Laurent Dubois's Blog, page 99

Remembering Algeria vs. Egypt

As we enter into several days of World Cup qualifying matches, it’s worth returning to some of the more dramatic moments of the 2010 qualifiers. This excellent short documentary (brought to my attention by Peter Alegi, editor of the blog Football is Coming Home) brings us back Algeria’s qualification. Their victory of Egypt incited mass celebration both in Algeria and in France, but also led to rioting and the withdrawing of diplomats between the two countries.

Algeria’s run in the World Cup ended in the waning seconds of their game against the United States, with a goal that was simultaneously the most exciting moment in U.S. soccer in decades and one of the more tragic ones for Algerian fans.

You can read more about the history of football in Algeria here.

Qatari Foundations

(This piece was originally published in the April 2013 issue of the Chimurenga Chronic)

A spectre is haunting European football – the spectre of Qatar. No holy alliance has emerged to respond to this rising power; indeed, it has been embraced by both established luminaries (Barcelona, Zidane) and by (hopeful) rising stars, such as the Paris Saint-Germain football club and now, in Belgium, Eupen. Qatar is already acknowledged by European football powers to be itself a power in their midst.

How did this come to pass? And what are the Qataris up to, anyway?

In some ways, the story all starts in Belgium, but then again, doesn’t it always? What is transpiring today in Europe was triggered by a professional footballer you would never have heard of were it not for a legal complaint he brought to the European Court in the 1990s. His name was Jean-Marc Bosman, and he played for RFG Liège. When, in 1990, they refused to transfer him to another club, he brought a complaint to the European Court of Trade, arguing that Fifa and professional club policies about player transfers constituted restraint of trade and went against EC policies. He won the case in 1995.

In the wake of the case, the regulations regarding player transfers were dismantled. But, perhaps more significantly, the case also struck down the right of European countries to maintain limits on the number of foreign players in clubs. Up until this time, professional teams throughout Europe had to include mostly players from within a given country, with quotas placed on the number of foreigners. Bosman changed that, helping to bring in a new era of mobility, coupled with vertiginous increases in salaries for European players.

One of the more far-reaching consequences of the Bosman ruling, however, was unintended: it created new openings for players from outside Europe to make their way into the professional system. Though the ruling applied only to European players, it essentially Europeanised the system of professional football, striking down any barriers that existed between national federations when it came to player transfers. That meant that if a player from Africa or Latin America came to play anywhere in Europe and was naturalised, they could then move freely to any other club.

In effect, Bosman did for professional football what the formation of the European Union did more broadly for immigration: it created new patterns of movement based on the fact that almost any door into Europe could potentially lead to any other country on the continent. As the scholar, Rafaelle Poli has examined in a series of brilliant articles, European football involved a process through which certain professional gateways gave access to a broader set of options. Clubs especially in Switzerland and Belgium, with smaller budgets and much less professional prominence, would recruit promising players from academies in Africa and Latin America. If those players succeeded, the clubs could help them apply for naturalisation, at which point they became highly marketable commodities. If the club could, every once in a while, then transfer a particularly promising player to another club, say in the English Premier League, they could make a windfall that would support their operations. The advent of European integration in professional football helped to open the way for more and more players from outside Europe.

These changes, of course, were part of a larger set of structural shifts that reconfigured how global football worked. The rise of cable television and the privatisation of media in western Europe created massive new revenue flows for clubs. The increasing visibility of European professional football in global media, coupled with the similar presence of players from throughout the world in clubs on the continent, made the clubs powerful brands that attracted new investors.

This entire landscape has now become so naturalised that it is easy to forget that it is also relatively recent; that there was a time, not so long ago, when many clubs in western Europe were owned and governed by public-private partnerships and when player salaries were relatively contained. Today, many global investors with capital to spend cannot resist the siren song of professional football. Though in many ways investing in the famously fickle realm of sports teams is economically irrational (it’s probably better to invest in technology stocks, or even hedge funds, if you are intent on making money), it offers a mix of status and symbolic capital that is seemingly  irresistible.

Qatari investment in European football is only one part of a global process that has drawn capital from the US and Russia, and has helped to encourage local investment in Chinese football, signing the likes of Didier Drogba and Nicholas Anelka to lucrative contracts. One of the more high-profile and remarked-upon investments has been the acquisition of Manchester City by Mansour Bin Zayed, a member of the ruling family in the United Arab Emirates, and its stunningly rapid transformation to the top of the Premier League. Yes, it turns out you can buy that prize by spending nearly £500 million on players.

