The Tibetan national team (photo: Kaos Pilot)

FIFA likes to promote the fact that it has more members than the UN. The international governing body of soccer got to its current level of 208 members (compared to 192 who belong to the UN) by various means, as Menary explains. Being the birthplace of soccer gives England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland separate teams. Chinese Taipei represents the island of Taiwan, and has since 1954 (the mainland Chinese team, like the country itself, was, for many years, an international pariah, and only joined FIFA in 1979). More recently, there has been a boom in FIFA membership, as some regional confederations with, as Menary dryly puts it, a “far looser idea of what constitutes a ‘nation’ than others” brought new members into the fold in a bid to boost their influence in the world governing body. CONCACAF has used this strategy most often, adding Arbua, the Turks & Caicos Island, and Anguilla among others to their ranks. Oceania boasts such powers as New Caledonia, Tahiti, and American Samoa. These three “countries” are not in fact independent. The first two are French territories, the latter an American possession. But they were let into FIFA in an earlier era. Today, becoming a new member of the club is a far more difficult proposition (only newly-independent countries such as Montenegro have achieved this goal in the past few years). But the fact that FIFA’s many non-independent nations have maintained their membership makes a mockery of the current argument that new members must be members of the international community (how exactly FIFA defined this is unclear, as Menary points out). Some of the teams have been rebuffed because they are technically parts of other countries that do have FIFA membership. In this category are Greenland, the Channel Islands, the Falklands, and Zanzibar, and the Sapmi people of Norway, Sweden, and Finland. For some countries, their entry into FIFA is too politically sensitive for the supposedly apolitical governing body to countenance. The national teams of Tibet, Northern Cyprus and Gibraltar have seen their progress hampered by larger countries with a political interest in the territories. When Greenland scheduled a match with Tibet, the Chinese government threatened to put an embargo on the Danish territory’s exports of shrimp to China. The match was called off. (In reality, FIFA is hardly apolitical. Menary describes their 1994 decision to give membership to Palestine as “a blatantly political act for a non-political organization.”) Then there are teams that Menary covers whose existence is an oddity at best. The Occitànian team is made up of speakers of the language of the same name, most of whom live in France, Spain, and Italy. The players who represent the Northern Marianas Islands, and whom Menary describes as “football missionaries” are mostly American expat “soccer dads.” In a game against neighbor Guam, the Northern Marianas team put out a team with a14 year-old and a teammate who, at 48 years old, could have been his grandfather. It’s easy to laugh off players and teams whose sole ambition is not to win, nor even qualify for the World Cup, but instead just to play in officially sanctioned matches. But all share the same dedication and work ethic as the players who lift the World Cup trophy every four years. Menary’s empathetic writing draws us into the world of Niklas Kreutzmann, Greenland’s captain and a dental student who would not let down his coach by missing a tournament that occurred just before his exams, and spent all his free time in between matches and training in his hotel room studying. Or Zanzibar goalkeeper Salum Ali Salum, who “has to be carried from the pitch crying uncontrollably” after his team loses a match in a penalty shootout. For these two players, as with nearly everyone Menary documents in Outcasts, the struggle to play international soccer is a task to which they have dedicated extraordinary effort.

Greenland (in red) and Zanzibar face off in the FIFI Wild Cup (photo: FIFI/Corbis)

The book is not without its faults. Many of the chapters were written as stand-alone pieces, and the book has a slightly pasted-together feel. And Menary’s decision to write about so many teams means that some of the more compelling stories are given short shrift. But overall, Outcasts is a wonderful addition to the increasingly homogenized diet of soccer writing being produced today. In an era in which so much soccer journalism simply repeats the latest result, transfer rumor, or Joey Barton arrest, the unique stories that Steve Menary writes about in Outcasts are a rare treat. Outcasts: The Lands That FIFA Forgot is published by Know the Score Books and is available from their website or Amazon.

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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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Son Al-Saadi Qaddafi, meanwhile, has signed for several Italian Serie A teams, played no more than one game for each, and been banned for drug use. Trying to understand the way that the family’s mind works, on politics or soccer, is difficult, is mind-boggling.

Father and son (photos: Getty Images/BBC and AP/BBC)

After coming to power in a military coup in 1969, Muamar Qaddafi rose to worldwide prominence as a supporter of terrorism. He is believed to have funded the Black September group responsible for the Munich Massacre at the 1972 Olympics and the bombers of Pan Am flight 103, which exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988. In 1984, a British policewoman named Yvonne Fletcher was killed by shots fired from within the Libyan embassy during an anti-Libyan rally (during the subsequent investigation Libya invoked diplomatic immunity and the shooter was never identified).

