When Burak Karan, an up and coming German-Turkish soccer star, was killed last month during a Syrian military raid on anti-Bashar al Assad rebels near the Turkish border, he joined a list of football players turned militants who were in the Middle East and North Africa or had roots in the region or in Islam. … Read more
Qatar’s failure to confront with a sense of immediacy and urgency appalling working and living conditions of its foreign workers, who constitute a majority of the population, and its reluctance to communicate steps it is taking, is undermining the very purpose of its staging of the 2022 World Cup: the creation of the kind of … Read more
A vast majority of Saudis favor women having the right to fully engage in sports in a country that has no official facilities for female athletes or physical education programs for girls in schools, according to a Saudi sociology researcher, who has put forward a series of recommendations at a time that the government is … Read more
Clashes this weekend between security forces and militant supporters of crowned Cairo club Al Ahli SC and a political demonstration by the team’s goalkeeper have dented the Egyptian military-backed government’s efforts to show that the country had put its political crisis behind it. The clashes raise the specter of world soccer body FIFA moving for … Read more
Little better illustrates the inextricable link between sports and politics than the frequent perception of Middle Eastern and North African national football teams as representatives of repressive autocratic regimes. That perception is reinforced by players’ adoption of a neo-patriarchic acceptance of their autocratic leader as a father figure that leads them to keep a distance … Read more
Militant, street battle-hardened soccer fans played a key role in toppling Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and resisting the military rulers who succeeded him. Almost three years later and four months after the military removed from office Egypt’s first democratically elected president, the stage appears to be set for renewed confrontations with the fans, one of … Read more
Financially stressed Turkish soccer clubs are becoming pawns in the political struggle between Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and militant soccer fans who rank prominently among his detractors as soccer pitches and university campuses emerge as major battlefields between the government and its detractors. Critics of Mr. Erdogan charge that the prime minister is seeking … Read more
Much like the Muslim Brotherhood, militant soccer fans in Egypt and Turkey are fighting for their existence. Turkish police raided the homes of and arrested 72 militant supporters of Istanbul’s top clubs – Besiktas JK, Fenerbahce FC and Galatasaray SK — after a derby between Besiktas and Galatasary was abandoned because fans invade the pitch. … Read more
“It’s good quality football, that excites the fans, gets them on the edge of their seats, so that you’re excited by what you see, or what you are about to see. When I was a kid growing up, I used to go to Manchester United, and I’m old enough to remember Bobby Charlton, Dennis Law, … Read more
Middle Eastern investors have adopted a new strategy of buying low and selling high with a series of acquisitions of second and third tier European soccer clubs. In the most recent acquisition, Saudi Prince Abdullah bin Mosaad, the billionaire former president of Saudi Arabia’s most successful club Al Hilal and founder and chairman of the … Read more