive note youth development is a discounted expense.  It is the goal of FFP to promote self-sustaining clubs and youth development is one way to cut expenses on transfer fees.

The biggest problem with the Article 58-1-2 is the term “non-football operations.”  Real Madrid is building a resort in the UAE with its brand name attached.  Since the resort is using the Real Madrid brand, does that make it a football operation?  If the team plays preseason exhibition games there does that make it a football operation?  Others agree with this sentiment,  “If a company says ‘We’re genuinely trying to build a global brand, this is a global club and we think this is what this deal is worth,’ it becomes quite difficult for UEFA,” said Daniel Hall, a partner at global law firm Eversheds. “It’s something that is very much open to subjective opinion and that is where there may be legal disputes.”[18]  Where is the clarity?

The last part of Article 58-4 states, “Relevant income and expenses must be adjusted to reflect the fair value of any such transactions.”[19]  Fair Value will have to be interpreted on a case by case basis but whose judgment will be used to make this decision and how will equality be maintained?  Building on this point, Article 11-1 states that UEFA, the licensor, will “ensure equal treatment.”[20]  Article 11 also states in subset 2 that, “The licensor guarantees the license applicants full confidentiality with regard to all information submitted during the licensing process.  Anyone involved in the licensing process or appointed by the licensor must sign a confidentiality agreement before assuming their tasks.”[21]  How can anyone outside of the license process judge if equality or fair value is being achieved  when the entire process is private? The FFP regulations stated that the goal is to protect the long-term viability of club football.   The fans are the heart and soul of club football.  But if they do not know their club’s financial position, how are they supposed to hold their club accountable?  How are they supposed to hold UEFA accountable?  UEFA states it will be equal but the ability to be absolutely equal and confidential with such vague regulations guarantees that problems will arise.

It gets even more interesting in Article 15 “Special Permission.”  UEFA reserves the right under the FFP regulations to grant special permission to lower division clubs if they earn UEFA qualification on sporting merit but are unable to go through the licensing process. [22]  This part of the regulations allows UEFA one of the many loopholes in the FFP regulations to make decisions as they please.  This article, however, only applies to lower division clubs.

Article 61 covers the amounts club equity owners can contribute to make up the club’s deficit.  This clause is perplexing for FFP was created to eliminate the ability for owners with deep pockets to bank roll their club.  Now UEFA is simply limiting the amount they can contribute but, nonetheless, still sanctioning it.

Finally UEFA throws another loophole into the regulations with 62-3-i “Going Concern.” The indicator will be breached if “the auditor’s report of the club included an emphasis of a matter or a qualified opinion/conclusion in respect of going concern.”  Without a numerical value “going concern” is open for interpretation and possibly inequality.  The regulation is meant to give UEFA the ability to govern new situations that cannot be imagined.  But it also gives UEFA and the CFCB the possibility to abuse their power.

Proposed Changes

Financial Fair Play in its current form is flawed.  Club football in Europe needs regulations to protect the institution.  It is the institution of club football that is in jeopardy of failing, not the game itself, as Michel Platini said in the previously mentioned Wall Street Journal article.  He said, “To me, it is a game — with many, many things attached.  It has to remain a game, or nobody will save it.”[23]  A few clubs that enter bankruptcy do not threaten the game of soccer but the institution of club football.  It is an institution that is exciting but must be tweaked.  Where FFP fails  is that it is too vague and bloated with red tape.  Its ultimate failure is that it attempts to fix club football by regulating the clubs in UEFA competitions instead of regulating the market within which UEFA clubs participate.

The largest expenditure clubs must burden is that spent on players.  For example, Manchester City spent 107 percent of revenue on wages last season (2011-12), and Inter Milan 104 percent.[24]  Stephen Dobson points out that players can attract such large salaries due to the capitalistic nature of the labor market and the marketability players have, as they are able to reach millions via technology.[25]   Unfortunately, this market is inefficient; there is not enough supply of elite level players to supply the many clubs that need their services.  This is true with players’ salaries but more evident in the transfer market where teams will pay millions of Euros for a player’s services.  This expensive outlay of capital does not guarantee the necessary dividend payments consistent championships would supply.

The authors of “Soccernomics,” Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanskisaid, said “We studied the spending of forty English clubs between 1978 and 1997, and found that their outlay on transfers explained only 16 percent of their total variation in league position. By contrast, their spending on salaries explained a massive 92 percent of that variation.”[26]  Clubs spend millions on a new signing in hopes that one man will lead the team to glory.  It is apparent clubs are being repaid for one of their two major expenditures, player salaries, but transfer fees are wasteful spending.

To protect European club soccer UEFA must regulate the transfer market instead of regulating the clubs.  When there is a transfer it is compared against the last player to get the largest transfer fee.  A number that is going to continue to rise as there is no shortage of demand for the “best player in the world.”  What UEFA must do is either cap the amount of money a club can spend in the transfer market in one year, or cap the amount of money a club can spend on one player.  In doing so UEFA will establish a numerical value that can be applied to the best player in the world at any time.  If a club feels it is prudent to borrow money to invest in players within the cap then they can go ahead and roll the dice.  To expand you have to take risks, but the current FFP regulations limit a club’s ability to take those necessary risks and, in turn, simply protect the status quo consisting of clubs that currently have large revenue streams.

European club football is in a time of crisis, and just like a sovereign nation might issue a commodity prices freeze, UEFA needs to issue a transfer market fee freeze.  Players’ salaries have shown that they are directly related to a team’s return on expenditures, so I would advise a free market to continue.  Transfer fees in contrast are an unregulated market and one that does not equate to a desirable return on capital.

An updated FFP must also eliminate confidentiality.  Club football exists because of the fans that support their team and buy the team’s merchandise.   The fans and supporters have a right to know what is going on with their favorite club.   Additionally, UEFA should follow the DFB model and require clubs that participate in UEFA events to have a portion of their club owned by fans.  It may not be 50 percent, but involve the fans and make them a part of decisions.

To truly level the playing field, supporters must be given a larger voice in their club.  Financial statements must be made public and the transfer market has to be capped even if just for a crisis period to curb the exponential rise of transfer fees.  Are these solutions clubs would welcome?  That is the true conundrum of FFP.  The top clubs collude together to stabilize the market of European club football that ensures their financial dominance.  These top clubs will not agree to provisions that knock them from their position of dominance.  That is why any “so-called” Financial Fair Play regulations are not fair but a guise of equality to portray to the media and fans.

