The politics of football in the Middle East (JMD quoted in The National)
Algeria’s goalkeeper Rais M’Bolhi, right, and defender Aïssa
Mandi, on the ground, after Germany scored their winning second goal on June
30. Kirsty Wigglesworth / AP
The politics of football in the Middle East
Updated:
July 10, 2014 03:57 PM
·
Only two teams from the Middle East made it to the World Cup but
many Middle East figures and politicians were present, playing politics on the
sidelines. Days before the World Cup began, Palestine called for sanctions
against Israel, despite Fifa’s attempts to foster relations between the
Palestinian and Israeli football associations by alleviating travel bans.
Palestine, the only Fifa member not recognised as a state by the UN, has
pushed for suspension of Israel’s membership.
“I think the issue for the Palestinians this time around was part
of a larger picture, the larger picture being peace negotiations with Israel
have failed,” says James Dorsey, a senior fellow at Singapore’s Nanyang
Technological University and author of the blog The Turbulent World of Middle
East Soccer and a forthcoming book of the same name. The Palestine Football
Association and Nonviolence International, an NGO, published a 45-page report
listing Israeli restrictions on the movement of players and officials,
dissuasion of visiting teams, hindrance of sports-facility construction and
equipment delivery and violence against Palestinian players.
In Egypt and Lebanon, fans turned on Israeli satellite TV to watch
matches after the Qatari-owned beIN Sports channel charged more than US$100
(Dh367) for World Cup access. “I hear that many football fans in neighbouring
countries are watching the World Cup live on Israeli channels. We welcome
you,” said Ofir Gendelman, the Israeli prime minister’s spokesperson, via
Facebook and Twitter. The Egyptian Sports Writers Association declared the
pricing an “Al Jazeera conspiracy”. “We demand all Arabs not to watch Zionist
channels, even at the price of not watching the World Cup,” it said.
In Lebanon, the chair of Tele Liban’s board proclaimed all
citizens had the right to watch matches and promised to broadcast all games,
even if it cost him his job. The issue reached the Lebanese cabinet and
judiciary, which dismissed the lawsuit against Tele Liban for unauthorised
broadcasting of World Cup matches.
Able to watch the matches, many Lebanese fans claimed Brazil and
Argentina as their own, citing South America’s high number of Lebanese
emigrants. Fans in Lebanon and across the Middle East also supported France,
Germany and even England, due to colonial connections, immigration and recent
transnational football ties. Algeria advanced to the knockout stages but were
not necessarily the first choice for regional football fans.
“A lot of countries have ties,” says Dorsey, who is also
co-director of the University of Würzburg’s Institute for Fan Culture. “There
is an empathy for the Algerians, they are the only Arab team, but you do at
the same time have a degree of globalisation of fandom, in which fans support
major European or Latin American teams. You can argue we live in a world in
which people have multiple identities, so why shouldn’t fans have multiple
identities?”
Algeria’s squad of 23 featured 17 players who were born in
France, many of whom did not speak Arabic or Kabyle. For fans, this mattered
little. “There’s a long-standing history of French-Algerians playing a major
role in Algerian football. There are always tensions between the community at
home and the community abroad but I’m not sure that I would attribute much
political significance to it,” says Dorsey.
Meanwhile in Saudi Arabia, conservatives bristled when women
joined men in World Cup fever, displaying their loyalties with abayas
decorated in national team colours. In Ward, a city in the Mecca province,
televisions were removed to dissuade men and women from mixing. As in Iran,
women are not allowed inside sports venues. “There’s been talk about building
stadiums so that women could attend, there’s been talk about introducing
sports education in girls’ schools. There’s been a lot of talk and nothing has
been done,” Dorsey says. “The clergy in Saudi is split and there are prominent
Saudi clergy who favour women’s sports, but you also have one faction of
Salafi who oppose it.”
If the Middle East wants on-pitch participation in future World
Cups, the independence of clubs must be addressed, says Dorsey. The close
relationship between government and Middle East clubs hinders regional
football development. This was made clear recently by allegations that Qatar
had paid football officials for support in their 2022 World Cup bid. “Fifa’s
fundamental issue is that sports and politics are separate, which as far as
I’m concerned is baloney,” Dorsey says. “Football and politics are twined at
the hip, inextricably. Holding up the notion that they’re separate allows
people to do all kinds of things that they couldn’t do otherwise.”
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