Middle East becoming a graveyard for Socceroos (JMD quoted in The Guardian)

Middle East becoming a graveyard for Socceroos

Plying their trade is the Middle East is becoming an increasingly risky career choice for aspiring Socceroos

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Alex Brosque plays for UAE Pro-League side Al Ain FC and was overlooked by Ange Postecoglou in his first Socceroos squad. Photograph: Joe Castro/AAP Image

The danger signs were there, long before being hit for six by Brazil and France. Guus Hiddink is said to have forecast a bumpy road ahead for the Socceroos after their exit from the 2006 World Cup, and the lacklustre manner of their qualification for Brazil 2014 seemed to prove his point. Another red light: the number of first-choice Socceroos kicking around in the Gulf of late.

"There are no top players in their prime who can command the market who will go there,” says James M Dorsey, an academic and expert on football and politics in the Middle East. “There’s no reason for them to.”

Asamoah Gyan might take exception to that. Ghana’s gun striker plays alongside Alex Brosque at Al Ain in the United Arab Emirates. But glamour signings like Gyan or one-time Real Madrid star Raul, who made the move to Qatar last year, belie leagues heaving with top-class, or once top-class, talent.

“A typical team [in the UAE] is made up of local players propped up by three foreigners, mainly strikers, who can barely see the ball for the dollar signs in their eyes,” reported English website When Saturday Comes in 2010. “The imports usually score a hatful of goals without breaking sweat, the local players stand in awe.” 

Things are a little different in the Qatar Stars League, where the likes of Mark Bresciano, Lucas Neill, Harry Kewell, Sasa Ognenovski and Matthew Spiranovic have all found themselves in recent years. The Qataris, says Dorsey, are playing the long game, using their Aspire Academy to groom young players from across the Middle East and Africa. Foreign players with solid international careers, experience in major tournaments and a considerable (if not enviable) record in Europe are a much rarer sighting.

At current Qatar table-toppers Al Sailiya, the list of star imports runs two deep: an Africa Cup of Nations finalist from Burkina Faso and a striker with a handful of caps for the DR Congo. The rest of the team is made up of low-profile foreigners and players drawn from the Qatar’s tiny talent pool - it has a population of just over 2 million, the vast majority of which are foreign workers. Its national team is ranked 105th in the world.

Ange Postecoglou isn’t a fan of the leagues either. He picked just one Gulf-based player, Bresciano, in his inaugural squad last week, and spoke frankly about the quality of football being played there. “It is a slower pace and we want to play a high-intensity, high-tempo kind of game.”

His predecessor, Holger Osieck, was also sceptical. He pointed to Gulf-based players’ lack of fitness as one of the reasons for the recent thumping in Brasilia, and he’d been worried about the trend of players moving there for some time.

As a place to make some good coin on your way home from Europe, the Gulf makes a lot of sense for an ageing Socceroo. But as a place to demand selection for the World Cup squad? It’s turning out to be more like a career graveyard for Socceroos.

Take Brosque. He moved from Sydney FC to Japan in early 2011, and by the end of the year, had made himself a regular in the green and gold. In late 2012 he moved to the Gulf, and within six months, stopped getting calls - or at least the kind you’d like to get - from the national boss. 

"The fact that he is now a starter in our team is based on his development in the Japanese league,” Osieck said at the time of his move. “Football-wise I'd rather have him in Europe or maybe even in Japan … I'd rather have players in a more competitive environment." 

The story of Spiranovic, now of the Western Sydney Wanderers, follows almost the exact pattern, as does that of Ognenovski, after his omission from Postecoglou’s squad.

Captain Lucas Neill played in the Gulf too, with some blessing from Osieck - “There's a lot of Brazilian players, predominantly strikers, so I think he's going to be tested" - though perhaps he can thank his move to the J-League for saving his spot. 

Then there’s Brett Holman. After many successful years in the Dutch top grade, Holman moved to English Premier League club Aston Villa last season. At 29, with more than 60 caps, he was just the type of player the Socceroos needed to fill the boots of the ageing Golden Generation. In the off-season he moved to Al-Nasr in the UAE. He was part of the humiliation in Brazil, was injured for the rout in Paris and now has been axed by Postecoglou. 

