Daniel Ridenhour (L) talking with locals in Uganda (photo: Daniel Ridenhour)

Daniel Ridenhour says that going to Uganda was an eye-opening experience for him personally. Having never been to the country before, he spoke with Winthrop’s two current Ugandan players, but he says, “they can tell you, but until you see it with your own eyes, it’s not what you think it’s going to be like.”

One of the first things that Ridenhour noticed upon arriving in Uganda was a very different attitude toward organization. Despite the fact that he had traveled thousands of miles, he arrived with Kampala with no “set schedule or set itinerary. You just know you’re going to watch games.”

Even appointments that were set while Ridenhour was there rarely began at the set time. When he went to see the Ugandan national team practice one day, the training session that was supposed to start at 9:00 kicked off at 11:15. The national team coach turned to him and said, “this is just Africa, it’s just how it is.”

In his two weeks in Uganda, Ridenhour spent most of his time watching high school games. Some of his time was spent looking at specific potential players for Winthrop, some doing general scouting and relationship-building. Ridenhour says that he was impressed by the skill he saw on the field – “talented, talented, talented kids” – even though the players often lacked equipment. One game he saw “half the kids [were] playing with shoes, half the kids [weren’t].” The fields were similarly lacking, and one match featured a very special pitch invader. “I literally watched one game and there were cows on the field. They’re not on the field the whole time but they’re just kind of passing through.”

Preparing for a pitch invasion (photo: Daniel Ridenhour)

Poor conditions did not damper the atmosphere at many of the games Ridenhour saw. He recalls one high school game in which 2000 students, almost literally, lined the field. “There was no net on the goal and … they were standing right on the field, a half yard off the endline behind the goalkeeper, egging him on. It was great.”

While in Uganda, Ridenhour sought to give something back to people he met. He gave clinics for local coaches and spoke with Ugandan officials who are working to put together a national coaching curriculum. Ridenhour notes that he often saw a lack of basic coaching knowledge, but no lack of enthusiasm to learn. “They were eager because they don’t get a lot of information.” Providing some information pleased Ridenhour. “It was fun to share,” he says.

Talking with local officials photo: (Daniel Ridenhour)

Ultimately, though, the purpose of Ridenhour’s trip was recruiting future players for Winthrop. Recruiting in Uganda is a difficult process, one fraught with difficulties that college coaches recruiting domestically don’t encounter. Although Division I Winthrop can offer scholarships, recruits from Uganda have to incur expenses that are prohibitive to many in the country. “They have to be able to support themselves when they get here, they have to be able to fly themselves over, basic expenses that they have to be able to afford. Being able to find out if a family can do that, that’s a hurdle unto itself because there aren’t a lot of families that can do that.” Daniel Ridenhour says he knows of examples of players whose expenses are being paid by a whole village in the hope that they will return and better the lives of villagers.

Then there is the potential hurdle of recruits getting student visas to enter the US. Winthrop has recruited players in the past, only to find out that their visa application has been denied by the American embassy. The process can be frustrating for all involved, says Ridenhour, but it is completely out of their hands and just one of the many hurdles involved in recruiting Ugandan players.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, there is the matter of ensuring that potential student-athletes have the academic and sporting talents to succeed. Given the unique system in which sports are intertwined with American colleges and universities, coaches looking for players overseas have to keep in mind the full range of talents that potential recruits possess. In Uganda, Ridenhour says, there are “a lot of kids who, academically, can’t cut it, but athletically can. And there are probably quite a few kids who can do it academically, but not athletically.” Finding those who can succeed on the field as well as in the classroom is one of the biggest challenges Ridenhour faced on his trip to Uganda.

The two Ugandans currently playing for Winthrop have succeeded on and off the field at the South Carolina school. Ridenhour describes Stephen Nsereko, who has represented Uganda at the under-20 level, as a “fantastic little attacking midfielder” with a “big heart.” Defender Henry Kalungi has played in every position across the back for Winthrop. With both players, Ridenhour says, “you put them wherever and they’re going to perform the job.”

