Football, Nationality and the State

Vic Duke, Liz Crolley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317886723
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Anthropologie

Football, Nationality and the State examines the complex and ever-changing relationship between football (its development and structure), nationality and the state. Divided into two parts the book first deals with the existence of more than one football nation within the same political state. Using international comparisons the authors argue that these divisions may result from football's early history and development, regional movements for independence, or the growth of a language cleavage. The second part of the book goes on to examine the structure of football as an extension, or reflection, of the structure of the state. Resulting structures include the imposition of state socialism on sport, the presence of democratic politics in the organisation of football clubs and the links between big business and football.

C H A P T E R 1

Introduction: the game of nations

Association football (often known as soccer) is the world’s number one game. This statement applies whether one is referring to participation in the game, spectating at a match or viewing a match on television. The importance of football as a business as well as a sport is confirmed by the television audience for the final stages of the last two World Cups. Italy 1990 achieved a cumulative worldwide audience of over 25 billion, which was bettered by over 32 billion for USA 1994.

Football’s popularity is in large part due to its simplicity and its low cost as a participation sport. The rules for casual play are basic requiring only a round ball and (if there are two teams) two improvised goals. No expensive equipment is needed and a match can take place anywhere there is an area of reasonably flat land. Children throughout the world seem to find kicking and running after a ball a natural and enjoyable activity.

Undoubtedly football has become the national sport in the vast majority of countries in the world. The term ‘countries’ is used quite deliberately as a catch-all at this juncture, because the Chambers Dictionary defines country as ‘a region; a state; a nation; the land of one’s birth or citizenship’. The terms region, state and nation will be clarified and distinguished later in this introduction, when the framework is outlined for the case studies, which constitute the rest of the book.

Exceptions to football’s status as the national sport are few in number but comprise some populous and powerful countries. The USA is the most notable example with football as a spectator sport ranked well behind the big four of baseball, American football, basketball and ice hockey. Elsewhere in North America, ice hockey is the national sport for Canada. Mexico and the countries of Central America, however, are undisputed soccer territory.

Europe overwhelmingly adheres to football as the national sport, although there are a few exceptions. Finland and Slovenia prefer ice hockey as a spectator sport, and for Wales rugby union is regarded as the national sport. Football dominates in South America with the only deviation being Venezuela’s preference for baseball. Africa is the football continent par excellence in terms of sporting dominance, particularly since the ending of apartheid in South Africa. The minority white elite preferred rugby union and cricket, but the black majority play and watch football in large numbers. Cricket has an area of dominance as the national sport in the Indian subcontinent and in the former British colonies in the Caribbean.

The development of FIFA and the changing global politics of football

The Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) was founded in 1904 by representatives from seven countries in mainland Europe. None of the first four football associations in the world (the four UK associations) was involved at this stage. Chapter 2 documents the unique position and turbulent history within FIFA of the four UK associations. Currently FIFA has more members than the United Nations, and the world population takes a greater interest in the activities of the former than of the latter. A prerequisite for FIFA entry in recent years is that the United Nations accept the political independence of the territory involved (not that this has been applied to the four UK associations – see chapter 2).

Eurocentrism was prevalent in FIFA until the wave of independence from European colonial powers in the 1950s and 1960s. On the eve of the First World War in 1914, FIFA’s membership had risen to twenty-four. Of these, twenty were European, including the four UK associations; the other members comprised two South American representatives (Argentina and Chile) and two North American (Canada and the USA). By 1938 FIFA had fifty-six members, exactly half of them from Europe. Members from the rest of the world were distributed as follows: South America nine, North and Central America (including the Caribbean) eleven, Asia seven, and Africa one (Egypt).

In 1995 the membership composition and resultant balance of power look very different. Africa has moved from the lowest membership of one in 1938 to the highest of fifty-one out of a global total of a hundred and ninety-one. The second footballing continent is Europe, or more accurately the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA), which includes Israel as one of its forty-one members. Making up the rest are Asia forty-one, North and Central America thirty, South America ten and Oceania ten.

