As the 2010 World Cup reaches its climax, Shiraz Ahmad looks at some of the ways in which football and politics have combined in the last century

This month, after a four year wait, the football World Cup is once again upon us, and for one glorious month the world is able to witness tantalising football played by some of the best players on the planet. Yet what happens off the field is every bit as significant as what happens on it. Football, like all major sports, has an incredible ability to act as a medium of communication for powerful political and social messages that can galvanise the masses.

This ranges from FIFA’s attempts at the 2010 World Cup to change perceptions of Africa as a victim continent to an empowered Africa, embodied by ‘Zakumi’ - the World Cup mascot symbolising South Africa and the rest of the African continent through self-confidence and pride - to the more sinister historical use of football as a tool of political PR, most notably under Mussolini’s Fascist Italy in the 1930s, when Italy won two consecutive World Cups and reinforced the regime’s notion of superior Italian national prowess.

Collective sentiment has the power to induce social change, and football, it seems, possesses that power at some level; take the 1954 World Cup final where Hungary’s legendary ‘Mighty Magyars’ lost to West Germany in one of the greatest World Cup upsets of all time. That loss is credited by some as triggering within Hungary a collective mood of open discontent with the status quo and a cycle of social unrest that would eventually culminate in the Hungarian uprising of 1956.

Another example is the 1969 'Soccer War' between Honduras and El Salvador, in which 6,000 people died and 50,000 lost their homes, fields, or villages; a war triggered by two highly contentious World Cup qualifying matches.

In both cases, highly charged nationalistic passions found their most zealous expressions through the medium of football.

So what accounts for this complex relationship between football and social & political fervour that appears to exist just below the surface of the game?

According to left wing thinker Terry Eagleton, ‘modern societies deny men and women the experience of solidarity, which football provides to the point of collective delirium.’ And there seems to be some truth to this - never, for instance, have I felt more patriotic an Englishman then during the wave of euphoria that gripped England during its Euro 96 campaign. The beautiful game, which began to take effect back in late 19th century England, was more than just a sporting outlet – it had a powerful social purpose. A local community’s football team was an embodiment of that community’s sense of identity and for whom it would eventually foster a kind of collective consciousness.

Take the politically charged rivalry between Spanish clubs Barcelona and Real Madrid. During the first month of the Spanish Civil War, Barcelona’s left wing president Josep Sunyol was murdered by the Nationalist fascist forces and Spanish football became a symbolic forum for the political ideologies of the day. To this day, domestic rivalries tend to take precedence over loyalty to the national team in Spain.

Football, it seems, helps fuse cultural, political and personal identities. And it is exactly this dynamic that has enabled state governments and regimes to leverage this latent tribal fervour for political ends. In the case of Fascist Italy and the Argentine military junta in 1978, hosting and winning the World Cup was a means by which to arouse a strong sense of national consciousness and unity.

Today, however, it would appear that corporate objectives have supplanted political ones. Despite Republican Representative Jack Kemp’s comments to the US Congress in 1986 that a distinction should be made between American football as democratic and capitalist and soccer as "a European socialist" sport, and a historic perception of football as the common man’s game - epitomised by legendary socialist football figures like Liverpool manager Bill Shankly and Nottingham Forest boss Brain Clough - the game has clearly taken a turn towards big business. So how has the commercialisation of football been reconciled with the game’s inherent grassroots tradition?

In some cases it hasn’t, as seen by widespread grassroots resistance to corporate takeovers of football clubs, most notably the opposition shown by Manchester United supporters to the club’s takeover by US sports tycoon Malcolm Glazer. But for the most part, the excessive commercialisation and materialism of the game have been accepted by football fans the world over. This is in part due to the subtle media positioning over the last two decades of a new type of football role model - the aspirational football celebrity, whose extravagant salary and opulent lifestyle implicitly endorse the free market globalisation that helped make such material success possible. This in turn has helped nurture a new generation of young football fans aspiring to achieve the footballing glory and material wealth of their role models.

As Terry Eagleton points out, ‘the game mixes glamour with ordinariness in subtle proportion: players are hero-worshipped, but one reason you revere them is because they are alter egos, who could easily be you.’ And so, from the favelas of South America to the impoverished slums of Africa, young football fans dream of emulating the material success of footballers hailing from the same poverty stricken regions as them and who have escaped that poverty by being snapped up to play for a major European club team. Gone, it would seem, are the days of football socialism that so often characterised the game since its historic development out of the working class communities of the world.

However, we should be wary of casting too negative a light on football’s relationship with politics and social development. Football has, after all, often been used as a tool for development by multilateral agencies, states and NGOs and as a vehicle to tackling social problems like poverty, the spread of AIDS, drug abuse and post-conflict reconstruction. Most notable among football’s moral crusades has been the 'Kick Racism out of Football’ campaign, to which both teams in last weekend’s (very one-sided) quarter final game between Argentina and Germany contributed a few minutes prior to kick off. Likewise, France's World Cup-winning team of 1998 was the most multi-ethnic team to have won the World Cup, helping make important strides towards breaking down ethnic barriers in France.

Today in South Africa we are witnessing the culmination of not just four years of pent up World Cup passions, but also the fruits of South Africa’s National Communications Partnership (NCP), a partnership comprising public relations and communications professionals dedicated to rebranding the image of Africa into a proud and proactive continent instead of a helpless poverty stricken one. Clearly, football has an incredible ability to act as a vehicle for progressive change, but as history tells us, wherever powerful nationalistic and tribal consciousness is aroused, the piggy backing of commercial and political interests are not far off. Football, it seems, is still the playground of competing ideologies and political interests.

Shiraz Ahmad is chief operating officer of Unitas Communications

Published on 11th July 2010