Conclusion

UEFA’s FFP is an honest try to fix the crisis in European club soccer, but it is by no means the solution.  It does a good job of beginning the process and conversation of protecting club football.  It is simply red tape that the larger clubs will be able to find ways through, for they have the resources to do so.  This red tape was brought on by capitalist expansion.

With the first major television rights deal European football has been on an explosive global expansion.  Football clubs were once simple local institutions where the fans were the club and the club was the fans.  Clubs like Millwall where Ultras define ‘“Millwallism” as a state of living and breathing relationship for one’s club that defines what it means.’[27]  As technology infiltrated European clubs it grew their ability to touch lives globally but also distanced them from those that matter most, the ones that were there from the very beginning.  They are the local, hometown fans that defined the club and the club defines them.  Now clubs must worry about the viewership of fans in remote parts of the world when their club is located in London, England for example.  Technology has distanced European club football from those that first defined the institution and must now find a way to balance them in the global and local marketplace.

The statement expresses “solidarity” with the people of Gaza, and specifically mentions the bombing of a football stadium that resulted in the deaths of four teenage boys. (The Israel Defense Forces claimed the soccer stadium was being used as weapons depot and launching site by Hamas). The footballer’s petition also mentions the arrest of two professional Palestinian footballers. And it insists that it would be immoral, in this context, for Israel to host the upcoming UEFA U-21 Championship. Having this event in Israel, the statement argues, would be a violation of “sporting values.”

There have been such protests before by footballers. The Egyptian international Mohamed Aboutrika famously bared a shirt saying “Sympathize With Gaza” during the African Cup of Nations in Ghana in 2008 (below), and Kanoute had similarly shown a shirt that read “Palestina” after scoring a goal for Seville in 2009.

Still, the new petition represents a more sustained action that draws together a powerful group of players. The size of the petition suggests interestingly some of the ways in which the exchanges and connections built within locker-rooms and on the pitch can become the basis for political mobilization.

The petition is part of a much longer history. The Palestine Football Association was founded in 1928 and became a member of FIFA in that year, and competed in tournaments during the next decades. When Israel was founded in 1948 the Association was replaced by the Israeli Football Association, which joined the Asian Football Confederation in 1954. The AFC covers the largest geographical area of any in the world, stretching from Japan to the Middle East, and it became the site of increasing political pressure against Israel which culminated in the expulsion of the state from the Confederation in 1974.

This action followed the precedent set by the African Football Confederation, which had expelled South Africa in 1958. The African nations were ultimately successful in pressuring FIFA to refuse South African membership, and the country was unable to compete in international competition until it fielded a multi-racial team in the early 1990s.

The situation with Israel was different, since FIFA did not officially outlaw the Israel Football Federation, which occasionally participated in competitions, despite the fact that it did not have a Confederation to play in. By the early 1990s, the IFA petitioned successfully to join UEFA, gaining full membership in 1994. That inclusion is, of course, weighted with symbolism: like Turkey, Israel competes in UEFA competitions such as the European Cup, while the countries that surround it continue to compete in the Asian Football Confederation.

And what of that other Football Federation — that of Palestine? Though it too traces its genealogy back to the 1928 Palestine Football Association. But it was only in 1998, with the creation of the Palestinian National Authority, that a separate Palestinian Football Association was founded. Accepted by both FIFA and the Asian Football Confederation, Palestine has fielded national teams in the years since then.

The story of the team’s campaign to qualify for the 2006 World Cup is documented in a film called Goal Dreams. That team, bankrolled by local businessmen, was about as cosmopolitan as it gets, bringing together local players from the West Bank and Gaza with Palestinians in Chile and one university player from the U.S. Descendants of Palestinian immigrants, they believed in the mission of the team. But on the pitch, their playing styles clashed, and they didn’t even have a common language to speak. Their practices were at times rendered impossible as certain players were unable to get in and out of the West Bank. In telling this story, Goal Dreams serves as a kind of anti-sports film: as it begins, you think it might be the story of triumph over adversity and the capacity of sport to unify and heal. Instead, it’s a case study in how limited means, political pressure, and the lack of a sustainable athletic program can fritter away dreams of athletic glory.

Many, including Michel Platini, have over the years dreamed that football can help bring peace and understanding to the region. In 2011 a new stadium was opened for the Palestinian Federation, funded by several European countries and FIFA. Lilian Thuram went on a goodwill tour to the region and attended the opening of the stadium. And yet the day when we will see a goodwill Palestine vs. Israel match seems quite far off.

The situation in Palestine today interestingly parallels that in Catalonia where, as Sid Lowe recounts in an excellent recent video aspirations for autonomy have long found a powerful expression on the football pitch. As demands for autonomy increase there, football continues to play a critical political role. In addition to it’s de facto “national” team, Barcelona, Catalonia also has it’s own “national” team made up of volunteers, who have in the past made a good showing on the pitch.

But Palestine, of course, is not Catalonia. That two Football Federations, and indeed two Football Confederations, co-exist so uneasily within a tiny part of the world is just one symptom of the endless, churning, complications of the story of Israel and Palestine.

The prior examples of Algeria and South Africa — and more recently events in Egypt — teach us that football can at times play a critical role in broader political change. But it’s difficult to predict how this will play out in the case of Palestine. Will the petition of the 62 footballers end up being part of some kind of shift in the political debate? How will UEFA respond in some way to the demand posed by these footballers? In the end, the petition is likely to end up little more than a footnote in a larger, tortuous history. But if it helps establish the idea that footballers can and should speak their minds on political issues, it may be part of a meaningful shift in the way athletes think about their political selves, and their political roles, in the roiling conflicts to come.

Football is, at the very least, is a part of the creative economy. According to the New England Foundation for the Arts, the creative economy refers to a sector of the economy that derives its value from producing and distributing “cultural goods and services that impact the economy by generating jobs, revenue, and quality of life.” Linking football to the creative economy likens football to artists, cultural nonprofit organizations, and creative businesses. This means that we can liken footballers to actors, dancers, sculptors, painters, educators, and other job paths associated with enriching society with a vibrant culture.
We can find evidence for thinking about football as generating the product of culture by looking at a few examples. First and most notably, many countries’ politics are linked to football. The best exemplar in the last decade is Silvio Berlusconi. He made his rise to prominence in football with his involvement in AC Milan’s top administration. After all, he named his political party after a football chant—Forza Italia!

