Football in the Middle East: State, Society, and the Beautiful Game

Football has long been a perfect lens to examine societal processes and fault lines. It has played a role worldwide in forming, expressing, and projecting national identity.But nowhere has the impact of sports in general and soccer in particular been as profound, consistent, and persistent as in the Middle East and North Africa since its introduction by colonial powers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Its influence was felt in terms of nation, state, and regime formation; assertion of national identity; the struggle for independence; republicanism versus monarchy; ideological battles; and fights for human, political, gender, and labor rights.And yet, while social scientists increasingly acknowledge that no study of a country or region is complete without looking at its nexus of sports, politics, and society, the Middle East and North Africa constitute a black hole in both social science research of sports and regional studies. Middle East studies have, by and large, ignored the role of sports. Social scientists in those parts of the world—the Anglo-Saxon world, Europe, and Latin America—that recognize the nexus of sports, politics, and society as a legitimate and important field of study have long looked at every part of the globe—Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas—except the Middle East and North Africa.Abdullah al-Arian’s edited volume, Football in the Middle East: State, Society, and the Beautiful Game, is the latest major publication to fill the void by exploring various aspects of soccer’s significance. The volume contributes to the existing literature by expanding and deepening research in what remains an under-researched aspect of Middle Eastern and North African society and politics.It does so with various chapters that take Egypt and Algeria as case studies to explore the power structure of the sport involving authoritarian regimes and militant fans who played key roles in many of the popular Arab revolts that bookended the 2010s. Cultural anthropologist Yagmur Nuhrat analyzes the power structure through the lens of gender inequality.Other authors discuss the marginalization of Palestinian football in Lebanon, home to an estimated 270,000 Palestinians; the role of social development policy in addressing the needs of refugees with a focus on girls and young women; the politics of football in Iran, particularly in women’s long struggle to gain access to stadia hosting men’s matches; and Qatar’s leveraging of its lucrative football broadcasting rights business to garner influence and soft power.Aubrey Bloomfield’s chapter on the place of football in the Boycott, Disinvestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign takes on added importance with the current Gaza war. Bloomfield acknowledges that punitive actions cannot always be credited to a boycott campaign but notes that BDS created the environment even before the war in which UEFA, the governing European soccer body, refrained from awarding Israel hosting rights for the 2020 European Football Championship, Adidas halted its sponsorship of the Israel Football Association (IFA), and Argentina scrapped a friendly match against Israel in 2018. However, the Palestine Football Association and BDS have yet to secure the crown jewel of their sports campaign, the suspension by world soccer governing body FIFA of the Israeli association, despite Israel’s unprecedented isolation on the global stage because of the current Gaza war.Bloomfield opens his chapter with the notion that there is “an enduring misperception that sports and politics do not, or should, not mix” (199). The author goes on to note that autocratic regimes use sports as a legitimization tool, while activists see stadia as protest venues. Bloomfield’s analysis speaks to Ibrahim Elhoudaiby’s valuable fine-tuning in the volume’s first chapter, “The Politics of the Game,” of this reviewer’s long-standing analysis that politics is written into the DNA of football. Elhoudaiby differentiates between professional and amateur football and argues correctly that this author’s analysis applies to the former rather than the latter.While media and literature scholar Thomas Ross Griffin offers a long-overdue study of soccer’s place in the evolution of Qatari national identity, and the book includes references to the sport’s significance in shaping other national identities, Al-Arian’s volume would have benefited from a chapter dealing with the broader picture. Such a chapter could have included the role soccer played, among others, in Israeli, Palestinian, Lebanese, and Jordanian contexts, which is substantially different in each case.Zahra Barber’s discussion of migrant worker rights, which took center stage in the run-up to the 2022 Qatar World Cup, is particularly relevant if, as expected, FIFA awards Saudi Arabia the hosting rights for the 2034 tournament. Barber rightly notes that human rights groups and Western media used the Qatar World Cup to single out migrant worker rights but have paid far less attention to the abuse of human rights in Middle Eastern and North African countries that host sporting events such as Bahrain, the first country in the region to boast an F1 race.Activists’ narrow focus in Qatar will not work in the Saudi case. Massive human rights abuses in the kingdom are already a main staple for activists and Western media. Even so, Barber’s chapter paves the way for research on how activists will have to adapt when taking Saudi Arabia to task. Understanding the differences between Qatar and Saudi Arabia will frame efforts to pressure the kingdom to adhere to all kinds of rights, including human, women, worker, and gender diversity rights.The differences include that Qatar saw an interest in cooperating with human rights groups and trade unions so that it would be seen as embracing reform. Brushing aside the allegation that he was engaging in sports washing, the questionable assertion that autocracies use sports to launder their tarnished images, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman made clear that he could not care less about concerns raised by activists and Western media. “If sport washing is going to increase my GDP by way of one percent, then I will continue doing sport washing,” Bin Salman told Fox News in 2023.1Simon Chadwick focuses in his chapter on the engagement of Gulf fans not only with football but also traditional sports like falconry and camel racing. Left beyond the purview of Al-Arian’s volume are the attitudes of Western sports fans and football executives toward increasing autocratic Middle Eastern influence in their clubs and sports governance, as well as the awarding of major sporting events hosting rights to significant rights abusers. No doubt, both autocrats, like Bin Salman, and activists learned from the Qatar experience that only a minority of Western fans care about human rights beyond their own. Criticism of Qatar’s migrant regime did not stop fans from streaming to the Gulf state to watch World Cup matches. Similarly, fans of Manchester City, Paris Saint-Germain, and Newcastle United have welcomed Gulf owners with deep pockets who are willing to spend lavishly on their trophy football assets.Even so, Barber’s chapter segues into a shift in focus in Middle Eastern football away from the role of soccer in popular revolts that bookended the 2010s to the acquisition of foreign clubs, a development pioneered by the United Arab Emirates with its acquisition of Manchester City in 2008, and foreign players, mainly by Saudi Arabia, to boost the sport domestically and the kingdom’s ranking internationally. The shift does not constitute a move away from human rights concerns.Instead, it represents a broadening of concerning issues to include fair competition given Gulf states’ willingness to flex their financial muscles and the power Gulf states, particularly Qatar, have accrued in football and other sports. These issues have played out since the publication of Al-Arian’s volume with, among others, Saudi-backed golf start-up LIV Golf’s attempted acquisition of PGA Tour, the long-standing organizer of the sport’s flagship events, Saudi Arabia’s purchase of England’s Newcastle United, the kingdom’s moves into esports, potential European investigations of Qatari and UAE subsidies for clubs they own in Belgium, and a legal battle between Manchester City and the English Premier League over issues of financial irregularity and the legal architecture designed to ensure a level playing field.Al-Arian’s volume is a valuable kick-off for studying the region’s engagement with sports, and others are in the works. Meanwhile, the volume demonstrates that issues confronting Middle Eastern and North African football are the same issues with which the sport grapples globally. These issues include the nexus of sports and politics; human, minority, and other rights; national, regional, and global sports governance and funding; and the promotion of women’s sports.