Dave Zirin : Why I Root for Argentina

No one can predict his devilish tricks: Argentina coach Diego Maradona. Photo by Ammar / AP.
The beautiful game:
Why I root for Argentina

By Dave Zirin / June 28, 2010

Before the start of the World Cup, I broadcast my rooting interest with the obnoxious insistence of a nuclear-powered vuvuzela: Argentina all the way.

I wanted Argentina to win because their style of soccer speaks to the full potential of the beautiful game. I wanted Argentina to win because few people in the U.S. could pick Lionel Messi out of a lineup, and he might be the most electrifying athlete on earth. I wanted Argentina to win because their coach, the walking, talking telenovela, Diego Maradona, is just too entertaining to see pushed off the stage

As Dan Wetzel of Yahoo Sports described Coach Maradona,

He screams and cheers. He complains and cajoles. He smiles. He prays. He blesses himself. He hugs. Actually, he hugs a lot. He even kisses his players. Pushing 50 yet wearing earrings and a salt-and-pepper goatee, he remains the biggest presence in the building -- and that includes his megastar players such as Lionel Messi and Tevez.

In his playing days, Maradona made people reconsider the sacred idea that Pele was surely the greatest player to ever patrol the pitch. He went from soccer superstar to Argentine folk hero during the 1986 World Cup, when he “avenged” the 1982 British defeat of Argentina in the Falklands War by defeating England in the quarterfinals, with a little help from the "Hand of God."

Maradona's brilliance inspired Eduardo Galeano to write

No one can predict the devilish tricks this inventor of surprises will dream up for the simple joy of throwing the computers off track, tricks he never repeats. He’s not quick, more like a short-legged bull, but he carries the ball sewn to his foot and he’s got eyes all over his body. His acrobatics light up the field... In the frigid soccer of the end of the century, which detests defeat and forbids all fun, that man was one of the few who proved that fantasy can be efficient.

Efficient fantasy is the best way to describe Argentina’s current run to the quarterfinals. In a modern world of robotic soccer strategems, they play with the wicked grace of decades past. Given that success breeds imitators, I would argue that it is in the best interests of international soccer to see Argentina take it all the way.

For those experiencing this World Cup in the throes of neutrality, there are political reasons to support Argentina as well. This has received next to no media coverage either in their native Argentina or around the world, but the team has fully embraced the courageous group of grandmothers known as Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo. This organization is devoted to finding out the truth about the fate of Argentina’s desaparecidos -- the people forever imprisoned or disappeared by the military dictarorship of Jorge Rafael Videla -- during Argentina’s Dirty War of 1976-1983.

Diego Maradona hugs Abuelas president Estela de Carlotto.Photo from as.com.
At a training session in South Africa, the entire Argentine team unfurled a banner that read, "We Support the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo for the Nobel Peace Prize." The group has in fact been officially nominated for the prize and Abuelas president Estela de Carlotto, is in South Africa, meeting with Nelson Mandela and other world leaders. She has also been publicly -- and literally -- embraced by Maradona.

The critical work that Abuelas has done will only receive a greater spotlight if Argentina continues to advance. This makes all those connected with Argentina’s dirty war, who still hold tremendous power in the country, increasingly, and deliciously, apprehensive.

I can certainly understand, and have heard from numerous people, that these kinds of political concerns shouldn’t play into our rooting interests when it comes to the World Cup. It should just be about the game.

But this is like wishing a double cheeseburger didn’t have cholesterol. There is simply no sporting event on earth more entangled in politics than this brilliantly bombastic tournament. Anytime you have half the earth tuned in -- as colonies play their former colonizers and dictatorships challenge democracies -- politics follows like rainbows after rain. As long as politics is part of the mix, we might as well support a team that in addition to epitomizing “the beautiful game” stands with a beautiful cause.

Viva Argentina!

[Dave Zirin is the author of the forthcoming Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games we Love (Scribner). Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com. This article also appears in The Nation.]

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SPORT / John Ross : World Cup as Bread and Circus

Bread and Circus: Circus Maximus in Rome, which seated 200,000, was the site for massive spectacle designed to keep the masses distracted. Image from Santa Barbara County Education.
Copa del Mundo de 2010:
The world's cup runneth over

Ever since the bad old days of ancient Rome, bread and circuses have been a powerful formula for social control. In South Africa, as in Mexico, the World Cup is designed to make the discontented forget their discontent.