In the classroom as well, Nsereko and Kalungi have both excelled at Winthrop. “They’re here to do two things: they’re here to study and they’re here to play. And they’ll tell you that. They’ll say, ‘Coach, grades and football, grades and football.’ This is all they worry about.”

Henry Kalguni (#4) and Stephen Neserko (#5) in action for Winthrop (photo: WInthrop University/Rich Posipanko)

Ridenhour sees another benefit to having Ugandan players on the campus of Winthrop University. Their presence and their life experience can provide a unique perspective to the American students. Ridenhour believes that Winthrop’s Ugandan players can also help to open up the eyes of Winthrop students. He tells me that Nsereko and Kalungi “bring a different perspective, a global perspective that not a lot of kids have.” It’s that perspective, combined with their on-field talents, that has made the many Ugandans who have studied and played at Winthrop University over the years such a success.

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One important aspect of the US military’s reconstruction work has been an attempt to win over Afghan and Iraqi “hearts and minds.” This work has seen the American military (along with private contractors and the State Department) to use soccer, a popular sport in both countries, to gain support from locals. In doing so, they have run into many obstacles, several of which are emblematic of the larger difficulties the US military has faced in attempting to rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan.

U.S. Army Sgt. 1st Class Michael Sandoval, from Charlie Company, 2nd Battalion, 35th Infantry Regiment, 25th Infantry Division, juggles a soccer ball before giving it away to a boy in the Maghdad district of Kirkuk, Iraq, Sept. 30, 2006. (Photo: TheDonovan.com / U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Samuel Bendet)

Several months after the invasion of Iraq, ever-supportive Fox News printed a list of the US military’s reconstruction projects. Several of these projects used soccer. Soldiers helped to collect and distribute soccer balls, set up teams and leagues, and clear and fix up fields throughout the country.

In the years since, Sadr City, Ramadi, and other cities throughout the country have all received new soccer fields or had old ones spruced up. Speaking in 2005, President Bush cited the reopening of a soccer stadium in Najaf as evidence of progress, although the Washington Post wrote shortly after that his claims were overblown.

Discrepancies between President Bush’s views on progress in Iraq and the reality on the ground occur quite commonly. Indeed, many have argued that his administration’s inability to see problems as they developed led to the full-blown insurgency that came about after the invasion of Iraq.

But while skewed perceptions of reality are a problem, some have argued that the military’s “hearts and minds” projects, such as those using soccer to win local support, are themselves problematic. Critiques have come from NGOs such as Oxfam, who said in 2003 that “[m]ilitary involvement in relief provision blurs the boundaries between military strategy and the independent action of impartial humanitarians. Military involvement can compromise the effective delivery of aid and lead to unintended consequences, potentially threatening the security of civilian aid workers.”

Some with military backgrounds have also criticized this strategy, saying that soldiers are not trained to be relief workers. Despite these critiques, the US military continues to employ relief work as part of its arsenal.

Throughout their time in Iraq, the US military has been accused of poor book-keeping. It has been alleged that millions of dollars have been lost and that weapons intended for the Iraqi army and police have instead made their way into the hands of those fighting the Americans. Abuse of funds destined for soccer-related projects has occurred as well. The Washington Post reported that an Iraqi contractor hired to renovate a high school in the Iraqi city of Musayyib was charging them double the going rate for soccer balls.

Part of the reason the military believes that soccer has the potential to win hearts and minds is because the sport and its stadiums had been so misused by previous governments in Iraq and Afghanistan. Saddam Hussein’s son Uday was known to torture Iraqi national team players who performed poorly. The Taliban banned soccer in the national stadium in Kabul and used it instead to stage public executions. By reopening soccer stadiums as places to play soccer and by encouraging people to play the sport free of fear or persecution, the US military hopes it will win local support.

