I think back to August 2007, when England hosted Germany in a “friendly” match that had “no meaning” as is often said. Christian Eichler of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a paper of record in Germany, wrote at the time about Wembley Stadium, where the game would be played:

In times of globalization, not only of markets but also of experiences and memories, there are few places that remain non-interchangeable. Places like Wembley. That place is uniquely English and at the same time: a German place.

Germany train at Wembley before their match against England (photo: AP/FAZ)

The article recounts important German wins at Wembley and the idea of playing in the land where the game was born. Articles in the English and German press show that many people, players and fans, cared very much about this match, despite the fact that it was only a “friendly.”

Of course the biggest event is the World Cup Final of 1966. In Germany, the term “Wembley Goal” signifies a goal that hits the top of the crossbar, lands in the goal, and then bounces out of it. The term refers to all such goals and the one that Germans believe lost them the 1966 World Cup Final against England, played at Wembley.

Why do events like this mean something? I will refer to something in philosophy called the “hermeneutic circle.”This circle consists of the background or “big story” that is understood by the interpreter encountering something new. Often, this background is implicit, also consisting of habits of interpretation. When we interpret something, we encounter a new “little story” and hold it up against the background, which also often changes as a result. The circle loops from the interpreter’s background to her new experience, which reshapes the background, and so on…National teams represent their countries and so their matches are inevitably held up against the big stories about those countries. For instance, when the US plays Cuba this year in the World Cup Qualifiers, the political relationship between these two countries will be thematized as the match is anticipated and discussed.

Germany’s World Cup win in 1954 represented a new state of affairs, in which Germany could again participate in the world scene in a normal way. Had they lost, another symbol might have been found but the “miracle at Bern” signaled that there is a way to be German and still participate in global affairs. Virtues are often cited in describing the team that won, including persistence, tactical intelligence, cooperation, and fitness. These enter the background in future attempts to deal with problems, many outside of soccer.

On the other side of this example: the Dutch have made every match with Germany about WWII. Representing the occupied Netherlands has proven to be a way to expunge the collaborationist parts of their history. Frank Rijkaard spitting on Rudi Völler wasn’t about Völler at all – great Dutch writers cite the occupation when they recall these matches (see Simon Kuper’s book Ajax, the Dutch, the War for more on this). There is a limit to how “normal” the interaction between Germany and the rest of the world can ever be.

(A side note: England’s football background is rather sad, really. The dominant themes are “we can’t get a break” and “those over-paid fat gits.” I can’t figure out if this is really part of England’s background in the larger scheme or not. There seems to be a sense that a country that ought to be the best isn’t. Having the fifth-best World Cup record and recently reaching the quarter-finals makes them the envy of most of he world but fans treat this as the result of forty years of bad luck or bad training or bad leadership. The win in 1966 somehow isn’t enough to turn around this diagnosis. Would another World Cup win achieve this? Why didn’t the Rugby win do the same thing?)It is hard to know how the interaction between a background and sporting events will happen. Germany’s “Wembley Goal” did not change the background in Germany. Second place in 1966 counted as a confirmation of the virtues they cited in 1954 and in other wins. The 2006 World Cup was hailed as a national “Summer’s Dream” and reaching third place launched massive street parties. Support for the national team launched a widespread discussion about how the country should present itself. There have never been so many Federal Republic flags flown and some people worried about how it would affect Germany’s behavior and image. The question that arises is whether it is appropriate for Germans to be proud of being German. Sporting events do not dictate interpretive outcomes because those are the products of the decisions made by the interpreters, given the options they are offered.

German fans fly their flag at the 2006 World Cup (photo: Orange.co.uk)

What makes Wembley a German place? The stories that were developed there. As Eichler puts it, “Ten German games there, five of them unforgettable.”Do sports events change things? Yes, thousands of people are doing something when they follow a game. For one thing, they are interpreting the world they live in. This is why measures to punish racist chants and unsportsmanlike conduct are important and need to be backed up with serious consequences.