By John Ross / The Rag Blog / June 11, 2010

MEXICO CITY -- The Caliente Sports Book down the street is buzzing with betters studying dog and horse races, Major League Baseball, even golf, on the multiple screens. Of particular interest are those channels running wrap-ups of the afternoon match between Mexico and 2006 World Cup champion Italy from which the national team emerged victorious in a final prelim before this year's edition of the Copa del Mundo gets underway later this week.

Italy, it may be remembered, won the much-coveted cup four years ago on penalty kicks after France was reduced to playing with 10 men on the field when super-star Zenedine Zidane was disqualified for ferociously head-butting a rival who purportedly called his mother and sister "whores." Beating Italy was a decided plus for Mexico's downtrodden spirits as the Mundiales approach.

But one group of aficionados was not much interested in Mexico's fortunes in the upcoming fandango in South Africa. Instead, they gathered around a big screen in one corner of the betting parlor cheering on the Los Angeles Lakers in a National Basketball Association finals match-up with the Boston Celtics. "Forget about football," sneered "El Guerro" Gonzalez, a regular, "this is where the real money gets made."

Because pro basketball games routinely rack up hundred point scores, betters have multiple opportunities to wager on winners and losers, over and under point spreads, total points in a quarter, and whether Kobe Bryant will hit the next three-pointer.

But with a maximum of four play-off games left on the NBA calendar, the basketball euphoria will dissipate post haste as the World Cup takes center stage. Although the NBA's despotic commissioner David Stern promotes his product as the world game, basketball hardly holds a candle to what the U.S. provincially terms "soccer" and the rest of the Planet Earth, football.

Indeed, the "Copa del Mundo" ("Cup of the World") will soon sweep every other sporting event from the screens, let alone political scandal of which there is plenty in this distant neighbor nation, the upcoming Super Sunday gubernatorial elections July 4th, and even droughts, floods, and other natural disasters.

The interminable drug war that has taken 23,000 lives in the past three years will move to the backburner. Ditto an economy that is tail spinning out of control -- a million workers lost their jobs in the first three months of this year alone despite President Felipe Calderon's rosy claims of "recovery." Speculation about the disappearance of one of the nation's most powerful politicians will fade from the prime time news and the first year anniversary of the incineration of 49 babies in a government-run day care center owned in part by the first lady's cousin, will not even be noticed.

The military takeover of the great Cananea copper mine and the dissolution of the miners union, is not news. New revolutions -- this is, after all, the hundredth year anniversary of our landmark revolution -- could rock the land but for the next month, but Mexico will live and die on what happens to the national team in South Africa.

"In football, we find our revenge against the adversaries of our lives," philosophizes sociologist Jose Maria Candia in a recent Contralinea magazine interview, "if it goes badly at work, in the economy, politics, the project of the nation, when 11 boys put on the green jersey and do well in an international tournament, we feel vindicated by life."

With 32 national teams from all five continents in the competition for the World Cup, the fate of the "seleccion" will have palpable impact on domestic tranquility. The political outfall of the Mundiales is unpredictable. Pumped up on toxic nationalism and xenophobia, football is a blood sport in southern climes. Honduras and El Salvador once fought a full-fledged war over soccer.

If the national team wins or acquits itself well, success will strengthen the government in charge no matter how poorly it has served the country. Likewise, a shoddy performance can topple rulers. In Mexico, increasingly unpopular president Felipe Calderon who won high office in fraud-marred elections three years ago is banking on the national selection's triumphs in the opening round to invigorate his deteriorating image. Calderon's bet is hardly a sure thing.

Mexico, Number 17 on the Federation of World Football Federation's rankings (now the Coca Cola FIFA rankings), plays host South Africa in the inaugural match of the tournament June 11th and "His Excellency" Felipe Calderon (dixit South African president Jacob Zuma) will be a guest of honor. The "Bafana Bafana" ("Boys Boys") as the locals are worshipped, have won their last four prelim matches and in the 2009 Confederation Cup took Spain, which some football gurus fix as the best team in the world, into overtime. Their fanatics' incessantly droning "vuvazelas" or plastic trumpets are said to drive opponents mad.

