Red Pepper » Sport

Showing Israel the red card

admin — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 18:00:02 +0000

Palestinian footballer Mahmoud Al-Sarsak waves to supporters as he is finally freed after three years in an Israeli jail without trial. Photo: Reuters
Ask your average football fan what they think about the Palestinian national side and you are likely to get an incredulous: ‘Palestine has a team?’ Ask about next year’s European under-21 finals being held in Israel and ‘That’s not in Europe!’ is the likely reaction. But European football’s governing body, the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA), has indeed selected Israel to host the men’s under-21 finals next June and the women’s under-19 finals in 2015.
Over the coming months Red Card Israeli Racism aims to publicise this and challenge Israeli racism through football.
Following a series of recent incidents, football’s governing bodies have again been proclaiming how seriously they take racism. Despite this a major competition is being staged in Israel – where campaigners argue that racism is institutionalised.
This was highlighted in June when football legend Eric Cantona endorsed a letter calling for the release of Mahmoud al‑Sarsak, a talented member of the Palestinian national squad who was on hunger strike in an Israeli jail. He had been arrested in July 2009 when he tried to travel from his home in Gaza to join a new club in the occupied West Bank.
An international outcry secured his release on 10 July. By then he had refused food for more than 90 days in protest at three years’ incarceration without charge or trial. Two other footballers are reported to be among at least 300 Palestinian victims of Israel’s ‘administrative detention’ regime.
Sarsak’s hunger strike came to a head during UEFA’s Euro 2012 competition in May, hosted jointly by Poland and Ukraine. Cantona was one of many notables questioning the double standard that saw Poland and Ukraine threatened with sanctions over racism while Israel’s treatment of Palestinians went unremarked.
After Sarsak was freed, Theo van Seggelen, secretary general of the International Federation of Professional Footballers’ Associations, said FIFPro expected any player, ‘be it Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo or Mahmoud al-Sarsak’, to be allowed to play for their country.
This concern is welcome, but it is not enough, campaigners say. Sarsak may have been freed but the overall situation remains unchanged. Street violence targeting Palestinians and immigrants in Israel occurs against a background of high-level racist rhetoric. In May, Israel’s interior minister Eli Yishai denounced black immigrants as ‘infiltrators’ and said migrants ‘think the land doesn’t belong to us, to the white man’. Days later, ten Eritrean homes were firebombed in Jerusalem.
In the West Bank, Israel’s 45-year-old military occupation oversees an apartheid-style system of permits and checkpoints that severely limits Palestinians’ ability to train and compete in any sport. In Gaza the situation is even worse. Three players were among the 1,400 Palestinians killed during Israel’s assault in 2008-9, during which the Rafah national stadium was levelled.
The president of the Palestinian Football Association, Jibril Rajoub, told UEFA president Michel Platini during Sarsak’s hunger strike that: ‘For athletes in Palestine, there is no real freedom of movement and the risks of being detained or even killed are always looming before their eyes.’ He pleaded with Platini ‘not to give Israel the honour to host the next UEFA under-21 championship’.
Rajoub’s request reiterated a plea sent to Platini a year earlier by 42 Palestinian football clubs based in Gaza. Platini ignored both. Instead he claims that Israel will host ‘a beautiful celebration of football that, once again, will bring people together’. This is despite the fact that Israel’s draconian controls will make it impossible for tens of thousands of Palestinian fans from the West Bank and Gaza to get to the matches.
Campaigners across Europe who took up Sarsak’s case are now in discussion with leading football anti-racists to make sure Israel’s racism remains high on the agenda. There will be leafleting and demonstrations at football grounds in several European countries. From October, they will focus on the seven European nations that qualify for the championship, aiming to persuade them to visit Palestine and see for themselves what life as a Palestinian footballer is like.
www.rcir.org.uk

Jeremy Hardy thinks… about competition

admin — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 10:00:15 +0000

Competition is not healthy. I enjoyed the summer’s sport as much as the next lazy asthmatic. I felt proud of my city, the drama was exhilarating and many athletes had an endearing humility or cheekily-harmless hubris. And it must have been irksome to racists. Mo ran so well that hardly a soul in the land questioned his nationality. It’s only right he should run for the country in which he lives: America. I jest.
But watching the long-distance running, I started to wish each athlete had run separately, unaware of how others had run. All the ‘intelligent’ and ‘talented’ stuff seemed to involve messing up the opponents, deliberately tiring them, making them run at a pace they didn’t like, getting in front to slow the race down, holding back to let others burn themselves out. It’s quite cynical, and realising that is like the moment you realise boxing is genuinely fighting.
I’m being too serious; sport isn’t important. That’s the joy of it. People can be competitive because nothing much is at stake. And competitiveness is not the whole story. Courage, dedication and the pursuit of excellence are involved and all have value in other areas of life. But competition doesn’t, so why inculcate kids with it?
Did sibling rivalry make you happy? Would you like to be treated by a more competitive doctor? Would the roads be safer with more jostling for position? Do you want hypermarkets to win the battle with local shops? Do you want your kids fattened on competitively-farmed fried chicken? Do you want the sky full of cheap flights and greenhouse gases? Do you want elections determined by a tiny margin of difference among the runners and the amount of money spent on them? Does it matter that this isn’t the best column you’ve ever read?

The neoliberal Games: who are the real winners from London 2012?

