Past results suggest that going through a period of dictatorial government is almost a sine qua non for a nation to be a champion.

Brian at The Run of Play did a very good job crushing that idea.

… [C]orrelation doesn’t imply causation; the fact that two things occurred simultaneously doesn’t prove that one caused the other without a mechanism to demonstrate the cause. Fetter gestures toward such a mechanism—“soccer prowess proved a national morale builder for the dictatorships of the last century”—but while it holds up in some specific cases (Mussolini, et. al.), as a general theory it’s just silly, especially considering that, as Fetter himself points out, most of the World Cup-winning countries that have had dictators since 1930 weren’t actually dictatorships at the time when they lifted the trophy.

The idea memed, nonetheless. (I’m shocked that highbrow soccer dorks — my favourite phrase this World Cup, used by The New Republic’s Goal Post to describe their ideal reader base — appear not to check RoP before coffee.) Laughable, snobbish solipsism — it’s not just for FIFA anymore, kids. The soccer blogosphere has no shortage of writers doing sterling work dissecting the politics of the World Cup and men’s football in thoughtful, moving ways (Occasional Pitch Invasion writer Jennifer Doyle, of From a Left Wing, is just one of them). But who needs all that when the USA’s finest journalists are sitting around a table writing football stories that are the intellectual equivalent of those Hitchens-Amis word games where they mad-libbed book titles with ‘sex’ and ‘prick’?

Last week, the phenomenon’s most high-profile instance was a piece by Roger Cohen in the New York Times called ‘Özil the German‘, an op-ed ostensibly exploring the multiculturalism of Germany, and the shattering of its team’s power structure with the absence of ‘Big Man’ Michael Ballack.

Perhaps it’s not a bad thing that the first African World Cup has seen stars fail where they were not backed by teamwork. Cameroon, with its Big Man Samuel Eto’o of Inter Milan, and Ivory Coast, with Big Man Dider Drogba of Chelsea, are both out. Ghana, meanwhile, has endured through discipline and coordination.

Africa needs more of that kind of spirit.

Ignoring the warning bells that usually ring in my head when the word ‘Africa’ appears in a newspaper that takes ads from the Government of Sudan and has in the past reported extensively on the Congo civil war without once mentioning its international backers, I read on.

Since decolonization began in the second half of the 20th century, it has too often been the continent of “The Big Man.” That was the sobriquet V.S. Naipaul gave in “A Bend in the River” to the African dictator plundering the city of Kisangani in Congo through mercenaires granted license to run amok.

The colonizer’s plundering merely gave way to the Big Man’s impunity in stripping Africa’s assets bare.

Many things about African football became clearer at once to me. Unlike the rest of the world, African football runs on the transitive properties of morality. Losing because of bad tactics and positioning, like Cameroon, conceals the deeper flaw of playing their best player — an inspirational, talented, eloquent man with almost all the qualities of a great leader — at all. How dare manager Paul Le Guen attempt to shoulder the blame for setting Eto’o adrift in a formation where his co-ordination with Webo failed repeatedly and his ability to track back was severely limited by his having to run between left and centre? The blame is Africa’s for producing a player who is celebrated back home as much as he is in white cities like Barcelona and Milan. Memories of the Barnes Theory Of Socialist Righteousness pierce the heart.

As for Cote d’Ivoire, it’s all very well for white people to give a man credit for stopping a civil war in his country. But ask him to play with a broken arm in order to bolster a team in a challenging group and reap the whirlwind, CIV. Given the paucity of Big Men in the rest of the group — no seriously, Kaka? Ronaldo? No civil wars! No Big Manhood! Oh, and Jong Tae-se who? — this was just as indicative of ‘African tragedy’ as any history of dictators in the Congo. Mobutu Sese Seko, your football Nazgul have failed you. Africa won and you lost.

Cohen is merely patting his column into shape at this point. The blissfully oblivious New York Times enjoys supporting the idea that the post-colonial world is self-sufficient and self-determining to such an extent that the origins of the ‘Big Man’ phenomenon in the support of African extremists by their former colonisers doesn’t seem to merit the status of rumour, much less truth, in their pages. Rest easy, readers; coltan wars, oil genocides and repeatedly invalidated democratic elections happen because Africans are just reverting to type. On the other hand, Cohen points out,

[South Africa] has resisted the devastating “Big Man” syndrome. Over the past 16 years, South Africa has had four free elections and four presidents … [a] robust judiciary and free press … [t]he interaction, under the law, of various interest groups … This is its great lesson for a continent where, by 2025, one in four of every person under 24 will live.