A match organized in Afghanistan’s national stadium after it was reopened in the post-Taliban era

Much of the use of soccer in reconstruction has been projects carried out on the ground in countries the US has invaded. But the success of Iraq’s Olympic team and later its full national team has not escaped the notice, and attempted political repurposing, of President Bush. During his reelection campaign of 2004, Bush used images of the Iraqi team (which surprisingly reached the semifinals) in an ad that included a narrator saying, “At this Olympics there will be two more free nations — and two fewer terrorist regimes.” Some players responded angrily, including Salih Sadir who told Sports Illustrated’s Grant Wahl, “Iraq as a team does not want Mr. Bush to use us for the presidential campaign. He can find another way to advertise himself.”

(Bush seems to have learned his lesson, and didn’t use the Iraqi national team’s victory in last summer’s Asian Cup as an opportunity to toot his own horn. Perhaps he didn’t need to: many media outlets, including the New York Times, wrote about how the accomplishment had brought Iraqis of all stripes together. More recently, Iraqi national team players made the news when three of them defected while in Australia.)

The US is not alone in using soccer to try to improve its image in Iraq and Afghanistan. Japan granted the rights to air its popular anime Captain Tsubasa (renamed Captain Majed) to be broadcast free of charge in Iraq. Before pulling out, Korean forces in Iraq organized soccer tournaments and invited Iraqi players to Korea. Even enemies of the US have tried to use soccer for their own purposes: Iran has sought to increase its influence in neighboring Afghanistan by rebuilding, among other things, soccer fields.

Captain Tsubasa, soon to be Captain Majed (photo: Coucoucircus.org)

But as the biggest player by far in both countries, the US has had the most opportunity to use (and misuse) soccer as a tool in attempting to rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan. Reconstruction has proven far harder than any of the original promoters of war envisioned. Their ideas about freedom and democracy, it turned out, could not simply be imposed on countries with cultures and histories far different from their own.

In August, the US military initiated a project they thought would win over people in the Afghan city of Khost. They flew over the city and dropped soccer balls from a helicopter as a gift to local children. But when the balls hit the ground, the locals were incensed. The balls contained a Saudi Arabian flag, on which the name of Allah is written, and this writing is considered holy by many Muslims. A protest ensued, bringing hundreds out onto the streets.

Khost residents protest the “blasphemous balls” (photo: BBC)

Local politician Mirwais Yasini said, “To have a verse of the Koran on something you kick with your foot would be an insult in any Muslim country around the world.”

A military spokesperson responded, in a manner that epitomized the bright-eyed naiveté with which the Americans have gone at reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan. She admitted that US forces had made “significant efforts to work with local leaders, mullahs and elders to respect their culture. Unfortunately, there was something on those footballs we didn’t immediately understand to be offensive and we regret that as we do not want to offend.”

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An African witch doctor (photo: Moonbattery.com)

In the summer of 2006, for example, a story came out which suggested that the Angolan national team was going to bring a witch doctor to the upcoming World Cup (manager Luis Oliveira Goncalves denied his team was going to receive any supernatural assistance).

The 2000 African Cup of Nations was tarred by suspicious events in the quarter-final between Senegal and Nigeria in which

… a former official of the Nigerian FA raced on to the pitch and seized a ‘charm’ that had been lying in the back of the Senegal net. Senegal protested, but to no avail, and Nigeria went on to score twice and win. The official was subsequently banned, but his action was seen as hugely significant in Nigeria’s progress.

African Soccer magazine once ran a “10-page investigation into witchcraft in football, detailing animal sacrifices, self-mutilation, casting of spells, lucky charms, odious concoctions and a one-hour delay at an international match while teams argued about who would be first to step on to the pitch.”

This phenomenon is not limited to Africa. Before each game at the 2006 World Cup, “Mexico’s grand wizard carrie[d] out two rituals a day for the country’s … team, invoking ‘Holy Death’ in front of a plastic skeleton to protect them and bring them luck.”

Ecuador’s national team brought along Tzamarenda Naychapi, described by the Guaridan as a witch doctor-cum-shaman-cum-priest-type-fella, although his juju wasn’t that powerful, as his team were knocked out by England in the round of 16.