admin — Fri, 27 Jul 2012 21:00:28 +0000

The world’s largest McDonald’s has been built at the heart of the ‘Olympic village’
Long before John Carlos stood beside Tommie Smith to give their famous clenched-fist salutes on the podium at the 1968 Olympics, he was a boy growing up in Harlem. ‘When I first learned about the existence of the Olympics,’ he recalls, ‘my reaction was different from anything I had ever felt when listening to baseball or basketball or football or any of the sports that I’d seen people play in the neighbourhood. The sheer variety of sports, the idea of the finest athletes from around the globe gathering and representing their countries: it was different, and the fact that it was every four years made it feel like an extra kind of special.’
The origins of the Olympic wonder lie in International Olympic Committee founder Pierre de Coubertin’s struggle with the French sporting authorities, and in the Olympic Charter, with its promises ‘to place sport at the service of the harmonious development of humankind, with a view to promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity’.
The London Olympics have always had a much narrower set of ambitions. One of the five promises made in the original Olympic bid was: ‘To demonstrate that the UK is a creative, inclusive and welcoming place to live in, to visit and for business.’
Welcoming business has meant that the 4,700 medals being given out at the event have been struck from gold, silver and bronze donated by Rio Tinto, mined chiefly from its Bingham Canyon mine in Utah, USA. According to the London Mining Network, Rio Tinto’s mining operation has generated air pollution causing between 300 and 600 deaths in Utah each year.
London 2012’s main ‘sustainability partner’ will be BP, responsible for the April 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster. This saw some 200 million gallons of crude oil released into the Gulf of Mexico, poisoning fishing stocks, endangering birds and other wildlife, and putting tens of thousands of fishermen out of work. BP is also one of the companies involved in extracting tar sands in Canada, a process that destroys forest, wastes untold volumes of fresh water, causes illness in mining areas, and is already responsible for around 10 per cent of all of that country’s carbon emissions, with production set to increase continuously over the next decade.
The companies sponsoring the Games include chocolate firm Cadbury’s. And right in the heart of the athletes’ village, the London organisers have authorised building the world’s largest McDonald’s. Another company hoping to be associated with the health and vigour of the athletes is Coca-Cola, the sponsors of the Olympic torch relay.
Cheering crowds
The day the London bid succeeded, there were cheering crowds in Stratford. Many local people, not unreasonably, expected that the Games would lead to significant regeneration of their borough, which is one of the poorest in London. Far from it: the closure of the Atherton leisure centre and its swimming pool, with the new Olympic pool not scheduled to open to the public before 2014, means that there are now fewer sporting facilities in Stratford than there were in 2005.
Stratford has seen no significant spending on housing, schools or other social infrastructure. A vast shopping centre has been built, the Westfield, and the tube station has been redesigned to drive residents into it. But the shopping centre is marketed at Olympic tourists with budgets to purchase luxury goods. Who really believes that Gucci, Jimmy Choo, Louis Vuitton, Versace, De Beers, Tateossian or Tiffany will still be in Stratford in 12 months time?
Across London, small but popular local green spaces are being shut to make way for the Games. This April, the Olympic Development Agency obtained an injunction to exclude local residents and protesters from Leyton Marsh to facilitate the building of a basketball practice area. The building was unnecessary, as there were several alternative disused sporting arenas within 30 minutes of the Marsh, which could simply have been refurbished. It has involved substantial construction works that have taken over a much-loved community space. The developers refused to engage with local councillors who began asking questions about the use of the site six months before the building work began.
The Olympics organisers have identified traffic ‘hotspots’ that are likely to be congested during the Games, including Canary Wharf, London Bridge, King’s Cross and Paddington. But the sports administrators themselves are going to be protected from the worst of the congestion. For three weeks from 25 July, large parts of the central London road network will be closed to all but Olympic dignitaries and their hangers-on. There will be ‘Games lanes’ for accredited vehicles, which will receive preferential traffic signals, and fines will be imposed on other vehicles driving into them. The dignitaries themselves will have access to specially-built, chauffeur‑driven BMW cars.
The British Library will be opening 30 minutes late each day for the duration of the Olympics to cope with anticipated staff shortages caused by traffic disruption. Businesses are being told to anticipate journey times being extended by over an hour during the Games.
The total cost of the Olympics is £12 billion (of which the bill to general taxation is £11 billion). This figure rises to £23 billion when all construction costs are included. These are fantastic sums of money. By way of comparison, during the last London Olympics in 1948 the total budget was £600,000. Even taking inflation into consideration, the real cost of the Olympics is 1,000 times more than last time London hosted the Games.
Guarding the Games
Despite this extravagance, there has been no significant pick-up in terms of local or London employment. The one area in which the organisers are recruiting is for security guards. But although a large number of them will be recruited (around 10,000 people altogether), the work will be precarious in the extreme. Most contracts will last just two to four weeks. Salaries are low at £10 per hour – and the main contractor G4S has negotiated further bonuses if it succeeds in reducing the hourly rate.
The recruitment of large numbers of guards chimes with the general tendency, under neoliberal economies, for spending on policing to increase while spending on health and education falls. The Olympics’ contribution to London policing has already included the use of pre-emptive banning orders (Olympic asbos) against supporters of the Leyton Marsh campaign and the deployment of armed police officers to transport hubs. The organisers of London 2012 will be able to call on 13,500 ground troops, several typhoon jets, Puma and Lynx helicopters, and two assault warships, HMS Ocean, and HMS Bulwark, the first of which will be stationed in the Thames throughout the Games.
Meanwhile, the low wages paid to Olympic security guards contrasts with generous salaries paid to Olympic managers, 16 of whom are being paid in excess of £150,000 per year. Sebastian Coe, chair of the organising committee, receives a starting £350,000 per year, but his full benefit rises to more like £600,000 per year when bonuses, image rights, and his Olympic-associated work for various private companies is factored in.
Inevitably, the London Games have been subject to protest. Several Occupy veterans joined local residents in the Leyton Marsh campaign. Various coalitions have formed, including a new Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR), backed by the RMT union, and a Counter Olympics Network (CON), which has called a day of action on 28 July.
Sports begin in the most basic of human responses – the pleasure of running, jumping, testing your own reflexes and those of the people around you. But the sports business is escaping from these moorings. All over the sporting world, we see the same phenomena: declining access to public land or to other free facilities to enable people to participate in sports directly, declining opportunities even to watch sports live (supporting sport is increasingly done via television, more and more on pay-per-view satellite television), rising ticket prices, increasing salaries for sports stars and sports administrators, and a tendency for sport not merely to mirror the worst excesses of private capital but to be used to give allure to some of the most controversial of businesses.
The London Olympics is merely the grandest expression of neoliberalism’s unhealthy involvement in sport.
The protest starts 12noon, Saturday 28 July in Mile End Park, London. More info.