From which statement we infer:

1. All African countries have the same history.
2. All African countries have the same set of problems.
3. Big Men are okay with us if they are Big Men by Committee, which is to say that they are Big Men who can be safely invited to speak at G20 gatherings.
4. It’s fine that he brokered the most incredible nation-building negotiation in the last fifty years and possibly ever, but what would really symbolise a betrayal of big man Mandela’s anti-Big Man policies, more than Zuma and the ANC’s drift away from his vision, would be if Siphiwe Tshabalala were a thirty-a-season goalscorer for Manchester United.

At this point Roger Cohen is satisfied with the lesson he has just taught his African readers, and returns to the subject of multicultural Germany and the meaning of Mesut Özil.

A Social Democrat once told me that the country’s ultimate victory over Hitler would lie in the reconstitution of the Jewish community, then being pursued by luring Jews of the former Soviet Union. I always thought that was a vain, slightly kitschy idea.

Parsing issues aside, since vanity and kitschiness are things that Hannah Arendt, the great analyst of European totalitarianism, would have resisted in her political philosophy, this seems sound. Reconciliation and reparation, as Arendt knew, are overwhelmingly difficult, and sometimes even tragic ideas. (Guernica Magazine recently posted a horrifying exploration of how, in the context of some African history, they can simply be another form of torture.) They can be begun by legislation, but history’s best hope is only ever that such acts may go on to form a new chapter. They cannot erase or change the one that has already been made. That is indeed the cause and effect of kitsch and vanity.

But the Germany of Özil and Aogo is such a victory over the Big Man who destroyed Europe.

Which is to say: thank you Turkey and Nigeria for bearing the brunt of the history of European imperialism in your own distinct ways. Directly or indirectly, we dismantled your countries in our world wars, plundered your resources, broke up your nations, sold off the pieces, put your worst enemies in power over you, treated your people like shit when they came to Europe looking for work, and continue to do so. But our football teams are now full of brown kids and black kids. So Hitler lost and you lost, but we all won. So we’re cool, right? We’re cool.

Roger Cohen says:

Africa, take note

Thank you for taking note, New York Times, and other ‘highbrow’ American soccer writers. We know now that you see the currents of history where the rest of us are trying — sometimes for painful reasons of our own — to see football games. But please remember that if other people wore the same smug-coloured glasses as you, your theories would undergo a fundamental shift. Where you see models of correlation/causation between dictators and football victories, others would see the run of play as the rest of the world knows it: of a history of possession dominated by those who wrote the rules, of enforced migrations and unwilling recruitments, of fallouts of totalitarianism where there is no such thing as an ‘almost sine qua non‘; of contests that we must always resist seeing as wars, because they can only ever be only fought — and won — on the field.

A rarer, but by no means surprising sight, is that of well-heeled teenage boys wearing the real stuff: soft, expensive-looking, logos embroidered in all the right places, and, sometimes, their own names on the back. I pass these ‘ANKUR 8 MANCHESTER UNITED’ jerseys, these ‘SHARMA 7 CHELSEA’ ones now and again, and am always startled into a double-take, which I suppose is part of their purpose.

These jerseys are intriguing symbols of globalisation. Premiership football is making deep inroads into the parts of India with the financial purchasing power to identify as a slice of of the target “Asian market” that has motivated so many of English football’s actions in recent seasons. (The situation is as bad as you fear, English fans: we really do believe that Rio Ferdinand is the world’s foremost defensive talent.) Like most converts of the EPL and Champions’ League era, we face the same dilemmas of identity and inclusiveness that fans face globally. What way is there to support a team that you don’t go to watch in person, whose stars look and speak nothing like you, a game in which your passionate involvement occurs from the very periphery of fandom?

The strong folk-roots and tribalist identities of local football support cannot export themselves intact. It was interesting to see Japanese fans recreate banners and chants straight out of the San Siro’s Curva Sud (as they did last December, for a Milan short on travelling support in Tokyo during the Club World Cup) –- but it’s rare for us to have that chance, or to impact team fandom in any personal way. Those of us who make up the Asian market, the prawn sandwich brigade, the leftie American soccerball addict circle, and other, lesser-known types — evoke, sometimes unreasonably, a certain amount of suspicion from within the tightly-knit circles of established local football fandoms. It’s true that these newish categories of fans have been formed or influenced heavily by the globalisation of the game, which has changed football so much in the last fifteen years. Money and power have never been as interchangeable as they are in the Premiership.

