Athletes, executives and fans are turning sports in an era of defiance and dissent into a battleground for freedom of expression and political change, putting national and international sports associations that nominally adhere to human rights on the spot.
Denunciations of repression in China’s troubled north-western province of Xinjiang and support for pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong by soccer celebrity Mesut Ozil, Houston Rockets basketball general manager Darryl Morey, and rugby superstar Sonny Bill Williams alongside soccer fans in regions like Morocco and Hong Kong, highlight the willingness of sports associations to sacrifice the values attributed to sports for commercial gain in their dealings with autocratic nations.
They also by implication puncture the fiction of a separation of sports and politics that sports associations have long employed to justify their often-close ties to government and dealings with countries irrespective of their records in upholding basic rights.
So has China with its penalizing of the NBA and Mr. Ozil for their critical statements.
The gap between professed principles and practice is even more yawning with the awarding of the 2021 FIFA Club World Cup to China despite Chinese president Xi Jinping’s crackdown in Xinjiang and his moves to turn the People’s Republic into a 21st century Orwellian surveillance state.
The awarding casts doubt on FIFA’s campaign against racism in stadiums given that the crackdown in Xinjiang aims to force Turkic Muslims to violate principles of their faith and adopt Xi Jinping though as superseding Islam.
The re-emergence of sports as a battleground is not limited to the plight of Xinjiang.
Hong Kong fans recently took their struggle for greater democracy to a match in South Korea.
Hong Kong fans booed China’s anthem, chanted “Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our times,” and displayed Hong Kong’s British-era flag.
Support for national teams in autocracies like Egypt and Syria has dropped with fans demanding reforms of regime-controlled football federations that are widely viewed as corrupt,
Privately, many fans assert that the team represents the repressive regime of general-turned-president Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi rather than its historically huge fan base.
In Morocco, fans, dressed in black, last year booed the national anthem during a match in the northern city of Tetouan that was being broadcast live on television in protest against the killing by the Moroccan navy of a 20-year old student as she tried to illegally cross into Spain.
Fbladi Dalmouni, a song chanted by RCA fans, that refers to suffering one’s own home, has gone viral and become the anthem of disaffected Moroccan youth. It has garnered millions of hits on YouTube.
“Oh Oh Oh Oh My country has wronged me…
We live in a cloud in this country
They have rendered us orphans to be judged on Judgement Day…
You stole the wealth of our country and shared it with strangers…
“Behind the title ‘Fbladi Dalmouni’ hides the difficulty of living, the feeling of being a foreigner in your own country… We are Moroccan citizens. We live in a dying society, and the youth is asphyxiated,” the group said.
It is a sentiment shared by anti-government protesters across the globe from Latin America to Asia.
Dr. James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, an adjunct senior research fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute and co-director of the University of Wuerzburg’s Institute of Fan Culture
James M. Dorsey
Dr. James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, an adjunct senior research fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute and co-director of the University of Wuerzburg’s Institute of Fan Culture.