Foot-The-Ball
It is a game, apparently
When I was growing up and people found out I was born in Manchester, they used to ask me, “What team do you support?”
“What sport do you mean?” I would reply.
After all, the team I support in the World Beard and Moustache Championships is going to be different from that which I support in the World Thumb Wrestling Championships.
After a decade of this I realised people were probably talking about Foot-The-Ball, more formally referred to as Foot-To-Ball (and someone I knew once called it “Fitba”; I think that’s what he was saying, anyway).
There are some games taking place in one of the fascist states at present I gather.
A Happy Story
I received this in an email today and thought I’d share it. The text was posted by former US Congressman Adam Kinzinger on Facebook.
We are told, over and over, that America has gone cold on the rest of the world. That we have decided the people on the other side of the ocean are a threat to be kept out. That the welcome mat got rolled up and put away for good.
Then a soccer team from the North African nation of Algeria showed up in Lawrence, Kansas, and within a week the whole town was wearing green.
For today’s Good News Sunday, I want to tell you about one of the best things happening in this country right now. It is happening at a soccer tournament, and it has almost nothing to do with soccer.
The World Cup is here, 48 teams playing across the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Each team in the tournament picks a base camp, one town to live and train in between matches. Germany set up shop in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Spain is training in Chattanooga, Tennessee. And Algeria, playing two of its games up the road at Arrowhead, picked Lawrence and made it home for the summer.
What the people of Lawrence did with that is the part I can’t stop thinking about.
It started small, with a whole town of people who had never given Algeria much thought deciding, more or less overnight, that this was their team now. Flags went up in shop windows. Folks pulled on the green jerseys. People drove over just to catch a glimpse of the players. And then a local news crew stopped an older gentleman on a Lawrence sidewalk, standing in front of a storefront draped in a whole row of Algerian flags he had clearly just gone out of his way to find.
They asked him what he actually knew about the country whose colors he was flying. He grinned, paused for a beat, and said something along the lines of: not much yet — but we want to welcome you here. There is no agenda in that man. Nothing performative. Just a neighbor, thrilled to his bones that these strangers chose his town, and perfectly at ease with the fact that he has a lot left to learn about them.
The welcome only got bigger from there.
The University of Kansas, the state’s flagship school that calls Lawrence home, sent its marching band out to the training ground. They had spent the previous days learning Algeria’s national anthem, note for note, and they played it as the players walked out for practice. Think about what that means for a moment.
These men are thousands of miles from their families, living out of a hotel in the American Midwest, preparing for the biggest sporting event of their professional lives. And the first thing they hear when they step onto the grass is the sound of their own country’s song, played by a hundred American college kids in red and blue who learned it just for them. Several of the players stopped walking. A few of them looked like they weren’t sure what to do with themselves.
Algeria did its part, too. The team opened a training session to the public and spent the afternoon out on the grass with neighborhood kids, walking them through drills, signing autographs, posing for pictures. There are children from small-town America who are going to be telling the story of the day they trained with a World Cup team for the rest of their lives. And the Algerians have spent the last week calling themselves honorary Kansans, falling hard for a corner of a state most of them could not have found on a map two months ago.
But it’s not just Lawrence.
This is happening all over the country, in towns you would never expect.
The city of Alexandria, Virginia threw a street festival with an evening of Croatian food and music, and wrapped a city bus in the team’s red and white. After crowds in Spokane, Washington flocked to watch Egyptian superstar Mohamed Salah, a brand-new Egyptian restaurant in town suddenly had locals lining up for food most of them had never tasted. All told, 19 American communities that are not hosting a single match still raised their hand to take in a national team and call them neighbors for a month.
There is a story we get told constantly about who we have become. That Americans have soured on outsiders. That we have decided the rest of the world is a threat. That we look at people who do not talk like us or pray like us or come from where we come from and see a problem instead of a person.
And then a college town in Kansas goes and learns every note of a North African country’s national anthem, just so a group of strangers feel at home for a few weeks. An old local stands in front of a row of its flags and tells them, in so many words: we don’t know much about you yet, but we are awfully glad you came.
