Soccer as political metaphor

soccer-as-political-metaphor

By Tatalo Alamu

 

The European Soccer fiesta has now come and gone. For about four weeks, many soccer buffs sat glued to their television sets as many European nations attempted to outwit and outclass each other in nerve-wracking and heart wrenching confrontations. It was a moveable feast; a soccer extravaganza which held the entire globe spellbound while it lasted. New talents shone forth with brilliance and bravura while old titans sizzled and fizzled out in their last hurray.

The tournament itself was a tribute to the indomitable and indefatigable spirit of humankind. Where there is human will there must surely be a way out of the most intractable viral conundrum that the world has seen. Originally scheduled to hold last year, the tournament was briefly put to sword by the rampaging coronavirus pandemic. But the organizers were having none of that nonsense. They simply devised a creative way round the pandemic.

According to a local saying, what cannot speak cannot be smarter and wiser than what has learnt to verbalize its thoughts. In the event, the tournament turned out a glittering spectacle of human ingenuity and a testament to what continental cooperation can achieve in the face of extra-human adversity. The European master-race, the original colonizers of the rest of the humankind, has demonstrated once again what grit and determination mean for the survival of the fittest.

But while all this was going on, something far more intriguing and revealing was also unfolding. Aljazeera, the historically minded even if occasionally controversial global television, was showcasing the latest heroic figure in a series named Footballing Rebels. It was about the talented Ivorian soccer superstar, Didier Drogba, and how he deployed the magic and power of football to save his beloved country from perdition and disintegration even if only briefly.

Put together by Eric Cantona, the great footballing prodigy and philosophizing contrarian who forfeited what could have been a glittering international career by standing up to the soccer authorities in his native France, it is an engrossing documentary about how talented individuals could make a difference to their society when, where and how it matters most.

From Brazilians to Hungarians and from Argentines to Tunisians and Algerians, many of these great and exceptional individuals chose to forfeit their careers or decided to risk jail, exile and even certain death rather than being found in bed with the untrammelled tyranny that has overtaken their beloved fatherland. In the process, they helped to save the fatherland from historic indignity and humiliation.

Far more than their exploits on the field, this heroic daring has marked them out as true heroes of their countries to be worshipped and wildly venerated by grateful compatriots. The football stadium in Budapest is named after Ferenc Puskas, aka, the galloping major. Arguably the greatest Hungarian footballer of all time, Puskas chose to go on exile in Spain rather than suck up to the communist tormentors of his Magyar compatriots in what has gone down as the Hungarian Uprising of 1956.

It was the end of the great Hungarian football team which dazzled the world in the early fifties and which was only prevented from winning the 1954 World Cup by the offensive and dishonourable conduct of the German team. In 1953, the Hungarian team memorably walloped the English in Budapest. If anybody thought this was a mere fluke, they returned to Wembley later to perform the same feat. Football had left home forever.

But what is it about soccer which provokes such high octane emotions and nationalistic malaria? Without any doubt, the beautiful game of football is about the most entrancing and enthralling leisurely creation of humankind since the advent of modern civilization.

To its aficionado, the puffery, leathery rounded object is worthy of veneration if not outright secular worship. Whereas hockey is seen to be too dignified and elitist, cricket too humdrum and genteel, rugby too violent and physical, it is football that seems to get the mix right.

But football can also provoke wild enthusiasm and raw emotions on and off the field. The hyper-nationalist hysteria often drips with venom and vitriol occasionally bristling with ancestral feuds. When he was asked why he was so sure that West Germany would lose to England in a celebrated confrontation during the 1982 World Cup final in Spain, Brian Clough, the irrepressible coach of Nottingham Forest, retorted that England had already beaten the Germans twice.

He was not referring to the 1966 World Cup final but the two world wars of the last century when the English decisioned their German cousins. Sometimes, the scores of military defeat are settled on the field of play such as the jnfamous grudge match between England and Argentina during the 1986 World Cup.

Diego Maradona personally supervised the exit of the English team in retaliation for the humiliation of his country by Margaret Thatcher during the Falklands War. The gifted urchin and lapsed pickpocket from the slums of Buenos Aires was heard to crow later that he preferred his dubious first goal because it was akin to picking the pocket of the English.

Disputed soccer matches have actually led to a shooting war between two Latin American neighbours. Footballers are known to have been shot dead by irate compatriots for what was considered an act of derelict perfidy against their own country. For years in France, a death sentence hung over the head of Harald Schumacher, the German goalkeeper during the 1982 World Cup Final, for viciously putting the menacing French striker, Patrick Battiston, out of contention through eye-thumbing.

Sometimes the vendetta can move to airports such as happened to the Italian football team in the seventies.  After a terrible trouncing, the team had to be landed in a military airbase because the crowd waiting patiently to receive them was equipped with cudgels rather than bouquets. Surely if the players did not take their soccer lessons to heart, they could at least make do with some lessons in frantic pummelling.

As usual in such matters, something new always comes out of Africa and the great continent makes a surreal entry. After the Central African Republic national Football team was thoroughly whipped by a neighbouring country, its military dictator, the thoroughly crazed Emperor Jean-Bedel Bokassa, personally flogged the entire team senseless for bringing such a shame and disgrace on the fatherland. It was said that the wailings could be heard in neighbouring countries.

As a corrective to this sordid tale of African brutality, it is useful to point out that of the five greatest footballers that have graced the field of soccer, at least two of them, Pele and Eusebio, are of African descent. Their ancestors were victims of colonization, industrial-scale slavery and its internationalization, a phenomenon that we often celebrate as globalization in its very first wave.