On the other hand, should Mexico beat sentimental favorite South Africa, it will make Calderon few friends on the African continent -- five other African teams are in the draw with war-torn Cote d'Ivoire the cream of the crop.

Aside from the Bafana Bafana, France and Uruguay are the real class of Mexico's four-team group -- while the French have appeared lackadaisical of late, whipping the South Americans is improbable. Anything less than reaching the quarterfinals will not rehabilitate Calderon's popularity.

Mexico has a young team that fluctuates between indifference and playing out of control. It is anchored by seven Mexican players from the European and Turkish leagues, and the wily but slow-footed veteran Cuauhtemoc Blanco. Burned repeatedly by the national team's poor performances in the Mundiales, many fans such as Manuel Garcia, a waiter at the old quarter Mexico City eatery Café La Blanca, consider that only divine intervention can save Mexico -- and Calderon -- from ignominious elimination.

When and if Mexico wins its matches though, wild celebrations are guaranteed to erupt around the gilded Angel of Independence on the bustling Paseo de Reforma -- drunkenness, fisticuffs, and hooliganism are de rigor. Flag-draped caravans of honking cars will jam the boulevards of this conflictive megalopolis.

On game days, half the population of Mexico, led by its president, will don green jerseys and play hooky from work and school. Saloons will fill to the brim with fans spilling out into the streets, jostling for a peek at the plasma screens. Masses to insure that God is on Mexico's side, will be pronounced from the altars and saints will be dressed up in the national colors.

Although football is tantamount to religion in this country where 70% of the population lives in and around the poverty line, only the super rich will have the wherewithal to jet off to Africa. Instead, the underclass will monitor the Mundiales at the "FIFA Fan Fest" on giant screens erected in the great Zocalo plaza from which nearly a hundred hunger-striking members of the Mexican Electricity Workers Union (SME), near death after a month of voluntary starvation, will no doubt be evicted so as not to dampen the fiesta.

Televisa and TV Azteca, Mexico's two-headed television monopoly, which will transmit the games (the premium package includes 3-D) will have the nation eating out of its hands (and guzzling Corona beer.) The TV monoliths have leased rights to broadcast the Mundiales from the Swiss-based FIFA, the absolute dictator of the sport for the past 106 years that counts 204 out of 208 football federations worldwide on its roster. FIFA TV revenues are expected to top $167,000,000 USD for the 2010 World Cup.

This year's Copa del Mundo is awash with drama. Will the Argentine selection, a perennial favorite, graced by the world's best player, Leonel "the Flea" Messi, blow up under their sometimes psychotic coach Diego Maradona, himself a Mundiales immortal? Will the first round match between England and the U.S. (14th on the FIFA listings with a world-class star, Landon Donovan, to prove it) invoke the star-crossed Yanqui upset of the Brits 60 years ago in 1950 in Brazil, the only time these two teams have ever met in the World Cup?

If the U.S. gets by England, a match between Mexico and its hated gringo rival would up the drama quotient here considerably. A face-off between South Korea and North Korea, both of which are in the draw albeit in separate groups, could lead to nuclear confrontation.

How will tiny, bruised Honduras, which played through a coup d'etat to qualify, fare against the big guns? What kind of karmic reward is in store for France which slimed its way into the World Cup with mega-star Thierry Henry's illegal hand-slap goal against the Irish? Will Germany be dispirited by the suicide of its troubled veteran goalie (is this a Wim Wenders' film?) Will five-time champ Brazil, which is hosting both the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics, be so overloaded with hubris that the selection will forget to play football?

But unquestionably the drama of dramas is focused on host South Africa, the land of blood and gold, Nelson Mandela, Steve Biko, Joe Slovo, and the last great struggle for liberation from colonialism.

South Africa, an unlikely site for the World Cup, was promised the games by Swiss football impresario Joseph Batter during his 1998 campaign to become the czar of the FIFA -- Blatter, who was said to have been backed by Middle East oil money, needed African votes to put him over the top. Although Nigeria and Morocco were also proposed to host the 2010 Cup, South Africa, the continent's fastest-growing economy, was chosen both as a tribute to African football and to Nelson Mandela. Blatter even flew the frail, aging apostle of African liberation, to London to ballyhoo the designation.