That is who we actually are when nobody is telling us to be afraid. The band on the field, playing somebody else’s song as if it were their own. The neighbor who knows next to nothing about you and waves you in anyway. We forget it sometimes. The good news is that it takes about one afternoon to remember.
That, my friends, is good news for your Sunday
Read more about it here: How Algeria and Kansas became the World Cup’s most unlikely love story
A Story That Is Happy For Some, Not For Others
From American Power Is Collapsing:
The World Cup is, in so many ways, a distraction from the war, mass murder and genocide inflicted by the empire and its proxies, but it has signalled the further fracturing of the soft power which has been integral to maintaining the myth of benign American empire.
The United States has used the opportunity to bare its imperialist, capitalist teeth.
It has outright travel bans on citizens of four countries playing at the tournament, has rejected fans and fan groups from countries around the world, denied visas to players and has banned referees from entering. Rather than using the moment, as past hosts have done, to repair images and restore reputations, the US has used the moment to showcase its essential imperialism. Rather than use the World Cup to defy critical narratives about who they are, the US has used it to reaffirm: yes, this is exactly who we are.
On the capitalist front, it has used the opportunity to showcase another favoured American tradition. Grift. New Jersey Transit, for example, has hiked a return ticket from Penn Station in Manhattan to MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, to $100 from a normal price of $12.90. The Massachusetts Transportation Bay Authority has priced return tickets from Boston to Gillette Stadium at $80 from the usual event-day price of $20. Other cities have enacted similar price hikes.
Every preconception about American greed has been validated, every assumption confirmed.
This fracturing of American soft power at the World Cup has been on full show for the globe to see, and it is all wonderfully self-inflicted. American leaders are capitalists and imperialists to their bone marrow. And I don’t just mean Trump, Hegseth and the MAGA crew. Do you hear complaints from Democrats about the entry bans, about the travel prices? In some cases Democratic cities are the ones grifting.
The World Cup has perfectly encapsulated the venal spirit of the United States. Ego, arrogance and hubris, undergirded by ideologies of capitalism and imperialism, have converged to create exactly the kind of experience they were always bound to create.
Nate also wrote The Most Racist World Cup In History:
FIFA-appointed Somalian referee Omar Artan, voted the best referee in Africa last year and travelling on a diplomatic passport, was denied entry to the US when he landed at Miami and forced to fly back home.
The Iranian national team have been forced to relocate their training base from Arizona to Mexico, and the manager of the team, as well as various technical support staff, have been denied US visas. The US is also demanding that the Iranian playing squad enter and leave the US on the day of their games, a condition clearly meant to harm their ability to perform well in matches. Iran’s fan ticket allocation has also just been withdrawn, meaning there will be no fans from Iran in the stadiums.
Iraqi national team vice-captain Ayman Hussein was detained, searched and interrogated at Chicago’s O’Hare airport for seven hours while Iraq’s national team photographer was denied entry and turned back on landing.
The Senegalese team were treated like criminals on landing, with security not allowing them to enter the terminal and strip-searching them on the tarmac. The Uzbekistan team were similarly searched after stepping off the coach outside the Icahn stadium in New York prior to a friendly match against The Netherlands.
At least 90 fans from two major supporter groups in Morocco have also been denied visas ahead of the tournament, most under a clause citing doubts about their intention to return home, despite their documented travel histories to Russia 2018, Qatar 2022, and the Paris Olympics. Some have lost thousands of dollars in non-refundable hotel bookings.
These refusals followed the initial refusal of a visa for the Moroccan player Zakaria El Ouahdi, who plays in Europe, after US embassy staff flagged him as a risk because his father was deemed to have a suspicious beard.
The South African team waited months for US visas to be issued, leading to a public complaint from the country’s minister of sport who said they’d been “made to look like fools,” and as of this week were still waiting for four visas to be processed.
The International Sports Press Association says that many Iranian and African journalists have been denied visas needed to enter the US and report on the tournament.
All of this is making people compare this World Cup to the 1936 Nazi Olympics, but that’s really unfair. By 1936 Nazi Germany hadn’t attacked any sovereign countries, assassinated any heads of state or committed any holocausts.
There you go. I am now an expert in Foot-The-Ball.
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