I argue that football is part of this creative economy because it produces and distributes cultural goods that directly impact quality of life and the connections between people. We first must take up the fact that football impacts the quality of people’s lives because this will lead us to understand the way that it creates jobs.
Soccer impacts the quality of life because the experience connects us with others and allows us to escape the pain, troubles, and hurt that we experience in our daily lives. Jordi Royo, a psychologist at the Palliative Care Unit and Home Care Team at the Fundacio Hospital Sant Jaume y Santa Magdalena in Mataró, Spain, demonstrated in a poster that cancer patients’ symptoms were lessened or alleviated while watching soccer matches. But we don’t need to be cancer patients to understand how soccer shapes our views toward life.
A soccer game is a performance. The players are actors in a drama whose laws govern play but do not predetermine it. The spectators come from different perspectives on the world to share the game. We typically think of soccer as being played in blue-collar, industrial cities, whose workforce turns out to support the local team; yet, (as Pelada would remind us) soccer is also played in schools, in jails, and by construction workers. And now, more than ever, soccer is a global game that brings together not only working class laborers in industrial centers but also white-collar workers from cultural centers such as Barcelona, Milan, Munich, and Liverpool. In this way, soccer becomes a cultural institution that defines our own identity.
The cultural centers I mentioned above were large industrial centers before they were cultural centers with outstanding soccer clubs. Kuper and Szymanski, authors of the book Soccernomics, point out that the aforementioned cities were industrial towns during the early development of the sport. These industrial cities have become cultural centers because they forged an identity from their soccer teams. Where capital cities focused on the standard cultural products such as fine arts, museums, government institutions, and business headquarters that come along with being a capital, these industrial cities defined themselves by their soccer clubs because it was a comparison point between cities

Hooliganism would seem to be a phenomenon that threatens the nexus between people because it pits city, ethnic, and class identities against each other in a violent way. Hooliganism though is universally derided as a major problem for the game. It is something that nearly anyone can recognize. Thus hooliganism is a structure—that even though it pits people against each other—is part of the common shared language that surrounds soccer. Hooliganism is a problem because it is a disjunction between seeing the big picture and hyper-focusing on certain particulars. The hooligan focuses on the fact that other fans belong to a certain group-identity that supports an opposing team and thus must themselves be bad. He loses his ability to see the contextual picture of how violence destroys his connection to the world because of the intoxication that he feels when connecting to a few radicals. As the hooligan focuses on his own identity, he loses sight of the sport and its creative power.

Soccer is a creative enterprise that connects people across political, geographic, and temporal boundaries. It is creative both because of the “product” the players produce on the field, but also because of the “products” the fans make, such as fan tributes, blogs, and cultural memes (chants, songs, fan clubs, etc.). Soccer contributes to humanity because it allows people to create new ideas and cultural institutions. Soccer then is part of the creative economy, because it emphasizes our humanity. And while some people become exorbitantly rich, the majority of people involved in football seek to create experience within a domain that underlines our connections to one another as human beings.

In 2005, Malcom Glazer used the financial tool of a leveraged buyout (LBO) to purchase Manchester United for $1.5 billion and make the company private. In the end, I would argue, this action ultimately hampered the team’s ability to keep or purchase new star players. A leveraged buyout is where the takeover artist will borrow the majority of the cost to purchase the new company against the company’s future cash flows and current assets. More often than not in a LBO the new owners will have to sell key parts of the new business to pay down the debt. In the case of a soccer club their assets are their stadium and training grounds as well as their players. Manchester United, for instance, sold Cristiano Ronaldo to Real Madrid for a record transfer fee of  $132 million. Even with the sale of Ronaldo, United has been unable to manage their mountainous debt payments and recently reissued shares of the club on the New York Stock Exchange for public purchase. Glazer raised $300 million dollars in the IPO, half will be used to pay down the $663 million in remaining debt. NYT blogger Graham Ruthven claims Sir Alex Ferguson may even benefit financially from the IPO. The IPO took place on Friday August 10th, with a $14 price. A price that was significantly supported by the underwriters of the IPO throughout the day.  But what if the $800 million spent on interest payments and banking fees could have instead been spent on increasing the player and fan experience at Manchester United? Even with the new issuance, control of the club will be retained by the Glazer family as they will retain 67% of B shares which have voting power, so little will likely change in the general approach taken to the finances of the club.

As you can see from the photograph below, the actions by Glazer have outraged many fans of Manchester United, who consider that he has in some ways taken the club from them. They have a point. After all, as a “brand” a club is not only made up of it’s players and managers, but also of the fans and the tradition they carry with them.

Another instance of over spending and debt damaging a club is Leeds United, formally of the Premier League. Rather than piling on debt through a LBO , the club borrowed to purchase players. Leeds were a big club in the 1980s and 1990s, culminating in a Champions League semi-final place in 2001. But the club was ultimately undone by their Chairman Peter Ridsdale’s idea to go for it. He proceeded to use shady financial products to purchase players with borrowed money using future ticket sales as collateral. Essentially the fans loyalty. Ultimately it failed and the club had to sell assets at a blistering pace as the club entered administration: the stadium Elland Road (pictured below), training ground at Thorp Arch, and any player that was worth a nickel, including some considered to be part of England’s golden generation. Great players were sold at a severe discount due to the team’s financial troubles. The club also suffered demotion to England’s third tier and have since had to claw themselves back from the brink of extinction.

The idea of corporate borrowing is nothing new. Most companies must borrow to fund future growth. But there is a line between intelligent borrowing and getting caught in a credit crunch. Just like the many U.S. home owners who over-extended themselves between 2003 and 2008, soccer clubs may soon find themselves unable to pay their debts. In Europe, several countries — Spain, Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Italy — are desperately trying to reorganize its debt in order to make payments. Fiorentino Perez, the Chairman of Real Madrid and creator of the “Galacticos” is in the midst of de-leveraging in his real business, A.C.S., or Actividades de Construcción y Servicios. The company is one of the largest building services companies in the world. As he has done with Real Madrid, Perez has orchestrated huge loans, creating $12 billion in debt that the company has since had to sell assets to cover. Real Madrid, meanwhile, is currently $500 million in debt because of the money it has spent creating the “Galacticos” (pictured below). Many in business have believed that  borrowing to fund instant success is the winning formula.But the formula only works as long as growth outpaces debt obligations.