Whether the beloved Mandiba will be well enough to attend the inauguration is the drama within the drama.

In his youth, Nelson Mandela was a keen amateur boxer and enthusiasm for sports has colored his life. Football is indeed the national sport of black South Africans, 75% of the population. During Mandela's 28 years of imprisonment on Robbin Island for the crime of defying apartheid, his fellow prisoners and comrades in the African National Congress (ANC), played football incessantly, taping up rags into balls, and booting them up and down the narrow prison corridors. But Mandiba was held in isolation and could never participate.

Nelson Mandela's vision for the new South Africa encompassed sports as a path to racial reconciliation. If football was a black sport in South Africa, rugby is an Afrikaner obsession -- the Springboks were the maximum icon of the apartheid regime. As president, Mandela brought the 1995 World Rugby Cup to Johannesburg, a story fictionalized in the film Invictus, and won the hearts and minds of his former persecutors. Now the World Cup 2010 is slated to project South Africa before the world as a dynamic, multi-racial powerhouse.

The truth is always more diffuse. Jacob Zuma, the country's very corruptible third president, and his predecessors have sunk between $3.7 and $6 billion USD in infrastructure to burnish their images in a nation where 43% of South Africa's 45.000.000 peoples live on $2 or less a day.

The gleaming $300,000,000 Soccer City Stadium where the July 11th finals will be staged, abuts Soweto, the festering high-crime enclave of 3,000,000 mostly threadbare citizens, 30% of whom suffer from AIDS, according to the World Health Organization. Gangs of orphaned children rule the street.

Similarly, the stadium at Port Elizabeth on Nelson Mandela Bay, which came in at $287,000,000, was built over a slum from which hundreds were evicted. A school complex was demolished to make way for the Neusprot venue (only $140,000,000) -- 13 such stadiums have risen from the dust amidst a storm of charges of kickbacks, bribery, and favoritism. Some who have spoken up have been brutalized.

If recent history is any hint, the new stadiums will quickly become certifiable white elephants. Even Beijing's much-praised "Birds' Nest" coliseum designed for the 2008 Olympics, is reportedly tenantless, and the Greek economy just collapsed under the burden of debt incurred for infrastructure for its Olympic Games.

With a population scuffling just to feed itself, filling all this dazzling stadia with paying customers is problematic. Even the $18 cheap seats -- a week's wages in the cities and a month's income in some rural areas -- are mostly out of reach in a country where 50% of the work force is out of work. To deflect a grave social crisis in the making, the FIFA is offering 120,000 free admissions, about 2,200 seats for each of the World Cup's 62 contests. Riots have already occurred at "friendly" preliminary games.

Ever since the bad old days of ancient Rome, bread and circuses have been a powerful formula for social control. In South Africa, as in Mexico, the World Cup is designed to make the discontented forget their discontent. For the next month, the violence, corruption, and class and race hatreds that dominate daily life in Mexico, South Africa, and the rest of what used to be called the third world will disappear beneath the social surface.

Although conflict is my bread and butter, I'm not going to miss the 2010 Mundiales for the world.

[John Ross is at home in the maw of the Monstruo watching the World Cup. You can complain to him at johnross@igc.org.]

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SPORT / World Cup in South Africa : 'Neoliberal Trojan Horse'?

Thousands of residents from the township of Oukasie, 60 miles north of Johannesburg are marching [on March 21, 2010]... to bring attention to the plight of impoverished areas of the country...

They argue it is wrong for the government to be spending so much on hosting the World Cup when so many South African residents still live in squalor in various townships outside the main cities. -- Metro.co.uk

'At least under Apartheid...':
South Africa on the eve of the World Cup

By Dave Zirin / June 11, 2010

At long last, soccer fans, the moment is here. On Saturday, when South Africa takes the field against Mexico, the World Cup will officially be underway. Nothing attracts the global gaze quite like it. Nothing creates such an undeniably electric atmosphere with enough energy to put British Petroleum, Exxon/Mobil and Chevron out of business for good.