I used national teams as my example but club identification can be explained (at least in part) with the same circle of interpretation. Later, I hope to illustrate that the great clubs all have a story. Many descriptions of clubs found in this blog have offered rich examples of this.

Note: The first notes for this article were written during the England/Germany friendly match. Germany won 2-1 and the match was declared a “typically English” one by the Guardian’s Tom Lutz. No meaning, indeed.

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Steve Menary (photo: Play the Game)

How did you get the idea to write Outcasts?

I’m just a self-employed freelance journalist. There’s no career structure: you write an article and then you write another one and then you write another one and it goes on. I wrote an article about football in the Channel Islands, the Isle of Man and Jersey, and why they didn’t play international football. When I’d done that, I thought, “this is quite an interesting idea and no one’s ever written about this.”

Not everyone who applies to FIFA can get in or there would be the FA of David Keyes [ed note – not a bad idea!] and anyone could join. When I looked into it, they had turned some places down. FIFA would admit they turned someone down if I could find them out, but I asked them many times for a list of people who they’ve rejected and they would just ignore me.

I wrote a few chapters and I realized there were a few things like the Island Games … that I could go to and I could meet Greenland. They don’t even play in Greenland anyway and the flight there would have been about 1,000 pounds. The Falklands would have been about 2,000 pounds. But I realized I could go to the [2005 Island Games in the] Shetlands and I could see these people.

Shetland’s Steven Umphray during the Saaremma vs. Shetland match (photo: Shetland Islands Council / Steve Lindridge / www.idealimages.co.uk)

I sent it out to some big publishers and they said, “It’s very good, but we don’t know how much we’ll sell.” The publishers were okay, they gave me pretty encouraging rejections, if there is such a thing.

I knew David Conn and he said, “Why don’t you try to get in touch with World Soccer?”So I had a chat with [World Soccer’s] Gavin Hamilton and he said to me, “Come along, write something for us [on a non-FIFA “country”] each month.” World Soccer paid me fairly and he said, “If you get a book deal, don’t worry about [the rights]. It’s fine.” So that meant, for about a year, I could carry on researching the book. Each month I’d do an article [for the non-FIFA section] and I’d amass so much information, more than I could fit in a 500-word article. Then I found a smaller publisher after that, Know the Score.

Tell me more about the research you did for the book. Did you do it mostly at tournaments?

Yeah, I realized that the Greenland and the Falklands were good stories. I decided I was only going to do a chapter on a team if I could go see them play, meet with them in person, or have substantial dealings with them on the phone or by email. It’s very easy in this day and age to go on the Internet and cobble something together, but I just thought that was a cop-out. That was a quality control I set for myself.

I didn’t go to the Northern Marianas, which you probably guessed. The guys there, Vince [Stravino] and Peter [Coleman], were fantastically helpful. We exchanged a lot of calls and emails.

But I pretty much met [everyone else]. I went to the Island Games, I went to that tournament on the Isle of Man, I went to Gibraltar, I went to the Wild Cup in Hamburg, I went to the Occitania vs. Cyprus game, I took the whole family down to Montpellier. I went to a couple of NF Board meetings, one in London and one in the Hague.

Northern Cyprus and Zanzibar face off in the 2006 FIFI Wild Cup final (photo: FIFI/Corbis)

I went to the [2006 ELF Cup in] Northern Cyprus, which was a great bonus. They wanted to invite some journalists out there and they invited me and the guy who did the photographs for the book. That was great because the problem was the cost. I could have blown the advance I got for the book just going to the Falklands. You kind of had to have an imaginative way.

I also got some commissions. I did a thing for Guardian Unlimited about the Sami Cup. The great thing about that is that I’m in the journalist union and I was flipping through the magazine. There was a little ad in the bottom corner that caught my eye. It said that the Norwegian Embassy in London funds journalists’ trips to Norway. At the time I was thinking, “How am I going to get to Lapland? I’m never to be able to find another magazine to pay me to go up there.” I got in touch with a guy at the Norwegian Embassy and he said, “Right, when do you want to go?”

