Everyone resents forking out for a humilating defeat but Tom Lines ponders if refunds miss the point of being a supporterArsenal’s decision to cover the cost of a future game for fans who witnessed their 8-2 defeat at Old Trafford in August is the latest in an alarming and seemingly growing trend where supporters are reimbursed for poor performances by their team.
Roger Titford on the proposal to Oxford United and Reading in the early 1908sIf megalomaniac tycoon and serial football chairman Robert Maxwell had not made two monstrous errors, there could well have been a Thames Valley United in Division Three in 1983-84 in place of Reading and his Oxford United. And, as David Lacey wrote in the Guardian at the time, “as a method of killing off two Football League clubs at a stroke the scheme surely has few rivals”.
Despite the 2010 World Cup the South African Soccer League is struggling to draw crowds, writes George ThomsonThe Cape Town Stadium might just be the most spectacular football arena in the world. Perched on the ocean’s edge between upmarket Green Point and the tourist-friendly Victoria and Albert waterfront, the location was earmarked specifically by Sepp Blatter, who felt the dramatic backdrop of Table Mountain would provide the defining image of the 2010 World Cup finals.
Dermot Corrigan reviews a new film and its focus on young footballers chasing success and fortune in EuropeIt is said that football can provide a route out of poverty, with FIFA often claiming that the game’s commercial revenues can “trickle down”. Soka Afrika, a new feature-length documentary which follows two young African players as they try to make it in European football, sets out to show another side to this story.
The film’s two subjects are well chosen. Ndomo Julien Sabo was playing youth football in Cameroon when a French agent persuaded his parents to mortgage the family home to “invest” in their son’s future. Brought to Paris, he trained in a clandestine network of camps around the city’s outskirts, playing trial games against other young imports.
When he got injured the agent disappeared, leaving 16-year-old Sabo completely alone and cold and hungry. He befriended fellow Africans sleeping rough and avoiding the police, and eventually managed to get back to Cameroon, but his parents were not overly happy to see him returning penniless. In Yaoundé he recovers his confidence and form, and returns to Europe better prepared for a professional career.
Ndomo’s story is cut with that of Kermit Erasmus, who was spotted by Feyenoord playing youth football in South Africa. This move went much more smoothly – at only 18 he is playing first-team games for satellite club Excelsior, showing off his fancy mobile phone to a former school-mate in a Port Elizabeth township and playing a football game on his big-screen TV in his nice apartment in Holland. He’s a cocky enough character but still likeable. We see him scoring three goals at the 2009 Under-20 World Cup in Egypt, but also struggling to make the step up with his club and the national senior team.
The film is stylishly put together by director Suridh Hassan and producers Simon Laub and Sam Potter, looking more like a relatively big-budget current affairs feature documentary than a typical fly-on-the-wall football film.
There are funky colourful credits and titles, an African drum-heavy soundtrack and edgy camerawork digitally filtered to bring out the greenness of Yaoundé and the greyness of Europe. The film-makers got great access, with the camera in the South African dressing room for pre-game team talks, on the touchline with openly unscrupulous agents at games in Cameroon and even with Sepp Blatter making a patronising contribution to a “Football for Hope” conference in South Africa.
The real star of the film is Jean-Claude Mbvoumin, a former Cameroon international who played club football in the 1990s in France before founding Paris-based NGO Culture Foot Solidaire. Mbvoumin describes the way promising young African players are brought to Europe as “child trafficking” and helps join the dots to make the film’s case.
Clubs and agents in both Europe and Africa, national football federations and under-age coaches, FIFA, even players and their families are all complicit in the system. Everyone involved knows the unwritten rules of the game. There is no surprise when Sabo is dropped from the Cameroon Under-20 squad as he cannot afford to pay the required bribe. “Corruption is everywhere,” Mbvoumin says. “I can’t say one country is more corrupt than others.” It would be better for everyone if African players stayed at home until they were ready – both in a footballing and personal sense – for the move to Europe he reckons.