Zayed’s was a shrewd investment partly because it tapped a loyal local fan base and an increasingly global loathing of rivals, Manchester United, thus managing  to produce simultaneously and rapidly a glorious spectacle of capital and footballing triumph. The US media has now capitalised on this as well, making the Manchester derby into a highly promoted television spectacle packaged for a growing audience in North America.

In the summer of 2012, Qatari investors followed suit, buying a stake in another club with untapped potential, Paris Saint-Germain. Long dogged by the reputation of violent, often far-right fans, the club and its new investors are now going to make a play for French dominance and European prominence. They might never get the majority of Parisians to care, but if they can cultivate a new global brand, and offer a fresh narrative in an increasingly saturated market of European clubs, it might not matter.

Middle Eastern investment in European football has, at times, incited open or thinly veiled xenophobic commentary. But there’s no particular reason to conclude that this form of investment is any more or less worrisome than the capital coming from other quarters. What is striking, however, is the interesting ways in which the Qataris in particular have combined multiple forms of investment, capitalising on philanthropy, government action and private investment in a visible and effective bid to shape the contours of professional football in Europe.

Qatari investors have been gaining a stake in European football slowly, over some time. For many, their presence popped into consciousness when one of their country’s institutions showed up on the jerseys of Barcelona FC. The team has long prided itself on keeping sponsors names off their jerseys. In 2005, they began carrying the Unicef logo on their shirts, but paid for the privilege. Then, in 2010, they broke with tradition and made a deal: in exchange for branding their jerseys with the name of the Qatar Foundation, the club received a cool $125 million.

‘What’s the Qatar Foundation?’ you might ask. It is, according to its website, ‘an independent, private, non-profit, chartered organization founded in 1995 by decree of His Highness Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani, Amir of the State of Qatar, to support centres of excellence that develop people’s abilities through investments in human capital, innovative technology, state of the art facilities and partnerships with elite organisations, thus raising the competency of people and the quality of life.’ The shorter version is captured in the slogan: ‘Unlocking human potential.’ And what better standard bearer for that than Lionel Messi?

This investment in European professional football laid the ground-work for the government of Qatar’s successful bid to host the 2022 World Cup, the first to take place in the Middle East. They hired Zidane as one of the spokesmen for the bid and he produced an endorsement video in which he speaks, from the Marseille banlieu in which he grew up, about his childhood and ends by declaring ‘Football belongs to everyone.’

We can look forward now to a decade of ongoing grousing about whose petro-dollars won the World Cup, how hot it will be and, more seriously, debates about how Qatari laws on homosexuality and women’s rights will shape the experience of the cup for foreign fans. But whatever its merits, the decision clearly highlights the shifting power relations within global football, as does Fifa’s recent overturning of the ban on the hijab in women’s football as a result of pressure from Jordan and Iran.

Another significant investment on the part of Qatar, however, has largely gone under the radar: the purchasing of second division Belgian Eupen in June 2012 as an extension of the Aspire Academy. The latter institution, based in Qatar and part of the Aspire Zone Foundation, offers scholarships to promising young footballers from Africa, Latin America and Asia. The idea, until now, has been to help them find their way into European clubs. With the purchase of Eupen, however, the goal is to cut out the middle man. The club will serve as an extension of the Aspire Academy, a place where its trainees will be placed on the field as professionals, ideally as the first step in their careers. The combination of philanthropy and investment is a brilliant one, for it positions the Aspire Academy at the centre of the happy discourse of global football as global opportunity, while also providing an opportunity for major profits from subsequent transfer fees for players.

For Belgian club football, this is an important and probably positive development. The leagues in the country have long laboured in the shadows of those much more prominent in England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain. Though the Belgian national team has, for such a small country, a rather illustrious record of qualifying and at times performing reasonably well in World Cups, in recent years they have fallen behind, failing to get to the 2006 and 2010 tournaments. Now a new crop of players who came up in the Belgian club system, including Eden Hazard and Vincent Kompany, have emerged as some of the more exciting talents in world football. They may well lead the Belgian team – one that boasts a much greater diversity of players than the national teams of a bygone era – to new victories in the coming years.