It has been a surprise to many, then, to see Qaddafi morph in the past few years into a semi-respectable leader. He allowed suspects in the Lockerbie bombings to be extradited in 1999 and in 2003 agreed to pay up to $10 million each to families of the victims. That same year, he announced that Libya had had a covert nuclear weapons program, but that it would be scrapped.

Shortly after September 11, Qaddafi had said, “Irrespective of the conflict with America it is a human duty to show sympathy with the American people, and be with them at these horrifying and awesome events which are bound to awaken human conscience.” Most recently, Qaddafi sponsored a peace conference aimed at stopping the killing going on in the Darfur region of Sudan. Though it amounted to little, it was striking to many to see Qaddafi, the former sponsor of terrorism, working to alleviate conflict.

Muamar Qaddafi presiding over the recent Darfur peace conference in Libya (photo: Reuters/Fred Noy/U.N./Handout)

But lest one think that Qaddafi is a completely reformed man, it should be noted that he retains a dictatorial hold on Libya, despite his rhetoric about “direct, popular democracy.” He urges his supporters to “kill enemies” of his regime. And his country was in the news recently for accusing 17 Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor of intentionally infecting Libyan children with AIDS and sentencing them to death on flimsy evidence (they were freed at the last minute under intense international pressure).

Qaddafi himself remains an eccentric person. Paul Vallely described the Libyan leader’s quirks in the Independent in September of 2006:

Gaddafi has always been odd. He dresses in flamboyant robes and receives visiting heads of state in a Bedouin tent. His personal bodyguard [sic] are an Amazonian corps of women, all martial arts experts. He does things like ordering the population of Tripoli to paint their rooftops green so that the desert city appears lush to visitors flying in.

Qaddafi looking absolutely fabulous (photo: The Royals Forum)

If Muamar Qaddafi’s personality and rule of Libya seem a bit odd, just wait until you hear about the soccer career of his son, Al-Saadi.

He began his career playing for Al Ahly Tripoli. In 2000, it was reported that he had signed with Maltese team Birkirkara F.C. But Al-Saadi never made the trip to Malta to join the team. He later signed with (and even joined!) Italian team Perugia in 2003, though he only played one match before failing a drug test and being suspended (this one match was apparently enough to convince many of his talents: the Observer wrote last month that he is “widely described as Serie A’s worst ever player).

This history wasn’t enough to dissuade Udinese from signing the younger Qaddafi in 2005. A bench-warmer the entire year, Al-Saadi did play 10 minutes of an unimportant late season match before being released.

Qaddafi the younger was most recently given the opportunity to train with Sampdoria, though this seemed to have as much to do with team president Riccardo Garrone, head of oil company Erg, trying to get a slice of Libya’s vast oil reserves. A friendly was arranged between Sampdoria and the Libyan national team that Al-Saadi Qaddafi said would “also add to the political and economic relations between Italy and Libya.” This was surely music to Garrone’s ears.

Libya and Sampdoria before their friendly (photo: Libyan Football Federation)

The Sampdoria president is not the only Italian boss reaching out to the Qaddafis. The family owns a 7.5% stake in Juventus, a team owned by the Agnelli family, who control Fiat, and have long ties to Muamar Qaddafi and his family. The connection between family and club seems to have as much to do with business and personal ties as it does with soccer.

The Qaddafi family normally divides up areas in which they demonstrate their strangeness: Muamar specializing in politics, Al-Saadi in soccer. But Muamar (the “Brother Leader” as he prefers to be called) recently ventured into the world of sport. Writing on his official website, he denounced FIFA and the World Cup.

It is monopolized, badly exploited and willfully adapted to serve the interests of those who monopolize and exploit it. Ostensibly, the World Cup was established to achieve a social and psychological benefit for people. Nevertheless, what The World Cup has achieved is the exact opposite.

He continued, claiming that soccer is bad for people’s health.

Those who have football (soccer) mania, and those addicted to the game are most at risk of psychological and nervous disorders. Those disorders in turn are the leading causes of heart attacks, strokes, diabetes, hyper-tension and premature ageing.

Oh, and soccer creates racism, claimed Qaddafi. And human trafficking. And war.

Mostly, though, Qaddafi seemed interested in having World Cup matches staged in countries around the world (without this change, he says, “the World Cup is not international nor does it belong to all people”). Brother Leader finished with a flourish.

This is the solution. Otherwise, the World Cup should be abolished in view of the mortal danger it poses to the world physically and morally. It leads to problems, difficulties, disorders, hatred and enmity. It causes the spread of degenerate behavior and collective recklessness and irresponsibility. Socio-psychological studies have proven that the manic, fanatical addicts of the World Cup are below normal in intellectual capacity and psychological development.