The Olympic struggle of the London 2012 resisters

admin — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 12:32:01 +0000

Illustration by Cressida Knapp
Resistance to the 2012 Olympics has been widespread and under-reported, starting with London’s bid to the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to host the Games back in 2004. Protests are planned to continue through to after the sporting events finish, in order to challenge the ‘legacy’ of a corporate spectacle. Many of the campaigns have organised around local issues, but the range of tactics has been impressive and has often strengthened community organising on issues beyond the Games.
The Olympics, wherever they are hosted, present a significant challenge to local, grass-roots politics because built into the nature of the ‘mega event’ is an anti-democratic value system that puts profit over people. This is demonstrated by the ‘host city contract’ that any city hosting the Games must sign, but which is not easily available to the public. It requires the host city to operate using different laws for the duration of the Games. It is required, for example, to ban any event that could have an impact on the successful staging of the Games taking place in or near the city during or in the weeks before the Games. This amounts to the temporary outlawing of protest.
During the bid process, the No London 2012 campaign fought to prevent London hosting the Olympics. The campaign started in December 2004, with a broad network of people involved, from boat owners to squatters, sporting enthusiasts to local residents, campaigners against racialised policing to environmental activists. The network opposed the bid for a wide variety of reasons, including the destruction of local housing and sporting facilities, the loss of common land and habitats, civil liberties implications and the inadequate consultation process designed to manufacture consent.
No London 2012 organised protests during the IOC visit in February 2005 that included a cycle protest, a march and a narrow boat regatta. They set up an online petition, sent all voting IOC members a lobby submission highlighting the damaging impacts the Games would have, and did local media work to get information to people in the five Olympic boroughs. During the bid process, the Hackney and Leyton Football League was campaigning around sports issues, the Marshgate Lane traders’ association was fighting the effects of compulsory purchase and associated job losses, the Clays Lane Housing Co-Op was attempting to negotiate its survival should the bid be won and the Hackney Marshes User Group was opposing the bid on the grounds that the Olympics would negatively affect Hackney Marshes and other green spaces.
In July 2005 London won the Olympic bid. Many campaigners were demoralised because they knew that once the bid was won it would be difficult to fight the separate problems the Games would bring. Yet organising continued and still does. This demonstrates commitment and shows that when grass-roots campaigning is ongoing, and not simply reactive, it is sustainable.
The key to this community activism has been to connect specific struggles to existing groups already working on housing, conservation and so on. This gives more purpose to campaigns as the aim is not to stop the Games, which would be impossible given the PR, money and power of the IOC and associated corporations, but to fight for various causes before, during and after the Games. If this continues, the real legacy of the Games will be the resilience of communities against the Olympic profiteers.
A brutal process
Once London had won the bid, there were immediate battles to be fought over land and home evictions and the taking over of green spaces. For example, 425 tenants from the Clays Lane Housing Co-op, which was situated on the site of what is now the athletes’ village, had to be relocated when the LDA (London Development Agency) was granted a compulsory purchase order. Tenants were dispersed into accommodation across London and were, on average, left £50 a week worse off as well as losing the community and social make-up of the estate.
Julian Cheyne, one of the residents of Clays Lane and a Games Monitor activist, had his home forcibly taken by the 2012 juggernaut. ‘Compulsory purchase is a brutal process and from day one the Clays Lane community was lied to while promises were made and broken without a second thought,’ he says.
One of the consequences of the Olympics is that communities have been set against each other. The Manor Gardens allotment holders, who fought a long and successful fight to preserve their community, found they were to be relocated to Marsh Lane Fields, which was common land being defended by the Lamas Lands Defence Committee. Likewise, the Clays Lane travellers, having successfully resisted being sent to live next to a flyover at Jenkins Lane, in the east of Newham, found their alternative move involved the loss of open space and a community centre at Major Road. These different communities did find ways of working together to try to resist the moves. However, when another small group of travellers was moved to a site on Hackney Marshes it caused deep resentment among those defending the Marshes.
There have been other arguments over the loss of open space. The situating of equestrian events in Greenwich Park has met strong opposition from the NOGOE 2012 campaign; local footballers have denounced the loss of football pitches at East Marsh; and residents at Leabank Square and elsewhere have protested at the loss of Arena Field. The decision to create a ‘temporary’ police operations centre at Wanstead Flats has resulted in an application for judicial review, which is due to be heard shortly. The Save Wanstead Flats campaign has seen lively community events, such as protest picnics on the site of the proposed police base, and has received wide support.
Eviction and gentrification
The twin spectres of eviction and gentrification work together as long term processes, often preceding and outlasting mega events, to reshape communities with damaging results. Community campaigns have emerged around gentrification in the Olympic boroughs.
In Dalston, Hackney, a squatted social centre, called Everything4Everyone, was established in a listed theatre building. It was occupied between February and November 2006 in response to the gentrification of Hackney and the threat to the building being posed by the new Dalston Junction station and blocks of luxury flats. The area was being ‘developed’ in preparation for the Olympics. The space had a roof garden, hosted film and music nights and a daily café. The theatre was eventually demolished but the social centre brought local people together and events continued in the square opposite after the building had gone. One such event was a public assembly to discuss how ‘regeneration’ affected locals.
Hackney’s Broadway Market faced similar problems. The estate agents appointed by Hackney Council sold off commercial properties worth £225 million for just £70 million, the majority of which went to offshore developer cartels. A campaign to save Broadway Market was initiated.
One of the threatened properties was Tony’s Cafe, which had been running from the same building for 30 years. Tony repeatedly tried to buy it from Hackney Council but he was passed over in favour of a wealthy developer. This happened to many tenants. A campaign to save the cafe saw people occupying the property on three occasions to resist eviction and even re‑building it after it was partially demolished by the developer. In the end, it was evicted to make way for luxury flats, but the resistance saw many people taking direct action for the first time.
Not so green
Initially, 2012 was going to be the ‘greenest games’ – until the organisers realised this promise could not be kept. The Eastway Cyclists had to argue long and hard to get adequate facilities to replace those lost. Clays Lane residents tried to take the ODA to court, but were refused legal aid, over the threat to their health posed by the disturbance of radioactive materials on the Eastway Cycle Track.
This campaign over the botched remediation of the park has been continued by members of the Games Monitor group, who have uncovered serious health concerns through a prolonged Freedom of Information campaign. ‘They said the Olympics would provide “a unique opportunity to clean up this contaminated area”,’ recalls Games Monitor researcher Mike Wells. ‘Rather than clean up the site, works have spread the contamination far and wide and include the deliberate and illegal burial of radioactive contaminants in the Olympic Park, 250 metres from the main stadium.’
The Nuclear Trains Action Group (NTAG) has long protested over the transport of nuclear waste from Sizewell through London. These shipments have been suspended during the Olympics, which the group claims as a victory for its long-running campaign.
Official and unofficial activities by workers have shown that London 2012 is vulnerable to organised action. The RMT transport union has secured a bonus for drivers working during the increased traffic of the Games alongside a 5 per cent backdated pay increase with inflation guarantees for the next three years for all London Underground staff.
However, outside of its transport power base, the RMT has had activists and members organising around the Olympics subject to blacklisting, alongside members of the building workers’ union UCATT and Unite. John McDonnell MP said that the blacklisting is ‘one of the worst cases of organised human rights abuse in the UK’.
Workers on the various Olympic construction sites have struggled to organise effectively, due to the intentional corporate bureaucracies of the Games and direct harassment. Yet there has been lively resistance to the blacklisting of union organisers with creative demonstrations at dawn among other actions. Facing the prospect of a near 30 per cent pay cut, electricians in the Unite construction national rank and file action committee have staged a series of walkouts and road occupations in London and beyond.
And it is not just the official unions that have been active. A report published in 2010 by the IWW union highlighted the poor safety record that has lead to a number of incidents, some fatal, which have been covered up.
What legacy?
Activists have recognised the need for the wide variety of Olympic campaigns to unite to support each other in the short term and use the spectacle of the Games to build long term, grass-roots networks. There have been several attempts to build anti-Olympics networks, such as the Counter Olympics Network (CON), which is currently hosting information nights, film screenings and history walks and organising actions in the lead up to the Games.
Beth Lawrence from CON explains: ‘It’s essential to bring campaign groups together, so we can learn from each other and also bring a global dimension to resisting the Olympics. We’ve learnt from Canada and Chicago and will help others resist the bid in their city.’ Radical media and research groups have been working hard attempting to bring people together and tell the real story of their, not our, Games. These include the Spectacle film collective, the corporate-critical research co-op Corporate Watch and the Games Monitor website, a comprehensive collection of resources dedicated to exposing the myths of the Games.
Mega events present a massive challenge to community organising, as they throw so many issues at us simultaneously and they are almost impossible to stop in their tracks once the bid has been won. Yet the willingness of people to struggle against the Games shows that the legacy will not be entirely theirs.
www.gamesmonitor.org.uk, www.corporatewatch.org