An infusion of talent recruited through Qatar into Belgium’s clubs can only help improve the country’s leagues. The combination of foreign capital and foreign players has stirred up, and will undoubtedly continue to do so, grousing about the end of European civilisation among members of the far-right in Belgium. But it is a fair bet that such sniping will be overtaken by the economic interests of both foreign and local investors. In the longer-term, all of this is likely to benefit Belgium’s international competitiveness as well.

An alliance between Belgium and Qatar, in pursuit of a place on the world’s greatest stage? That is where we are in today’s global football: a land of beautiful, stunning, contradiction.

Invisible Men? Racism in Honduran Soccer

* This article is cross-posted with the blog ¿Opio del pueblo?

During the Mexico-Trinidad/Tobago Gold Cup quarterfinal the other night, I was part of an engaging twitter discussion about racism in CONCACAF soccer that centered around these posts:

It has struck me how much blatant racism you see around #GoldCup chat sites/twitter directed at Caribbean teams. @StaycoolFanzine @jhnadel

— Laurent Dubois (@Soccerpolitics) July 20, 2013

 

Conversation with @jhnadel makes me ponder why racism in Latin American football is discussed/addressed less than in Europe. Or am I wrong?

— Laurent Dubois (@Soccerpolitics) July 20, 2013

In the United States we hear a lot about racism in soccer, but it is always in the context of events in Europe. Most people who follow the sport know about the John Terry-Anton Ferdinand affair, for which Terry was stripped of the England captaincy. And many are familiar with the more recent cases involving fans making monkey sounds at  Kevin Prince Boateng and Mario Balotelli. Even when a Latin American player is involved–such as in the  Luis Suárez-Patrice Evra incident–the question of whether or not something qualifies as racism is interpreted through a European (not to mention a U.S.) lens. 

As the above tweets suggest, however, issues of race are very much alive in Latin American soccer.  Yet very few anglophone soccer fans in the United States are aware of racism in the Latin American game. This is in part because the European game is so much more visible in this country–ESPN shows highlights of the EPL and the Serie A, but not the Liga MX or the Argentine Primera División. But it is also because in much of Latin America questions of race have been consciously obscured. As a result, for most people in the United States race and racism in Latin America are almost completely invisible.

Racism has existed in Latin American soccer since the arrival of the sport.  Chile famously protested its loss against Uruguay in the 1916 South American Championship due to the presence of two “Africans” in the Uruguayan squad. In Brazil, after the 1924 season, Rio’s major teams (Flamengo, Fluminense, and Botafogo, among others) formed a breakaway league rather than play against the mixed race Vasco da Gama (in Portuguese, scroll to 1923).  Racism is, in fact, embedded in the definition of Brazil’s futebol arte, but that is a post for another day. Today, I’d just like to call attention to some recent cases of racism–and fights against racism–going on in Honduran soccer, and look at some of the historical context behind questions of race in Honduras.

Before looking at all of that, I want to point out the parallel racial/ethnic dynamics in Honduras and some European nations. France is roughly 85 percent European, with a mixture of North African, Caribbean, West African, and Asian making up the rest of its population. In Italy, nearly 95 percent of the population is white, while England’s white population stands at around 85 percent. Honduras is ostensibly a mestizo nation: according to official statistics approximately 90 percent of the population is a mixture of indigenous and European. Afro-Hondurans officially make up about 2 percent of the population, and indigenous peoples comprise the rest. [1]  Given the similar ethnic profiles of Honduras and European nations–and the propensity of racism in European soccer–perhaps racism in Honduran soccer should not come as a surprise. 

If you look at the Honduran national team, however, you could be forgiven for not thinking that Honduras was predominantly mestizo: roughly 50 percent of the players are of African descent. Of course, sports teams often do not accurately reflect the ethnic or racial make-up of a nation, as socio-economic realities of minority populations–in many places around the world–make sports seem like one of the only viable avenues out of poverty.  