In no way is Muamar Qaddafi mentally unstable (photo: Algathafi.org)

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When Greece and Turkey faced off in a recent Euro 2008 qualifier, politics hung heavy in the air. But it had nothing to do with Turkish-Greek relations. Instead, the game, played in Istanbul, offered the local fans a venue to air their more recent grievances against the Kurdish PKK group, which recently killed 12 Turkish soldiers.

Turkish fans wave flags before kick-off (photo: Asher Kohn)

I was tipped off to this by Asher Kohn, a student at the University of Maryland, who is spending the semester abroad in Turkey. Asher went to the game (which Greece won 1-0, their first ever victory over Turkey) and sent me this account of what he saw.

Last week I somewhat miraculously scored tickets to the Greece-Turkey game for Euro 08 qualification. It was funny, I really had no clue what to expect. I figured that there would be a lot of good-natured screaming and mocking of Greeks; maybe a “1453!” chant (when the Turks took Constantinople) or something like that. Instead it was an ultra-nationalist atmosphere just this side of a Fascist Rally.

Things are getting fairly nasty in Eastern Turkey/North Iraq right now. A lot of Kurdish separatists are hiding out in Iraq and go across the border, kill a few soldiers, then return to Iraq. Any day now, the Turkish Army is going to go into Iraq. The US is trying to convince them not to, but there’s pretty much no way that’ll happen after 12 soldiers were killed yesterday. I think there was a big battle and 8 or so were killed the day before the Turkey-Greece game.

The stadium holds about 50,000 people, and this game was on TV or radio just about everywhere in Turkey. Everybody has a Turkish flag, I think. And the chants were not friendly, not light-hearted … and not directed at the Greeks. The standard chants were “Fuck the PKK!” and “Martyrs never die, our nation won’t be divided!” The game was actually a protest more than it was a game. No one cared about Greece, they just wanted the Turkish Government to do something about the PKK.

Greece won, 1-0, by the way. It was a fairly boring game. The most interesting part, by far, was the fact that the game was a political weapon, something that really doesn’t have a parallel in the states. I’ve never seen such a huge number of people so devoted to a single political cause. It was a pretty enlightening experience, the sort of thing that really turns on a light bulb in my head: “Oh, so that’s why there are so many problems with the Kurds here.”

Turkish soccer fans display a banner reads that: “Not only 15 we are 70 million Mehmetcik’”referring the 15 Turkish soldiers who were killed by separatist Kurdish rebels (photo: AP/Murad Sezer)

Banners hung by Turkish fans to express their feelings (photo: Asher Kohn)

The political demonstrations at this game seem to have inspired other Turkish soccer fans to let their feelings be known in the stadium. There were similar scenes when Liverpool took on Besiktas last week in the Champions League, as Andy Hunter wrote in the Guardian’s match report.

The setting for Liverpool’s latest ordeal was more akin to a political rally than a Champions League tie between two teams desperate for their first group win. Outside the arena were banners calling for an invasion of northern Iraq and war against the Kurdish rebel organisation, the PKK, and inside a lone bugler sounded a tribute to the Turkish soldiers killed by the group in recent weeks. “This is an important victory for the nation, given the men we have lost in the east,” said the Besiktas coach, Ertugrul Saglam. Amid a sea of Turkish flags one supporter broke forth to plant the national banner in the centre of the pitch, only for the pole to break as it struck the grass. The symbolic failure had no lingering effect on the team or an exuberant crowd, however.

Besiktas fans display a giant Turkish flag with the words “Martyrs never die. This land cannot be divided” written on it (photo: Reuters/Fatih Saribas)

Asher Kohn tells me that Besiktas are the traditional working-class team of Turkey and their stadium, which is across from a park that is the site of nationalist rallies, is covered with political slogans at the moment. Turkish Daily News reporter Çetin Cem Yilmaz also attended the match about Liverpool and wrote about his feelings while inside the stadium.

We entered the stadium and I was simply stunned by the decibel of the fan shouts, though I am familiar with Besiktas. But I was even more impressed by the quiet during the one-minute silence in honor of the 12 slain soldiers’ who were killed last Sunday by the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) militants. The constant playing of nationalist songs in the stadium via the speakers proved that Besiktas fans, too, saw the game as a chance to prove that terrorist attacks cannot bring Turks down.

With the nation’s consciousness overwhelmed by the question of the PKK, it is perhaps not surprising that Turkish soccer fans have expressed their feelings in the country’s stadiums. Politics and soccer often mix in the minds of fans throughout the world (see the 1998 World Cup game between the US and Iran or every game since the Falklands War involving England and Argentina). But it is rare that soccer fans express their feelings as viscerally as have Turkish fans in the past couple of weeks. To paraphrase and misquote Rodney Dangerfield, it’s as if they went to a political rally and a soccer game broke out.

