The Rebellious Game: A Political History of Football in the Middle East and North Africa

Authors

  • Authors

  • Jan Busse
  • René Wildangel

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.31430//ifxq9754

Keywords:

Sport and Colonialism, Sport and National Mobilisation, Sport and Liberation

Abstract

​It was mostly British colonisers who came to consolidate the political, economic and military interests of the motherland and did what they used to do: play football. Apart from spending their time, football worked as a colonial instrument both "civilising" and "disciplining" the colonised populations. The first clubs in North Africa and the Levant restricted membership for non-Westerners and non-whites, but soon football also became a transnational transmitter of independence movements, the stadiums becoming important social spaces on the local and national levels. Such was the emancipatory force of football that it has been preserved across the region ever since the colonial era, prominent again in the Arab Uprisings. However, the massive wealth of the Gulf States and their decision to invest in football's soft power has changed the equation. The article thus describes emancipatory and counter-emancipatory trends in MENA football history from a longue durée perspective.

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Published

2022-07-01

Article dates

Received: March 20, 2022 Revised: April 25, 2022 Accepted: June 15, 2022

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Issue

Vol. 10 No. 057 (2022): Issue 057

Section

Studies

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Copyright (c) 2022 Jan Busse, René Wildangel (Author)

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.