 

The Johnny Palacios Affair

In October 2011, a couple of weeks before the Suárez and Terry incidents, Johnny Palacios made a stir in Honduras after receiving a red card in league match for talking back to the referee. Palacios, who plays for Olimpia and played for the Honduran national team from 2009-2011 (and whose brothers Jerry and Wilson still play on the national squad), accused the referee of racial abuse.  Asserting that the referee, Mario Moncada, had used racial epithets in the past, Palacios explained that he had grown tired of the taunts and was defending himself. According to Palacios, who plays for Olimpia and the Honduran national team, the referee called him a “black homosexual (negro culero).”[2] Moncada denied the charges, claiming that since he had a black grandchild he could not be racist and certainly would not use racist language. True or not, the allegations opened up a nagging question for Honduran soccer and Honduras in general. Palacios, by the way, received a three-game suspension for his red card. 

 

Wilson Nuñez, et al.

Palacios was not the first player to complain of racial abuse in Honduras. Milton “Tyson” Nuñez, a leading player on Honduran national teams from the mid-1990s until 2008, complained in 2009 of racial taunts that he suffered as a soccer player. Nuñez recounted that in stadiums and on the street people hurled racial slurs at him. Rodolfo Richardson Smith also remembered hearing racist chants during games in the Honduran professional league. More surprising, he said, was that even when playing for the national team, Hondurans insulted him based on his race. Smith noted that when he played well he had no problems, but if made a mistake on the field fans used racial epithets and threw rocks at his house. In 2013, while playing in professionally in Guatemala, Nuñez took off his shirt and shorts and walked off the field in the face of racist chants from opposing fans.  

 

Osman Chávez

In May 2011 Osman Chávez, central defender for the national squad and captain for the 2013 Gold Cup, began discussions with other Afro-Honduran players. They had grown tired of hearing racist taunts during games and seeing comments to articles posted on the Web that denigrated them based on their race. As a result, the players–Chávez, David Suazo, Maynor Figueroa, Hendry Thomas, and Wilson Palacios–along with non-black members of the national team agreed to boycott national media until the Honduran newspapers’ online versions filtered out Web comments that disparaged their race. While the long-term effects of the campaign remain unknown, it generated a good deal of immediate interest. All of the Honduran newspapers picked up the story and one, Deportivo Diez, created an antiracism Facebook page. Chávez has begun to speak out whenever he can against racism.    

 

Institutional Soccer Racism?

Fans and referees are not the only ones accused of racism. In the past coaches and team directors discussed the “problems” of having “too many blacks” on the national team. Indeed, many coaches refuse to play black players in midfield, which is considered to be one of the more cerebral positions on the field. Instead, they prefer to play them in more “athletic” roles in defense, as strikers, or as wingers. One Honduran politician suggested that black players “are not intelligent” and bring down the play of the squad.Others think that racism does not exist in Honduran soccer and accuse black players of imagining the problem. Former national team psychologist Mauro Rosales suggested that Chávez and his colleagues overreacted to racist comments, claiming that “blacks, by nature, have low self-esteem and therefore look for ways to call attention to themselves.” Still others affiliated with Honduran soccer dismiss charges of racism entirely. In an interview with the newspaper Proceso Digital, Rafael Leonardo Callejas, the president of the Honduran Soccer Federation and ex-president of the country, not only denied claims of racism in Honduran soccer but suggested that the word “racism” be “completely erased from the language” because Hondurans were not racist people. 

 

Context (because I’m a historian)

In fact, there is a long history of racism in Honduras, which is visible in the Honduran narrative about how Afro-Hondurans got to the country. According to the dominant history of the country, there are three Afro-Honduran groups, all of whom arrive well after colonization: the Miskito (a mixture of runaway slaves and indigenous), the Garifuna (deported to Roatán from St. Vincent by the British in 1797), and the negros ingleses (free blacks who left British Caribbean in the early- to mid- 1800s and settled in the Bay Islands, augmented by people brought to work on banana plantations in the late 1800s and early 1900s). Late arrivals, these populations never fully integrated with the rest of Honduras, and stayed segregated on the north coast and on the Bay Islands.  Or so the story goes. 