I had to make each thing pay. I wasn’t going to lose money going anywhere. It was more fun that way anyway.

Do you have an overall goal for the book?

I kind of wanted to try and look at how nationality is defined on the football pitch. I come from the UK and to most other places, it’s Great Britian. To us, we’re all English or Scottish or Welsh or from Northern Ireland. I live in a place that isn’t a country to the rest of the world, but it’s a country to us. In terms of football and rugby union, it’s a country.

I knew that I’d end up asking more questions than I answered. But I thought maybe it would just be a way of exploring it and writing something that will make people think in the way it made me think.

What are some of the questions you think you’ve asked?

I suppose, what is nationality? What is that, really? The Tibetian [player Karma Samdup] said: “It’s just a passport and you travel on that passport.” Or the Greenlanders. To them, [Greenland] is a place, [it’s] a country. It’s almost the same as the Faroes, who are in FIFA. There are certainly anomalies and there’s so much madness. It’s all about politics at the end of the day as much as anything else. There’s that idea that sport and politics shouldn’t mix. But clearly, they’re tightly intertwined.

Would you like to see the countries you profiled get into FIFA?

When I started telling people I was doing the book, they all kind of thought I was writing some kind of manifesto. I was never doing that. You couldn’t conceivably have the Falklands playing against Argentina even if [FIFA] let them in, which they never would. It would be ludicrous.

I think some of the places need more help than others. Certainly, Greenland deserves more sympathy than others because it’s been practically abandoned. They couldn’t go [to the Island Games last year] because they didn’t have the money to send the men’s and the women’s team and they thought it was about time the women got to go. They had played in every Island Games since 1989, but they had no money so they said, “Right, let’s let the women go” and [the men] stayed home. That seems madness really.

Greenland (in red) and Zanzibar face off in the 2006 FIFI Wild Cup (photo: FIFI/Corbis)

I don’t think they can all go in, but some of them, like Greenland and Gibraltar, they only want to play amateur football. They don’t want to play in the World Cup qualifiers; they don’t want to play in the Champions League. That was never really their ambition. I think they just wanted some help with the football they were organizing and they weren’t getting any.

Did you ever feel like you were ever covering teams that were too amateurish to warrant your covering them?

Some of the things with the NF Board were more about making a statement. A Lapland journalist, for example, told me that, in his opinion, a West Papuan team had no intention of ever turning up [to the 2006 Viva World Cup]. That was a bit amateurish.

And the Sami team that went out there murdered everyone because they had a lot of good players. They had people who had played international football at the under-21 level. So yeah, some of those teams, you feel, there’s got to be a real team, there’s got to be some basis to it rather than just a political stunt. Some of the teams didn’t have enough substance, but maybe if they got going long enough, they would have some substance.

Clearly, these teams aren’t going to win the World Cup. What, then, do you see as the value of your book?

They’re not going to win the World Cup, that’s true. But if you take some of the teams that are in FIFA, say Luxembourg. It’s 300,000 people, they’re not going to win the World Cup. I think they won a competitive match last year for the first time in 10 years. But they’ve been playing a long, long time. Luxembroug played in the early Olympic games. I think in the mid-1960s they knocked Holland out of the European Championships when it was a two-legged tie. Every dog has its day.

The nature of competition is that someone’s going to win and someone’s going to be last. It doesn’t matter if you’re playing golf or if you’re playing football. Someone’s got to be Arsenal and someone’s got to be Derby, and that’s just the nature of it. But you can’t go around and say, “Derby are really crap so let’s drop them” because maybe next year Derby will be better.

I think if you give people a chance, there’s a chance they’ll improve. I think if you cut them off, which is what’s been done to some of these places, then [the level of play] will just dissipate.

Who were some of the most interesting people you met while working on Outcasts?