FIFA is an egalitarian institution in that each member has one vote irrespective of the size of the country. The Republic of China’s vote (population over 1.1 billion) is of equal weight to those of San Marino (22,000) and the Cook Islands (17,000). However, any change to FIFA’s rules requires a three-quarters majority to support it. Europe currently accounts for 25.7 per cent of the membership, so that a united Europe can prevent any change. Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, Europe has increased its membership in FIFA. Moreover, the demise of Soviet-style communism has produced greater political uniformity, certainly in relation to the global politics of football.

Dominating the FIFA political agenda in the 1990s has been the issue of unequal distribution between the continents of places in the World Cup finals, which are held every four years. A growing African and Asian lobby is demanding greater representation at the expense of Europe and South America. At the 1994 finals in the USA, Europe’s forty-nine members were represented by twelve finalists (including Germany as 1990 champions), which is exactly half the participants. Africa had only three finalists among its fifty-one members.

It is not a case of European countries beating African countries in the qualifying competition, because the qualifying stage is divided into continental groups. Europe was allocated eleven qualifying places (in addition, the holders of the trophy qualified automatically) and Africa only three. Asian countries are similarly aggrieved at receiving only two places in the finals for their forty-one members. South America, in contrast, was allocated four places to be competed for by the ten members. Admittedly, South American teams have won the World Cup eight times to Europe’s seven in the fifteen finals thus far, but the other continents argue for a fairer share of the starting line-up for the finals.

Given that it has the highest number of members, Africa is particularly dissatisfied with the distribution of places in the World Cup finals. Egypt qualified for the 1934 finals in Italy by beating Palestine twice. The next African appearance in the finals was Morocco in 1970, when for the first time one place had been allocated to Africa. In between Africa felt harshly treated; in 1958 a joint African-Asian qualifying place was won by Wales! (this was caused by several withdrawals which left Israel as winners without playing a match, so being forced into a play-off against Wales); in 1962 Morocco beat Tunisia and Ghana before losing to Spain; in 1966 all the African entrants (and all the Asian entrants except North Korea) withdrew in protest at the allocation of only one place to Africa and Asia combined.

Since the breakthrough to an earmarked place in the 1970 finals, political pressure has intensified to increase the African quota. At the same time there was a steady increase in the number of African members of FIFA. The African quota in the finals was increased to two out of sixteen in 1982, and to three out of twenty-four in 1994. FIFA’s solution has been to increase African participation as part of an overall enlargement of the scale of the World Cup finals. For the next World Cup finals in France in 1998, Africa will have five teams out of thirty-two finalists. Predictably, Europe’s representation has been increased from twelve to fifteen, and South America’s from four to five.

Football, nationality and the state

Returning to our earlier definition of a country as ‘a region; a state; a nation’, it is necessary to distinguish between the various components in order to establish the framework for the rest of the book. The extent of overlap between the state and nation in a given country is crucial to an understanding of the politics of football in that country. The specific definitions presented are adapted from Dearlove and Saunders (1984).

A state is a political unit, which claims the monopoly of legitimate force within a given territory: a state has its own army and police force as well as a foreign ministry for dealing with relations with other states. People know which state they live in because they pay taxes to the government of that state. States usually have a football team to represent them in international competitions. FIFA’s members are the football associations of independent states, and the World Cup is competed for by teams representing individual states. (The exception to this rule is the UK: see chapter 2.)

A region is a geographical subdivision of a larger territorial unit such as a state. Regions may or may not be recognized and represented in the institutional structure of the state. They do not usually have football teams officially representing the region, although the best club in the region may be regarded as the region’s football ambassador. Examples of historical regional rivalries in football are those between clubs in the north of England and London, and the enmity between northern and southern Italy.

A nation is a sociological entity with a defined territory, involving common sentiments and a common identity shared by its members: people feel themselves to be part of a nation. As an ideology nationalism became prevalent towards the end of the eighteenth century in Western Europe and North America (Hutchinson and Smith 1994). National movements are most often associated with the educated middle class, who have the most to gain from the replacement of colonial or monarchistic rule by a national republic.