In fact, the Afro-Honduran population was much more integrated in Honduran society than many would have liked.  African slaves were a major part of Honduran society from its colonial beginnings. Though Honduran mines never contributed more than 5 percent to Spanish coffers, they still produced a good amount of ore and required slaves.  By 1540 more than 2000 enslaved Africans worked in Honduras. Comayagua, a town in the center of the country near Tegucigalpa and a major mining center throughout the colonial period, had at least four hundred enslaved Africans working in the mines. In the 1600s population statistics for people of African descent get spotty. Still, entire towns were populated by people of African heritage. In 1801, according to Mario Felipe Martínez Castillo, the 7,910 people who lived in the towns of Yoro and Olanchito were “all mulattos.”[3] In other words, when we scratch at the surface of race in Honduras, it becomes clear that the dominant narrative obscures more about race in Honduras than it shows.

In the early twentieth century, nationalist elites further obfuscated the question of race by consciously crafting a mestizo history for the country. This was happening in much of the region, as the indigenous past became a powerful tool for uniting people behind the idea of the modern nation. This drive had its most famous proponent in the Mexican José Vasconcelos. He wrote about a cosmic race, born of racial mixing in Latin America, which would lead the way to a greater human existence. Vasconcelos nevertheless retained a highly eurocentric view of supposed racial characteristics. To form the cosmic race, European rationality mixed with African passion and Native American simplicity and honor.

 

Lempira

In Honduras intellectuals and government officials such as Alfonso Guillén Zelaya, Jesus Aguilar Paz, and Gregorio Ferrera followed Vasconcelos’ lead. They began searching for indigenous heroes to add to the Honduran pantheon and to confirm the country’s status as a mestizo nation. In the process they minimized the country’s “primitive” African past by crafting historical narratives that excluded or vilified blacks. In the mid-1920s Honduran officials found their national hero: Lempira. A warrior from the Lenca indigenous group, Lempira valiantly led the fight against Spanish invaders in the 1530s until his death at the hands of the conquistadors. Although no images of the indigenous leader existed, the Honduran government produced one (which can still be seen today on the Honduran currency that bears his name). He fit the bill: he represented the racialized ideal of the indigenous man as noble, strong, and honorable.[4] In embracing Lempira, Honduran nationalists of the early twentieth century consciously chose to create an image of the nation built on European and indigenous bases, thereby ignoring–and erasing from national history to the extent possible–the black population. In other words, it was only in the early twentieth century that Honduras invented itself as a biracial nation. This bi-raciality was reinforced throughout the twentieth century in the Honduran education system and the census, which failed to recognize any category that allowed for African heritage.[5]

 

And So?

So these are some of the historical roots of racism in Honduras. What does it mean in soccer? On one hand, perhaps, little: since the first Honduran national soccer team took the field against Guatemala in 1921, Afro-Hondurans have been included on the team. On the other hand, national sporting icons who are black still suffer racist treatment at the hands of their compatriots.  There are no black coaches or referees in the Honduran first division. After generations of being invisible in the national narrative, Afro-Hondurans are still not considered fully Honduran. They remain outside of “normal” Honduran identity due to their skin color, and present a challenge to the dominant narrative that says to be Honduran is to be mestizo.

And what of our perception in the United States?  We could say that U.S. lack of understanding of racism in Honduran (and Latin American) soccer results from a double invisibility: it exists due to the historical invisibility of people of African descent in the region and is exacerbated by the overweening focus in the United States on the European game.

**Note: Some of the foregoing is material adapted from my forthcoming book, tentatively titled Fútbol!: Why Soccer Matters in Latin America, being published by the University of Florida Press. 

———-

[1]  República de Honduras. Características generales de las Garífunas conforme a los resultados del XI censo nacional y de vivienda, año 2001, (Tegucigalpa: INE, 2001).

[2] Some sources report the slur as being “negro de mierda” (fucking black).

[3]Luz María Martínez Montiel, ed, Presencia Africana en Centroamérica (Mexico City: Dirección General de Culturas Populares, 1993), 9; and Rafael Leiva Vivas, “Presencia negra en Honduras,” in Presencia Africana en Centroamérica, edited by Luz María Martínez Montiel (Mexico City: Dirección General de Culturas Populares, 1993), 123. Gold peaked in production prior to 1565, after which it declined. But between 1540 and 1542, more than 200,000 pesos worth of gold came from Honduran mines. See Linda Newson, “Labor in the Colonial Mining Industry of Honduras,” Americas 39, no. 2 (October 1982), 186, 193. See also William L. Sherman, Forced Native Labor in Colonial Central America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1972). Sherman notes that black slaves were “more desirable” than indigenous people, and cost more–between 100 and 200 pesos in 1550. See ibid., 232-33 and note 387; and Robinson A. Herrera, “‘Por que no sabemos firmar’: Black Slaves in Early Guatemala,” Americas 57, no. 2 (October 2000), 247 note. See also Robinson A. Herrera, Natives, Europeans, and Africans in Sixteenth-Century Santiago de Guatemala (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003); Mario Felipe Martínez Castillo, La Intendencia de Comayagua (Tegucigalpa: Litografía López, 2004), 12. 