Moving to the Gulf is, says Dorsey, “an opportunity to end [your] career in a comfortable way.” But the standard of play isn’t the only issue he sees. He cites the case of French player Zahir Belounis, who claims to have been trapped in Qatar for years due to a contractual dispute with his club, as an example of the conditions facing those who move to the Gulf.

Then there’s the fan culture and stadium environment there. Little Maracanas, these ain’t. “If you go to a stadium in the UAE or Qatar, it is by and large empty,” says Dorsey, who is also a co-director of the Institute of Fan Culture at Germany’s University of Wuerzburg.

“If you’ve got 85 per cent [of the population made up of foreign] labour and you want to maintain control of your country and your identity, you are really worried about all of these 85 per cent thinking they are at home. So you go out of your way to ensure people understand that they are there for a period of time, to fulfill a contract, whatever that may be, and then after that they are out.

“The one thing you are concerned about is that people form roots, forge bonds. And one way of forging bonds is of course being associated, involved, emotionally tied to a soccer team.”

Still, clubs in Qatar and the UAE can point to the Asian Champions League as proof they offer more competitive leagues than their counterparts in Australia. Those two Gulf states earned seven ACL spots between them last season; the A-League’s presence was reduced to just one.

Al Ahli turns African championship into anti-government protest

By James M. Dorsey

Clashes this weekend between security forces and militant supporters of crowned Cairo club Al Ahli SC and a political demonstration by the team’s goalkeeper have dented the Egyptian military-backed government’s efforts to show that the country had put its political crisis behind it. The clashes raise the specter of world soccer body FIFA moving for security reasons Egypt’s 2014 World Cup qualifier against Ghana, scheduled for November 19 in Cairo, military strongman General Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi’s birthday, to a neutral venue.

The incidents overshadowed Al Ahli’s eighth triumph as African champion, an achievement in a country that has been wracked by political volatility since the 2011 popular revolt that toppled President Hosni Mubarak and a coup in July that overthrew Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Mohammed Morsi. Al Ahli’s victory contrasts starkly with the performance of Egypt’s national team, which has effectively lost hope to reach the World Cup finals when Ghana defeated it earlier this month 6:1 in a first match in Accra.

The government has since sought to avert clashes with militant, highly politicized, well-organized and street-battled hardened soccer fans who played a key role in the ousting of Mr. Mubarak and subsequent opposition to the military with a number of conciliatory measures. Al Ahli’s match on Sunday against the Orlando Pirates, South Africa’s oldest club, was the first game attended by spectators since 74 Al Ahi fans died in February of last year in a politically-loaded brawl in the Suez Canal city of Port Said. Authorities further released on the eve of the match 25 Al Ahli fans arrested a month ago when they attempted to storm an arrival terminal at Cairo airport.

Fans commemorated the 74 dead in chants during the match and put up posters in remembrance of the incident that is widely believed to have been an attempt that got out of hand to teach the militants a lesson and counter their revolutionary zeal. The fans lit up the stadium secured by some 4,000 police officers with armored vehicles with bright red flares and fireworks as security forces lobbed tear gas.

The clashes followed an earlier refusal by opponents of the military-backed government to support Egypt’s national team in its match against Ghana because it represented the regime rather than the nation. The refusal largely by supporters of Mr. Morsi who’s Muslim Brotherhood has been brutally targeted by the military and the security forces, is reminiscent of perceptions in Iran that blamed the Islamic republic’s soccer failures on the intense interest in the game displayed by former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Perhaps even more significant than the clashes with the security forces was the fact that Al Ahli goalkeeper Ahmed Abdul Zaher celebrated his decisive goal with a four-fingered hand signal - a gesture that 

commemorates the sit-in of Morsi supporters at Cairo’s Rabaa al-Adawiya mosque which was violently cleared by security forces in August, leaving hundreds killed. Human rights groups say some 1,300 people have been killed and that thousands more have been injured and incarcerated since the toppling of Mr. Morsi and the crackdown on the Brotherhood.

"Yes I raised the sign of Rabaa. But I didn't mean political excitement to any one side or fan. All I meant to do was to remember the dead, whether in Rabaa, any other citizen and even policemen,” Mr. Abdul Zaher said.

Mr. Abdul Zaher’s gesture broke with a tendency among players to remain publicly aloof from the country’s 

political travails and highlighted the deep fissures between supporters and opponents of the military. Starred Al Ahli player Mohammed Aboutreika who scored the team’s first goal against the Pirates denied in August that he had verbally confronted a security officer detailed to protect the team, saying:  “Are you bringing the army which is killing the people to secure us?”

