Revolution, Counterrevolution, and Football

Being an American of the Boomer generation, my 11-year old daughter probably understands soccer better than I do, but I know how politically loaded it can be in many countries. (Remember the Algerian-Egyptian football war of 2009?) So, though my American readers probably won't see this till the NCAA basketball championship is over tonight, I thought I should note the events of Saturday in Cairo.

During a match between Egypt's popular Zamalek team and Tunisia's Club Africain, supporters of the former went wild in a way that would make a British football hooligan proud, invading the pitch in large numbers. Video:



James M. Dorsey, a veteran journalist who blogs about soccer in the Middle East, offers details and calls it "a stunning display of nihilism,"; he has subsequent developments covered in posts here, here, and here. His stories attribute the trouble to the Ultra White Knights, the Zamalek team's ardent supporters. That's also followed by the NYT Soccer blog. But some Egyptian sources, including Al-Ahram, speculated that the "thugs" (baltagiyya) who have remained diehard supporters of Husni Mubarak were behind the riot, which forfeited the game to Tunisia. That is echoed somewhat in Bikya Misr and clearly accepted by Zeinobia, though Dorsey notes that the Ultra White Knights were actually strongly supportive of the revolution, and has suggested an excess of revolutionary fervor was behind the outburst. (The conspiracy theory now seems to be that the police were generally absent, so therefore are responsible for the hooliganism getting out of hand.) [Update: Dorsey adds a personal note in the comments:]

Thanks for the quote. Just to be clear, I spent some 30 hours of the last weekend including attendance at the match with the UWK. My comments were based on first-hand conversations and observations including of the UWK meeting to prepare for the match. The UWK by its own admission accepts responsibility and rejects conspiracy theories that it was provoked. That includes the police whose absence may have been designed to enable something like what happened. Nonetheless, the UWK accepts that it was up to them to control their rank and file.

What is clear is that Egyptian supporters of the revolution were not only embarrassed, but particularly by the fact that it involved Tunisians, whose revolution inspired Egypt's. Egyptian crowds waving Tunisian flags turned out at the Tunisian Embassy, chanting "Egypt and Tunisia are one hand!" (an echo of the slogan, "The Army and the people are one hand!"), and offering apologies. Both the Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister publicly apologized.

It does show how, in a revolutionary situation, anything can be politicized, with some seeing the riot as revolutionaries out of control and others as the forces of counterrevolution trying to create anarchy, when it may have been just a football dispute.

Or is that the origin of the phrase, "a political football?"