Winners and losers: The human price of Olympic gold

admin — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 20:47:45 +0000

In Salt Lake City, Utah, Rio Tinto plc operates the world’s largest open pit copper, molybdenum and gold mine. It will provide 99 per cent of the metals for the medals at the 2012 London Olympics and Paralympics, advertised as the most ‘sustainable’ Games ever. The remaining 1 per cent will come from Rio Tinto’s mine in development in the south Gobi desert in Mongolia.
The headline 7.75 kilograms of gold for the Games will cost in the order of US$100,000, a staggeringly low price for the massive branding exposure. The Games, broadcast to four billion people over 29 days, provide Rio Tinto with a huge platform from which to promote its claims of sustainability, which it conflates with a notion of product ‘traceability’ – ‘from mines to medals’.
Jonathan Edwards, London 2012’s leading official athlete, may believe the medals are ‘worth going to bed with’. But organisations representing people living downwind and downstream of Rio Tinto’s mines know the cost is far too high.

Brian Moench, Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment
Utah residents will find it easy to hold their applause for Rio Tinto. Rio Tinto’s Kennecott open pit copper mine and smelter are on the edge of the Great Salt Lake wetlands and Utah’s largest urban area, Salt Lake County. There is no comparable geographical juxtaposition of urbanisation and heavy duty mining and smelting anywhere in the world.
Salt Lake City has severe air pollution problems. The American Lung Association gives it the rank of ‘F’, ie ‘red’ for ‘unhealthy’, for ozone and for small particulates. Rio Tinto is the largest contributor, responsible for over 30 pert cent of the particulate air pollution. This pollution comprises heavy metals contamination of our air, water, and soil. Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment, using American Heart Association guidance, calculate that Rio Tinto’s air pollution is responsible for about 150 premature deaths every year. Its copper production has been estimated to result in two gallons of highly contaminated water for each pound of copper produced. Its contamination of underground aquifers in the Salt Lake Valley and discharges into the Great Salt Lake constitute the largest mining-caused water pollution in the world.
Rio Tinto made about US$15 billion after-tax profits last year, more than enough to make a genuine commitment to air and water pollution reduction in Salt Lake City. It won’t do it.

Sukhgerel Dugersuren, Mongolian NGO Oyu Tolgoi Watch
Water is scarce in the Gobi desert ecosystem. Rio Tinto (which has majority ownership of the mine here) has not demonstrated the availability of water resources, yet plans to operate the mine, an international airport, and a coal-fired 480 megawatt power plant.
The mine construction process has already depleted the water resources. The company is pumping water from the central well of Khanbogd soum, the nearest settlement with a population of around 9,000. It is taking away drinking water from local communities at a daily rate of 25 tons per well. In August the company refused to show its water approvals and to allow site entry to inspect documents. Khanbogd soum is running out of water and this will eventually force the families there to vacate the land and join the homeless poor in Ulaanbaatar.
The company wants no public discussion of toxic emissions, chemical exposure and health risks, so there are no public Oyu Tolgoi project health impact assessments. Local communities, especially nomadic herders, are not aware of the chemical exposure and health risks the mine will have for them and their livestock. They guess the meat of the animals they herd and consume may also be contaminated, but have no information and no choice.
In a sign of things to come, in 2004 the company relocated 11 nomadic households using individual contracts. These prohibit public disclosure and require the displaced to absolve the company of any liability for relocation. Oyu Tolgoi Watch interviewed eight of the relocated households and found that all have suffered loss of herds due to frozen land without animal shelter, inadequate water supplies and poor grazing. This is in violation of internationally accepted norms requiring that companies support relocated communities through the transition and ensure there is no lowering of living standards.
The nomadic herders in the south Gobi region are carriers of an ancient culture. However, Rio Tinto and its investors refuse to recognise them as indigenous to this area, and because of loss of pasture land, their lifestyle is under threat of extinction.

To find out more about the campaign visit the London Mining Network or the Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment

The Olympics site: ‘a ticking-clock assault on the residue of industrial history’