Anderson (1983) has described nations as imagined communities. They combine both objective and subjective attributes. A finite territorial area is linked to a common bond based on a myth of common descent. Tomlinson (1994) suggests that nations attain their fullest expression in two ways – war and sport. The two were infamously combined in the war between El Salvador and Honduras in 1969 following on from riots at World Cup qualifying games between the two.

Football captures the notion of an imagined community perfectly. It is much easier to imagine the nation and confirm national identity, when eleven players are representing the nation in a match against another nation. If nationalism was a movement fostered by and favouring the educated middle class, its spread to the working class in the twentieth century was surely assisted by the development of international football. It has often been argued that only religious commitment can rival national loyalties in scope and fervour, but the passion of football supporters for their club is in the same league. When football support and nationalism are combined, the brew is particularly strong, as evidenced by the invading army of England supporters on numerous occasions throughout Europe in the 1980s and 1990s (Williams et al. 1984).

Another crucial feature stressed by Anderson is that nations should exhibit historical continuity in terms of an affinity with dead generations one has never met. The rise of football at the same time as the establishment of many nation-states has contributed to the development of this continuity. Tales of the legendary exploits of past international players, never seen but never forgotten, are passed on from generation to generation. In extreme cases of nations invaded or annexed by a neighbouring state, the legacy of previous international football matches becomes part of the very confirmation that the nation did exist, and indeed does exist.

A good example is the three Baltic republics, who have regained their independence from the former Soviet Union. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania played international football from the early 1920s to the early 1940s, recommencing their international careers in 1991. Similarly, Croatia and Slovakia have reappeared in international football after disappearing in the 1940s.

Where the state overlaps to a large degree with the nation, the politics of football in relation to the state is straightforward. Nationalism becomes loyalty to the state, and support for the national team can be interpreted as support for the regime. Many political leaders have recognized the importance of football in this respect as the national and world sport. Equally however, opposition leaders or movements have been known to use the football stadium as an arena for resistance to the regime (for examples of both kinds see Kuper 1994).

In the cases where the state does not equal the nation, the existence of latent or submerged nations within a state provides the potential for political conflict. Politically unrecognized or unsatisfied ethnies (ethnic communities) are particularly prone to resistance to the centre. The 1960s witnessed an upsurge in nationalist movements demanding greater autonomy such as Scotland, Wales, Flanders and Catalonia. These movements may find expression in the football stadium. In authoritarian regimes football may be the only legal theatre for the expression of latent nationalism. Part one of the book presents case studies of the politics of football where there is more than one nation within the state. Part two provides examples, again via a series of case studies, of football as an extension of the state and closely linked to the political structures.

Football nations within the state

The first set of case studies relates to the existence of more than one football nation within the state. In the 1990s, the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia into smaller independent states has diminished the extent of the phenomenon. However, several latent nations continue to exist within, and sometimes across, state boundaries. Football may provide an important means of expressing latent nationalism with the gathering of large crowds in the stadium.

Chapter 2 considers the unique position in world football of the UK, which has four football associations in the membership of FIFA, namely England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. This anomaly is due to the foundation of modern football in the UK in the second half of the nineteenth century. Some sections of the FIFA membership, particularly the African states, have recently questioned the UK’s privileged position in world football. The Welsh football association responded to the threat by introducing a national League of Wales for the first time in 1992 in order to establish its separateness from England.

Chapter 3 analyses the role of football throughout different phases of twentieth-century Spanish political history. It focuses on the use of the football arena as a vehicle for expressing nationalism in the latent nations (or ‘historic nationalities’) of the Basque Country and Catalonia, and on the role of Real Madrid as promoting the notion of a single, centralized Spanish nation...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: the game of nations
• Part One Football Nations within the State
• Part Two Football as Extension of the State
• References
• Index