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This agreement is the latest example of labor policies having a particularly marked effect in the world of soccer. Soccer often seems disconnected from the real world; the effect of labor policies on the sport is one of the ways in which we are reminded that soccer is very much a part of the world we have created.

The effect of this little-noticed decision could be dramatic. The high number of African players in France is due, in no small part, to their being from former French colonies and thus able to qualify easily for work permits (this stands in marked contrast to the England, where there is a fairly strict work permit process by which non-EU players have to prove their exceptional talent). If African players are no longer counted in the non-EU quota, they will likely flock to Spain.

A similar situation to that seen in Spain today arose in Italy in 2000. Then, Andriy Shevchenko was playing and scoring (yes, it was a long time ago) for AC Milan. But, the striker complained that he was still counted as a foreign player despite the fact that Ukraine and Italy had previously signed a labor agreement. After Shevchenko’s repeated complaints that he was being treated as a “second-class citizen” and appeals by AC Milan, he was finally granted EU status.

Andriy Shevchenko (photo: BBC)

These two examples affect only a limited number of players in two countries, but other labor decisions have affected the whole of European football. The EU decision in 1993 to allow free movement of workers throughout its member countries has dramatically affected European leagues. Leagues that previously had quotas of non-Spanish, non-Italian, etc. players were forced to reshape their limits so they only applied to non-EU players. The result has been a dramatic increase in the number of players moving across borders. The heated debates on the number of foreign players in the Premier League, for example, have come about because of the EU decision to allow free movement of its workers.The changes above have been forced by larger labor policies that end up affecting soccer dramatically. There has also been one major decision recently which came directly from the world of soccer. In 1990, Belgian player Jean Bosman sued because he was not permitted to leave his club RFC Liege when his contract had ended. Difficult as it is to believe now, players at the time were still considered property of the team they played for, even when their contract was up. Bosman won his suit and from 1995 on, players were permitted to leave their clubs at the end of their contract.

Jean Bosman surrounded by judges (photo: La Galaxia de Estrellas)

The so-called Bosman ruling had a dramatic effect on European soccer. Clubs such as Ajax, which developed young players received no compensation when their protégés were poached by bigger teams. Players and their agents began to negotiate for contract extensions far before their deals were up, using the threat of leaving for free to pressure the club. Opinions about the effects of the Bosman ruling are mixed, but it is fairly incredible that it was not until 1995 that soccer players gained the right to leave at the end of their contracts. I cannot imagine that other workers would have persisted under this system nearly so long.

A large part of the reason soccer players didn’t complain was because, even before the Bosman ruling, they were, for the most part, making good money. Even if things were exactly as they would have liked, they weren’t that bad.

Since 1995, salaries have increased dramatically. Several players in England make over 100,000 pounds per week. As a result, it’s difficult for many fans to consider them in the same class as themselves. Were a soccer player to complain about labor conditions, he would become the object of scorn among the fans who spend an increasingly high percentage of their earnings following their teams (witness the treatment Rio Ferdinand receiving when renegotiating his most recent contract).

In 2001, the Professional Footballers Association in England threatened to strike over revenue-sharing before striking a deal with the Premier League at the last minute. Given the lack of patience fans in England have shown with big earners complaining about their salaries, I doubt a strike would have earned the players much sympathy. (Union power may be on the decline in the US compared with Europe, but ironically American athletes are much more apt to strike than their European counterparts; see baseball in 1994, American football in 1987, and even the US national team’s threatened strike in 2005.)

Strikes in soccer-playing countries where players are not getting as rich as the Premier League are more common. Latin American leagues are notorious for not paying their players on time, or at all. It was over unpaid salaries and paltry pay that players in Argentina struck in 2001, followed by their Chilean counterparts in 2002 (a union leader there said at the time, “At the moment here in Chile there are players who earn only a hundred dollars a month, and that’s not enough to live decently on”).

In the eyes of some, sports have overtaken religion to become the opiate of the masses. As providers of this opiate, it is often difficult to remember that professional athletes are workers as well. They may be fabulously wealthy, but labor policies designed for all workers affect them just the same.

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FIFA president Sepp Blatter

Blatter attempted to justify the ban of high altitude games with what is normally a water-tight justification: medical necessity. He said, “The executive committee have listened to a proposal from the medical committee and have decided to act because to play at above that altitude is not healthy …”

But Blatter may not have realized that countries affected by this decision would be so vociferous in their rebuttals. The most outspoken has been Bolivia, whose president, Evo Morales, said, “It is possible to play soccer just as much at high altitudes as low altitudes.” To prove his point, Morales, an avowed soccer fanatic, took to the streets of La Paz (altitude 3600 meters) and played four straight games.