Tzamarenda Naychapi is also a hit with the ladies (photo: AP/ Franka Bruns)

It’s easy to see these practices as strange, but are they? Soccer players and fans may do so in different ways, but don’t people around the world do strange things to help their team?

Take the act of players crossing themselves, which many do so as they enter the field, after missing a shot, or after scoring a goal. This act is intended to bring the player good fortune or to give thanks to God for having received the strength to score a goal, etc.

There are also a multitude of pre-game rituals that Westerners carry out to help their team’s cause. In his book The Soccer Tribe, Desmond Morris discusses several of what he calls these “soccer superstitions.” He writes about players always stays at the same hotel when playing away, a team that always plays a round of golf before a match, and even a player who required his wife to wash the windows on match day as “she was doing just that when he last had a great game” (151).

Pre-game rituals alone are worthy of a book (Morris writes “of one hundred soccer superstitions, collected at random, no fewer than 40 per cent were concentrated in the pre-match dressing room”). They include always lacing up boots in a prescribed order, always entering the field first or last, and wearing a lucky charm during a match (FIFA’s recent crack down on jewelry has made this more difficult).

Holland’s Ruud Krol with his lucky necklace at the 1978 World Cup (photo: BBC)

Shoes, not surprisingly, play a central role in many soccer superstitions. Cameron Kippen at the Curtin University of Technology in Perth, Australia writes that “In 1908 when goal-scoring ace, George Hedley played for Woverhampton Wanderers he scored a goal against Newcastle causing one of his favourite boots to split. Despite being offered a new pair Hedley steadfastly refused and saw the game to completion with one tattered boot. The player had his favourite boots patched up at least 17 times before eventually and somewhat reluctantly parting with them.”

The most recent, and most hilarious, incarnation of the soccer superstition was Stuart Pearce and his lucky mascot, Beanie the Horse. Given to him by his daughter when he was manager of Manchester City, Pearce placed his equine buddy in the technical area, claiming it brought his team luck (Psycho lost his job later that season, so perhaps it wasn’t that lucky).

Stuart “Psycho” Pearce (right) and Beanie the Horse (left) (photo: BBC)

Western soccer superstitions make sense to us Westerners (well, maybe not Beanie the Horse). Crossing oneself, for example, makes complete sense in a society rooted in Christianity, but to someone unfamiliar with Western ways it would be as strange as witch doctors often appear to us. As Horace Miner points out in his classic essay Body Ritual Among the Nacirema, nearly all cultural practices appear odd if one does not understand the context in which they exist. It is easy to see a practice like those employed by African players and fans as something as “foreign” and “strange”; it is far more difficult to recognize how similar it is to our own actions.The practices of African witch doctors and Stuart Pearce may seem very different, but they both have the same goal: to help one’s own team win. The means may be very different, but the ends are identical.

Desmond Morris’s words could describe players in any part of the world.

[Players] seek additional aid of a kind their trainers and managers cannot give them – the supernatural aid of superstitious practices. They have no idea how such actions can help, but they perform them all the same, ‘just in case’. They frequently call them ridiculous and stupid, but they dare not omit them (150).

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The Saudi Arabian national team

That the entire 2006 Italian squad played their club ball in Italy is not a surprise given the strength of Serie A. But the story of the Saudi squad is as much about Saudi Arabia the country as it is about soccer.

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, to use its official name, has long had a conflicted relationship with the outside world. 75% of government revenues come from oil exports, but these funds are used largely to maintain an insular and extremely conservative society. Women, for example, are not permitted to drive and cannot travel outside the country without a male family member escort.

Women are not the only Saudis who face restrictions on travel abroad. Saudi footballers face even more of a challenge when attempting to play outside of the kingdom. To date, only two Saudi players, Sami al-Jaber and Fahad Al Ghasian, have ever made the move abroad.

Why is it that Saudi Arabian players do not go abroad?

