Free Liverpool
The latest in my occasional series on the connection between sports, mostly football, and politics.
• On May 17, FIFA will hold its 74th Congress in Bangkok, Thailand. The big story from the congress — a weekend of glad-handling, corruption, and empty speechifying — is that the Palestinian Football Association (PFA) has tabled an official request to discuss sanctions against the Israel Football Association (IFA). “Suspension or expulsion of a member association” is number four on the FIFA Congress agenda. The IFA and its clubs are open supporters of Israel’s terror campaign, occupation, and war against Palestinians. The request calls for sanctions against Israeli teams, including national and club teams, for operating clubs in the occupied territories and for failing to tackle discrimination against Palestinians in its leagues.
On paper, Palestine should have the support of most of the Global South countries whose governments openly side with the Palestinian cause in international forums, but the same can’t be said for their football bodies. For example, the South American association recently signed a cooperation agreement with Israel, which would love to play in the Copa America. (Given that the US, a close ally of Israel, now, too, hosts the Copa, I won’t rule this out.) Crucially, Israel is a member of UEFA and plays its national and club competitions there, not in Asia, where it is physically located. In 1974, the Asian Football Association banned Israel. In 1991, UEFA began allowing Israeli teams to play in its competitions. UEFA or its national affiliates, while quick (and rightly so) to ban Russia for invading Ukraine, has not shown any desire to act against Israel.
• American professional and college sports teams effectively treat beat reporters as staff members. The MLS is not immune. Just look at the case of Laurel Pfahler, a reporter covering FC Cincinnati. About a month ago, the team canceled her press credentials for “conducting interviews with sources outside the facility and team-approved interviews.” Awful Announcing published a great summary of events and the stakes for journalism but was vague about the actual reasons. ESPN later reported FC Cincinnati was upset over how Pfahler reported on team transfers—basically for doing her job. I contacted Pfahler via Twitter on Friday. She confirmed the suspension is over: “Yes, it was just two weeks. Unnecessary but in the past.”
• FIFA’s statutes stipulate that member associations must “… manage their affairs independently and ensure that any third parties do not influence their own affairs” and that “decisions passed by bodies that have not been elected or appointed,” according to FIFA rules, “shall not be recognized by FIFA.” Not in Cameroon. Rigobert Song was fired after the 2024 Afcon, where Cameroon only reached the Round of 16.
In early April, the Ministry of Sports appointed the new men’s national team coach, Marc Brys from Belgium. Fecafoot, the national association, was supposed to appoint a new coach. The president, Samuel Eto’o (yes, him), also favored a European coach. He had proposed one of Hervé Renard (who has managed Zambia twice, Angola, Cote d’Ivoire, and Morocco), José Peseiro (Al Ahly of Egypt and the Nigerian men’s national team), and Fabio Cannavaro (who has not coached in Africa before, but in Dubai and Saudi Arabia).
The problem is that Eto’o, while adopting an independent posture, is very much implicated in the politics of Cameroon’s ruling elite, though occasionally they’ve reminded him who his boss is. He is a confidante of 91-year-old president Paul Biya, who has ruled the country since 1982. In fact, the Guinean news site, Le Lynx, quoted Eto’o before the beef with the Ministry went public that Biya would have the final say in the appointment of the new coach: “We will work on several profiles, and we will send them to the head of state. Because you know, for us, we need the Head of State's agreement and opinion on the Cameroonian federation's proposal.” Fecafoot also officially defers to Biya.
Unlike his playing career, Eto’o’s tenure at the top of Fecafoot has mainly been a series of own goals and ethical lapses, and he has many enemies in CAF and Cameroonian football (including former teammates in the national team) who want to see him fall. He is also being investigated for match-fixing. FIFA has since rejected the Ministry of Sport’s decision to hire Brys. A writer on Africa Is a Country (the site I founded and edited for 14 years) once described Cameroonian football, like its politics, as Kafkaesque. That’s all.
• Meanwhile, several African football legends (Emmanuel Adebayor, Didier Drogba, and Eto’o) played alongside French President Emmanuel Macron in a charity match in Paris. Given France’s legacies in their countries (and its treatment of people of African descent in France), you’d think they’d refuse to play with Macron or have him disinvited. But then France and Macron have a strange hold on African elites, including its intellectuals.