Evo Morales warms up for his protest games by jumping on a trampoline

Morales reached out to other affected countries and received support from other Andean countries. The mayor of Quito, Ecuador called for street protests and hundreds of people exercised in the city to show that the city’s altitude (2800 meters) was not dangerous. His counterpart in Bogota, Colombia has pledged to climb to 3300 meters to protest FIFA’s decision. Morales is planning to unite all of these voices of protest in a “unity meeting” tomorrow (June 6).

While most of the Andean ire has been directed at FIFA, some in those countries believe their wealthier South American neighbors played a part. Immediately after the announcement, Bolivian officials claimed that Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay had pushed for the decision (though, bizarrely, Morales claimed that the Argentine and Uruguayan presidents support his protests).

Some bloggers believe there is a conspiracy involving wealthy South American countries and FIFA. Bolivian blogger Hugo Miranda writes that “FIFA is only looking for money and unfortunately that in order that its sponsors continue to give out these amounts of money they need the same teams: Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay to be part of the [World Cup].”

Like FIFA, these countries have claimed to be concerned about the potential health risks of playing at high altitudes. But Andean highlanders have been quick with their response, saying that, for them, playing in heat and humidity is just as dangerous.

All of these medical rationales are, as yet, unproven. A conference is scheduled later this month in Paraguay in which medical experts on high altitude will present their work. But this conference will not likely settle the debate, as it has become about much more than medical necessity.

The decision is also about fairness, as Blatter himself pointed out. A quick look at the home and away records of Andean nations will demonstrate how much of an advantage the altitude of their stadiums gives them against opponents. But their response, and in particular that of Evo Morales, may be as much about identity.

Most of Bolivia’s indigenous peoples (around half of the population overall) live in the Andean highlands. Indigenous identity has become closely tied with living at altitude. Morales is particularly sensitive to this issue, as he is himself the first indigenous president of Bolivia. The decision to ban games at altitude was certainly not intended as a slight toward the indigenous population, but it was likely seen that way in many parts of Bolivia.

In many ways, this controversy mirrors that surrounding coca growing in Bolivia. Upon being sworn in to office, one of the first moves Evo Morales made was to suggest he would be less supportive of American efforts to eradicate coca growing than his predecessors. Coca, which can be made into cocaine, is significant to the indigenous in Bolivia, many of whom continue to chew the plant to this day. Like the altitude ban, the recent US policy of coca eradication in Bolivia was not intended as an insult to the country’s indigenous population, but was seen as such. In both cases, the expressed intentions of the decision and its interpretation varied widely.

Coca leaves for sale in a Bolivian market

The difference between the altitude ban and coca eradication is that Morales has control over the latter, but not the former. As Bolivian president, he is able to decide how much American money to accept for coca eradication, but has little influence on Sepp Blatter and his band of naive bigwigs at FIFA (but then, who does?). Morales’s “unity meeting” will begin tomorrow, but it’s unclear whether FIFA will be listening to the voices of Andean people.

Even if the meeting has no effect, the controversy has provided a good opportunity for some cross-border smack talk, as reported by the AP. Among those in the streets of La Paz to protest the altitude ban was “71-year-old Beatriz Ordonez, who spent Wednesday morning dancing in the streets of La Paz, merrily waving a yellow handkerchief to the beat of the music and not even breathing hard.” What did Ordonez think of those who complain about having to play in the altitude of Bolivia? “Brazilians are wimps,” she said.

Since MLS decided this season to allow its teams to sign jersey sponsorship deals, four teams have done so. In their bids to secure corporate sponsorship, a pattern has emerged. Whether by choice or necessity, several MLS teams have reached deals with companies whose products and marketing strategies are not the most reputable.

Real Salt Lake was the first team to announce a jersey sponsorship deal, when they signed with XanGo. XanGo paid an estimated $4 to $5 million dollars to have Jeff Cunningham and the rest of the RSL team promote their brand.

Dave Checketts gets hooked up with some mangosteen juice

This raises the question: what exactly is XanGo? Well, according to its website Xango is

A delicious dietary supplement, XanGo Juice harnesses the nutritional power of the whole mangosteen fruit through a potent proprietary formula. Just one to three ounces each day unleashes a concentrated rush of xanthones, a vigorous family of phytonutrients. The best part: sensational flavor that’ll keep you coming back for more and more.

What XanGo is still seems a bit murky (Mangosteen? Xanthones? Phytonutrients?). But it is not the first slightly sketchy drink to find itself emblazoned on an MLS jersey.