admin — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 12:00:27 +0000

Iain Sinclair. Photo: Joy Gordon
Circumambulations of the Olympic Park were becoming an addiction. Richard Mabey, author of The Unofficial Countryside, a book I twinned with Ballard’s Crash as the great edgeland testimonials of the 1970s, accompanied me on another forlorn excursion. He travelled with binoculars, not a camera. He pointed out the feathery clumps of fennel growing at the cropped margin of the canal, near the Mare Street bridge. He told me that coots and ducks would be unaffected by radioactive spillage into the water table. They breed quite happily, and often, in the teeth of eco disaster. He was impressed by the duckweed lawns clotting the Lea, near Old Ford Lock.
The telling moment on this walk came with our arrival at the stack of yellow containers that operate, in playfully ironic mode, as café, viewing platform and learning centre on the Greenway overlooking the Olympic stadium. We explored a thicket that ran along the side of the railway, where wild nature, profligate and without imposed narrative, thrived in blossom and berry.
Hacking our way out of the tunnel, we emerged on a strip of bare, baked earth beside the yellow tin box. Mabey examined, in grim fascination, a cluster of dying saplings. At which point, a young woman emerged from the education centre to tick him off for having the temerity to intrude on the few yards of precious ground reserved for the education of the disadvantaged children of the Olympic boroughs. Richard pointed out that the pathetic plantings were choked of sustenance, uncared for, coughing their last. And if she really wanted to let the children see something grow, all she had to do was take down the rickety exclusion fence and a fruiting, thrusting wilderness would sweep across from the embankment.
Hear Iain Sinclair read this section. Video: ftbs
Among the cargoes regularly transported down the railway line, through the heart of London’s major development, the site where countless thousands will soon be arriving from across the globe for the great B&Q self-assembly Olympics, are flasks containing highly radioactive nuclear fuel-rods, shipped from Sizewell in Suffolk, and Dungeness in Kent, to Sellafield on the Cumbrian coast. When the Nuclear Trains Action Group (NTAG) contacted the Olympic Development Authority to ask if these convoys would continue to run through the period of the Games, they received no reply. Mayor Johnson knows nothing, remains silent. He has other, more pressing problems. [The shipments were later suspended.]
A protest rally, marching from Victoria Park to Stratford station, staged a ‘die-in’ in front of the CGI Westfield promotional panels, well aware of the official Olympic clock clicking down the seconds like the nuclear triggers in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove. Such oddities are part of a conflicted topography: protest into art, political rhetoric into psychotic babble. The Angel Lane bridge over the railway, the route we walked from Chobham Farm to Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Royal and the High Street, has been demolished. Mounds of scoured earth appear overnight, mountain ranges of a rigid formality thrown up by some new collision of the earth’s tectonic plates.
At the junction of the Hertford Union canal and the Lea Navigation, I came across an Olympic art manifestation which stopped me in my tracks. Here at last was a conceptual piece that took the breath away. Between Whitepost Lane and Old Ford, water gushed, cascaded, out of the enclosed site, through the fence, into the turbid and duckweed-infested canal. New barriers had been erected to deny access to potential paddlers heading for the main stadium. It was shapely, the way the water folded, curved and shimmered: a dwarf Niagara coming out of nowhere.
A jogger paused alongside me, hands on knees, taking in this unexpected water feature. ‘Twenty-eight years,’ he said. ‘And now this.’ He had come from Hong Kong and settled on an estate in Hackney Wick. Every morning he ran the same circuit, now his path was blocked. He never knew when he set out which way he would be allowed to return home, or if his home would still be standing. ‘There has never been such division between rich people and poor.’ He gestured towards the cliff of green-glazed windows on the spit of ground opposite us: a man-made island, the triangle between the Hertford Union, the Lea Navigation, and the A102 Blackwall tunnel approach.
This was no art work, in the sense of being funded, approved: punctured Victorian pipes on the Olympic site. No water in the taps for much of Hackney. The security guards brought in to protect the rapidly assembled plywood barriers were old‑fashioned bouncer types, amiable and suspicious, nervous of saying the wrong thing in an unfamiliar language. The inner ring, close to the stadium complex and the construction convoys, was now guarded by regiments of Joanna Lumley’s diminutive and unreadable Gurkhas.
It was only when I studied privately commissioned reports of investigations into the extensive radioactive contamination of the 2012 site that I appreciated the implication of the gushing pipes. The dispersal cell holding many tonnes of treated and untreated soil, in layers under a permeable skin, was positioned right here. As Ian Griffiths revealed in an article in the Guardian: ‘Documents obtained under Freedom of Information (FOI) rules reveal that, contrary to government guidelines, waste from thorium and radium has been mixed with very low-level waste and buried in a so-called dispersal cell’. A cell which was placed about 500 metres to the north of the Olympic stadium. The setting for the involuntary water feature.
Bill Parry-Davies convened a meeting at which Mike Wells, who had been sifting thousands of documents and invigilating the progress of construction activity with numerous photographs, gave a lucid and alarming account of his findings. You could not nominate, in all of London, more challenging ground for a landscape blitz, a ticking-clock assault on the devastated residue of industrial history: insecticide and fertiliser works, paint factories, distillers of gin, gas mantel manufacturers, bone grinders, importers of fish-mush, seething dunes of radiant maggots.
Waste: dumped, buried. Disturbed. Distributed.
Decay.
Putrefaction.
Tyre mounds.
The crunched metal-and-glass of innumerable breakers’ yards hidden behind convolvulus-draped fences, under the flag of St George. Snarling dogs. Shirtless men smashing white goods with hammers.
And the dust.
The particulates. Hot cinders.
Blind warehouses with bundles of rags and damp paper waiting for insurance fires. Petrol reek. Black ash.
Oily smoke saturates cloth, fouls underwear.
In the dirt, they prospect: the pinstripe outsiders, compliant bureaucrats. Sanctioned buck passers.
This was where London University carried out experiments with a now-decommissioned nuclear reactor. An area so far off the official map, so hidden within a nexus of dark waterways, that it functioned as the dumping ground of choice for what Parry-Davies refers to as ‘uncontrolled deposits of radioactive thorium’. In an OPEN Dalston blog, Bill presents a photograph by Mike Wells showing ‘clouds of dust, and a skip with unsealed bags of asbestos material, during demolition of the Clays Lane estate.’
In the Leabank Square estate, from which the Chinese jogger had emerged for his restorative morning circuit, mediating rather than remediating the territory, residents were concerned about dust from the Olympic site. ‘A recognised pathway to contamination,’ Parry-Davies said, ‘is by a person inhaling radioactive dust particles. Thorium is particularly hazardous.’ On the estate, as the summer barbeque season opened, families found themselves ‘literally eating’ a relish of airborne dust, a mega-chilli bite on their steaks and sausages. When their worries were published on a website, the ODA threatened the Leabank whistle-blower with legal proceedings. And sent in a dust-sweeping vehicle to patrol the yellow-brick avenues.
Rumours were rife. I was told that the only consequence of the remediating exercise was to spread low-level radioactivity across the entire landscape of the Olympic enclosure, the divided fiefdoms of competing contractors. Toxic soil removed from the stadium was stored alongside bundles of Japanese knotweed, suggesting delirious Quatermass mutations, vegetal Triffid creatures slouching towards Westfield to be born.
Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project is published by Hamish Hamilton