[4] Dario Euraque, Estado, poder, nacionalidad y raza en la historia de Honduras (Choluteca: Ediciones Subirana, 1996), 79-81; and Breny Mendoza, “La desmitologización del mestizaje en Honduras,” Mesoamérica 42 (December 2001): 266-68.

[5] The Honduran census of 2001 included African descended ethnicities for the first time since the early 1900s.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Incitement

*This article is cross-posted with the blog Africa is a Country.

“Tear gas is a magic potion,” writes Chris Gaffney from the streets of Rio. “Those who launch it are weakened while those forced to inhale it are strengthened.” For those of you interested in the politics of football in Brazil, his blog – as well as his excellent book on Stadia in Argentina and Brazil - is a key place to go to understand the ways in which preparations for the 2014 World Cup have served as a trigger for what may become a major political and social movement in Brazil. As is often the case, the state’s response to what were initially small protests has energized a movement that is tapping into a powerful vein of dissatisfaction in the country.

In Le Monde, Jean Hébrard, who co-directs a center for Brazilian studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, has analyzed the role of the looming World Cup in the protests. There have been worries from the very beginning, he notes, that there would be “excessive spending” surrounding the tournament at a time when the population badly needs investment in other types of infrastructure. And there has also been anger and criticism about corruption, notably within the Brazilian Football Federation. The World Cup didn’t create the bigger problems, but it has served to “crystallize” the public debate because of the very obvious ways in which funds are being directed towards something that won’t benefit most Brazilians. Even if many, Hébrard notes, will still “love the World Cup” when it comes around, it presents an opportunity to call out political leaders and elites for mixed-up priorities.

The bigger story here is the intersection of the increasingly interventionist and heavy-handed management of the World Cup by FIFA and a potentially explosive mix of grievances percolating within Brazilian society. Especially since 2010 in South Africa, FIFA’s management of the event has become a de facto removal of national sovereignty in certain key domains, notably that of security and infrastructure. Why, you might ask, does a country like Brazil which is full of football stadia have to build new ones in order to host a tournament? Because FIFA has a wide range of specific stipulations about precisely how the stadia for the event need to be. And a big part of that is, as Chris Gaffney has described, transforming these stadia from spaces that are open to and integrated into local communities into fenced-off, highly-regulated spaces where only FIFA-approved products (including what at least in South Africa was an absurd and paltry menu of food centered around hot dogs and Budweiser). In other words, hosting a World Cup requires not just the transformation of urban space, but in many ways the transformation of the practice of traveling to and attending sporting events.

When a government tries to sell the advantages of hosting a World Cup to its population, one of the main arguments that is made is that the infrastructural investments that are necessary for the event will ultimately benefit the population in the long term. There were promises a few years ago that, in preparing for the World Cup, new public transportation lines would be built. This is something that did in fact happen in South Africa, where new trains, including a line through Soweto, were built.

Even when such projects are carried out, of course, they can end up not really serving the needs of the population as much as they should, since the organization of transportation for a major sporting event doesn’t necessarily line up with daily needs. In the Brazilian case, though, something worse has happened: these promises have simply not materialized. And now Brazilians are seeing the cost of their transportation increase, alongside many other daily costs, even as the government pours money into the construction of new stadia and the renovation of old ones into structures which will likely end up, as is the case all over the world, as “white elephants” after 2014 and the 2016 Olympics are over. In South Africa, even major sporting events have trouble filling the stadia built for 2010, though they have found a use for another, unexpected, form of mass event: evangelical rallies, which have taken place in the Cape Town stadium among others.