That honor goes to Red Bull, whose logo has been seen on the jerseys of the team of the same name since it was taken over by the Austrian beverage company. Wooed by Red Bull company head Dietrich Mateschitz’s billions, the league changed the name of the franchise formerly known as the MetroStars and allowed Mateschitz to put his logo on the team’s uniforms before other teams were permitted to sign such corporate sponsorship deals.

The 2006 New York Red Bulls

So, what is Red Bull? Well, the official website is a bit murky, claiming only that “All ingredients used for Red Bull Energy Drink are synthetically produced. Most ingredients are produced by pharmaceutical companies. This guarantees highest quality.” A bit vague.

Wikipedia clarifies a bit (though not much for those without advanced degrees in chemistry), claiming Red Bull contains “Water, sucrose, glucose, acidifier sodium citrates, carbon dioxide, taurine (0.4%), glucuronolactone (0.24%), caffeine (0.03%), inositol, vitamins (niacin, pantothenic acid, B6, B12), flavourings, and colours (caramel, riboflavin).”

So, highest quality synthetic ingredients such as taurine, glucuronolactone, inositol? Thanks, but I’ll pass.

New LA Galaxy sponsor Herbalife is also not quite mainstream. Though it markets itself as a “premier nutrition and weight-management company” with “life-changing products,” every product it sells carries the disclaimer “These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.”

Many of Herbalife’s products deal with weight control. One, called Snack Defense, claims to be

A scientific advancement in snacking control, Snack Defense … works all day to reduce the desire for sweets while it helps prevent the urge to snack between meals. Formulated with a blend of natural ingredients, including Gymnema sylvestre, a cutting-edge herb that targets the body’s response to sweets, plus chromium polynicotinate and Garcinia cambogia extract, Snack Defenseâ„¢ takes weight loss to a whole new level.

Gymnema sylvestre, chromium polynicotinate, Garcinia cambogia extract? Delicious!

(The one counterexample to MLS teams signing deals with producers of sketchy products is the expansion team Toronto FC. Their deal with the BMO, a bank, seems straightforward enough, even if Maurice Edu is a bit skeptical about their mascot.)

The ingredients of XanGo, Red Bull, and Herbalife products are enough to give me pause about those companies. But the sketchiness doesn’t end there.

All three companies have had their business practices questioned publicly. XanGo was issued a warning letter from the FDA telling the company to stop claiming health claims about its product, such as fighting depression, Parkinson’s disease and cancer. Red Bull was banned from being sold in Canada until 2005 and a CBC investigation headlined Raging Bull found that “two people have reported serious adverse health reactions after consuming the Red Bull energy drink.”

According to a 2000 article in Salon, since its founding in the 1980s, Herbalife has “courted its share of regulatory nightmares. Some health experts questioned the effectiveness of the company’s nutritional supplements; Herbalife claimed to increase energy and cure a range of illnesses from venereal disease to bee stings.” Other have criticized Herbalife for being a pyramid scheme (see Dan Loney’s in-depth discussion), though a wildly successful one that made founder Mark Hughes over $400 million dollars by the time of his 2000 death by overdose (ironically, by anti-depressant pills: wasn’t there an Herbalife cure for what ailed him?).

The companies whose logos will be on the chests of David Beckham and fellow MLS players this season are not quite mainstream. But, then again, neither is MLS. It is a ten year-old league struggling to succeed on the field and on the balance sheet. Real Salt Lake is about as well as known to the general public as is XanGo, so in that sense, the teams and the sponsors are at an equal level in their respective fields. But as a fan who hopes to see MLS become a long-term success, I can only hope that XanGo, Red Bull, and Herbalife will be on teams’ uniforms only until they can find more reputable sponsors.

The suicide bombing that killed 18 boys as they played soccer in the Sunni insurgent stronghold of Ramadi last Monday was sad enough on its own. At the same time, it illustrates how badly the American military is struggling to contain the violence in Iraq as the country spirals downward towards all-out civil war.

Children play soccer on a Fallujah field after a suicide bombing

On hearing reports of the suicide bombing, the US military went into news-spinning mode. Spokesmen said that there were two incidents that day in Ramadi and that one had been a controlled explosion near a soccer field in which there had been injuries but no deaths.

Only later in the week, with some reporting from the Washington Post, did it become clear that the soccer field attack had indeed occurred. The Post quoted local sheikh Raad Sabah al-Mukeilef, who was likely the intended target of the attack. Mukeilef said of the suicide bomber, “He came in a pickup. Instead of coming in my street, he did it in a small park for children.”

The sheikh also claimed that no members of the US military had responded to the incident. Despite this account, US military spokesman Mark Fox continued to contradict reality. “We ran this down,” said Rear Admiral Fox. “There was no second blast and there were not 18 children killed. The soccer field that was touted in the erroneous report was across the street from the structure that was in the controlled detonation.”