At the heart of players’ reluctance to join popular revolts is what Palestinian-American historian Hisham Sharabi called neo-patriarchy in a controversial 1992 book that is still banned in many Arab countries. Mr. Sharabi argued that Arab society was built around the dominance of the Father (patriarch), the center around which the national as well as the natural family are organized. Between ruler and ruled, between father and child, there exist only vertical relations: in both settings the paternal will is absolute will, mediated in both the society and the family by a forced consensus based on ritual and coercion.

In other words, according to Mr. Sharabi's thesis, Arab regimes franchised repression so that in a cultural patrimonial society, the oppressed participated in their repression and denial of rights. The regime is in effect the father of all fathers at the top of the pyramid. General Al-Sisi has emerged as Egypt’s father with many Egyptians wanting him to run for the presidency. Despite public denials that he was considering running for office, Gen. Al-Sisi has done little to stem expressions of public support.

A popular Egyptian blog tracks expressions of adulation for the general.  Posters of Al-Sisi hang in shop windows as businesses take advantage of the Sisi mania by rebranding their products in his image. Chocolate-maker Bahira Galal offers clients a choice between chocolates coated with Al-Sisi’s face and others embossed with messages of adulation such as "Thank you, Sisi, from the bottom of our hearts." Fans on Facebook have created hundreds of pages obtaining millions of “likes” from those who want to pledge their allegiance to military chief.

In a blow to the military-backed government’s prestige and General Al-Sisi’s to project Egypt as business as usual, Ghanaian sports and youth minister Elvis Afryie Ankrah’s efforts to persuade FIFA to move the November 19 qualifier against Egypt to another country were boosted by this weekend’s clashes. He said Ghanaian players feared for their safety. “It’s a matter of fairness,” Mr. Ankrah said.

James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, co-director of the University of Würzburg’s Institute for Fan Culture, and the author of The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccerblog and a forthcoming book with the same title.

Charting the shift in Olympic power and sport’s future challenges (JMD at Play the Game)

International sport is facing new power structures, but also a huge task in making sport and physical activity more inclusive. At the closing session of Play the Game 2013, four speakers mapped some of sport’s urgent challenges without reaching a clear consensus on how to assess and deal with them.

By Søren Bang, Marcus Hoy

07 November 2013

Print version

Jens Weinreich talked about the power structures within the Olympic movement at the closing session of Play the Game 2013. Photo: Play the Game / Thomas Søndergaard

The landscape of sport is changing rapidly with new powers like Russia and Qatar emerging. A lot of challenges are also presenting themselves at the grassroots level where sport’s ability to attract and retain people is being contested.

At the very last session at Play the Game 2013 four speakers presented a global outlook, discussing who holds the keys to the future of sport.

Following the election of new IOC President Thomas Bach on 10 September, German freelance journalist Jens Weinreich mapped out the current structure of the various organisations within the Olympic structure and pinpointed where the power now lies. While the faces may have changed, he said, the IOC continues to operate “almost without transparency and almost without control”.

Weinreich, a former Play the Game Award winner, charted the behind-the-scenes wheeling and dealing that had led to Bach’s succession of Jacques Rogge, and named the key influential players who can garner votes. Prominent among them, he said, was John Coates, IOC Vice President and Head of the 2020 Tokyo Coordination Commission, and SportAccord President Marius Vizer, who enjoyed Vladimir Putin’s support in his successful campaign to be elected as President of the International Judo Federation.

The rising powers in international sport are Qatar and Russia, Weinreich said. Both have control over huge amounts of money; both have future visions, projects and ideas. Sport is an integral part of their visions.

Weinreich also detailed a shift in the hosting of mega-events and world championships away from Western nations towards newly-powerful nations such as China, Russia and Brazil.

Football as ‘soft power’ 
James Dorsey, Senior Fellow at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, took a closer look at Qatar’s rise as a sporting power which culminated in it being awarded the 2022 FIFA World Cup. The main reason for Qatar choosing to bid, he said, had little to do with country branding or leveraging business opportunities. “[These things] are not worth the money Qatar is putting on the table for this,” he said.