Does that mean, then, that the boys with the personalised shirts are trying to buy their place in fandom? It does indicate a certain egoism, some over-identification with a team or with a celebrity player. But more straightforwardly evident is the business acumen of companies like Nike, as well as the clubs, of course, who have anticipated this need, and anticipated it in the right markets — the young, the moneyed, those alienated from the geography and culture of the traditional fanbase. The void left by a lack of individual contact is filled in neatly by related things, in a way that will trouble both the liberal and the conservative ends of the football support spectrum.

This is in even starker evidence in an article written for The Times by Alyson Rudd (The Pink Cap Does Not Fit) about a month ago (found via Dipped in Tea), in which she takes on, with no small amount of disdain, football merchandise created for and marketed to women. Rudd’s anger is directed equally at the existence of accessories created for women, and at the women who actually buy them.

I support Liverpool and Liverpool are red. I do not support them because they are red. Are there women out there who have been pouting all these years, desperate to go to a game but refusing to do so on the ground that the club colours are all wrong? “Come on love, I’ve got a spare ticket, come to the match with me.” “What? And wear blue? I’m a lady. If they change their strip to pink, I’ll think about it.”

The undertones are conflicted. Rudd writes as a woman, which her article acknowledges is not status quo. Men, by default, do not require colour-coded affirmations of their gender or their choice of club when it comes to scarves, or beer mugs, or replicas of the ‘Liver Bird.’ She’s not one of those women, however, the ones who, in spite of having had the good taste to get with the programme and actually attend to football, fudge their chances at achieving real fan status by going with the wrong kinds of accessories for it.

The knee-jerk defensiveness, the need to distance oneself from a certain kind of fan, is a common enough response from minorities who fear being judged on the whole by the actions of a few. (It’s often in evidence when I meet beleaguered young Manchester United fans who are women, and feel pressed to insist that “it isn’t because of Cristiano Ronaldo” as soon as they declare their colours.) It’s harder to understand the self-righteousness, though.

So all I got for Christmas in an LFC sort of way was a club calendar, a beer glass and beer mats with lovely red insignias. Presumably there is a range of LFC champagne flutes with pink insignias out there somewhere.

Pink may have no place in the identity of a ‘red’ club, but do beer glasses and club calendars bespeak fan authenticity at all? Do replica jerseys, for that matter? Rudd is right to be alarmed at the gendering of football merchandise, and perhaps more so at the fact that there seems to be little self-awareness among the female fanbase that does pay money to buy these accessories. Since her piece is based entirely on casual observation, I’d like to counter it with more of the same, and propose that most women wearing feminized football accessories have been gifted them, either by men with ideas similar to Rudd’s about sex and colour preference, or people with no interest in football. But she fails to highlight the impersonality of the merchandise market, pink or red, on the whole.

Fan identities, as discussions over the past few weeks in various sections of the blogosphere have highlighted, are in an unprecedented state of flux. The presence of the pink and the personalised among the array of saleable football souvenirs may be damning evidence of the inadequacy of non-traditional fan bases when it comes to conventional football support. But prescriptive solutions that require them to conform to a certain set of rules to be counted as “real” fans are not really productive, either. I don’t understand Rudd’s exclusionary viewpoint because, pink or no, I would always be glad to see other people — other women in particular, given my gender — support the same club as I do, and it would be discomfiting for me to presume to tell them how it should be loved.

Can tolerance be sold? As we consider the embedded racism in Italian football brought up by Martha’s recent post on The Offside: Italy blog and Vanda’s follow-up post here on Pitch Invasion, we need to consider how it’s best addressed: will it be solved by an advertising campaign to kick racism out of football, by the levelling tendency of corporate globalisation, or does it need more radical and direct action by those on the pitch and in the stands?

Martha, like most of us calcio fans from outside Italy, got to the very heart of the question that often puzzles us. It’s not the why of the racism — it’s the why not, as in “Why aren’t there more measures challenging it?”

This is a difficult question for those of us dependent almost wholly on mediated images and sounds for our Italian football fix.

Why can’t we see people doing more to stop the offensive chants and the hate speech that crop up continually in stadiums across the peninsula? It’s agonising, as from this distance it seems it could be dealt with by a sustained and prominent campaign against racism.

But in our heart of hearts we know, ruefully, that advertising is not the answer to everything, even if it can help kickstart change.