It is sad enough that the US military has so little awareness of, let alone control over, the violence in Iraq. It is even sadder that 18 children had to die playing soccer to make this clear.

Days after the suicide bombing that killed these young boys Ramadi was again the site of violence toward soccer players. The Guardian reports that Mohhamed Hamid and Mohammed Mishaan, both members of the local Ramadi Football Club, were killed on March 2. According to the website Iraq Slogger, both players were killed in the middle of a team practice.

Masked gunmen in Ramadi, west of Iraq, killed football players Mohammed Hamid, 27, and Mohammed Mish’an, 23, from the Ramadi Football Team in front of spectators and teammates while they were in a training session Friday. Three vehicles carrying a dozen gunmen entered the stadium and dragged the two players toward the cars, while people watched in fear. When the two players resisted, they were both shot execution-style, according to eyewitnesses and Ramadi police spokesman Major Tariq Yousif. The two players were accused of being supporters of the Anbar Salvation Council, a tribal group led by Sheikh Abdul Sattar Al-Rishawi, which is opposed to Al-Qaeda militants in the Anbar Governorate.

No word yet on whether the US military plans to deny this latest violence on Iraq’s soccer fields.

Update

NPR ran a great story which is an antidote the theme of violence being perpetrated on the soccer field. The story talks about a mixed Sunni / Shiite league in Baghdad that attempts to bring players from all backgrounds together. Many of the players specifically talked about the league being non-sectarian as a reason why they played in it. Unfortunately, it’s probably only a matter of time before those in Iraq who don’t want to see such unity attack the players in this league.

When former NBA player John Amaechi recently announced that he was gay, he knew it would be controversial. In his soon to be released book, Amaechi writes,

Coming out threatens to expose the homoerotic components of what they prefer to think of as simply male bonding. And it generally is. It’s not so much that there’s a repressed homosexuality at play (except for a small minority), only that there’s a tremendous fear that the behavior might be labeled as such. Or, as I heard the anti-gay epithets pour forth that gay men in the locker room would somehow violate this sacred space by sexualizing it.’

Amaechi knew he would get some negative responses to his decision to come out and another former NBA player, Tim Hardaway, obliged, letting fly on a Miami radio station. Hardaway ranted, “yeah, I’m homophobic,” insisted he “hate[s] gay people,” and said that “[homosexuality] shouldn’t exist in the world or in the United States.”

Amaechi took it in stride, telling ABC News he wasn’t surprised. “To me, it’s astonishing that anybody would be surprised to hear them,” he said.

Amaechi’s lack of surprise probably came, at least in part, because he is almost surely aware of another English athlete who came out. When the former Norwich City striker Justin Fashanu came out in an interview with British tabloid The Sun in 1990, he did not expect the response he received. “I genuinely thought that if I came out in the worst newspapers and remained strong and positive about being gay,” he was quoted as saying, “there would be nothing more that [people] could say.” In fact, the opposite occurred.

The denunciations began with Justin Fashanu’s own brother, John, himself a professional soccer player. John Fashanu said bluntly, “My gay brother is an outcast” and disowned him. His manager, the often-lionized Brian Clough, followed suit calling Fashanu a “bloody poof.” Fashanu was denounced by many blacks in England for “bringing shame on their race.” Tony Sewell, columnist for black weekly magazine The Voice, wrote,

[We] are sick and tired of tortured queens playing hide and seek around their closets. Homosexuals are the greatest queer-bashers around. No other group of people are so preoccupied with making their own sexuality look dirty.

Given the response of family, coaches, and members of the media, it is hardly surprising that the British public’s response to Fashanu’s coming out was largely negative. The groundwork for the homophobic chants that would follow from the terraces of stadiums across England was laid by the attitudes of those in power. Fashanu committed suicide in 1998 and the response to his coming out surely played a part in the tragic end to his life.

(Fashanu was a very troubled man, however, and his sexuality was not the only reason for his suicide. At the time of his death, there was also a warrant out for his arrest in Maryland for having sex with a 17 year-old boy.)

So, will John Amaechi in 2007 be treated in the same way as Justin Fashanu 17 years ealier? The United States and Britian have moved forward on issues of gay rights, to be sure, and there is much wider acceptance of homosexuality in society at large. But if Amaechi’s announcement shows us anything, it may be that homophobia retains a strong presence in sports.

Tim Hardaway was not the only NBA player to make his feelings known about gay players. Oliver Irish writes on the Guardian Unlimited sports blog about the responses of several current NBA stars. He quotes the Sixers’ Steven Hunter saying “As long as he don’t [sic] make any advances toward me I’m fine with it.” LeBron James insisted it is all a matter of trust:

With team-mates you have to be trustworthy, and if you’re gay and you’re not admitting that you are, then you are not trustworthy. So that’s like the No1 thing as team-mates – we all trust each other. You’ve heard of the in-room, locker room code. What happens in the locker room stays in there. It’s a trust factor, honestly.