All governments have to essentially lie to their population when they promise that it’s good for everyday people to host a major sporting event. For politicians, the real drive for hosting these events is never the economic or infrastructural benefit they will bring, but the power gained by being, for a brief moment, at the center of the world. Political elites can’t resist that symbolic catnip. Business elites and politicians, of course, also stand to gain materially from all the contracts and construction that go on around these events. All of this always creates some amount of criticism, and sometimes protest, as was the case in South Africa. As we look forward to 2014, we should keep an eye on what happened in South Africa, where the various doomsayers who worried about a crime epidemic, failed infrastructure, and generalized chaos were chastened when the event was carried out extremely successfully. At the same time, it is certainly not clear whether, in the end, the massive investment in the World Cup really improved anything at all for South Africans as a whole, and many who have analyzed the question — notably those who contributed to an excellent recent collection called Africa’s World Cup (look out for Sean’s interview with the editors later this week) – have called attention to the fact that very few of the promised economic benefits really happened.

For all the debate in South Africa, however, there was never a mass political movement that developed to criticize the way the tournament was being organized. The Brazilian case seems, at least potentially, to be of a very different order. The direct confrontation on the part of larger numbers of demonstrators with police outside matches is something relatively new. When the police respond with violence to peaceful protests outside stadia, it will become even harder for the Brazilian government to convince critics that hosting the World Cup is something being done in the service of the people. The boosters for the 2014 World Cup in Brazil want people to imagine joyful, dancing, pretty, green and yellow clad fans: not lines of riot police firing tear gas. But FIFA and the World Cup are, and have always been, inherently political. What’s happening in Brazil is that protestors are attempting to re-shape the political meaning of the event, turning it into an opportunity to change Brazil according to their vision.

 

 

The Blood of the Impure

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.

On Context (Hexagonal, part 1)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Moth for Mali

The Western-most tip of Africa seemed like as good a place as any to watch the Mali vs. South Africa quarter-final in the African Cup of Nations. On Saturday, I was at the Pointe des Almadies in Dakar, a tourist stop and hang-out with a beach carpeted with black stones and hand-holding couples. On offer there were grilled fish, birds, paintings made of butterfly wings, ham and cheese crepes and beer, Bob Marley renditions — and a tiny television tuned to the match. We stood packed behind a bar watching. Everyone, as usual, was both coach and expert tactician. “Mali is leaving way too much space for the South Africans – they are fast!” “Why can’t they hold the ball?” “Only Keita is worth anything.” Some went on offence: about the South African coach Gordon Igesund: “That white man needs to calm down! He’s going to be more tired than his players!”

“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.

UEFA Financial Fair Play

Introduction

            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 paper 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 paper 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.

To introduce financial discipline
Decrease salary and transfer fee pressure
For clubs to compete within their revenues
Long term investment in youth academies
To protect the long term viability of club football
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 11th 2012 the UEFA CFCB imposed sanctions against 23 clubs (Index A) by withholding prize money and setting an October 15th 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.

[1] Kuper, Simon, and Stefan Szymanski. Soccernomics: Why England Loses, Why Germany and Brazil Win, and Why the U.S., Japan, Australia, Turkey and Even Iraq Are Destined to Become the Kings of the World’s Most Popular Sport. New York: Nation, 2009. Page 80.

[2] Dennis, Phil Dawkes & Ian. “Adopt Arsenal Money Model – Uefa.” BBC News. BBC, 01 Nov. 2011. Web. 9 Oct. 2012. .

[3] Hughes, Rob. “THE SATURDAY PROFILE; Former Star on the Soccer Field, Now Trying to Level It.” The New York Times. The New York Times, 31 Oct. 2009. Web. 9 Oct. 2012. .

[4] Ibid.

[5] Dobson, Stephen, and John A. Goddard. The Economics of Football. 2nd ed. New York: Cambridge UP, 2001. P. 15.

[6] “Financial Fair Play.” UEFA.com. UEFA, n.d. Web. 10 Oct. 2012. .

[7] Ibid.

[8] UEFA Club Licensing and Financial Fair Play Regulations. Nyon, Switzerland: UEFA, 2012. PDF. Article 58-1.

[9] UEFA Club Licensing and Financial Fair Play Regulations. Nyon, Switzerland: UEFA, 2012. PDF. Article 58-2.

[10] UEFA Club Licensing and Financial Fair Play Regulations. Nyon, Switzerland: UEFA, 2012. PDF. Article 61.