It is not a question of skill because, while not world beaters, Saudi players are good enough to play in leagues stronger than their own.

The reasons why Saudi players remain at home are economic and cultural.

The Saudi Arabian league is, as Sukhdev Sandhu writes in The Thinking Fan’s Guide to the World Cup, structured very differently from most. It is a “cosseted league system, bankrolled by princes and the state rather than by local entrepreneurs” (246). Those same princes are also in charge or closely connected to those at the Saudi Arabian Football Association and few in the hierarchy want to lose their most recognizable local stars. (Yet, just as Saudi Arabia’s rulers keep their people happy with oil dollars from abroad, soccer authorities often import aging European and Latin American stars to generate excitement.)

The economic imperative to keep home-grown stars at home is apparent, but it is not the only reason so few Saudi players have gone abroad.

Just as there are laws that hinder women from traveling abroad, Saudi soccer stars have faced restrictions on playing in other countries.

Throughout history, the Saudi authorities have officially banned its players from going abroad. After the 1994 World Cup, star Saeed Owairan (scorer of this goal) “was banned from moving abroad by his football federation … along with the rest of that squad.”

Saeed Owairan

Saudi bans on women’s freedom are, by nature, paternalistic. Paternalism is also in evidence in the soccer authorities’ ban on players going abroad. Sukhdev Sandhu writes, “The Saudi Arabian Football Association apparently fearing that its players might not be ready for the rigors and discipline of foreign leagues, has sought to stop would-be-exiles from leaving” (264).

In the past decade, there has been some loosening of this ban. Sami Al-Jaber played for half a season with Wolves in 2000, although he returned home after playing only a few matches as a substitute.

Sami Al-Jaber

Recently, the ban on Saudi players going abroad has been lifted. There are rumors that Galtasaray is interested in Yasser Al-Qahtani and the striker may move to Turkey over the summer.

But Al-Qahtani is unique in appearing to have an interest in playing abroad. As written on the Channel 4 website prior to the 2006 World Cup, “The barriers imposed by the Saudi FA on players moving abroad are no longer in place, but still few Saudi players have the desire to take their talents abroad.”

Saudi soccer fan Ghassan Bataweel told the website menafan.com in January that many players from his country have internalized the paternalistic attitudes of the Saudi FA. He says players are fearful that they might not be able to cut it in Europe. “[P]layers would not get the opportunity to play for prominent European clubs. It takes hard work and training to develop the level of skills that are required in order to make it on such teams.” (Economic factors are at work here too. Salaries in Saudi Arabia are far higher than Saudi players going abroad could hope to earn.)

In Saudi Arabian soccer, as in the country as a whole, a degree of hegemony has been established. Just as many in Saudi society have come to accept the strict social controls imposed by the country’s rulers as natural, so too have the country’s footballers internalized the interests of those who run soccer in that country. The Saudi FA may have eliminated the ban because, with so few players interested in playing abroad, it is no longer necessary.

The greatest threat to this status quo is globalization, a phenomenon occurring at a torrid pace. Even insular societies such as Saudi Arabia are facing increasing outside influence (satellite TV has brought European soccer to the kingdom and several leagues are draw higher ratings than the local competition). In the future, Saudi players will become more familiar with other leagues, and will recognize the poor quality of their own league by comparison. This may lead to more players wanting to test themselves abroad. But until that time, the country’s best players will continue to ply their trade in Saudi Arabia.

The Soccer Tribe is a coffee table sized book from the early 1980s. The biography of the author said he had earned a Ph.D. from Oxford and had carried out much important research on animal behavior (he may also be known to readers more worldly than I was at the time as the author of the classic The Naked Ape).

The book, in 320 pages and complete with full-color pictures, looks at everyone (players, coaches, referees, fans, bureaucrats, etc.) who has anything to with soccer. This so-called “Soccer Tribe” is studied with the type of precision usually reserved by anthropologists in their work on tribes in remote parts of the world. As I flipped through the pages for the first time, I couldn’t tell whether Morris had written a serious study or if his book was simply intended to amuse.