I think some of the NF Board people. They’re very interesting. [President] Jean-Luc [Kit] is a very interesting guy. The Sami guy, Leif Isak Nilut, too, when he’s up on stage doing one of his yoiks.

President of the Sami FA, Leif Isak Nilut, in traditional clothing (photo: NRK.no)

And some of the Greenlandic people, too. It’s quite a harsh world out there. There are 15 kilometers of road in the capital and none of them go anywhere.

Probably the best thing about the book was that I met a lot of really interesting people and everyone was really interested in talking to [me]. That was one of the joys of doing the book. [I’d] ring someone up and they’d say, “Yeah, I’d love to speak to you.” The response from people was fantastic.

Do you see potential for change on FIFA’s part in terms of which countries they’ll let in?

UEFA have taken a reasonable stance and said, “You’ve got to be in the UN.” Whereas FIFA have just said, “You’ve got to be in the international community.” They don’t say what international community. It’s whatever international community they want it to be.

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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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Surprisingly, George Weah is one of the few former soccer players to use their fame to move into a career in politics. Former players are some of the most prominent people in society and were they to move into politics, they would begin their new careers with higher name recognition than many politicians in office for years. But, for whatever reason, few players attempt to make this transition. A few of those who have (along with some former coaches, officials, and referees) are listed below. I’m limiting this list to those who have played at the professional level. Many politicians played soccer as kids (though few are as bad as Tony Blair).

Blair attempts to at least make contact

The most recognizable former soccer player of all, Pele, has tried his hand at a few things since retiring from the game. Unfortunately, he’s been bad at just about all of them. His stint in politics was no different. Appointed Extraordinary Minister for Sport in 1995, he went about trying to kick out corruption in Brazilian soccer (a much-needed task). His attempts to do so were unsuccessful and Pele left his job in 1999. In 2001, Pele himself was accused of profiting off of a charity match staged for UNICEF that never happened.

Turkey’s prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is today visiting Washington, speaking with George Bush about the situation in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq and Turkey. But before he got into politics, Erdogan was apparently a professional soccer player, though with which team I don’t know.

Far less notable is Toshiro Tomochika, current member of the Japanese Diet and former J-League player. Tomochika was part of the surprising Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) sweep of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in the upper legislative house earlier this year. Soccer features prominently on the legislator’s website.

Toshiro Tomochika playing for J-League team Ehime FC (photo: Live Door)

Eastern Europe under the Iron Curtain produced two politicians who were former players. Jozsef Bozsik was a friend and teammate of the great Hungarian Ferenc Puskas, and also a great player in his own right. He won 101 caps for the Hungarian national team. After his playing days were over, Bozsik was also elected to the parliament, though perhaps elected is too strong a word to describe the political system in use at the time in Hungary.

Several decades later, Oleg Blokhin became a star for Dynamo Kiev and the USSR national team, for whom he earned 112 caps in total. He also won the European Footballer of the Year in 1975. Blokhin later coached several teams, including Ukraine, whom he guided to the 2006 World Cup. His coaching duties have not stopped Blokhin from serving in the Ukrainian parliament, to which he was elected in 2002.

Soccer club officials go into politics in far greater numbers than do the players they employ. Silvio Berlusconi parlayed his career as owner of AC Milan into a stint as Italy’s prime minister. Elected as head of Forza Italia (a party with connections to soccer supporters), Berlusconi ruled the country twice (1994-95 and 2001-06), though never as successfully as he has run AC Milan.

The always dapper Silvio Berlusconi (photo: Monte Cerignone e dintorni)

Berlusconi’s peer at Boca Juniors is Mauricio Macri. The Argentine won election as mayor of Buenos Aires earlier this year, a victory that just happened to coincide with Boca’s victory in South America’s Copa Libertadores. Some have suggested Macri may have his eye on the presidency, though he will now have to take down Argentina’s equivalent of the Clintons, current president Nestor and his wife Christina, who just won the election to take over his job.