Irish adroitly analyzes the underlying attitudes present in such pronouncements:

You don’t need to be a master of the subtext to see that Hunter, like so many athletes, is pretty far from cool with sharing a locker room with a gay man. It speaks volumes for the rampant vanity of many sports stars today that Hunter would qualify his tolerance – and it is mere tolerance, rather than acceptance – of Amaechi’s sexuality in such terms: “Sure, I’ll play ball with the guy. We’ll just be two sweaty, muscular black men trying manfully to get a rubber ball through a hoop… but if he tries to touch my balls in the showers, boy, there will be a ruckus.”

Even in Britian, a country that legalized gay marriage in 2005, attitudes among athletes toward homosexuality remain stuck in the past. Homophobic chants remain common in stadiums there. When the BBC’s radio program Five Live attempted to poll Premier League managers on homophobia, none returned the survey. The Independent had more luck in getting responses to its survey of professional players in England. The results were not promising, however: 57 percent of all players and an astonishing 77 percent of League One players said that football is homophobic.

There have been efforts made to change attitudes. The English FA recently organized a conference aimed at eliminating homophobia. Barcelona recently announced the formation of its first gay fan club. Three teams in Germany (Hertha Berlin, Borussia Dortmund, and Stuttgart) also have gay fan clubs (see picture below), as do the NHL’s Vancouver Canucks.

But these remain isolated examples in a sports environment which remains, by and large, wary of homosexuals, if not overtly hostile toward them. In December, Simon Kuper of the Financial Times reported on three gay players in Germany who were set to come out of the closet. As of yet, none has. John Amaechi is to be applauded for having the courage to announce he is a gay athlete. But sadly, the response to John Amaechi’s coming out may indicate not how far the world of sports has come in its attitudes about homosexuality, but how far it still has to go.

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The article cites a survey of “600 senior-level sports industry executives” in which 44% said that MLS was doing the best job of marketing to Hispanic fans of any American sports league. It mentioned that Hispanics account for 35% of MLS fans and that all teams have Spanish-language radio broadcasts.

But the picture is not completely rosy. As Andrea Canales at Sideline Views points out, not all MLS teams have websites in Spanish, shockingly including the L.A. Galaxy. Either Team Beckham has ceded the Spanish-speaking fans to Chivas USA or the marketing department there needs a wake-up call.

For a while, it was the whole league that needed a wake-up call. MLS’s initial marketing efforts were geared almost exclusively at “soccer moms” and their families. Gimmicks like having the clock count up and the shootout turned of may serious fans, including Hispanics. As MLS has matured as a league, so too has its marketing policy. It now promotes itself to suburban soccer families as well as Hispanics.

Some teams have been more successful in marketing to Hispanics than others. The Galaxy’s failure to even put up a Spanish language website stands in contrast to DC United’s sustained efforts to reach out to the large Hispanic population in the nation’s capital. United boast one of the best fan clubs in the league, which is not coincidentally a mix of white and Hispanics. The Barra Brava takes their name from fan clubs in Latin America and sings in both English and Spanish (they also recently brought their brand of support to a Washington Capitals hockey game to mixed reviews). They have a manager of Hispanic relations, whom I have often seen quoted in Spanish-language media in the area.

One interesting aspect of appealing to Hispanic fans is the language in which it is done. As the Hispanic population in this country grows, so too does the diversity within it. In the year 2007, it cannot be assumed that Hispanic means primarily Spanish-speaking. As the American-born population increases, the number of Hispanics speaking English at home has risen as well. (This linguistic shift has not occurred without controversy: see the furor raised by the magazine Tu Ciudad, which is geared toward a Hispanic audience but published since its 2005 founding in English).

The growth in Spanish-speaking Hispanics has been linked with a shift in sporting taste. The same New York Times article quotes a study showing that the NFL is the most popular of all sports leagues among Hispanics who speak primarily English at home. Is this because they speak English or simply because such fans have grown up in this country and feel more connected to American football? According to David Steinberg, general manager of Fox Sports en Español, “the key word is acculturation”

Both the NFL and MLS face a demographic imperative in figuring out how to appeal to Hispanics, both in English and Spanish. The Hispanic population truly arrived in the American psyche when, in 2003, they overtook African-Americans as the largest minority in the country. Today, Hispanics account for “one of every two people added to the population through immigration and birth.” Tomorrow’s America will be more heavily Hispanic than today’s. Whether these Hispanics will become fútbol, football, or soccer fans is the challenge for both the NFL and MLS.