It turns out the book is quite serious (it would have been quite a lot of work to simply make a joke, I now realize). The Soccer Tribe is, in some ways, reminiscent of the satirical paper Body Ritual Among the Nacirema, in which anthropologist Horace Miner made typical American behavior (like teeth brushing) seem exotic. Like Miner, Morris employs tools that anthropologists typically use to study “real” tribes in other cultures in looking at those involved in soccer. The result is a book that is simultaneously brilliant in analysis, hilarious in making light of things we take for granted, and beautifully presented (fair warning: short shorts and mullets do make many, many appearances).

I now have The Soccer Tribe on my coffee table and love to show it off to both soccer fans and non-fans alike. It is, to be sure, not a typical coffee table book, but this uniqueness is one of the things I most value about it. Morris’s book is now, sadly, out of print so it will take some searching to find it. But trust me: it’s worth it.

* * *

Looking back at Morris’s book recently made me think again about some of the funniest of soccer rituals. Having watched so much soccer in my life, I rarely stop to consider the uniqueness of many such rituals, as I am so accustomed to seeing them. It is only in looking at The Soccer Tribe or watching games with friends not familiar with soccer that I remember how unique they are.

The pre- and post-game rituals offer some of the most striking examples. The most interesting pre-game ritual I have seen develop in the past few years is the players walking out to the field with young children in tow. Every Premier League game has these “mascots,” to use the British terminology. The sight of cute little children accompanying sporting superstars to the pitch is something I have not seen in other sports. Perhaps the thought of how Allen Iverson would respond if this happened to him is enough to dissuade the NBA from trying something similar.

On behalf of Steven Gerrard and all overpaid superstars ever treated poorly by four year-olds, Thierry Henry gets revenge on a mascot before a game against Ajax.

In Argentina, four year-olds are clearly over the hill. Most games there involve players carrying out infants to the field. But watching this Argentine spin on the pre-game ritual, one can’t help wonder if this might be a bit too young. The deafening roar of the crowd, the confetti thrown toward them, and the thought that they might be dropped by a sweaty many with strange clothes on has brought several of these young children to tears. And quite why parents trust soccer players, who clearly have other things on their minds right before a game, to not drop their infants is beyond me.

Boca Juniors’ Martin Palmero is lead to the field by young children.

There are also several post-game rituals which are unique to soccer. Players in most sports will exchange some sort of handshake at the end of a match. Soccer players (in big games, at least) take it a step further in exchanging shirts. On occasions when a smaller team players a bigger opponent, less well-known players fight to be able to exchange their shirt with superstars.

The US’s Claudio Reyna and the Czech Republic’s Pavel Nedved exchange shirts at last summer’s World Cup.

Soccer players also have a post-game ritual that I find completely endearing: applauding their supporters. Even in this era of massive money in sports, it is refreshing that professional soccer players recognize their fans after nearly every game by clapping to them. The gesture may be symbolic, but it epitomizes the fact that soccer teams in Europe have historically been clubs to which all belong, not the franchises that reduce the connection between professional athletes in American and their fans.

Sunderland players applaud their fans.

The post-game ritual of applauding fans is given a Japanese spin in that East Asian country. Instead of simply applauding, players there bow to their fans. This has come as a shock to some foreigners who have played in the J-League, but bowing is, of course, prevalent in Japanese society.

When I lived in Japan, I often saw bowing in soccer games. The middle school I worked at had a team whose players would bow both before and after matches to show appreciation to their coaches, opposing players, and referees.

Japanese (American) football players bow before a game.

* * *

If a new version of Desmond Morris’s book The Soccer Tribe were to be written, it could certainly include this Japanese and the above Argentine example of soccer rituals. The 20 years of globalization since it was published have brought increased connection among the peoples of the world. In this time, we have been shown the similarities and differences of the rituals of the soccer tribe.

Further Reading

The US Soccer Players Association did a review of The Soccer Tribe in 2005.

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