• Johan Kriek was active and quite good as a professional tennis player between 1978 and 1984. Kriel won 14 men’s singles titles, including two Grand Slam titles (the Australian Open twice). His best ranking was seventh on the ATP Men’s Tour in September 1984 behind (in that order) John McEnroe, Ivan Lendl, Jimmy Connors, Mats Wilander, Andres Gomez, Jimmy Arias, and Pat Cash. Kriel also reached the men’s singles semifinals of the French Open and US Open and the quarterfinals at Wimbledon. Right before he retired, Kriel took American citizenship and moved to south Florida, to Palm Beach, an area favored by rich, right-wing Republicans. He runs a clean water charity (which seems obsessed with Afghanistan) and a tennis school. Nothing out of the ordinary.
But Kriel is from South Africa. He is from a part of the country (Pongola in the then-Transvaal; now in northern Kwazulu-Natal province) that was particularly conservative and reactionary during apartheid. Kriel fondly remembers his childhood, mostly around other whites. But I don’t remember Kriel ever speaking out against apartheid. He was playing tennis. When he did talk politics, he did so in relation to the backlash he received from other South Africans at home for taking up citizenship. As for the sports boycott, then at its most intense, Kriel remembers it as an obstacle to his career: “Traveling the world, South Africa was a pariah country back then, politically.” So, just another ordinary white South African expatriate who made it good with little self reflection on home.
More recently, however, he has been quite vocal about politics, mostly about the affairs adopted country, and, he mostly veers right. On Twitter or X, he routinely defends Donald Trump, Elon Musk (another white South African expatriate), Jair Bolsonaro, and rightwing troll Alex Jones, among others. He amplifies conspiracy theories (COVID, elections, Hilary Clinton) from suspended X accounts (a tall order on X) for their extremist views. He tweeted “me too” to a post promoting starting a “home armament business” if Joe Biden gets reelected president. In his X bio, he refers to himself — dog whistling — as “Proud Patriot.” But I shouldn’t have been surprised.
In an interview in 2010, he was asked about the last book he read. Kriek responded that he read “a lot of political stuff” and recommended a book: “Marching To Hell: America and Islam after Iraq,” by Michael Scheuer, a former CIA agent, which he described as “a scary book.” Foreign Affairs described the book’s foreign policy recommendation as “killing those who seek to kill Americans.” The only good ones are those working for the US military-industrial complex. Even The New York Times, which has David Brooks and Brett Stephens on its roster of opinion writers, review judged Scheuer as unserious; “his prescriptions are the stuff of fulminant talk radio and “enormously crude” and “reductionist.”
• The Ballon d’Or only gets announced on October 30th. But trust Twitter fingers, especially Messi’s detractors, to smell a conspiracy: that if Messi wins (he is the Ballon d’Ors most decorated winner) most the competitions he is slated to play in this year — the MLS Cup (yes, I know) and the Argentinean men’s national team wins the Copa America and the Olympics, he is the favorite to win the 2024 Ballon d’Or, decided by a panel of journalists; like the various “Halls of Fames” in American sports. Unless of course “… the UCL [European Champions League] winners don't win Euros with their country plus league title with their club while boasting POTY [Player of the Year] and POTT [Player of the Tournament].”
• The Jamaican defender, Dexter Lembikisa, announced himself on the world stage with a brilliantly struck goal for Jamaica to beat Panama (1-0) in the CONCACAF Nations League third-place match on Sunday, March 24, 2024. Lembikisa — who plays for Wolves in the Premier League — was born in Bristol, UK, to immigrant parents, a Congolese father and a Jamaican mother. Afro-Jamaicans, the descendants of African slaves brought to the island in the 16th century, make up the majority of Jamaicans. The national team usually features several players whose parents or grandparents migrated to the UK. However, Lembikisa may be the first player with a parent born in Africa. But Lembikisa’s goal also brought attention to another feature of modern football: most black players, whether European, Caribbean, African, or Latin American, playing in Europe’s professional leagues, are quite religious. Many of them, like Lembikisa, are evangelical Christians. This is usually combined with very reactionary politics, as with many Brazilian footballers. Lembikisa doesn’t post about politics on his social media, so we don’t know what he thinks of capitalism, public goods, women’s rights, or Palestine, but in a post pinned to the top of his Instagram account, he is baptized in a pool. Most of his posts — whether showing him playing football or lounging on a chair in the latest fashion — are captioned ‘Thank you, Jesus.”
• Following the CAF Women's Olympic Qualifying Tournament, Nigeria and Zambia will represent Africa in the Olympic Games in Paris this summer. They defeated South Africa and Morocco, respectively. Zambia—who disappointed at the 2023 Women’s World Cup—has the world’s two most expensive footballers on its team: Racheal Kundananji and Barbara Banda. That’s the bright side. The team’s coach, Bruce Mwape, faces allegations he sexually abused some players on the national team. He is still in his job. By the way, the coach of the men’s national team, Avram Grant, a Zionist, is an accused sexual predator. He is also a Zionist.
