{"id":18089,"date":"2015-01-30T11:00:05","date_gmt":"2015-01-30T00:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=18089"},"modified":"2015-02-01T17:36:55","modified_gmt":"2015-02-01T06:36:55","slug":"asian-cup-politics-more-than-just-a-game","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/asian-cup-politics-more-than-just-a-game\/","title":{"rendered":"Asian Cup politics: more than just a game \u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Opening<\/a>Kuwait may\u2019ve scored first against Australia in the opening match of the Asian Cup but when the match ended 4:1 in favour of the Australian hosts the message wasn\u2019t simply of a defeat on the pitch. It highlighted the importance and the impact of Middle Eastern politics on the region\u2019s game.<\/p>\n

In a world where government diplomacy\u2019s expanded into public and cultural diplomacy, and where nations are ranked as much on their performance in high-profile international tournaments as on other attributes, autocratic abuse of sports is nowhere more prevalent than in the Middle East and North Africa.<\/p>\n

Ten of the 16 finalists in the 2015 Asian Cup hail from the Middle East. And politics plays in the background each time a national squad enters the pitch. The politics range from long-standing, heavy-handed interference in national soccer affairs (as in the cases of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Iran), to teams like Palestine who see their performance as a projection of nation- and statehood, to efforts to shore up the tarnished images of various regimes (including those of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iran and Bahrain).<\/p>\n

Kuwait\u2019s national team was carrying significant political baggage when it showed up for the opening match. Kuwait\u2019s failed to win an Asian Cup for the last 35 years. The team\u2019s coach, Jorvan Vieira, an Arabic-speaking Brazilian\u2013Moroccan national, who led Iraq to winning the tournament in 2007, was fired barely six weeks before the kick-off in Australia.<\/p>\n

Viera was blamed for Kuwait\u2019s poor performance in the Gulf Cup in November. He was the latest casualty of a Middle Eastern approach towards soccer as a zero sum game. Members of autocratic ruling elites punish trainers for failure on the pitch, seeing it as failure to help them polish personal and political images and improve their standing in the soccer barometer of their nation. Unlike Viera, Iranian coach Carlos Quieroz escaped dismissal\u2014because of an Iranian conviction that they were knocked out of the Cup because of referee bias.<\/p>\n

Still, Viera\u2019s but one recent casualty. Bahrain\u2019s Anthony Hudson was dismissed barely three months after being hired as a result of his team\u2019s poor Gulf Cup performance. Soccer performance is important to Bahrain\u2019s ruling minority Sunni Muslim family. Almost four years after brutally crushing a popular uprising, it confronts ongoing protests, and struggles to shake the image of a repressive regime unwilling to seek genuine political compromise with its majority Shiite Muslim population.<\/p>\n

Similarly, Iraq fired Hakeem Shaker after his team ended last of its group in the Gulf Cup. Iraq\u2019s winning of the 2007 Asian Cup was feted as a triumph against the odds of a team composed of members of its warring Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish communities, at a time when\u2014much like now\u2014Iraq\u2019s territorial integrity as a nation state was in question.<\/p>\n

Saudi Arabia\u2019s changed coaches more than 20 times in the past two decades. One of its longest-lasting coaches, Juan Lopez Caro, was also let go in November after Saudi Arabia failed to defeat its political nemesis, Qatar, in the Gulf Cup final. Soccer as a tool to project modernity is important for Saudi Arabia at a time when its puritan Wahhabi interpretation of Islam is under fire as a feeding ground for more militant jihadist philosophies like that of Islamic State.<\/p>\n

For Qatar, fresh from winning the Gulf Cup, soccer performance is not simply part of its soft power strategy. Its controversial winning of the right to host the 2022 World Cup has been mired in controversy over the integrity of its bid and the working and living conditions of its majority migrant labour population. It needs to counter allegations that it has no soccer legacy nor a real soccer future. The fact that its squad in Australia is in majority made up of Qatari nationals was key to that effort.<\/p>\n

Similarly, Iran hoped to repeat its success in the World Cup in Brazil six months ago. Despite narrowly losing a match against World Cup favourite Argentina, Iran emerged in Brazil as the spectator\u2019s darling, a badly-needed image boost for a nation long seen as one of the world\u2019s pariahs. \u2018We know the world will be watching\u2019, Islamic Republic of Iran Football Federation president Ali Kafashian told The Daily Telegraph<\/em> at the time.<\/p>\n

The politics of Asian soccer were evident even before the kick-off in the Asian Cup\u2019s first match. Asian soccer federation bosses, led by Sheikh Ahmad Al-Fahad Al-Sabah, one of the most powerful men in world sports, endorsed Sepp Blatter for a fifth term as world soccer body FIFA president. Blatter\u2019s used his past four terms effectively to support Arab autocracy.<\/p>\n

Sheikh Ahmed\u2014a mover and shaker in Asian soccer even though he has no official position in the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) or FIFA\u2014advised FIFA vice-president Prince Ali Bin Al Hussein of Jordan, the foremost proponent of reform of world soccer\u2019s sordid governance, to rethink his newly declared challenge to Blatter<\/a>. He was echoed by AFC president Bahraini Shaikh Salman bin Ebrahim Al Khalifa, a member of Bahrain\u2019s ruling family.<\/p>\n

The politics of the game play out both on and off the pitch.<\/p>\n

James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies as Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, co-director of the Institute of Fan Culture of the University of W\u00fcrzburg and the author of the blog, <\/em>The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer<\/em><\/a>, and a forthcoming book with the same title. Image courtesy of Flickr user\u00a0Tourism Victoria<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kuwait may\u2019ve scored first against Australia in the opening match of the Asian Cup but when the match ended 4:1 in favour of the Australian hosts the message wasn\u2019t simply of a defeat on the …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":302,"featured_media":18093,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18089","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nAsian Cup politics: more than just a game \u00a0 | The Strategist<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/asian-cup-politics-more-than-just-a-game\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Asian Cup politics: more than just a game \u00a0 | The Strategist\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Kuwait may\u2019ve scored first against Australia in the opening match of the Asian Cup but when the match ended 4:1 in favour of the Australian hosts the message wasn\u2019t simply of a defeat on the ...\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/asian-cup-politics-more-than-just-a-game\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Strategist\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/ASPI.org\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2015-01-30T00:00:05+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2015-02-01T06:36:55+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/16071954828_c44059ac50_z.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"640\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"427\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"James M. 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