From toe-hold to no hold: football and the EDL

admin — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 20:00:23 +0000

Since the English Defence League (EDL) first appeared in 2009, it has sought to make its presence felt among the country’s football fans. And although football might be a more tolerant sport than it once was, there remains a small element within the game that has responded to their overtures.
The majority of these supporters can be found among the ranks of the hooligan ‘firms’ that are still associated with some football clubs. These first emerged from the ‘casual’ sub-culture of the 1970s and 1980s as a way for fans who enjoyed post-match violence to organise themselves along team lines. Although these firms are much diminished today, some have survived, with several even enjoying continuity in membership.
According to Paul Jenkins, north west regional organiser for Unite Against Fascism (UAF), these fans represented a readymade army that the EDL could unite and organise: ‘Not all of the men in these firms – and it is just men – share the views of the EDL. But there’s enough that do for the EDL to have representation at several clubs. These are the people who are trying to bring racist and Islamophobic chants and language onto the terraces and who come out to protest and instigate violence on the streets with the EDL. At the moment you’re not talking about massive numbers, but the problem is that these people can be used to recruit other football supporters, something they are increasingly trying to do.’
What’s happening today has parallels with the 1970s and 1980s. Then it was the National Front (NF) organising among football supporters and managing to gain representation at several clubs, such as West Ham, Chelsea, Leeds and Millwall. Much of this representation was also drawn from the ranks of hooligan firms. Both the ‘Chelsea headhunters’ and the ‘Leeds United service crew’ possessed links with the NF.
Along with wider societal changes in attitudes towards race and religion, from the late 1980s onwards several factors combined to diminish the problems faced by the sport. The increasing prominence of ethnic minority players, the rise in the number of women, children and ethnic minority supporters attending games and a more aggressive approach by the police and the clubs in targeting hooligans (such as banning certain fans from a ground) all played a part in changing the face of the game. These have been complemented by a succession of anti-racist campaigns, such as Show Racism the Red Card and Let’s Kick Racism Out of Football, as well as anti-racism community work undertaken by the clubs themselves.
The EDL has also so far failed to make any significant impact among fans at England matches, despite this being an area where the far right has had a presence in the past. ‘I can honestly say that I have never seen any evidence of the EDL at England games over the last few years,’ says Mark Perryman of the England Supporters Club. ‘A lot of football hooligans are already banned from these games and few real fans would risk getting a banning order because of any suspected involvement with the EDL.’
The England team has also gone to great lengths to take a stand against racism – not least because they have been the targets of racist chanting and abuse at away games such as the recent Euro 2012 qualifier in Bulgaria. Both the manager Fabio Capello and captain John Terry made strong public statements on the subject before September’s game against Wales, where the team wore ‘Kick It Out’ armbands to stress their commitment to anti-racism.
But although the overall picture has improved, there remains inconsistency across the sport. In the lower divisions and in non-league football, a lack of adequate stewarding and enforcement of banning orders has meant that racism and religious intolerance remain more of a problem.
‘This is why the EDL has targeted clubs outside the top divisions,’ says national UAF organiser Paul Sillett. ‘In the lower leagues the EDL feels more confident in speaking out and organising.’
Worrying presence
While the EDL as yet is confined to the margins, the fact that it has been able to establish a presence at all is worrying. ‘They’ve got a toe-hold and a message that a lot of people give time to,’ says Paul Sillett. He believes that unlike the simplistic racist views of the NF in the past, elements of the EDL’s message today find an audience across a much wider swath of society.
‘The EDL portrays itself as a protest movement against militant Islam and excessive immigration, two perspectives that find sympathy among sections of our society,’ Sillet says. ‘There are plenty of football supporters, specifically young lads who like the appeal of being part of a gang and have an affinity with the patriotism that the EDL wrap themselves up in, who are going to be open to the superficially persuasive message that the EDL provide, specifically when they see aspects of it mirrored in the tabloids and echoed by certain leading politicians. These are people who might not consider themselves racist and would never use conventionally racist language but who nevertheless find the anti-Islam rhetoric of the EDL acceptable. This means that although the EDL might be confined to the hooligan fringes at the moment, it will not necessarily stay that way.’
According to Gav Sutherland from Show Racism the Red Card (SRRC), the rise of the EDL has to be taken seriously. ‘The increase in popularity of the EDL is having a big impact, particularly their targeting of young people. As an educational campaign that uses professional footballers to talk to young people about racist and religious intolerance, we will continue to do our best to tackle the myths and lies about Islam and Muslims that the EDL is trying to spread.’
These educational campaigns would be immeasurably aided if there were more British-Asian football role models. But there are only a handful of British-Asian professionals playing in England and they make up less than one in 100 young players in football academies.
At a club level, although many mirror the work undertaken by SRRC in their own communities, as yet there has been no specific action against the EDL, even among clubs where the EDL has been active. Instead, the strongest reaction is coming from the supporters themselves, who in the absence of any meaningful response from the teams they follow have decided to take matters into their own hands.
‘One of the most pleasing aspects of this is the way some existing casual firms have taken on the EDL,’ says Paul Sillett. He says that although the link between the far right and the hooligans is an established one, it’s not the whole story.
‘Back in the 1970s not all hooligans were racist. There were examples of mixed-race hooligan firms and examples of casuals that organised themselves against the NF, something that is also happening today. At West Ham their firm is active against the presence of the EDL.’
Fans fight back
Ordinary supporters are getting involved too. Across the country, fans are part of a growing grass-roots action against the far right. Bolton supporter Lindsay Bessells is one of many fans who joined with UAF last season in a concerted campaign to counter the presence of the EDL. ‘I’d begun seeing an increasing number of men at the Reebok stadium wearing EDL t-shirts and began to realise that this hooligan element in our fan base was partly responsible for the rallies that were happening locally, and for much of the violence that was associated with them. I felt that I had to get involved and do something to stop their influence spreading.’
By mobilising and engaging supporters the campaign has sought to mirror what the EDL has tried to do. But whereas the EDL has been appealing to a minority element within football, the anti-EDL campaign has been preaching to the majority, according to Linda Jones, who leafleted outside Bradford City’s ground.
‘We’ve leafleted a few times and now and then you might get people refusing to take one or telling you that they are sympathetic to the EDL but in general most fans support what we are doing. As in wider society, football fans as a whole are much more tolerant than they used to be. They recognise the EDL for what it is, just another incarnation of the far right – something that has no place in the modern game.’
This supporter-led action harks back to the late 1970s, when, in the absence of any action by the football authorities or the clubs, fans began to fight back against the influence of the far right themselves. This was often done in an organised way, with Anti-Nazi League groups being established by football fans at 20 or more British football grounds. And this more formal organisation is already evident today with the creation of anti-fascist organisations at clubs such as Leicester, Aston Villa and Tranmere.
‘Following the formation of the EDL we began to see the development of something worryingly reminiscent of the 1970s. It struck us that the best way to counter this was to organise properly, providing a better chance of countering the EDL’s propaganda,’ says Bidston Moss of the Tranmere Rovers Anti Fascist group (TRAF).
TRAF has already undertaken a mass leafleting of the ground and organised a number of anti-fascist social events in Birkenhead. The group has ambitious ideas for the future, with a possible outdoor festival and large evening events planned.
‘Our overall aim is to appeal to our supporters to resist sly right-wing “come-ons” from these far-right bigots,’ continues Bidston. ‘The EDL sing from the same hymn sheet as other far-right groups. Its demos are dominated by Nazi-saluting thugs and chants of “dirty Muslim bastards” and “we hate Pakis more than you” are evident whenever they congregate. This is the reality that football supporters need to understand – and it’s a message that more and more of us fans are beginning to spread.’