Qatar had carried out a very simple cost-benefit analysis of what it could gain from hosting the World Cup, he said. In 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait, the Saudi defence umbrella was “not worth the ink it was written on”. Recognising this, Qatar made a key decision based on defence and security concerns. Hosting football’s greatest event gave the nation ‘soft power’, Dorsey said. Qatar’s decision to bid was based on a “very different calculation than any other bidder had made. Who would invade a World Cup host?” he asked.

Sport should adapt to people 
Margaret Talbot, President of the International Council of Sport Science and Physical Education (ICSSPE), broadened the discussion by calling for a more inclusive sport and pointed to a number of challenges for physical education and sport, including the need to fight non-inclusive norms, rules and practices. Sport should adapt to people rather than the opposite.

She mentioned the need for a cultural change in sports, e.g. from over-exposure to competition towards retaining participation. But the colliding worlds of physical education and a professional sport with problematic ethical standards is another increasing challenge, she claimed. “Should physical education teachers abandon even trying to teach right from wrong? I think that is big question for the whole of sport to answer,” as she said.

According to Talbot, science should help out by challenging some of the paradigms and stereotypes of sport.

“Sport is full of myths based on stereotypes. Women do not like sport. Men do not like to dance. All sorts of silly stereotypes based on normative assumptions – and some of those become rules in sports,” she said, naming as examples some federations’ double standards when it comes to forcing female athletes to wear non-functional ‘feminine’ sports uniforms – as well as men not being allowed to take part in synchronised swimming.

Global influence in the long run
Representing organised sport, the President of the Danish NOC and Sports Confederation, Niels Nygaard, recognised that parts of international sport are challenged by problems like corruption, lack of transparency, doping and match-fixing. But he challenged the perception that sport in general is facing a crisis. Sport on daily basis has a lot of positive qualities, he noted, arguing for a less confronting attitude towards the international sport organisations.

Instead, according to Nygaard, the Danish NOC tries to influence international sport by being present in as many organisations as possible. One reason for doing this is to affect the rules of international sport, and another is to promote Danish and Nordic values regarding democracy, transparency and good governance, he said.

“But we want to do it in the only realistic way to make changes – and this is by trying to convince our colleagues. Of course it is important to have conferences like Play the Game and critical journalists to make all of us aware of the problems, but the only ones who can really make some changes are the international organisations,” he argued. “We don’t believe we can do it by making a lot of criticism all the time. (…) But we believe that in the long run we will be able to make changes come true.”

How to handle the autocrats of sport?
In many countries sport is in fact more like a tool for governmental politics than an independent movement. Countries like Belarus and Azerbaijan have even appointed their incumbent president as their local NOC president as well.

The question of how to handle the challenge of people and countries with weak or no democratic traditions apparently gaining more power in international sport dominated the following panel debate. “Should international sport organisations be pillars of autocratic regimes?” as James Dorsey asked.

Niels Nygaard refused the idea of direct governmental intervention when asked if the sports movement would call for the intervention of governments in the future, like in the case of doping, to help it resist autocratic regimes. Governmental intervention should only be the case if sports organisations are operating illegally, misusing public funding or if the intervention is about developing and promoting good governmental practice, he said.

“Some say we should not go to Sochi because of the laws on homosexuals in Russia. I don’t think we should stay away. We have to accept there are different cultures and political systems, and just by being there (in Russia) and having them as a part of our international cooperation, I believe we can influence them in the long run,” Nygaard said. 

“We can smile at Azerbaijan and Belarus where the President is also President of the NOC. In those instances, where they had a general assembly electing the NOC President, they are formally complying with the IOC rules… whether they are in practice, I am not quite sure.”

Nygaard’s statements provoked a sharp reply from Jens Weinreich, who warned that some of the people that are having an increasing influence in international sport, from the IOC downwards, are anything but harmless; some are outright criminals, some are even murders, according to Weinreich.

But as Margaret Talbot also noted, the international sports organisations won’t take over the whole sports system, including local sport. She addressed what she believes is a broader democratic issue in sport: “I think the biggest problem is the lack of vertical accountability. International and national federations should be accountable to their members, and members should be asking questions. But there is such a disconnection between the grassroots members and the people who run specific sports.”

Soccer and autocracy: Who do national football teams represent?