The authors of the book “Soccernomics,” Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski, make a compelling argument that the outlandish transfer costs that have become the norm in professional soccer are not the way to success. “We studied the spending of forty English clubs between 1978 and 1997, and found that their outlay on transfers explained only 16 percent of their total variation in league position. By contrast, their spending on salaries explained a massive 92 percent of the variation” (48). They conclude that the market for player wages is efficient while the transfer market is well not efficient. You can see this inefficiency at work in many cases. Tottenham Hotspurs, for instance, transferred Jermaine Defore to Portsmouth and Robbie Keane to Liverpool for a combined $52 million only to bring them back a year later under new manager Harry Redknapp. Soccernomics provides the ultimate example of transfer market inefficiency. “In 1983 AC Milan spotted a talented young black forward playing for Watford. The word is that the player Milan liked was John Barnes, and that it then confused him with his fellow black teammate Luther Blisett.” Milan bought Blisett. This type of almost comical folly may be why, down the road, Milan has had to sell two of their most valuable players this summer to pay down debt — Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Thiago Silva (below), both to now super-wealthy club Paris Saint-Germain. AC Milan has run a total deficit of  245.4 million euros in the last 5 years. The spending of some of the biggest football clubs in the world is out of control.

Many clubs feel that they must take on such debt to keep up with the “Jones’s” — clubs like Manchester City and Chelsea, whose  billionaire owners are not worried about the bottom line of the clubs they own. Sheik Mansour from Qatar bought Man City for a measly $330 million but then proceeded to spend close to double that on stocking his team with talented players. He was only following the lead of Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich (pictured below). UEFA reported that more than a quarter of the 650 soccer teams in Europe are spending $16.50 for every $13.50  of revenue. Running a deficit is fine for the super rich owners who care about nothing else than winning. Unfortunately not every team is owned by an owner with bottomless pockets. The massive television contracts in Europe are giving clubs increasing revenue. In June 2012 the English Premier League signed a record $4.7 billion/3 year television deal and the German Bundesliga signed a $3.2 billion/4 year deal. The deals were a 72% and 52% increase over the previous deals respectively. Compare those numbers with the $115 million Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. paid for the television rights to the Premier League in 1992. But even with the rising revenue teams are still forced to borrow to compete with the billionaire owners of the world. European teams currently run a collective $1.5 billion deficit.

Some are trying to stop the process. Michel Platini (pictured below) has launched the Financial Fair Play (FFP) plan, which is meant to force European clubs to balance their books by the 2013/14 season. If clubs fail to balance their books they will be excluded from UEFA competitions.But what if Real Madrid, Inter Milan, Manchester United, Chelsea, Barcelona, Bayern Munich, Manchester City refuse to follow the rule and are kicked out of the Champions League. Mr. Platini, what happens then? Riddle me that?

Perhaps clubs will have to start running teams like my namesake, Arsene Wenger. Are we related? I  guess we will never know. He is a fantastic manager though. It is said Wenger uses statistics to judge a players future output on the field compared rather than over-evaluating a player’s past performances. He has a degree in Economic Sciences from the University of Strasburg in France: from an economic perspective, this player evaluation model makes much more sense than the approach taken by other clubs. It is similar to judging a blue chip stock. You don’t make your decision to invest on the stock’s previous performance but attempt to judge its future performance by looking at the fundamentals of the company presented in their financial reports. As players, our statistics are our financial reports.

Perhaps the Financial Fair Play plan will alter a shift in professional soccer in Europe. Barbara Berlusconi has underlined the need for change: “Soccer teams will have to transform into proper companies. If you can only spend what you get, then you have to keep costs in check and increase revenue. It’s a challenge that can become an opportunity.” This change in soccer will be a positive one if it improves what is produced on the field, or simply forces owners to be smarter with how they spend their money. The thing is soccer clubs are not like regular companies. The authors of Soccernomics say it best: “The business of soccer is soccer,” they note, and clubs “are more like musems: public-spirited organizations that aim to serve the community while remaining reasonably solvent.” The irony of what is happening today in so many clubs is that running a soccer club with pressure to make money may ultimately contradict its stated goal of winning on the field!

On Friday, July 6, the French Football Federation announced that it would ban the wearing of hijab during all organized competitions held in France. The Federation declared that in doing so it was fulfilling its “duty to respect the constitutional and legislative principles of secularism that prevails in our country and features in its statutes.”

The decision came one day after the International Football Association Board — the body within FIFA that governs the laws of the game — unanimously declared that it would, for a “trial period,” allow players to wear the hijab during international competitions. France, then, is seeking to carve out an exception to an international ruling, one that links its football regulations to a broad set of laws that ban veils in public schools and public administration, as well as banning the burqa in all public spaces.

(The hijab covers the hair and neck; generally the term “veils” is used to describe coverings that also cover part of the face, though the usage varies quite a bit; and a burqacovers the entire face).

Scholars including Joan Scott and John Bowen have analyzed the history of these broader debates in rich detail, tying them both to longer colonial histories and contemporary battles over secularism, Islam, and immigration in France. The banning of the hijab from the football pitch was initially a relatively minor subplot in these broader battles over veils, hijab, and burqas in Europe and Canada. But the involvement of FIFA, the Iranian government, a Jordanian Prince, and the United Nations have helped to transform the terrain of football into an increasingly important battleground over the hijab.

The recent controversies are part of a longer, complex story of the presence of Muslim women in football, a topic nicely examined by Risa Isard on the Soccer Politics blog.  But their more immediate background goes back to 2007. In that year, in Quebec, a referee at Under-12 girls’ soccer tournament ordered an 11-year-old player named Asmahan Mansour (pictured below) to remove the hijab she was wearing during play. She refused, and was told she would have to leave the field. As Mansour later explained: “I think it’s pathetic, really, ’cause it’s [the head scarf] tucked in my shirt.”

In a powerful — but since little-reported — show of solidarity, her entire team along with four others playing in the tournament protested, refusing to continue playing unless Mansour was allowed to play. Their instant reaction to the decision speaks volumes. To them, it seems, Mansour’s hijab was a normal and unproblematic part of their daily lives as players, and the insistence that she remove it seemed an intolerable intervention — one they were so insulted by that they preferred to forfeit than to accept it.