Fueling an oily future

emma — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 18:26:27 +0000

BP launched their 2012 Olympics sponsorship advertising campaign in July 2011, just over one year after the 87-day oil spill catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico. The re-seduction of public opinion began in televisions, high streets and roadsides across the country. Since the Deepwater Horizon tragedy the BP clean-up has taken place in two dimensions: the seabed, fragile coastal ecology, habitats and livelihoods of the Gulf; and that of its shamed image, justly sullied by a catastrophe caused by its own negligent, cost-cutting behaviour. The opportunity to be seen as a good corporate citizen through its sponsorship of the Olympics is magnificent timing from BP’s perspective.

This sponsorship support is not provided as a form of philanthropy, but as an integral part of engineering the social and political circumstances that will best ensure the long-term security of their investments in oil and gas projects. Approached as an engineering challenge, the corporation tends to see all opposition to its activities as solvable with the appropriate time, capital and techniques.
The construction of an offshore platform is one of the most expensive projects on earth in the 21st century. It can only offer a high return on capital if oil production if maintained over two or three decades. The maintainence of this production is usually threatened by social and political shifts in the countries of extraction. Any such threat to production – or the perception that that threat might exist – can immediately undermine the profitability of a corporation. BP’s share value was almost halved by the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, not because of the potential costs of the oil spill clean up, but because investors were concerned that the company’s future prospects in the US were being undermined by the collapse of support in Washington DC and in the US media.
To guard against any such threat to the company’s value, BP works constantly to engineer its ‘social license to operate’. This is a term widely used in business and government circles and usually applies to the process of engendering support for a company’s activities in the communities who live close to their factories, oil wells and pipelines. However it can shed light on how corporations construct public support far from the places of extraction or manufacture – for example how BP builds support in London and the UK.
In the summer of 2010, a large swathe of the British political establishment called on the White House to ‘stop bashing BP’ – support that assisted the company in persuading President Obama to say on TV: “BP is a strong and viable company and it is in all our interests that it stays that way”. To construct and maintain this support, BP focuses on building a positive image in the eyes of politicians, diplomats, civil servants, journalists, academics, NGO’s and cultural commentators. These groups are known as the ‘special publics’ or ‘clients’ in the public relations industry. Building a supportive attitude within the ‘special publics’ can be done through direct engagement and dialogue, through advertising, and through financial support – funding academic posts at universities, creating programmes in schools, sponsoring culture such as Tate or the British Museum, and financing sports such as the 2012 Olympics.
The BP Olympics advertising includes images of a runner on a pristine beach, calling to mind the Louisiana coastline which remains oil-soaked to this day. The choice of imagery here seems a bit of an oversight by the PR agencies Ogilvy and Landor. The campaign seeks to dress BP in green, making references to BP’s use of biofuels for the Games. Yet only 40 out of 5000 vehicles will use this source that campaign groups argue is unsustainable because it necessitates large scale planting of monoculture crops that wipe out biodiversity, deplete soil and exacerbate world hunger.
The success of the campaign rests not on these details however. Via global media attention the BP brand is associated with the hype, passion and fervent feel-good factors of the biggest international athletics event. This lends the company a guise of social acceptability that enables harmful oil and gas projects the world over. As such, BP extracts what it needs to continue profiting on its investments – a social licence to operate.

For more on BP sponsorship, follow @PlatformLondon on Twitter for their upcoming arts publication ‘Not if but when: Culture Beyond Oil’ and the ‘Tate a Tate’ audio tour.

South Africa’s own goal

admin — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 11:54:53 +0000

Visitors to the World Cup in South Africa this June will have to try hard not to see some shocking contrasts in wealth and poverty. On the one hand, the vast informal settlements in the Cape Flats and Soweto, where hundreds of thousands of poor black South Africans live in shacks without basic services. On the other, the new £380-million Green Point stadium in Cape Town and £300-million refurbished Soccer City in Johannesburg, which have received huge subsidies thanks to rulers from both the white liberal-dominated Democratic Alliance and the African National Congress.

Cape Town’s contrast is especially galling given that an upgrade of the Newlands cricket field (in a white suburb) or of Athlone’s stadium (in a black neighbourhood) would have been far cheaper. The latter was rejected, according to a representative of the international football federation Fifa, because ‘a billion television viewers don’t want to see shacks and poverty on this scale.’

South Africa’s second-largest city, Durban, boasts the most memorable new sports facility (£275 million worth, overrun from an original £160 million budget), as well as the country’s highest-profile municipal sleaze and chutzpah. This exudes from a city manager, Mike Sutcliffe, who tried – but failed – to gentrify a century-old Indian/African market for Fifa’s sake, and who regularly bans nonviolent demonstrations.

Executives of Zurich-based Fifa, especially Fifa president Sepp Blatter, blithely ignore the havoc this extravaganza is creating. To illustrate, expensive imported German marquee tents apparently require erection by a German construction company. And Fifa gets sole occupation of Durban’s Moses Mabhida stadium – including retail space and a controversial, oft-broken Sky Car up the iconic 108 meter high arch – for nearly a month, even on the 75 per cent of days soccer won’t be played, keeping the facility off-limits to visitors.

Recent national laws provide Blatter guarantees in terms of ‘ambush marketing’, logistical support, access control and protection for Fifa’s corporate partners (Adidas, Sony, Visa, Emirates, Coca Cola, Hyundai-Kia, McDonalds, local phone giants Telkom and MTN, First National Bank, Continental Tyres, Castrol, McDonalds, and Indian IT company Satyam). Only Fifa-endorsed items can be advertised within a one-kilometre radius of the stadium and along major roads. All profits go to Fifa, whose 2010 take is estimated at £2.2 billion.

Shunted off

Little will trickle down. Aside from ear-splitting vuvuzela plastic trumpets, the much-vaunted ‘African’ feel to the World Cup will be muted. Even the women who typically sell pap (corn meal) and vleis (inexpensive meat) just outside soccer stadiums will be shunted off at least a kilometre away. According to leading researcher Udesh Pillay of the South African Human Sciences Research Council, in 2005 one in three South Africans hoped to personally benefit from the World Cup, but this fell to one in five in 2009, and one in 100 today.

Danny Jordaan, CEO of the World Cup Local Organising Committee, predicted in 2005 that the games would be worth as much as £3.9 billion profit to South Africa, even after 2010-related infrastructure expenses. An estimated 400,000 people would visit the country and 160,000 jobs would be created. But current estimates have more than halved those figures. The hospitality industry is shattered after a third of rooms initially booked by Fifa’s Match agency were recently cancelled.

Benefits have shrunk but costs have soared. South Africa’s 2003 Bid Book estimate of between £100 million and £750 million rose in October 2006 to a final projected £900 million. Since then, escalations have been prolific, and now £3.6 billion is typically cited as the 2010 cost (above and beyond standard infrastructure maintenance and upgrading) – as against £1.2 billion in tourist income (an overestimate since many non-soccer tourists are staying away due to fears of overcrowding).