Jack Warner is a mover and shaker in the FIFA hierarchy. The Trinidadian is a vice president of the world soccer body and head of CONCAF. He has allegedly used these position for his own profit when he resold 2006 World Cup tickets for $1 million, despite FIFA edicts against the practice. Warner announced his candidacy for the Trinidadian parliament recently and used his prominent position to win a seat in yesterday’s election.

Jack Warner (left) with Trinidadian Prime Minister Patrick Manning (photo: Office of the Prime Minister)

In addition to Oleg Blokhin, Argentina’s Carlos Bilardo is one of the few coaches to go into politics. The man (whose fantastic and accurate nickname is “Narigón” or “big nose”) who coached his country to victory at the 1986 World Cup announced he will become sports secretary of the province of Buenos Aires.

Argentina seems to produce more politicians from the ranks of soccerdom (perhaps it’s because the politics and soccer are so intertwined in the country). Javier Castrilli is, as far as I’m aware, the only referee to jump the ranks of arbiters to politics. The man once known as “El Sheriff” has hung up the whistle and become an official with the Argentine Ministry of Internal Affairs, focusing on security at stadiums.

Though the ranks of former soccer players, officials, coaches, and referee going into politics are fairly limited, there are two current players who one can imagine having a political career after retiring from playing. Not surprisingly, they both play for Barcelona, a club that define its identity in political terms. Defenders Lillian Thuram and Oleguer have both spoken out forcefully on political issues they feel strongly about. Will they devote themselves entirely to politics in the future? Only time will tell.

Have I missed any former soccer players, coaches, officials or referees who have gone into politics? Let me know by leaving a comment.

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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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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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Croatian-Australian Mark Viduka (photo: Getty Images/ABC)

The connections between Croatia and Australia began in the 1850s during the Australian Gold Rush. The number of Croatians moving to Australia was small (not getting over 1,000 until after the turn of the century). The first Croatian soccer team in Australia was founded in 1945 by Marin Alagich.

A wave of Croatians who had been displaced by World War II came to Australia shortly after the fighting concluded. These new immigrants filled the ranks of Croatian teams, which multiplied throughout Australia’s major cities. Roy Hay, in his article ‘Those Bloody Croatians’: Croatian Soccer Teams, Ethnicity and Violence in Australia, 1950-99 has written of one ambitious club official. “Joe Radojevic, secretary of Geelong’s Croatia club in the 1950s, visited incoming ships in the company of a Slovenian priest to recruit Croatian soccer players, bringing around 350 to the club in his own estimation” (79).

The clubs grew and became integral parts of the Croatian communities in Australia (Hay claims they were initially more important than the local churches). The clubs took on great importance to community, standing for the Croatian state that many hoped would eventually become independent of Yugoslavia. Australian academic Philip Mosley has written:

More than any other ethnic group in Australia the Croats used soccer for political means. It was not just that they expressed their own nationalism. Plenty of other groups did so as well. What differentiated them was how pointed was their expression of nationalism. Convinced of perceived injustice, the Croats gave voice to their antagonism to Tito’s Yugoslavia … (35).

There was occasionally violence associated with Croatian soccer clubs and their fans. In 1972, a Croatian team was expelled from the Victorian Soccer Federation after numerous incidents of violence surrounding their matches. Matches against other ethnic Serbian teams were particularly charged. During the wars in the Balkans during the 1990s, matches between such teams had to be played behind closed doors.

Wray Vamplew has claimed that the violence was to “some extent … a product of the media, particularly the Australian press, which has focussed on crowd disturbances seeing them as newsworthy in the light of the European experience” (1). Accurate or not, the perception of violence among ethnic teams was such that teams with ethnic names were at one point not permitted to play in Australia’s professional league.

