The Spanish Federation’s announcement last week that Africans would no longer count as non-EU players passed with little notice (but I thank Joseph for bringing it to my attention). The decision was made to keep La Liga in line with the Cotonou agreement, ratified last year by the Spanish parliament, which treats workers from 77 African, Caribbean, and Pacific nations as EU workers. Thus, players already playing in Spain from such countries – the most notable being Barcelona’s Samuel Eto’o and Real Madrid’s Mahmadou Diarra – will no longer take up one of the three non-EU roster spots per match that teams are permitted, nor will future signings.

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.

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People of Croatian ancestry make up less than one-half of one percent of the population. But the influence of this small Balkan country on soccer in the land of Oz has far exceeded their numbers. Of the 23 players on Australia’s 2006 World Cup squad, 7 had Croatian heritage. Croatia’s team had 3 Australian-born players.

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

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Stephen Colbert is a comedic genius. He skewers the world of TV punditry by acting out an extreme version of the pundits themselves (of course, even in his extremes, he’s often right on target).

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).

The United States has a long and sordid history of interventions in Latin America. The “banana republics” of that region have often had policies imposed on them by the American government or business. But in Ecuador, one American brought something to the locals that they all welcomed. His name was George Capwell and he founded Emelec, one of the most popular soccer teams in Ecuador.

George “El Gringo” Capwell

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Jafar Panahi is a reknowned Iranian filmmaker who chooses to deal with controversial topics in his work. His movies (Crimson Gold, The Circle, among others) have been heralded abroad and banned at home. In many ways, then, it’s incredible that Jafar Panahi was able to make his latest movie, Offside, about women trying to sneak into an Iranian stadium to watch a soccer match.

Panahi knew that taking on the subject of female football fans in Iran would be controversial, and so tried to make his movie quietly so as to avoid the censors. In an interview, he described how even his best attempts to avoid notice were ultimately unsuccessful.

We tried to be very discreet and avoid any mention in the press. However, five days before the end of the shoot, a newspaper published an article stating I was directing a new film. The military immediately gave orders to interrupt the shoot. We were instructed to bring them our rushes to be verified. I immediately announced to the official in charge of cinema in Iran that this was out of the question, and that I would not allow a single soldier during the final days of the shoot. Luckily, there were only a few scenes left to shoot, inside a minibus, so we just left the military zone and continued filming sixty kilometers outside of Tehran.

But the difficulties Panahi faced from overzealous authorities is nothing compared to those encountered by the subjects of his movie. They are the female football fans who so desperately want to watch Iran play Bahrain in a 2005 match that would decide which team would go to the World Cup.

The movie opens on a bus, as Iranian fans make their way to the Azadi Stadium to see the crucial qualifier against Bahrain. The scene is joyous, with fans hanging out the windows and singing, psyching themselves up for the game. But one fan is more nervous than excited. This fan, it turns out, is a she and shes are not allowed into stadiums in Iran.

The female fan (we never find out names of any of the women in the film) is going in disguise, trying to avoid the glare of police at the stadium. But her cover is blown by her own nervousness and she is taken to a holding pen, along with other female football fans.

It’s in this holding pen, which is really just metal barricades shaped into a rectangle, that the majority of the movie takes place. The action of the movie, if it can be called that, is mostly the captive female fans attempting to persuade their captors to let them watch the game. Those looking for dramatic shots of the action on the field will be sorely disappointed; this is a movie about the repressive realities of contemporary Iranian life that just happens to have a crucial World Cup qualifier as its background.

The Azadi Stadium is as good a place as any to show many of the injustices that exist in Iran today. The rationales that the female fans are given for not being allowed into the stadium are as numerous as they are absurd: women will be harmed by the coarse language in the stadium, they should not be looking at attractive young male players, soccer is just not a women’s game, etc. The most argumentative of the detained female fans points out that Japanese women were allowed in to a game at the same stadium and wonders if “my only problem is I was born in Iran?”

The soldiers who become the women’s captors are hardly enthused with having to keep the fans from watching the game. One soldier is completely disinterested in his work, another continually sneaks peeks at the game, and a third laments that his conscription has taken him so far from his family farm. The root of the problem does not lie with the soldiers; they are merely forced to carry out the unjust laws created by those above them.

That seems to be the point Panahi is most interested in making. Individually, Iranians may support female fans’ right to go to the stadium, but the authorities in the country create a system that forces some citizens to oppress others.

Panahi also clearly hopes that Iranians might take collective action to stop these injustices from occurring. When a female fan escapes from her captor with the aid of some male fans, it is impossible not to see Panahi’s desire that more Iranians take a stand against injustice in their country. As the famous quote goes, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”

Jafar Panahi

Offside is undoubtedly an interesting, it is not the most engaging movie. Its topic may be unique, but the film itself is all too predictable. The soldier least interested initially in the female fans’ plight comes to see their perspective by the end of the film. The women are detained, but in the end are released onto the streets of Tehran to celebrate with their countrymen and women. Watching Offside, you’ll rarely be surprised by what’s coming next.

The one surprise in the movie is how little soccer there is. Leaving the theater, my friend and I concurred that we would have liked to see shots of what sounded like an intense game. Of course, as we quickly realized, not showing the game was an intentional decision on Panahi’s part and that we had little right to complain. We, two twenty-something American men, had been denied a peek at the game during the ninety-minute movie; women in Iran have been denied the right to watch soccer for their entire lives.

Shortly before the game between Lazio and Livorno in April 2005, Ian Hawkey wrote in The Times that “politics will outshout the sport.” While exaggerations about the wider significance of games are rampant in sports journalism, Hawkey’s assertion was completely accurate. Lazio vs. Livorno was not just a Serie A match. It was to be a clash of ideologies between the two clubs, their fans, and their star players, Paolo Di Canio of Lazio and Cristiano Lucarelli of Livorno.