Globalization has led to the forcible homogenization of the human race and the increasing standardization of divergent cultures. But oceans of racism persist and discrimination based on dissimilar cultures subsists in even the most advanced locations of human civilization. It is a wonderful irony of history that the greatest resistance and most telling rebuff of globalization is seen at the level of the old colonial nation-states.

Sometimes the resistance is unintended and entirely unintentional , the outcome of the forces of change unleashed by the dynamics of globalization itself. Nowhere is this sharp irony of globalization more evident than in sports particularly in football where the first are on their way to becoming the last and where economically backward societies are playing first violin.

Something new comes out of Africa indeed.  The last European soccer tournament featured football prodigies of African descent who played outstanding football for their adopted countries. In some cases, these African avatars constitute the livewires of their teams: Romelu Lukaku of Belgium, Mbappe and Pogba for France, Alaba for Austria, Akanji for Switzerland and Raheem Sterling for England. As usual, the Dutch team boasted a riot of them.

But it is said that however much we choose to ignore history, history in all its alienating necessities will not ignore us. History is the site and shrine of ancestral hurt and great human sacrifice. It is trite in Literary Theory that a work of art must reveal the conditions of its possibility willy-nilly the efforts of the author to hide them.

So is the art of soccer. It did not take long for the sparks of racism and institutional prejudice to start flying at the last European soccer fiesta. When many of the players in the England Football team decided to open their campaign with the now famous kneeling posture as a gesture of solidarity with the oppressed of the world, it elicited protracted boos, jeering hoots of disapproval and intemperate catcalls from the stand.

This was small beer compared to what was to happen next. England has always relied on courage and raw “ up and at em” physicality to make a mincemeat of their opponents. Although not outlandishly talented, organic teamwork, the mulish obstinacy and bulldog tenacity famously associated with the national temperament saw them romp to the final against better fancied teams.

But all hell was let loose as soon as the team lost to the sleek and stylish Azzurri after an engrossing penalty shootout. The internet was deluged by racist jibes and taunts fingering the three Black footballers who lost their penalty kicks as the culprits. They were asked to go back to wherever they came from.

It has taken the intervention of Boris Johnson and the entire British establishment to calm frayed nerves. They have given what is an unfortunate situation their best shot. It can be argued that most of the racist ruffians are soccer yokels and beer louts on the margins of decent and civilized English society. But they must have taken their cue from somewhere. Despite their bravest efforts, racism remains deeply engrained in the fabric of British society.

It must however be conceded that despite this appalling setback, the country of good manners and tolerance fares much better than most European societies when it comes to institutional racism and rabid bigotry. What Britain and other racially bifurcated and ethnically divided societies need is just what the soccer yobs have repudiated.

They need transcendental heroes, particularly cultural icons and sporting avatars, who will rise above the racial and economic divisions of their countries to bring solace and succour to their land. Marcus Rashford, the good boy of Manchester United, is doing his best in that department. Hopefully there will be more like him who will not be deterred by the lager louts and other beer-quaffing yokels.

Hastily assembled and clumsily glued African nations need this even more to avoid chaotic disintegration. In a bitterly polarized Nigeria bristling with ancestral animosities, driven round the bend by a besieged feudal hegemony, we need the example of a transcendental hero like Didier Drogba. Drogba is an ethnic Bete from the South West of Cote D’Ivoire who rose above the ethnic and cultural divisions of his country to give hope and solace to millions of his compatriots.

By so doing, he was able to unite his fractious and divided nation behind him. When Drogba won the African equivalent of the Ballon d’Or in 2006, he flew into the country with the trophy and insisted that the then Ivorian president, Laurent Gbagbo, must accompany him to Bouake to present the trophy after a soccer tournament. The scene was of biblical magnitude in the frenzied adulation and rapture. What the politicians could not do, Drogba has done with his soccer wizardry.

It was a very brave and heroic thing to do. At that point in time, Cote D’Ívoire was effectively partitioned with Boake serving as the secessionist capital while the rump of the old state presided over in Abidjan. The rest of the country was a no-man’s-land of pulsating anarchy.

It was only a man of plucky courage and international standing with a dash of metropolitan rootlessness that could go against the yearnings of his ethnic nationality in a fractious nation spilt along ethnic and cultural lines without paying a heavy price or even being served with the prospects of summary banishment.

But Drogba had reached a point where the country needed him more than he needed the country. He had nothing to lose except perhaps his national identity which did not amount to much at that point in time. The politicians looked on with wry bemusement knowing fully well that football magic could only do as much and that war was inevitable when political disputes became intractable.

Drogba could only stave off the inevitable by a few years. He could not prevent the looming collision of forces and an armed determination of the outcome of the crisis. But what is unknown to his compatriots is the fact that the real import of the Drogba intervention lies in opening the eyes of Ivorians to the possibility of a northern presidency and the inevitable ascendancy of Allasane Quatarra.

It will be recalled that despite having served his country with distinction as a technocrat, Quatarra was prevented from acceding to the highest office in the land on the grounds of his being the son of Burkinabe immigrants from Burkina Faso. The nation’s founding father, Felix Houphouet-Boigny , did not help matters by refusing to name a successor. He had famously retorted that a Baole chief does not know his successor.

Houphouet-Boigny’s death left his country roiling in terminal chaos and a crisis of succession which eventually led to a partitioning of old Ivory Coast after the military split along ethnic lines. It must have been a sad denouement for the rescue bid of Didier Drogba. But he has lived to see his country rise from the ashes of self-destruction. Those who make national integration impossible make national disintegration inevitable. Citizens of bitterly polarized African nations have a lot to learn from the example of Didier Drogba. May his brood increase on the continent.

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