Football, World Cups and politics: a long history

The Germany team covers their mouths during the team photo before the FIFA World Cup Group E match between Germany and Japan at the Khalifa International Stadium in Doha, Qatar on Wednesday (November 23rd). 2022.AP - Matthias Schrader

Text by: Olivier Favier Follow

14 mins

Established in 1930 and 1970 respectively, the Men's and Women's World Cups have enhanced the development of professional football.

The last editions were watched by 3.2 and 1 billion viewers respectively.

Everything that happens there brings with it challenges and broad repercussions, including on the political level.

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" 

," said French President Emmanuel Macron on a trip to Thailand on November 14, 2022, faced with questions around human rights and respect for the environment in the preparation. and the organization of the World Cup by Qatar.

He adds: “

»

The sentence caused a reaction, reviving for many commentators a debate going back, beyond football, to the origin of the modern Olympic Games.

Suffice it to recall that the last Olympiads organized during Pierre de Coubertin's lifetime were those of 1936 in Berlin, a city chosen in 1931, that is, two years before Nazism came to power.

We remember the use that the Third Reich made of it - as evidenced by Leni Riefenstahl's film,

- as the triumph of the African-American athlete Jesse Owens, who liked to recall that the President of the States States Roosevelt had not even sent him a telegram of congratulations.

During the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia, more than half of the world's population over the age of four saw at least a minute of the event on television or watched it on digital media or in public places.

This sport is by far the most popular on the planet today, whether in terms of spectators, practitioners or licensees.

It is also the most lucrative.

How to imagine that it is not constantly crossed by political issues?

© FMM Graphic Studio

A popular sport

Modern football developed in 19th century England.

Codified as a school discipline, it first became professional in the industrial North – where factory bosses did not hesitate to invest in order to have better players – and remained more aristocratic in the South where it retained the spirit of private clubs.

And it is by inheriting this imagination, for example, that it spread among the Anglophile youth of Rio in Brazil at the end of the century, bourgeois and white.

In a country where the abolition of slavery is particularly late - 1888 - the segregation of the teams is total.

Only a few mixed-race players manage to integrate the white teams, powdering their faces and smoothing their hair.

As English football has moved from dribbling to passing – building team spirit, when until then everyone saw themselves as attackers having to run alone to the goal – players of color across the Atlantic are reinventing the art of dodging, which allows them to avoid physical confrontation with their white adversaries.

The writer Olivier Guez has shown how this strategy of avoidance – necessary when arbitration is not objective and physical strength turns to the advantage of men from the upper classes, who are better fed and therefore taller – embodies subversion.

Unlike the noble sports – cricket, tennis, field hockey or rugby – football did not spread in the Empire through the colonial elites, but in particular through British students or English teachers everywhere. in Europe and Latin America.

Book published in 2020. © La Découverte

A challenge for totalitarian regimes

In Rome, its origin made it suspect to the fascist regime which tried in vain to replace it with a national variant, the

, a practice abandoned a year before the 1934 World Cup, organized in Italy.

The

had no less than seven stadiums built for the occasion.

The Italian victory - not without pressure from the regime on arbitration - inspires Adolf Hitler for the Olympic Games.

The

– the color chosen since 1911 in homage to the house of Savoy, the reigning dynasty – did it again four years later in France.

In order to distinguish herself from the Blues whom she beat at the Colombes stadium, in the Paris suburbs, she dons black jerseys for the match, a strong tribute to the fascist militias.

In this propagandist framework,

became a "national sport" and the team changed in the eyes of its coach into a "platoon of

 " - in reference to the elite troops of the Great War, many of whom joined the hard core. of fascism.

The Italian team will not have had to face the one who, a few months earlier, was still one of the big favorites of the tournament: the Austrian team has in fact no longer existed since the Anschluss – the annexation of the Austria by Nazi Germany – and its captain Mattias Sindelar, who had refused to don the Nazi jersey, disappeared the following year under suspicious circumstances.