Part of the reason for the strong reaction the girls had to the referee’s intervention is that Quebec’s position was at odds with that of other regions of Canada. In Ontario, for instance — and in Ottawa, where Mansour was from — officials and referees had allowed girls to wear the hijab as long as it was properly tucked into clothing so as not to present a hazard on the field. But the intervention on the football pitch was part of a broader pattern in Quebec, which like France has banned the burqa in all public spaces.

Mansour’s case was referred to the International Football Association Board (IFAB) in March 2007. They agreed with the decision of the referee, saying that Law 4 of the Rules of the Game listed the articles players could wear, and did not include headscarves. “If you play football there’s a set of laws and rules, and law four outlines the basic equipment,” said one IFAB member. “It’s absolutely right to be sensitive to people’s thoughts and philosophies, but equally there has to be a set of laws that are adhered to, and we favour law four being adhered to.”

The IFAB decision was, perhaps intentionally, vague: no mention was made of safety, the banning of religious or political symbols, or other reasons to prevent women from wearing a hijab. The conclusion was just that the current laws didn’t allow them to do so. In an interview, legal scholar Linda Sheryl Greene explores the potential implications of the decision. What became clear over time was that it was a precedent-setting decision in the world of football. Though national federations still had leeway about how they dealt with the issue in local competitions, the FIFA decision had a necessary trickle-down effect: federations couldn’t place players who insisted on wearing the hijab in teams in international competition.

As importantly, FIFA became the first global international organization to officially take up the issue of the hijab as a human rights issue. (The European Union Court had, on previous occasions, upheld the banning of hijab in both France and Turkey, rebuffing legal activists who claimed they were violations of human rights; but these decisions are territorially limited.) As a result, FIFA’s decision took on a kind of symbolic importance that the members of the organization had perhaps not, at first, expected it would.

The 2007 decision didn’t provide much guidance for subsequent attempts to justify the decision. After all, IFAB can change the Laws of the Game, as they have done on frequent occasions: so why not change them to allow hijab? In response to questions and pressure about the decision, however, FIFA and national federations offered a variety of justifications for the ban. One of the most frequent has been to insist that hijabs pose a safety hazard — that they could get caught during play, for instance, and perhaps strangle a player. This particular argument has always seemed like it would collapse under the weight of its own absurdity. After all, long hair is more likely to get pulled or tangled in play. And one could ask: if wearing something that covers your head poses a danger to players, why are goal-keepers allowed to do so according to Law 4, as Petr Cech famously does to protect his skull in the wake of an injury received on the pitch? The safety argument was probably deployed because it seemed the least controversial, a way to skirt the obvious cultural and religious struggles at work in this debate. The problem for those who wanted to use it to stop the approval of the hijab is that it was also relatively easy to confront: all that was needed was to develop a hijab that was relatively tight and attached with velcro (the way Cech’s headgear is) to avoid the danger of it being stuck around a player’s neck.

Another problem for FIFA is that there has, at least to my knowledge, never been any concern expressed by players themselves about the hijab. Indeed, like the girls in Quebec who walked off the field in 2007, many players have supported the rights of teammates to play while wearing one. The global player’s organization FIFPro came out in support of lifting the ban on veils, for instance. The organization Right2Wear has been advocating at the grassroots for women’s right to wear headscarves while playing football.

Such organizations on their own, however, probably would not have had the clout to reverse FIFA’s decision. Unlike France, Quebec, or Europe more broadly — where the bans on veils and burqas have been contested but never successfully overturned—FIFA has to deal with powerful internal constituencies who opposed their ruling on the hijab. For football federations from North Africa, the Middle East, and Asia seeking to develop the women’s game, the ban on the hijab represented a serious obstacle. Given the increasingly important role played by the region within FIFA, the association began as an ideal site for international political pressure against the ban.

The process of reversing the ban began in 2011, when FIFA officials stopped the Iranian national women’s team from playing in an Olympic qualifying game because their players were wearing hijab. The team was literally minutes from entering the field when they were told they could not play, though FIFA later claimed that the Iranian federation had been warned in advance they would not be allowed to play. Interestingly, during that incident FIFA justified the ban on hijab on the basis of regulations that outlaw the presence of “politics or religion” on uniforms, not based on the safety dangers cited in 2007. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad attacked FIFA, referring to them as “dictators” and “colonialists,” while the Iranian ambassador to Jordan referred to the leaders of the international footballing organization as “extremists.”

As FIFA cynics pointed out at the time, the organization was perhaps the only one in the world capable of making Ahmadinejad sympathetic to a broader global consituency — especially on the issue of women’s rights. If Iran had been on its own in confronting FIFA, they might not have made much headway. But others also began mobilizing to criticize the ban. Jordan’s Prince Ali Bin Al Hussein took up the cause, and in March 2012 insisted that FIFA should overturn the ban. He argued that this decision was vital “to ensure that all women are able to play football at all levels without any barriers or discrimination.” (Jordan’s national women’s team had been forced not to select certain players for international competition because they wished to wear the hijab when they were playing.) And a United Nations sports advisor wrote to FIFA also urging them to lift the ban, arguing that “FIFA has the responsibility to ensure that everyone has an equal chance to participate in football.”

In March of this past year, FIFA voted to end the ban and allow players on the pitch in new, specially-designed, velcro-fastened hijab. Besides spurring on the creation of a whole new branch of athletic wear — one can imagining smiling Nike and Adidas executives reading the news — this was a significant reversal.

It was, however, still tentative, for the issue of the safety of the hijab was still to be taken up by medical specialists at FIFA. Finally, on July 5, a full — if still temporary — approval of the hijab in international women’s play was passed by FIFA, prompting much celebration in some quarters, and the immediate refusal of the principle by the French Football Federation.

There will, undoubtedly, be more twists and turns to this issue. Globally, the hijab has become a crossroads for political and religious conflict, and it should come as no surprise that this is true in football, too. Yet there is something fascinating about this struggle over the right to play football in a hijab because of the nub of contradictions at work. Though they often used the pretext of player safety, what underlies the decisions of authorities who have banned the hijab is the idea that they were simultaneously protecting women from the veil and protecting the turf from expressions of worn Islamic religious identification. Those who have insisted that women and girls be allowed to play wearing the hijab have argued that to deny them this right is an attack against their freedom and equality. For the moment, the latter argument has — at least tentatively — won the day. This means that girls and women will no longer be asked to make a choice between the hijab and playing the game they love.