Paolo DI Canio is nothing if not controversial. In 1998, while playing for Sheffield Wednesday, Di Canio achieved infamy by pushing referee Paul Alcock to the ground after being sent him off. (Incredibly, Di Canio also won the 2001 FIFA Fair Play Award for catching a ball he could have easily put in the net because a player was injured at the time.) But Di Canio’s most controversial moment came in 2005, when Di Canio gave a one-armed Roman salute (most famously used by Italian fascists) to fans of his team, Lazio.

Di Canio make his Roman salute, a gesture he would repeat two more times

But Di Canio’s is not the only salute witnessed on an Italian soccer pitch. Livorno’s striker Cristiano Lucarelli often celebrates his goals with clenched-fist salutes made famous by those associated with Communism.

Lucarelli’s clenched-fist salute

The ideologies of Di Canio and Lucarelli are apparent in their salutes. And the players’ choice to use their prominence to espouse political views shows the strength of their beliefs.

Neither player is ashamed of his views. Di Canio describes himself as right-wing and he tried to quell the controversy over his salute by saying, “I’m a fascist, not a racist” (Jewish groups, among others, did not take kindly to this justification). Lucarelli, on the other hand, is an admitted communist, whose ringtone is the communist anthem The Red Flag. The player’s official website prominently displays Lucarelli’s most famous quote: “Some football players pay a billion for a Ferrari or a Yacht, with that money I bought myself Livorno’s shirt. That’s all.”

It’s tempting to write off Di Canio and Lucarelli as ideological extremists who just happen to be extremely talented soccer players. But they both represent ideologies shared by many fans of their teams. Livorno and Lazio are two of the 42 clubs in Italy’s top three divisions that a study claimed had “significant political orientations.”

The connection between Lazio fans and fascism is long-standing. Mussolini was a fan of the biancocelesti who often went to matches. Though Mussolini is long-dead, support for his fascist ideology lives on in some elements of the Lazio support. Ben Fenton wrote in the Telegraph in 2005 that Di Canio described his Roman salute, as “a salute from a ‘camerata‘ to ‘camerati‘, carefully using the Italian words for members of Mussolini’s fascist movement.” Andrea Mussolini, granddaughter of Il Duce, gushed over Di Canio’s gesture, saying, “What a delightful Roman salute! I was deeply moved. I will write him a thank you note.”

Lazio’s hard-core fans, known as irriducibili, are well-known for bigoted views that would make Mussolini proud. It wasn’t that long ago that the Curva Nord, the stand where the ultras congregate for home matches, displayed a banner “Team of Blacks, Crowd of Jews” to taunt their counterparts at Roma. Non-white players have been relatively rare at Lazio, perhaps scared off by the racist graffiti that welcomed Aron Winter, the first black player at the club in the early 1990s. In 2000, the fans showed their support for Serbian war criminal Arkan.

In stark contrast to the right-wing fans of Lazio, Livorno’s supporters are known to be extremely left-leaning. The Italian Communist Party was founded in Livorno in 1921 and this ideology is expressed by fans of the local soccer team. Ian Hawkey writes that, Livorno are known as a communist club, whose fans don’t just take scarves, replica jerseys and loudhailers to matches, but go with Che Guevara in tow. His face, emblazoned on banners and T-shirts, is the chosen signature not just of a club but of a city as strongly associated with the left as any in Italy.

Che’s image is accompanied by Communist flags and songs in the Armando Picchi Stadium.

Livorno’s fans have not avoided controversy either. Writing in the Scotsman, Kasper Steenbach describes an incident in which the “newly formed left-leaning fan club Brigate Autonome Livornesi (BAL) defined its stance at a Livorno home game when members unfurled a banner depicting a local female member of the post-fascist political party, Alleanza Nazionale – with the Italian flag up her backside.”

Just as Di Canio has explicitly connected himself to Lazio’s most extreme fans, Cristiano Lucarelli expresses admiration for BAL. He wears number 99, in homage to the year the fan club was founded and shares their love of Che. Many believe Lucarelli’s international career has been hampered by an incident in which he celebrated a goal by removing his uniform to display a t-shirt with the iconic image of the Argentine revolutionary. The striker is unperturbed, saying, “I am sure that, if I had been a little more careful expressing my political views, if I had shut up more often, then I would have had fewer problems with getting in the national team. But my national team is Livorno.”

Though they would be loathe to admit it, Di Canio and Lucarelli have many things in common. Both are, first and foremost, passionate fans of their clubs. “[Di Canio] travelled [sic] with the fans to away games even when he was already a distinguished member of Lazio’s youth team back then in mid-eighties.” And Lucarelli, while playing for Torino in 2002, went to see his beloved team play a crucial match.

That game changed his life. When Igor Protti scored the winner, it secured Livorno’s promotion to Serie B for the first time in 30 years. Lucarelli, donning scarf and sunglasses, joined fans who rushed on to the pitch at the final whistle.

Lucarelli would join Livorno soon after, taking a pay cut to do so. Di Canio also sacrificed money for love of club, joining a financially troubled Lazio in order to help his team regain past glories.

The love Di Canio and Lucarelli have for their clubs is reciprocated by their fans. Lazio fans offered to pay Di Canio’s 10,000 euro fine after his Roman salute (a gesture which is illegal in Italy). And Kasper Steenbach writes that in Livorno, the “hero is Lucarelli, a man who put the right to laud Che Guevara above his career with the national team.”

As Barney Ronay pointed out recently in the Guardian, players with strong political views are rare today. Yet in Paolo Di Canio and Cristiano Lucarelli, Italy has two of the most outspoken players. Their views may differ, but both Di Canio and Lucarelli have a need to express their politics on the pitch.

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