It was in a completely different political atmosphere – and for good reason – that a child from Argenteuil, Rino della Negra, son of an Italian political refugee, played in French football between the wars and the Occupation. .

A short-lived but unforgettable striker for Red Star Saint-Ouen – a club renowned for its early integration of players from all geographical backgrounds -, he managed to pursue his football career in broad daylight despite his refusal to join the STO and his commitment to the within the Manouchian group of FTP-MOI [Francs-tireurs partisans - Immigrant workforce].

In June 1943, he took an active part in three Resistance attacks before being arrested and shot at Fort Mont-Valérien in February 1944. As shown in the recent book by Dimitri Mansessis and Jean Vigreux,

Life, death and memory of a young footballer from the "Manouchian group", book published in February 2022. © Libertalia

For the African continent, a question of visibility

We cannot leave the question of the relationship between football and politics during the Second World War without mentioning the legend of the "death match" - which is also a mystification - in kyiv, in 1942. A Ukrainian team - largely made up of former players of the legendary Dynamo de kyiv, winner of the Red Star in 1935, for the first major match of a Soviet team in France – triumphantly defeated a German military team in front of a white-hot audience.

Then the victorious players went through the arms in order to wash away this affront.

No less than four films have been inspired by this story – including one by John Huston with its breathtaking cast.

Then we discovered that it had been invented from scratch to give this sporting event the heroic dimension it had never had.

Like all clubs bearing the Dynamo name, the Kyiv team was a creation of the GPU – the ancestor of the KGB.

After the war, Soviet football experienced its heyday between the end of the 1950s and the 1960s. The stars were not the attackers then, but the goalkeepers, seen metaphorically as the ultimate defenders of the fatherland.

The most famous of them, Lev Yachine, will be the only goalkeeper to win the Golden Ball.

He will end his career as a colonel in the KGB.

In 1954, the victory of the FRG at the World Cup is perceived as the true birth certificate of a country born from the defeat of Nazi Germany.

This is the first time in almost ten years that the German people have been allowed to boast of success.

Four years earlier, FRG,

In 1966, the African nations refused to take part in the selection of the World Cup.

Only one place is in fact accessible to a selection from the continent, which it will have to compete with teams from Asia or Oceania.

Africa will have a reserved place at the following World Cup, then two in 1982. Cameroon's accession to the quarter-finals in 1990 earned the continent an additional place.

There will be 9 in all from 2026, when the tournament will bring together 48 nations.

Europe, which has an equivalent number of FIFA members, will then have 16 places.

On the African continent, it is still necessary to evoke in 1961 the suspension of South Africa because of Apartheid, in spite of the opposition of the director of FIFA who thinks that one should not mix sport and politics.

A final exclusion followed in 1976,

American director John Huston, center right, with British actor Michael Caine, left, and American actor Sylvester Stallone, during the filming of 'Escape To Victory', in Budapest, on June 10, 1980. ASSOCIATED PRESS - Anonymous

Boycott, reconciliation and national jubilation

In 1978, the World Cup took place in the dictatorial Argentina of General Videla.

The Argentina-Peru match is particularly questionable.

It allows the host country to qualify on the wire, after a victory as crushing as it is unexpected from 6 to 0. Some have mentioned links of corruption of the Peruvian players within the framework of the Condor plan (alliance of far-right dictatorships of Latin America with the United States against left-wing political opponents, Marxists in particular).

During this World Cup, French coach Michel Hidalgo is the subject of a short-lived kidnapping attempt – he manages to disarm one of his attackers – whose objective is to protest against arms sales from France to Argentina.

In 1970, North Korea refused to face the United States. Four years later, the USSR did the same with Chile, which fell under the yoke of the Pinochet dictatorship in September 1973. In 2002, the Cup of the world is organized for the first time in two countries at the same time, Japan and South Korea.

It is indeed impossible for FIFA to decide between two countries linked by a painful colonial past.

This unprecedented collaboration is at the origin of a real enthusiasm, cultural and touristic, for their neighbors on the continent.