Meanwhile, last time I checked, Nigeria’s players — backed by their American coach — were in a pay dispute with the federation.
As for South Africa, the most unlucky of the finalists in the qualifying tournament, essentialist and offensive views about race and racial "traits" that were propagated by apartheid's white rulers and ideologues have found traction among some of the team’s critics at home. Notably from its black critics.
Coach Desiree Ellis has led the team to the 2022 Women's African Cup of Nations (Wafcon) championship and runners-up in 2018. She also coached them to qualify for two World Cups (including making it to the Round of 16 in 2023). Every year between 2018 and 2023, CAF named Ellis its coach of the year. Right after South Africa was defeated by Nigeria, some were calling for Ellis to be fired. Her fiercest critic is Portia Modise, a former Banyana star. It's been going on for a while.
One of Modise’s gripes against Ellis, who is coloured (or mixed-race), is that she "favors" players from that community. Ellis picked only one coloured player, goalkeeper Kaylin Swart, to start against Nigeria. Swart kept goal in Wafcon and the Women’s World Cup. IOL live sports editor John Goliath has an excellent summary. It may be that Ellis’ tenure with Banyana has run its course or that she is catching strays for women footballers’ displeasure with South African Football Association president Danny Jordaan (a former ANC MP) whose critics associated with mismanagement of football. It is telling and worrying (as the football writer Natheer Marshall noted on Facebook) that Modise chose to make it about coloureds (Jordaan is also coloured) and that essentialist and offensive views about race and racial "traits" that were propagated by whites under apartheid (and still are), are also common and thriving among its former black subjects.
• Then there is the story about Aston Villa's Leon Bailey and the Jamaican FA. Here is what Bailey said about them: “They’re very unprofessional. You're getting your flight details sent to you at 11 pm at night! I don’t remember the last time I received a dollar from the Jamaica national team. When I say unprofessional, you don’t have equipment for you. You go and there’s only one shirt. You turn up to a game and you see a woman’s shirt. It’s ridiculous. Whenever I’m there, it’s like they don’t know how to operate. When I go, I feel exposed. Any person can bring a camera to my face. There’s no security, nothing." For this, Bailey was sent home by the team management.
This reminds me of when Benni McCarthy, the most prolific goalscorer for the South African men’s national team (31 goals in 79 games between 1997 and 2012) and now a forwards coach at Manchester United, used to complain about the treatment he received from the South African Football Association. Benni played most of his career for European clubs (Ajax, Celta Vigo, FC Porto, Blackburn Rovers, and West Ham) and resented being called up for meaningless friendlies against Thailand and Guatemala (it turned out later that was to lobby FIFA members for votes to host the 2010 World Cup) or having to buy his own plane tickets to World Cup or African Cup of Nations qualifiers. For being outspoken about this (locally based players or other less illustrious European-based South Africans did not dare complain), Benni was labeled as "unpatriotic" by SAFA, the local media, and some fans.
• Finally, in random history: Harry Gwala was a South African Communist and political prisoner on Robben Island whose health was neglected by his white apartheid jailers so he developed motor neuron disease; and, then improbably, on his release, led the defense of Natal’s black communities against the violence of Inkatha, apartheid’s proxy.
Significantly, Gwala was also a hardcore Arsenal fan.
Gwala died in 1995. At the time of his passing, journalist John Carlin, then at The Independent, wrote about meeting Gwala for the first time in 1992, right at the start of South Africa’s transition from apartheid to liberal democracy: “A British diplomat in the Thatcher era who visited him at his office in Pietermaritzburg hit upon a stratagem to defuse what he anticipated would be a tricky reception. He arrived with a pile of video recordings of recent Arsenal games. The two got on famously.” Carlin continues that to break the tension for his own interview with Gwala, he tried a version of the same tactic: '... "Mr Gwala … what I would like you to talk about is the dialectic, taking in the objective contradictions, that accounts for the demise this season of the Arsenal football team?" Puzzled, [Gwala] suddenly got the joke. He hurled back his head, body otherwise inert, and laughed till he cried."
For Harry Gwala’s sake, Arsenal better win the English Premier League this year, as many of us can’t bear a club owned and operated by an authoritarian petrostate that doesn’t play by football rules (115 charges of breaching finance rules) will win the league again.