But more lasting than any violence is large number of players from the Croatian community who have reached the highest levels of Australian and international soccer. Australia’s former professional National Soccer League had two teams – Melbourne Knights and Sydney United – with strong connections to the Croatian community (neither features in the new A-League but do play in regional leagues as well as the annual Australian Croatia Soccer Tournament). The following players on Australia’s 2006 World Cup team had Croatian ancestry:

• Jason Culina (his father, Branko, is a coach and the entire family is featured on the Austrlian Migration Heritage Centre’s website)
• Tony Popovic
• Josip Skoko
• Mark Viduka
• Ante Covic
• Zeljko Kalac
• Mark Bresciano (his last name comes his Italian father, but his mother is Croatian)

The Australian national team (photo: Xinhua)

At the 2006 World Cup, Australia and Croatia played each other, drawing 2-2 in a first round match. The game is best remembered for Graham Poll giving Josip Simunic 3 yellow cards before sending him off. The English referee’s mistake has since become infamous, but perhaps Poll was confused about which country Simunic was really representing. After all, the defender was one of three Croatian players (along with Joe Didulica and Anthony Seric) born in Australia.

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One of the funniest parts of his show, The Colbert Report, is his Better Know a District series, in which he interviews members of Congress (it was to have 435 parts until Colbert retired convicted bribe-taker Duke Cunningham’s district).This past Thursday saw Stephen Colbert interviewing Washington state representative Adam Smith. In between discussions of rhubarb, secret intelligence-gathering programs, and whether he supports NAMBLA (he does not, it turns out), Colbert informed Rep. Smith that he is a member of 29 caucuses, which was news to the congressman.

One of these caucuses, Colbert pointed out, is the Soccer Caucus. (If you’re wondering, yes, this does exist, although its membership has not been updated since the 2006 elections.)

Colbert got his best Andres Cantor on and asked Smith, “You’re on the soccer caucus … what are some of the soccer caucus’ gooooooals?” Watch it for yourself (the soccer bit comes with 0:45 seconds left).

George “El Gringo” Capwell

George Capwell was an unlikely founder of an Ecuadorian soccer team. The New York native went to the South American country in 1926 to head an electric company in the port city of Guayaquil. Though he had little knowledge of or interest in soccer, he was an avid fan of popular American sports of the time: baseball and boxing. Soon after arriving in Ecuador, Capwell had the idea to start a sports club at the company he headed, Empresa Electrica de Ecuador. Working with other managers, Capwell started Emelec (taking the first syllable from each word of the company’s name). The sports played at the club initially reflected the founder’s interests, with baseball (Capwell himself was the catcher) and boxing (potential members had to fight, and survive against, an experienced club boxer in order to gain membership) the big two.

A 1929 newspaper announcement of Emelec’s founding

The American company head may have been happy with Emelec putting out baseball teams and boxers, but the locals showed little interest in those games. In a piece of managerial genius, Capwell formed a soccer team within Emelec to satisfy his workers’ demands.

An early Emelec team

The new team began play in 1929. It won its first title, a local league made up of business-backed teams in Guayaquil, in 1933. Emelec’s popularity rose quickly and they soon developed a fierce rivalry with fellow Guayaquil team Barcelona (founded by a Spaniard and named after the famous team in his home country). Emelec would go on to have much success, including 10 Ecuadorian league titles. Yet in becoming an Ecuadorian institution, the club never lost touch with its American roots. In 1945, the team named their stadium after their founder. The Estadio George Capwell has been around since then, and got a face-lift a few years ago. The fans who pack the Capwell Stadium are known as some of the most intense in Ecuador.

Were he alive to see it, this might all come as a surprise to George Capwell himself. Capwell probably never thought that Emelec’s soccer team (which was, at its root, simply a way for Capwell to please his local workers) would grow to what it has become. For an American with a known dislike for soccer to have founded one of the country’s most popular teams is more than a little ironic.Capwell’s work in Ecuador stands as a nice contrast to his country’s generally more negative dealings in the region. Treating countries in Latin America like banana republic has, not surprisingly, brought contempt dislike upon the United States. The American government might have done well to follow the lead of George Capwell. Soccer, it turns out, is an excellent way to win hearts and minds.

Thanks to Emilio Rigazio of the Emelec fan club La Boca del Pozo for his help on this post.

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