In the long-running debates over the banning of veils from French public schools, a minority of critics have persistently insisted on the fundamentally contradictory nature of such regulations. If the goal is to encourage the emancipation of women from patriarchal structures, how is excluding them from school the answer? And sociologists who interviewed the girls who were wearing veils to school in the 1980s and early 1990s found that their motivations, as well as their religious convictions, were extremely diverse and more often expressions of cultural or community pride — or a mechanism to avoid unwanted attention from boys — than the result of pressure from families.

Wearing a hijab onto the football pitch is an inherently complicated act. It is difficult to argue that, in doing so, girls and women are demonstrating deep submission to patriarchal gender constructions, for in the very act of participating in an intense, competitive, and highly public athletic contest they are pushing the boundaries of such constructions. From the beginning, the worry about the implications of wearing a hijab on the pitch has come from referees, national federations, and FIFA authorities, rather than from players. Many of them — like 11-year-old Mansour in 2007 — seem to feel none of the conflict or contradictions that those supervising their play feel about the garment.

Shireen Ahmen has recently written about the experience of playing in a hijab, describing with a mix of humor and irritation the constant questions she gets about doing so. Her piece asks readers to simply understand that wearing a hijab is “how I play. How I CHOOSE to play.” To those who ask her questions on the pitch — “Isn’t it hot?” — she offers: “I am not averse to answering questions. Just not in the middle of a match. Ask me after. I am happy to provide my number, a dinner invitation and a Tariq Ramadan website.” And though she imagines “scoring 3 goals and performing in some Messi-like manner whereby achieving a great victory for all oppressed Muslim women and earning the respect and acceptance of these nimrods,” in fact — just like any player — the reality is more banal. “Some games I play well. Some games I get called for illegal slide-tackles.” Ahmen’s piece offers precisely what we need more of now: an understanding of the lives of “hijabi footballers” as she calls them, that gets us back to reality on the pitch of play — and the play of individuality and community that is ultimately what football is about.

The official debate about the hijab in football is clearly far from over. Authorities in Quebec seem committed to pushing back against FIFA’s new rules, and have curiously brought the story full circle: just days after the ruling, they banned Rayane Benatti, a 9-year-old girl, from playing in a youth match in a hijab. They explained that they would wait until the International Football Association Board determined precisely what type of hijab could be worn (a decision they will take in October) before allowing any girls to play wearing them. But France and Quebec will likely be increasingly isolated in this stance; indeed, the Montreal Gazette itself published a strong editorial attacking the regional football association’s action.

Now that the hijab has been allowed back on the pitch by FIFA, perhaps football can help to confront and unwind the simplistic debates that have surrounded the issue for too long. After all, the day may not be too long off when a player in a hijab scores the winning goal for a country — maybe even England or Germany — in the Olympics or the World Cup, producing an image of triumph and belonging that can serve to trouble the other images of women veiled that govern and shape much debate in Europe on this topic. To allow the hijab on the pitch is to allow football to do the work that it can, at its best, do so well: confusing certainties, upending easy affiliations, and reminding us that no one has a monopoly on the future.

Each has different styles to rearing football prodigies, but the goal is the same, to produce players to play for the first team. Ajax looks at their young players as a business investment, giving them everything they need to succeed and pays particular attention to not wearing their young athletes out for fear of losing their capital.  And they certainly should for they routinely sell players they have trained in their academy for millions of euros. Their academy stresses that development and technique is the key to success. Rarely are wins and losses considered when determining which players will make it to the next level at such a young age.

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Barcelona begins enrolling players in their academy (pictured above) at age 7, and they follow a rigorous schedule with little time for unsanctioned activities from dawn until dusk. While Spain and the Netherlands let the football tutelage specifically up to the clubs, France also employs a national training center in addition to club academies. These approaches are time proven to produce world class footballers that save their parent club’s millions in transfer fees. They have a structured plan to develop players and give them all the tools necessary to achieve. The question is, however, whether they give them the ability to live a normal childhood. People will argue that great players were never normal but what about the children who won’t earn World Footballer of the year? One of the costs of the academy system is that the single-minded focus on athletic training can leave players who ultimately don’t make it in the professional world without alternative skills or professional options.

For aspiring soccer players in the United States there is no real equivalent to these structured environments. Athletes are largely left to their own devices to figure out how to succeed. That is what I experienced growing up in Pennsyvlania.

I began my playing career like most young American children — in youth soccer. Seriously, is there a handbook somewhere that instructs all parents to enroll their children in youth soccer? It seems like almost everyone played on one soccer team or another during their childhood. But most won’t remember the team’s name — or the rules of the game for that matter. I, however, found a love for the game and progressed from one local youth select team to the next. First it was a county team, then a regional team, and then my local club team, Leeds United — which later became Pennsylvania Classics.

This is where Zarek and I began playing together at age 11. Although we played many games, it’s not clear to me now how many of them were truly worthwhile. We did a lot of traveling with Pennsylvania Classics and other select teams simply to get more practice and more exposure. I also competed for my high school team for three months of the year. That was a great social experience, but it disrupted my practice schedule with my club team. The other select teams were often apart of the  U.S. Youth Soccer Olympic Development Program. In trying to progress towards the highest levels of the game, we tried to balance playing for these different teams as well as Pennsylvania Classics, but it wasn’t always easy.

Among players, everyone’s goal was to be asked to join the U.S. U-17 Men’s national team residency program in Bradenton, Florida. That program was the only place were you could get a high level of training on a daily basis. The program was modeled after the French Football Federation’s National Institute of Football at Clairefontaine. You could be scouted for U.S. U-17 team with Pennsylvania Classics at any of the number of tournaments we played in or on any of the various Olympic Development Teams. There was no clear path to attain the ultimate goal so we tried to do it all.

U.S. Soccer finally figured out that players, myself included, were playing way to many games with little meaning. So, they created the U.S. Soccer Development Academy Program; a league that has  78 clubs in the U.S. and Canada and  culminates each year with a National Championship game. The “Development Academy” lays out a structured format for all elite players to compete against each other. It also has a set of guidelines for coaching instruction and puts an emphasis on development over winning games. Players are asked to forgo their other commitments, specifically high school soccer. This eliminates the need to play for multiple teams and allows them to concentrate on one avenue for success. At the same time, as Kyle Martino has noted, while high school soccer may disrupt club practices, it does provide an important avenue for social growth. The question is how to balance a pursuit of a professional dream and a normal childhood. Is it even possible?

