In wake of the atrocities seen last night in Cairo, I thought about my love, and the love of billions of others across the globe, for football. I often say, and wholeheartedly believe, that football transcends politics, that it eclipses our social frailties and embraces our differing cultures. Football has always had its hardships, it has always had its difficulties and disasters. Tragedies such as Munich and Hillsborough will send a shiver down the spine of any hardened football fan regardless of club or city. The first of these blogs I did was about using sport as a platform for diplomacy, both at a national and international level. The events that occurred outside the Air Defence Stadium have not compromised these feelings, nor, despite them being a tragedy, can they be considered in the same category as the disasters of Munich or Hillsborough. Although there are certainly similarities between Hillsborough and Zamalek based on initial reports, what has drawn my attention is the supposed politicised football fans.
This is not Egyptian Football’s first catastrophe of this nature. Over seventy people were killed in violent clashes between rival fans in the Egyptian city of Port Said in 2012. Although the two teams in the Port Said disaster were rivals, the killings have not been attributed to the rage of disillusioned football fans. Neither has this been the case with the violence that erupted outside the Air Defence Stadium last night. Rather the actors and instigators appear to be those disillusioned with the internal political and social environment afflicting young people in Egypt. Football matches are being chosen as their medium for exercising frustrations due to their attendance, police presence and media coverage. Relations between security forces and football fans in Egypt, known as ‘Ultras’, have been tense since the 2011 popular uprising, when football supporters are deemed to have played a key role in ousting the Hosni Mubarak regime. The atrocities of Port Said have been seen by many Egyptians as a climax of anger with the regime. It is therefore plausible that the violence seen last night outside the Air Defence Stadium, is similarly in response to the current Sisi administration. It is now four years since the ousting of Mubarak and the supposed ‘Arab Spring’, and on the surface not much appears to have changed.
Are the deaths in Port Said and Cairo therefore attributable to football hooliganism or socio-political oppression? Following the violence that erupted in the African Cup of Nations semi-final between Ghana and Equatorial Guinea on Thursday night, there is certainly an argument that the former is still rife within the beautiful game. If Green Street is anything to go by, then firms like the GSE are still prevalent today and not just a narrative of the 1970s. BBC’s documentary ‘Football Fighting Club’ showed me that football hooliganisms and firms are not as fictitious as Green Street may have you believe and still feature prominently in the underground world of our beautiful game. A member of Blazing Squad, the firm attributed to Manchester City and the same age as myself, justified his involvement by saying “we get treated like scumbags anyway”. Does football hooliganism therefore emerge out of socio-political oppression? If we take this answer as ‘yes’, then this can go some way in explaining the violence in Egypt at both Port Said and Cairo.
The atrocities witnessed in Cairo last night have become an all too frequent scene within Egypt, both regarding football hooliganism and civil unrest. It is of my opinion that the provocations for this violence go beyond football rivalry, football is just an unfortunate platform for displaying socio-political frustrations within Egypt. It is not a corruption of our beautiful game but a blemish. The socio-political undercurrent that litters the violence outside Air Defence Stadium poses a genuine threat to the Sisi regime within Egypt even if it is just disregarded as an act of football hooliganism.
joshcallander23 