Jamil Chad Gag: Players from Germany make sports history 11/23/2022 10:25

Players from Germany made sports history this Wednesday with a simple and powerful move. The four-time champions cleverly deflected the joke that the organizers had imposed on the use of armbands to defend the LGBT movement by covering their mouths while taking the official photo of their World Cup debut.

During the current Cup, some loopholes were allowed for fans to make political gestures. But always in a controlled manner and with well-established boundaries. Anyone who crosses this line is instantly silenced.

Over the years we have seen how the monopoly over the political use of sport is in the hands of politicians and their accomplice leaders. For others, the law establishes the joke, which is a political act.

With the argument of avoiding politics in sport, institutions and laws ensure that only those in power can politicize sport, fans and emotions.

Those who argue that athletes and fans do not represent themselves politically, consciously or unconsciously, are doing a great service to perpetuate this manipulation. And suppress any cry of citizenship. Therefore, what is at stake when an athlete remains silent is freedom.

There have been countless examples of this throughout history. For example, Stalin was afraid of Spartak. He knew that the screaming in the stands was not just for the goal. The Nazis feared Dynamo Kiev years later. They knew that victory wasn’t just for a trophy.

In the 1950s, the Algerians formed a secret team. The French tried to prevent the escape of the players joining the team. They were not afraid of being beaten on the field. But in the trenches.

In all these cases, freedom was at stake.

In 1978, in the midst of the Argentine dictatorship, General Videla would fulfill a tradition in World Cup history. It would take the finalists: the home team and the Dutch. The hosts had no choice, and they were there. Europeans, on the other hand, chose not to appear in a political protest. Joseph Blatter told me that Videla was very angry and João Havelange, annoyed by the attitude of the European team, decided that such meetings should not be held anymore, so as not to create a fair struggle for the dictators.

Since then, rules have been proliferating rapidly, limiting the urban space outside stadiums, while football hypocritically advocates that sports and politics should not mix. The idea surpassed other sports and was transferred to their events by the IOC. But interestingly, this is a rule that only applies to two groups: athletes and fans. For politicians and sports officials, the law is seriously broken.

Havelange continued to visit African dictators adopted by Pinochet, authoritarian regimes in the Middle East.

He was not alone. The CBF saw no problems in 2010 when Robert Mugabe hired the national team to be featured in all the country’s newspapers along with Kaká. In the Olympic world, Chinese pressure never worried the IOC in 2008. Or in Sochi in 2014.

The European Games held in Minsk in 2019 seemed to ignore Aleksandr Lukashenko. The fact that Azerbaijan’s president Ilham Heydar Aliyev was also the head of his country’s Olympic Committee did not seem to be a problem either; it’s a “tradition” in many other countries where propaganda is plentiful and there is no democracy.

You may not make a gesture in defense of human rights during a sporting event. However, manipulation of the same tournament to suppress crime and harassment is allowed.

It is not allowed to remove the uniform to show a message of support for democracy or the LGBT movement. But authoritarian regimes in Qatar and elsewhere are rewarded by giving them the right to host major events.

For a few days, those illegitimate leaders gain a seal of legitimacy, hand out medals, and smile at the world. Or would it be a mockery?