My team later joined the development academy and saw a marked improvement in the competition. The Montreal Impact Academy is going to field two teams to join this very league in the coming year in the U-15/16 division and U-17/18.  Outside of the MLS clubs with youth teams in the “Development Academy,” there is no direct path for youth players to take to a professional team.

Many MLS clubs are giving their youth players the support and coaching they need but most importantly a clear path to the first team. Youth players can achieve their goal by being offered a Homegrown Contract which allows them to sign for the MLS team without entering the draft. Andrew Lewellmen argues that Homegrown Contracts are the future of MLS as the league looks to capitalize on its investment in youth systems. The Montreal Impact have a very defined youth academy and have already shown that they are willing to sign deserving players to homegrown contracts. Our first team often plays the academy team; this gives them an opportunity to see the level they must attain. The Impact have stated that they modeled their academy off of the famed youth systems in France, Spain and the Netherlands mentioned above  but curtailed it to specifically support the Quebec soccer community. It is set up with soccer schools, U-12 and U-14 teams that compete in the Quebec soccer league. U-16 and U-18 teams that will compete in the U.S. Soccer Development Academy and the U-21 team that will compete in the Canadian Soccer League.  Karl Ouimette is a prime example of progressing through the academy as he is the first Montreal Impact player to be signed to a homegrown contract. Karl signed on June 5th 2012 and he commented that, “Being the first homegrown player is an honor and it is due to all the hard work I did with the academy. It also proves that the academy program trains players to be able to play with the first team.” He has certainly proven that the academy is a strong component of any successful club and specifically the Impact.

The club draws players from other Quebec clubs that have close to 85,000 players. The academy has a full time staff that is focused solely on coaching soccer players. Players in the Montreal Academy system have an advantage because they are seen on a regular basis by the coaches and administration of the first team. This would hopefully lead to a professional contract similar to Karl’s. Montreal is not the only MLS team with a youth system, every other club has an academy in some form or another. Most recently Toronto FC just unveiled their new academy structure that is looking to compete with the NCAA. In contrast I went to college at Duke University and eventually entered the MLS draft. Things may have been different had I had the opportunity to play for an MLS academy team before college. I certainly would have benefited from competing against better players. Though I do agree with Alexi Lalas, I feel that I was able to mature and grow as a person in college and learned to handle myself for the x number of hours that I was not on the field. I also grew considerably as a player. Could I have grown more if I had played in a less restrictive NCAA regulated environment where a prolonged season replicated a professional season? Possibly, but I will never know. I enjoyed my time in college and think it was a beneficial experience for me, not to mention I value my education. Is college for everyone, clearly not. Each player must figure out what is best for them.

There is no right way to accomplish your dreams but it is hard to argue that MLS academy systems and most European academies are giving players the tools necessary to succeed. What you will see is a movement to the MLS academy system and more and more players will be produced from the academies. The question is are all of these academies the correct balance of soccer and life at such a young age? At the end of the day there is no right answer for everyone, each individual is different and will take a different route to achieve their goals. Talent will always be recognized one way or another.

It was incredible for close to 60,000 supporters to come out and show their support for the team and the organization. We felt their passion again during our recent game against Sporting Kansas City, when they clearly let their displeasure with the events on the field be known. It shows that they truly care about Impact de Montréal and the city.

One of the most moving shows of support came during the game against the Columbus Crew on July 8th. My roommate Zarek Valentin commented on  twitter that the fans were unbelievable. We had suffered a few tough losses at that point in the season, and went down a goal in the middle of the second half. But no one left for the exits early. I was watching from the stands and saw only two men leave — but they returned two minutes later with fresh beers knowing it was going to be an exciting finish. Without the fans’ support we couldn’t have clawed back from the one goal deficit and eventually won the game. It was a special feeling those last 20 minutes as you could see the team recover mentally from the deficit and begin to earn the win as the excitement in the stadium got stronger and stronger. It was our fans that produced the collective feeling of belief and unity that helped the players on the field succeed. The fans truly were the 12th man, “La Garde.” They exuded a passion for the game and for our team that is typical of the city. All the players on the team are very thankful for the support for you have helped us through some tough times this year!

As I saw clearly from the reactions to my first post both here on the blog and on twitter, residents of Quebec and specifically Montréal really throw themselves into a cause or event they believe in. I have already commented that I was struck this year by the passion and effort the students of Montréal showed as they opposed laws they found unjust. It was a new experience for me moving from the States and seeing the scale of these protests. Though I don’t know enough about the details of the issue and am not endorsing or opposing their stand, I feel one must respect the commitment they showed to their cause, something that seems ingrained in the culture of the city. In my reading of “A People’s History of Quebec” I learned about the politics surrounding Bill 101 on August 26, 1977 — which parents of current university students must remember — which stipulated the use of French in government and other official capacities. At that time, residents in Montreal also stood up, supporting the culture and Bill they believed in. In the same way, this generation of students marched and stood for their beliefs.

Standing for what one believes in is clearly not a new idea to residents of Montréal, and it is something Impact de  Montréal supporters group “les Ultras” do for 90 minutes — pun intended. Since I first saw their massive 60 foot banner and heard their support during my first home game in the Olympic stadium, I have been intrigued by our supporter groups les Ultras as well as 127 Montréal. I’m probably biased — and have yet to see the Sons of Ben, the Timbers Army, or the supporters of the Seattle Sounders in person, but the Impact ultras are one of the best supporters group in the MLS I have seen thus far in my short career.

I had a chance to chat with one of the members of the ultras, Eric Chenoix, about their organization which recently celebrated their ten year anniversary. I learned that the group began as an idea in 2001 when 60 Toronto Lynx fans invaded Claude-Robillard stadium unopposed. Group founders Daniel Nahmias Leonard and Patrice Vaillancourt made the idea a reality in 2002 when the small group encouraged the Impact to a 2-0 win over the Lynx. They set out to build a group whose sole mission is to support our team Impact de Montréal. Nick Sabetti recently covered the ultras’  anniversary with an article. He quoted Eric as describing the group as “apolitical” and saying, “We avoid mixing politics and football. We don’t even use the Québec flag, to avoid any association with separatism or anything like that, although we do use it on the road sometimes. We just want to support the Impact.” In my own conversation with Eric, I learned that the ultras took inspiration from the larger ultras movement in Europe, modeling themselves on groups in France, Belgium, and Germany but seeking to infuse the group with the traits of  Montréal and its devotion to a cause. The term ultras is used for extreme football fans, and is meant to characterize their extreme devotion for their club and fellow members. I have been told that Ultras Montreal members see their support of the team as a job.