Some expenses, such as a new fast train from Johannesburg’s refurbished airport to the Sandton financial district, will receive partial payback from future customers, but many such projects were break-even at best without the momentary 2010 inflow. The Congress of South African Trade Unions argued in early 2009 that ‘the billions being spent on this prestige project for a rich minority of commuters should rather be spent on upgrading the existing public transport system, which is used by the poor majority.’

Mood of protest

The mood of poor and working people remains feisty, with several dozen protests each day according to police statistics, most over ‘service delivery’ shortcomings. A University of Cape Town research team reported in early 2010 that the underlying causes of discontent will continue long after the final goal. Principal among these are worsening urban poverty and rising income differentials (along both class and race lines) in what is already the most unequal major society in the world.

At least two political assassinations allegedly associated with 2010 profiteering have occurred in Mpumalanga Province’s host city, Mbombela (formerly Nelspruit). More than a thousand pupils demonstrated against Mbombela stadium when schools displaced in the construction process were not rebuilt. Mpumalanga also witnessed a recent return of apparent xenophobia, which after the World Cup may well worsen, with desperately poor South Africans turning from attacks against municipal facilities to loot retail traders from Pakistan, Somalia and Ethiopia.

Other World Cup-related protests have been held by informal traders in Durban and Cape Town; against Johannesburg officials by Soccer City neighbours in impoverished Riverlea township; against construction companies by workers; and against national officials by four towns’ activists attempting to relocate the provincial borders to shift their municipalities to a wealthier province. Just a month before the first ball was to be kicked in the tournament, strikes were threatened, raging or had just been settled over national electricity price increases, transport sector wages and municipal worker grievances.

Nor will the masses have much to cheer on the field, as the national soccer team, appropriately named Bafana Bafana (‘boys, boys’), has fallen in the global rankings from 81st to 90th this year. Global soccer apartheid means that the best African players are sucked up into European clubs with little opportunity to prepare for such events.

Trevor Phillips, former director of the South African Premier Soccer League, asks: ‘What the hell are we going to do with a 70,000-seater football stadium in Durban once the World Cup is over? Durban has two football teams, which attract crowds of only a few thousand. It would have been more sensible to have built smaller stadiums nearer the football-loving heartlands and used the surplus funds to have constructed training facilities in the townships.’

The local winners in the process are not footballers or even rugby teams that municipal officials fruitlessly hope will one day fill the white-elephant stadia. They are the large corporations and politically-connected black ‘tenderpreneurs’ (who win state tenders thanks to affirmative action, if linked to established white firms), especially in the construction sector.

This process reflects post-apartheid accumulation, according to Moeletsi Mbeki, brother of former president Thabo: ‘Black economic empowerment was created by the ultra-wealthy white business community in this country, who were involved in mining and financing and other big business, as a method of countering a programme of nationalisation. It was a matter of co-option, to co-opt the African nationalist leaders by enriching them privately.’

But with all the problems thus created, co-option is not on the cards this year. As the hype fades and protests become more insistent, the local elites’ mistake in hosting these games will be glaring. Global business and the genuine joy associated with the world’s most loved sport are mutually incompatible.

Ashwin Desai recently edited The Race to Transform: sport in post-apartheid South Africa. Patrick Bond directs the Centre for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu-Natal

Off the ball

admin — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 14:39:44 +0000

A butcher, a baker, a candlestick-maker: local businessmen out to make a bit of a name for themselves were traditionally the owners of league football clubs. Sure, they were sometimes a bit crooked in their intentions, but at least they were our crooks. With roots in their communities, they owed a degree of loyalty to the club, its fans and traditions – and failing that were vulnerable to popular pressure.

The game’s appeal is rooted in its easy accessibility and the passion of fandom. But the relentless drift of modern football could overwhelm both these factors. The top division once had an era of unpredictability – Manchester United and Chelsea could get relegated, for goodness sake – but since 1995 the league title has only been won by Manchester United, Chelsea and Arsenal. The ‘best league in the world’? A better description would be the most overpaid and predictable.

After the last minute shock as the early season transfer window slammed shut, Manchester City now find themselves taking the place of Chelsea as modern football’s whipping boys for all that’s wrong in the game. The morality behind the club’s former ownership by an ex-prime minister of Thailand, who was on trial for corruption and subject to well-founded charges of human rights abuses, was neatly summed up Manchester City chief executive Garry Crook: ‘Is he a nice guy? Yes. Is he a great guy to play golf with? Yes. Does he have plenty of money to run a football club? Yes. I really care only about those three things.’ Now there is another new owner, and the Thai millions available to the club to spend have suddenly multiplied into Abu Dhabi billions.

Is this what football has come to? A plaything of the global rich, hopping from one club, sport or continent to the next in their search for brand awareness and tax-deductible losses? Complete with a brief flurry of badge-kissing to bestow some authenticity on their investment, deep pockets for the manager to plunder, and, if they’re lucky, some silverware to add some glory and prestige to their otherwise low profile outside the closed world of the international mega-rich.

It began with the rebranding. No longer satisfied with a first division, we now have a ludicrous Premiership, Championship, Leagues One and Two. Presumably ‘Division Two’ doesn’t sound good enough to attract the necessary corporate sponsorship and advertising revenue. Then legendary Celtic manager Jock Stein’s maxim, ‘Football without fans is nothing’, was sacrificed by forcing kick-off times and days to match the needs of television programming – the channels were saturated with football every night of the week, with three or four matches on a Saturday and Sunday.

Clubs knocked down historic grounds, built magnificent new ones and promptly named them after brands of crisps and airlines. The core of our teams, once scouted from local schools and parks and happy enough to stick at the one club for the best part of their career, were replaced by players bought and sold with the flash of a £100,000-a-week salary cheque and a chance of a shot at greater glory.

That glory is increasingly defined by, and restricted to, the Champions League, which, with four guaranteed places from the English premiership, has not only delivered a near impregnable predictability but also destroyed the finest cup competition in the world, the European Cup. The unpredictability of the European Cup’s knockout format threatened the market share of advertising and sponsorship revenue of the biggest clubs, who in turn forced the change to the easier to qualify for – and survive in – Champions (and rich runners-up) League format.

Against modern football? What this version of money-driven change is creating is a breakdown in the loyalty and passion that underpins football. It won’t disappear overnight of course, and it might take new forms, but the sport that was once proud to call itself ‘the people’s game’ is in danger of becoming more concerned with us sitting down than with what football once stood for.

Mark Perryman is a research fellow in sport and leisure culture at the University of Brighton. The ‘Against Mod£rn Football’ t-shirt (pictured left) is available from www.philosophyfootball.com