Football for everyone in Soka Afrika is a means to get rich (or get by), not a goal in itself. Both Erasmus and Sabo really believe in the “rags to riches” possibilities. The film concentrates more on their concerns about making a living and building a career than training methods or tactics or trophies. We see a modern business structure feeding on the hopes of the resource and information poor. A few thrive and are successful, but many of those who make the big bucks are not the most deserving. The context could be any similar industry – perhaps fashion or music – where large numbers of talented young people with dreams are chewed up and spat out by the system.
Soka Afrika is produced by Masnomis and was screened in London during the Kicking & Screening Soccer Film Festival on September 23-29. For more information see sokaafrika.com
From WSC 296 October 201
Cameron Carter Begins our new column by scrutinising the way we decide which team to followMorality is nomadic, we know this from history. The Ancient Greeks believed it was perfectly acceptable for a man to love a boy – and I mean any boy – whereas trousering stray apples was punishable by death. In the West it was only in the last decade that fidgeting was legalised in infant schools. Yet there remain some last taboos that prevail across most cultures: murder, incest and changing the football team you support.
Most of us have selected our team for life by the age of five – an age when we can spend the best part of an hour smacking a mud hill with the back of a spade while conspicuously wearing safety pants. Would we choose our career, our political affiliation, our life partner at this age? The answer must be a resounding no – otherwise there would be a surfeit in society of apolitical train drivers holed up with a jingly panda. So surely there should come a point later in our lives when we might legitimately, and without censure, make a more informed choice about which club we would like to follow and, as a consequence, switch allegiance.
Just as we are permitted to vote for one of three Conservative parties upon turning 18, so we should have the opportunity to fix upon our football team at that age. I chose to support Arsenal when I was five, probably because they won the Double that year but also because I liked the kit and Charlie George looked like every single one of my older brother’s friends.
Had I waited until my 18th birthday, I may have opted for Southampton, as the nearest team to my hometown and one I could more easily mention – along with names like Reuben Agboola and Ivan Golac – in a facetious tone, to comply with the prevailing college-boy snobbery towards the game. It would actually be quite reasonable for a psychometric test to be applied in early adulthood to match individuals to the most fitting club.Home-loving, spirited but ultimately unambitious? Try Norwich City. Confident and charismatic in public but afraid of the inner silence when alone? Take Chelsea. New to football? Sign up to the Manchester City Project.
For that matter, why not free ourselves of these self-administered chains entirely and change teams whenever we choose – or not support an individual team at all? If the owners of clubs wish to commercialise the game to make maximum profits, then perhaps fans should act more like conventional consumers and treat the game as a product and the teams as brands. Should we cling to a half-remembered childhood vow when most players manifestly look elsewhere towards the end of every season, and our club tacks and lists on the commercial whims of a foreign gentleman who made his money in the post-communism cupcakes boom?
Shouldn’t we, as consumers, look around for a cheaper or more accessible team that brand loyalty had previously prevented us from considering? Why not try another team on a trial basis, at trial size (say, two or three games) and if they give us a better experience than our previous club, or the same experiences at a lesser cost and inconvenience, we might legitimately stay with the new brand.
But we are not ready for this yet. Researching this topic, I asked a handful of people if they would ever consider changing team. The query resulted in four swift one-word rebuttals, with only one person bothering to supply a rationale, peppered with abuse words, to their answer. Loyalty is not necessarily a force for good. Many more atrocities are committed through loyalty to a flag or charismatic leader than by dangerous loners acting on their own free will. Loyalty also breeds complacency in its subject. Look what happened to Tonight-period David Bowie and to West Ham every other season.
The philosopher Josiah Royce argued that to lead a morally significant life, one’s actions must express a self-consciously asserted will. It is not good enough to simply copy the conventional moral behaviour. This is the time to assert that self-will and wield our little wooden sword of consumer choice. The herd mentality can be consigned to the past – we should by now be heading towards an enlightened society of limitless possibilities, as acted out by the Deal Or No Deal participants in their hotel and television studio demi-monde.
It is time to be moving away from the one man-one club mentality of those ghostly pre-Premier League days. As we are paying 21st century prices and player wages, we must counter with a vigorous new philosophy and go where the spirit and the marketplace take us. Or veer towards the football that is most aesthetically pleasing to us at any given time. Love of tradition has painted the British fan into a corner: we allow ourselves to admire foreign teams, we merely support our own.
From WSC 295 September 2011