And finally, after 80 years, the World Cup has come to Africa. We should take a moment to celebrate that this most global of sports has finally made its way to the African continent, nesting in the bucolic country of South Africa.

And yet as we celebrate the Cup’s long awaited arrival in the cradle of civilization, there are realities on the ground that would be insane to ignore. To paraphrase an old African saying, “When the elephants party, the grass will suffer.”

In the hands of FIFA and the ruling African National Congress, the World Cup has been a neoliberal Trojan Horse, enacting a series of policies that the citizens of this proud nation would never have accepted if not wrapped in the honor of hosting the cup. This includes $9.5 billion in state deficit spending ($4.3 billion in direct subsidies and another $5.2 billion in luxury transport infrastructure). This works out to about $200 per citizen.

As the Anti-Privatization Forum of South Africa has written,

Our government has managed, in a fairly short period of time, to deliver "world class" facilities and infrastructure that the majority of South Africans will never benefit from or be able to enjoy. The APF feels that those who have been so denied, need to show all South Africans as well as the rest of the world who will be tuning into the World Cup, that all is not well in this country, that a month long sporting event cannot and will not be the panacea for our problems. This World Cup is not for the poor-- it is the soccer elites of FIFA, the elites of domestic and international corporate capital and the political elites who are making billions and who will be benefiting at the expense of the poor.

In South Africa, the ANC government has a word for those who would dare raise these concerns. They call it “Afropessimism.” If you dissent from being an uncritical World Cup booster, you are only feeding the idea that Africa is not up to the task of hosting such an event.

Danny Jordaan the portentously titled Chief Executive Officer of the 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa lamented to Reuters, "For the first time in history, Africa really will be the centre of the world's attention -- for all the right reasons -- and we are looking forward to showing our continent in its most positive light.”

To ensure that the “positive light” is the only light on the proceedings, the government has suspended the right to protest for a series of planned demonstrations. When the APF marches to present their concerns, they will be risking arrest or even state violence. Against expectations, they have been granted the right to march, but only if they stay at least 1.5 km from FIFA headquarters in Soccer City. If they stray a step closer, it’s known that the results could be brutal.

You could choke on the irony. The right to protest was one of the major victories after the overthrow of apartheid. The idea that these rights are now being suspended in the name of “showing South Africa... in a positive light” is reality writ by Orwell.

Yet state efforts to squelch dissent have been met with resistance. Last month, there was a three-week transport strike that won serious wage increases for workers. The trade union federation, COSATU, has threatened to break with the ANC and strike during the World Cup if double digit electricity increases aren’t lowered. The National Health and Allied Workers Union have also threatened to strike later this month if they don’t receive pay increases 2% over the rate of inflation.

In addition, June 16th is the anniversary of the Soweto uprising, which saw 1,000 school children murdered by the apartheid state in 1976. It is a traditional day of celebration and protest. This could be a conflict waiting to happen, and how terrible it would be if it’s the ANC wields the clubs this time around.

The anger flows from a sentiment repeated to me time and again when I walked the streets of this remarkable, resilient, country. Racial apartheid is over, but it’s been replaced by a class apartheid that governs people’s lives. Since the fall of the apartheid regime, white income has risen by 24% while black wealth has actually dropped by 1%. But even that doesn’t tell the whole story since there has been the attendant development of a new Black political elite and middle class.

Therefore, for the mass of people, economic conditions -- unemployment, access to goods and services -- has dramatically worsened. This is so utterly obvious even the Wall Street Journal published piece titled, "As World Cup Opens, South Africa's Poor Complain of Neglect." The article quotes Maureen Mnisi, a spokeswoman for the Landless People's Movement in Soweto saying, "At least under apartheid, there was employment -- people knew where to go for jobs Officials were accountable."

Anytime someone has to start a sentence with “At least under apartheid…” that in and of itself is a searing indictment of an ANC regime best described as isolated, sclerotic, and utterly alienated from its original mission of a South Africa of shared prosperity.

A major party is coming to South Africa. But it’s the ANC that will have to deal with the hangover.

[Dave Zirin is the author of the forthcoming Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games we Love (Scribner). Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.]

Source / The Nation

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