Real change

I’m suspicious of the media industry that has sprung up around public forums on racism and discrimination. There is a give and take between social and brand awareness – but the imbalance of the two limits any potential success. Nor am I sure of the long-term value of commercial spots against racism. Maybe the nature of the cause celèbre industry is such that more money goes into pimping the brand than the cause. I’m reminded of the recent Apple/U2 anti-AIDS initiative, costing millions of dollars promoting Apple and Bono but a huge failure as no one turned up to buy their red iPods after all.

And the corporate social responsibility bandwagon is an industry. It’s far more edifying to see sportsmen advertise anti-racism measures than it is to see them do cola ads, but it isn’t less manipulative, for all its moral rectitude. I’m convinced that they are not the yardstick by which real social change can be measured. Is it really possible to sell the idea – and not merely the appearance – of tolerance?

Real change needs emotion and spontaneity, rather than an institutionalised campaign. Stadium violence in Italy is linked to a deep frustration with the failure of social institutions and a society in which offenders are traditionally suspicious of their government, their media, and their footballing establishment. A stadium ban, a fine, a police clampdown, and a multicoloured wristband can only achieve limited success.

In November, Juventus fans smuggled a banner into their game against Inter which called Zlatan Ibrahimovic a foul gypsy. The offenders were dealt with quickly, and the incident faithfully reported in measured tones by papers like La Gazzetta. And yet, apart from a short statement by Javier Zanetti in the post-match conference, the Juve case prompted little personal response. To the best of my knowledge, Zlatan’s own response to this demeaning abuse is yet to be recorded.

Which is fine; the man has the right to stay quiet, or simply decide that he doesn’t give a damn, if that’s what it is. After all, the Italian Football Federation seem to be doing a better job now in punishing such incidents.

But the ossification of these incidents into the administrative platitudes of Isolated Racist Behaviour and They Are Not Real Football Fans served up with a We Have It Under Control assurance is not what Italian football needs. It requires, instead of corporate social responsibility-fulfilling TV spots, the sight of a football team — or perhaps both football teams — refusing to continue a match until an abusive chant is silenced. It requires the players to walk up to the sidelines and ask fans what the fuck they think they’re doing: a popular rebellion is needed, and possible. One Marco Zoro may have been a lone voice in a storm. But four or five, acting with intent, can be effective.

Standing Up

Lilian Thuram once told of his experience playing for Parma around the turn of the century.

‘It was at a Parma-Milan match,’ he says, ‘when our Parma fans were chanting racist slogans against Ibrahim Ba and George Weah (both Milan players) that I thought how sick this was. The press officer tried to stop me, but I went to see the fans at our training ground and told them what I thought. The next week there was an apologetic banner at the match saying, “Thuram, respect us please!”

Of course, times have changed and naïveté has never been an excuse for bad behaviour, but the Thuram example remains important. The average racial abuser, in our imaginations, has a particular profile: he is white, male, often young, usually unemployed, or disenfranchised in some way (and usually, especially if you’re from outside Italy, in a Lazio jersey). The sort of guy who feels safe in a mob, who will duck and cower if you confront him. Accurate? Maybe, maybe not. Has anyone ever tried a confrontation, though? Not from behind a desk or a truncheon, but face-to-face, like Lilian Thuram with his home crowd?

Which is why football stadia should be good places for players themselves to set the ball rolling. There is a visceral connection between fans at a stadium and the team they are watching. And if, without choreography, without tokenism, without performing behind the safety screen of a symbolic gesture, someone stood up and asked for change, I think they could get it. Protest movements may not work against war and empires anymore, but they can work in sport. Perhaps a Newcastle player shushing his own fans would have stopped his team’s own fans calling Mido a ‘terrorist’. He might have made a difference where Rio Ferdinand holding a placard on a TV screen couldn’t.

Of course, footballers (and fans, who can make the same sort of grassroots-level difference, à la Perugia) are only human. It would hardly be easy, especially in a mob activity like football, to tip the world upside down.

But it’s dangerously wrong to expect the mass media to substitute for the visceral effect of individual actions. It’s just another way for corporations to subjugate political impulse. Perhaps it’s too Hollywoodish to expect a movement to awaken the guilt of privilege, so dormant in societies without a modern history of colonisation or oppression. But what is football but drama? And why not expect change that comes about in sporting arenas to percolate through the rest of the world?

Photo credits: watt.stuart; smuykpp1plaju