Militant Al Ahli fans commemorate 74 killed in politically-loaded Port Said brawl

By James M. Dorsey

Little better illustrates the inextricable link between sports and politics than the frequent perception of Middle Eastern and North African national football teams as representatives of repressive autocratic regimes.

That perception is reinforced by players’ adoption of a neo-patriarchic acceptance of their autocratic leader as a father figure that leads them to keep a distance to mass expressions of political discontent. It is also strengthened by efforts by Middle Eastern and North African autocrats to control soccer in a bid to ensure that it does not emerge as a rallying point for protest and in an attempt to exploit the sport’s popularity to shore up their tarnished images.

Nowhere is support for the national team more dependent on politics than in Egypt. Opponents of the country’s military-backed interim government blamed Ghana’s 6:1 dashing  last month of Egypt’s hopes to qualify for the first time in almost a quarter of a century for a World Cup finals on the toppling of Egypt’s only democratically elected president, Mohammed Morsi, by military strongman General Abdel Fatah al-Sisi.

"You jinxed us, Al-Sisi," said Mohammed Dardeer on Facebook, describing the general as "religiously defiled" in a comment reminiscent of perceptions in Iran that blamed the Islamic republic’s soccer failures on the intense interest in the game displayed by former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It also reverts Egypt to the period before 2011 when a popular revolt forced President Hosni Mubarak to resign after 30 years in office and militant soccer fans, one of the country’s foremost social movements, rejected the national team as “Mubarak’s squad.”

Perceptions of the national team’s political role position it as the object of a tug of war between nation and regime, particularly in countries where the relationship of sports and politics is ungoverned. That lack of governance creates gray areas that in 2010 for example allowed Egypt and Algeria’s autocrats to whip up national emotion and bring their countries to the brink of war over the outcome of a key World Cup qualifier.

In post-revolt Arab nations like Egypt, Tunisia and Libya political control has largely meant preventing soccer pitches from becoming protest rallying points. As a result, fans have been banned from stadia, forcing teams to play in front of empty terraces. That approach is becoming however increasingly untenable.

Ghana defeated Egypt in the first of two matches at a time that the country is deeply divided between supporters and opponents of the military. The coup prompted many of the military’s opponents to view the national team as representing the regime rather than the country much as militant soccer fans did under Mr. Mubarak. That earned them charges of being traitors by those who see the Brotherhood rather than the military as the greatest obstacle to resolving Egypt’s political crisis.

“When a large number of Egyptians, too many to be ignored, felt happy after our national team lost to Ghana, didn't the coup organizers ask themselves why they felt this way towards their national team? They most likely will not bother themselves to think about it, but will claim naively, ‘It is out of spite so that no victories, not even in football, will be attributed to General Al-Sisi…  Al-Sisi's Egypt is no longer the Egypt of love that celebrates victories, as tyranny and injustice cannot win; they are defeated in every aspect, whether militarily, as in 1967 (Israel’s defeat of Egypt), or on the sports field. It is ironic that one of the coup leaders called the football result a catastrophe, which was what the 1967 defeat was called.” quipped Amira Abo el-Fetouh in the Middle East Monitor.

Ghana’s stunning thrashing of Egypt did persuade the military to allow some 30,000 fans to attend the return match in an out-of-the-way Cairo stadium scheduled for November 19. The symbolism of Egypt’s performance – victory or defeat – in the return match weighs heavy on the game given the regime’s need to project itself more positively internationally and to counter the analogy of defeats on the military and the soccer battlefields. The symbolism is all the greater with General Al-Sisi also celebrating his birthday on November 19.

The qualifier alongside an earlier clash between storied Cairo club Al Ahli SC, whose militant supporters played key roles in the toppling of Mr. Mubarak and the subsequent three years of volatile street politics and the Orlando Pirates, South Africa’s oldest soccer team, have become litmus tests of the military’s ability to demonstrate that it can ensure security amid a growing insurgency in the Sinai and continued protests against Morsi’s deposal.

Ghana, concerned about security in Egypt, is pressuring FIFA to move the November 19 match to a neutral venue. "We will be monitoring the game between Al Ahli and Orlando Pirates to see whether we can draw some conclusions about the situation in Cairo ahead of our game," said Ghana football association management committee member Yaw Boateng.

James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, co-director of the University of Würzburg’s Institute for Fan Culture, and the author of The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccerblog and a forthcoming book with the same title.