Football, Identity and Politics In and From the MENA Region
By Javier Bordón
Download project data documentFootball, Identity and Politics In and From the MENA Region
This report on Football, Identity and Politics in the MENA Region originated from a workshop held online on the 20th of June 2024 and hosted by the SEPAD project at the University of Lancaster. The report offers a stimulating and timely window into an important issue, for which we would like to thank all the authors for their excellent contributions and engagement with the topic. As editors, we are aware that football might seem a trivial matter at a time when the region is witnessing widespread violence, regime change in Syria and a genocide carried out by the Israeli army in Gaza. We are however convinced that sports, and football in particular, provide a unique tool to understand the sociopolitical sphere, and within it complex concepts such as identity (Tuastad, 2019). Football and identity very often intersect to reflect and shape a broad purview of political, social, economic, and cultural phenomena.
This is particularly true in a region such as the Middle East and North Africa, where the game is both incredibly popular and closely linked to regional politics (Al-Arian, 2022). In fact, it may not be too far-fetched to think of football as a metaphor of the politics of MENA, where sometimes it seems that everyone gets hurt and every team has its own style of play that seems unfair to foreigners –paraphrasing George Orwell’s words about the beautiful game. In other cases, football is a space of solidarity and accountability, as the support for the Palestinian cause shown in stadiums across the region illustrates. From the political chants of Algerian football fans to the attempts by authoritarian leaders in countries like Syria to use the game for their own popularity, and from the search of social justice by marginalised communities to the investment in the sport by Gulf states, politics and football and never far from each other in the MENA. Football therefore provides a unique lens to study the complex and multi-layered concept of identity, or rather identities, in the Middle East and North Africa.