[11]  UEFA Club Licensing and Financial Fair Play Regulations. Nyon, Switzerland: UEFA, 2012. PDF. Article 62.

[12] Procedural rules governing the UEFA Club Financial Control Body. Nyon, Switzerland: UEFA, 2012. PDF. Article 4.

[13] Procedural rules governing the UEFA Club Financial Control Body. Nyon, Switzerland: UEFA, 2012. PDF. Article 5.

[14] Procedural rules governing the UEFA Club Financial Control Body. Nyon, Switzerland: UEFA, 2012. PDF. Article 21.

[15] “Football: Uefa Hands out First Financial Fair Play Penalties.” BBC News. BBC, 11 Sept. 2012. Web. 5 Nov. 2012. .

[16] Dunbar, Graham. “UEFA to Decide next Month on 23 Clubs in Financial Difficulty | Sports , Football | THE DAILY STAR.” The Daily Star Newspaper. The Daily Star, 5 Oct. 2012. Web. 5 Nov. 2012. .

[17] Jones, Matt Scuffham, Rhys, and Neil Maidment. “Special Report: Soccer’s New Goal: Kick the Spending Habit.” Reuters. Thomson Reuters, 12 Aug. 2011. Web. 6 Nov. 2012. .

[18] Ibid

[19] UEFA Club Licensing and Financial Fair Play Regulations. Nyon, Switzerland: UEFA, 2012. PDF. Article 58-4.

[20] UEFA Club Licensing and Financial Fair Play Regulations. Nyon, Switzerland: UEFA, 2012. PDF. Article 11.

[21] UEFA Club Licensing and Financial Fair Play Regulations. Nyon, Switzerland: UEFA, 2012. PDF. Article 11.

[22] UEFA Club Licensing and Financial Fair Play Regulations. Nyon, Switzerland: UEFA, 2012. PDF. Article 15-1.

[23] Hughes, Rob. “THE SATURDAY PROFILE; Former Star on the Soccer Field, Now Trying to Level It.” The New York Times. The New York Times, 31 Oct. 2009. Web. 9 Oct. 2012. .

[24] Jones, Matt Scuffham, Rhys, and Neil Maidment. “Special Report: Soccer’s New Goal: Kick the Spending Habit.” Reuters. Thomson Reuters, 12 Aug. 2011. Web. 6 Nov. 2012. .

[25] Dobson, Stephen, and John A. Goddard. The Economics of Football. 2nd ed. New York: Cambridge UP, 2001. P. 214.

[26] Kuper, Simon, and Stefan Szymanski. Soccernomics: Why England Loses, Why Germany and Brazil Win, and Why the U.S., Japan, Australia, Turkey and Even Iraq Are Destined to Become the Kings of the World’s Most Popular Sport. New York: Nation, 2009. Page 48.

[27] Robson, Garry. No One Likes Us, We Don’t Care: The Myth and Reality of Millwall Fandom. Oxford: Berg, 2000. P. 137.

Palestine on the Pitch

“It is unacceptable that children are killed while they play football.” So declares a statement by 62 professional footballers protesting the recent Israeli actions in Gaza. Posted on the website of Frédéric Kanouté, it includes some of the best known names in global football, notably Didier Drogba and Eden Hazard. It is a striking gesture, one with few precedents. It highlights how powerfully football and politics are increasingly intertwined in Israel and Palestine.

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. It 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 may well likely end up little more than a small gesture lost in a larger, endlessly tortuous history. But if it helps to establish the idea that footballers can and should speak their minds on political issues, it may at least be part of a significant shift in the way athletes think about their political selves, and their political roles, in the roiling conflicts to come.

Why Football is Part of the Creative Economy

Football is part of the creative economy because its value lies in ideas. Typically when we think of football, we tend to think of it as “big business.” Real Madrid made over $695 million in the 2011 fiscal year and the combined net worth of the top five richest clubs for 2011 is over $5 billion. But to put this into perspective, we need to realize that the combined value of the world’s five richest companies is nearly $2 trillion. We can all see that in the grand scheme of things, football financially pales in comparison to other sectors of industry. Yet football is both immensely powerful and popular. In FIFA’s latest Big Count, 270 million people—or four percent of the world’s population—are involved in football in some way. Further, more people watch the World Cup Final than any other single sporting events. This leads us to ask—is football really a business at all?

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.