I have recently been reading two excellent books about “ultras” that help me understand a bit more about those I have encountered in the city. The first, about the fans of Millwall in England, was written by scholar Garry Robson named after one of their amusing chants: “No One Likes Us We Don’t Care!. The other is a recent account by journal Robert Andrew Powell of the supporters of a team in Cuidad Juarez, where soccer provides hope and community in the midst of violence.

Fans of Millwall are known for their aggressive support of their club but this commitment takes on a deeper meaning for they have joined their  physical being and their love for Millwall F.C. into one. This kind of commitment to the club is typical of international ultras movement minus the aggressive posture. Garry Robson argues that “Millwallism” is not, in fact, mainly about language and symbols. It is, instead, defined by “experiential relationships” between individuals who find in the fan group a place express themselves collectively. (137) It is this state of a living and breathing relationship for one’s club that defines what it means to be an ultra. Once a fan defines their life by the club, they then become an extreme fan.

The Indios de Ciudad Juarez are also loved by residents in Juarez, Mexico for whom it is one of the few positive aspects of their lives as drug cartel warfare rages on their doorstep. Powell’s book, which focuses on a group of fans who call themselves — with a bit of irony — “El Kartel,” gives a riveting depiction of not just soccer but also humanity in a modern day war-zone. It illustrates how the power of a soccer team’s promotion can allow its fans a brief respite from the horrors of everyday life. The fans of the Indios may live in an inhospitable place but they still find the need to support their team.  

The Impact ultras, then, are part of a global cultural phenomenon that is a central part of what makes soccer such a powerful and meaningful sport for communities throughout the world.

Two hours before a game, the Ultras Montréal meet at Bar 99 on Hochelaga Street. From there, they walk as a group to the stadium where they take their positions in section 132. There they have some 20 different chants they use to invigorate the crowd in Stade Saputo in support of the players on the pitch. Since I have been injured recently, I often sit behind the ultras and I always enjoy the way the chant leader or capo directs to the group. There is one particular chant I love. I don’t know what it is called or what the words are, but everyone sits down for about 30 seconds and bangs their feet on the stands before finally jumping up and waving all their scarves and flags. I get a kick out of it every time.

Outside game days, the group meets regularly. They enjoy each others’ company, for they have a common bond in their support and passion for the Impact. They spend time making flags and tifos, watching away games or planning trips to those very games. Each member designs their own flags and tifos, which allows them to individually express their own form of support for the club and the greater city of Montreal. When I asked if the group drew on a specific demographic in the population, I was told that the only thing that united them all was a passion for the Impact. Otherwise it is quite a diverse group. To become a member of the ultras it is simple: fans just need to get involved in the group by coming to games and other group events, living their passion for club, and investing their time.

The ultras are not the only supporters’ group for our club. The fans in section 127 of Stade Saputo are known as 127 Montreal. Though their group’s inception was much more recent, their support is just as passionate. The group was reportedly founded — as most supporter’s groups all over the world probably are! — over several pints of beer in early 2011. Since then, it has flourished. Instead of a march to the match they can always be found in the parking lot before the game tailgating. I have often walked by on my way into the stadium and they are always having a good time getting themselves prepared for the match. All you have to do to join in is go up and introduce yourself and talk about the team.

From my brief experience in Quebec, it seems to me that here professional teams — whether the Habs or the Impact — in some ways take on the status of representing the province as a whole. Given the strong provincial pride, and the two relatively recent attempts at establishing Quebecois sovereignty, I’m curious about what the local relationship is to the Canadian national team. I know Patrice Bernier is a native of Montreal and has represented his country 46 times. But I wonder: do fans here have more admiration for, CNT of IMFC? Or do they support both equally, but in different ways? How deeply do political sentiments in favor sovereignty influence sports fandom? Like the Impact ultras, many fans prefer to see their relationship to a team as “apolitical,” and yet it seems that at times it’s difficult to untangle sport from regional or national political contexts.

I have profiled two of the Impact’s supporters groups here. But these groups do not make up the bulk of the fans of our club. Though what we might call “the common fan” does not align themselves with a certain group, their passion is just as strong. Perhaps we can start a conversation to find a way so that, once or twice during the game, all the fans can join together in one concerted effort to support the club and the city. This could take the form of a quick chant or simply raising your scarf above your ahead at the beginning of each half. It would be a great way to celebrate and enjoy the unity of all the fans in the stadium, who have a common affinity in supporting the team and loving Montreal.

As a player I am always working and searching for that one night when everything goes right. It rarely happens. But you keep searching for that mystical apex of perfection. The same goes for fans for you routinely come back to cheer on and support our team, thinking and hoping that tonight could be the special night when everything falls into place and works perfectly. Laurent Dubois comments in his book “Soccer Empire”: “Football games open up incredible spaces of mass mobilization, public fervor, and hope. They give spectators the rare feeling of being ‘exactly at the right place at the right time’ and ‘at the centre of the whole world’ writes Nick Hornby ‘” He also quotes the novelist B.S. Johnson, who writes about the felling that accompanies the beginning of any soccer game: “‘Always, at the start of each match, the excitement, often the only moment of excitement, that this might be the ONE match,’ . . . the one ‘where the extraordinary happens,’ the game ‘one remembers and talks about for years afterwards, the rest of one’s life.’”(21)

Let’s be honest — we may be searching for that night for a while. In the meantime, though, we can fill each night in the Stade Saputo with the collective belonging that celebrates Montreal and it’s culture. We can make each night one where everyone believes tonight is the tonight, doesn’t give up on our team even in the face of adversity and continues to stand and support us. Those are the nights when the hair rises on the back of your neck — for you know something special is happening and that this is a special place. Nights like that of July 8th 2012 against the Columbus Crew.

As always, I invite you to leave your thoughts, tell me where I am right or wrong, or simply suggest what I should look at next. Leave a comment here or tweet to @andrewwenger.