The French have great memories of the 1998 World Cup, organized at home.

The triumph of the final – 3 to 0 against Brazil, four-time world champions and defending champions – two days before the national holiday created for several months the illusion of a reconciled nation and the successful integration of the immigrant population. despite the weight of the colonial past.

Many babies that year will be named Lilian or Zinedine, in tribute to the players Lilian Thuram and Zinedine Zidane.

Four years later, despite everything, the myth of a black-white-beur France has been tarnished by the accession of the far right to the second round of the presidential election.

Argentina President Jorge Rafael Videla (centre) after presenting the World Cup trophy to Argentina captain Daniel Passarella (#19), during the presentation ceremony at the River Plate stadium, Buenos Aires, June 25, 1978 The other players from left to right: Americo Gallego (6), Passarella, Osvaldo Ardilles and unknown.

Argentina beat the Netherlands 3-1 in the final.

AP - HEINZ DUCKLAU

2019: Megan Rapinoe's team wants to "make this world a better place"

The last two World Cups have been marked by controversy around the host country.

In 2018, England and Iceland diplomatically boycotted the competition, in reaction to the annexation of Crimea by Russia in 2014 and the attempted assassination of Sergei Skripal, a former Russian agent who passed to MI6, the British secret service, in the 1990s. About sixty MEPs, including members of the ecologist party EELV in France, addressed an open letter to the leaders of the European Union asking them to join this action, in vain.

During this World Cup, during the Switzerland-Serbia match, the two scorers of Kosovar origin from the Swiss team celebrate their exploit by mimicking the double-headed eagle of the Albanian flag.

Offending players receive a fine,

In March 2021, an investigation by the British newspaper

argues that 6,500 workers from South Asia died on the construction sites of the Qatari World Cup, between 2010 and 2020, a figure which would even be underestimated because the data of workers from other communities have not been recorded.

Another issue is the violation of the rights of LGBTQUIA+ people in the host country.

However, if a few days before the World Cup, a quarter of football fans in France say they are boycotting what journalist Nicolas Kssis-Martov called the "World Cup of shame", the figures reported since by the media remain stable – unlike Germany, where they literally collapsed, even before the elimination of the national team.

Neither the France team nor the political power have issued the slightest criticism of a country whose economic ties with Paris are multiple and sprawling.

And the public will not have really listened to the calls of former football glories Éric Cantona or Vikash Dhorasoo.

In a column published in the daily 

on September 26, the latter wrote: “ 

This reference to the feminist formula of the French actress Adèle Haenel taken up by the writer Virginie Despentes is undoubtedly no coincidence.

At the 2019 Women's World Cup, in fact, the political positions of the players on the stadium were multiple and relayed.

After refusing to sing the national anthem to protest Donald Trump's policy against minorities, after speaking out about the gender income gap in sports, after refusing to go to the White House, Captain Megan Rapinoe had his words to celebrate the victory of the American team: 

 ”.

In 2023, the Women's World Cup will be held in democratic countries, Australia and New Zealand.

What relationship will she establish between football and politics?

Megan Rapinoe, right, kneels next to teammates Samanth Mewis (20) Christen Press (12), Ali Krieger (11), Crystal Dunn (16) and Ashlyn Harris (22) during the US national anthem before a football match against the Netherlands, Sunday, September 18, 2016, in Atlanta.

AP - John Bazemore

• To read :

→ On RFI Knowledge, these Olympic Games which were disrupted by political events.

→ Mickaël Correia, A popular history of football, La Découverte, 2018.

→ Olivier Guez, Praise of dodging, Grasset, 2014.

• To listen :

→ In 2022, debate of the day: is sport a political showcase?

→ In 2022, Football World Cup: an economic showcase for Qatar?

→ In 2018, Putin's very political World Cup.

→ In 2012, debate of the day: football: politics in shorts and cleats

i Other teams have chosen the color of their shirt in connection with a reigning dynasty – orange in the Netherlands – or having reigned – the white of the German players, the color of the Hohenzollern dynasty.

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