There is little evidence that football helps racial integration

By T.A.W.

“I AM German when we win, but I am an immigrant when we lose,” wrote Mesut Özil, an attacker of Turkish descent, when retiring from the national team on July 22nd. The playmaker won the World Cup in 2014 and was voted Die Mannschaft’s player of the year five times. He was once the poster boy for multiculturalism in Germany. In 2010, soon after he burst into the national team, Angela Merkel, the chancellor, posed for a photo with him in the dressing room.

But eight years later, after a photoshoot with Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s despotic president, and a humiliating World Cup exit, Mr Özil has become a national scapegoat. He claims that the vilification is racially motivated. Many Germans disagree. Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, a Mannschaft star of old and now chairman of Bayern Munich, has argued that Mr Özil’s claim that he was “criticised because he is of Turkish descent” is a “fairytale”. “There is no greater promoter of integration than football”, he insisted.

That claim has often been made by people with a vested interest in the game, and rarely challenged. Yet there is scant evidence to support it, and plenty to suggest that football actually encourages division—not just in the case of Mr Özil, but from the experiences of other European footballers and academic studies.

The criticism of Mr Özil began on May 13th when he and Ilkay Gündogan, another German player of Turkish descent, posed cheerfully with Mr Erdogan ahead of his re-election. Turkey’s president, who imprisoned thousands of opponents after an attempted coup in 2016 and rigged the constitution, has a strained relationship with Germany. He accused it of “Nazi practices” when it prevented Turkish politicians from campaigning there ahead of his constitutional referendum. Both players denied having political intentions, though Mr Gündogan had presented Mr Erdogan with a shirt reading: “For my honoured president, with great respect”.

Germany was outraged. Fans booed the duo in pre-tournament friendlies. Ms Merkel asked supporters to get behind them while admonishing them for the photos. The anger intensified after the team’s lacklustre World Cup performances. Mr Özil is notoriously languid, at times almost apathetic. He does not sing the national anthem, preferring to pray silently to Allah. After the reigning champions lost to Mexico, he was dropped for the first time at a major tournament. He reappeared against South Korea, but could not prevent an elimination.

That he created 5.5 scoring chances per 90 minutes—the best rate at the tournament—was irrelevant. After his resignation, Uli Hoeness, a former World Cup winner and now president of Bayern Munich, said that he “had been playing rubbish for years”.

Yet Mr Özil’s statement caused a different uproar. He refused to apologise for meeting Mr Erdogan, which he claimed was out of respect for the birthplace of his grandparents, and detailed the racist abuse that he had suffered since. His family received anonymous threats, irate fans called him a “Turkish pig” and Bernd Holzhauer, a councillor for the Social Democratic Party, labelled him a “goatfucker”. Mr Özil was scathing about the German football association, which he says encouraged the vitriol by singling him out for criticism.

He explained that he had “two hearts, one German and one Turkish”. #MeTwo began trending on Twitter, as Germans with ethnic-minority backgrounds shared stories about discrimination. Four days before Mr Özil’s photoshoot, psychologists from the University of Mannheim published a study showing that primary-school students with Turkish names received lower grades for the same work than those with German ones. Similar experiments have demonstrated such prejudice in applications for jobs and housing. “Is it because it is Turkey?” Mr Özil asked about his treatment. “Is it because I'm a Muslim?”

Nicking a living

Other European footballers from immigrant backgrounds have described similar discrimination during the World Cup. Romelu Lukaku, who fired Belgium to the semi-finals, wrote: “When things were going well, I was reading newspaper articles and they were calling me Romelu Lukaku, the Belgian striker. When things weren’t going well, they were calling me Romelu Lukaku, the Belgian striker of Congolese descent.” Jimmy Durmaz, a Swedish winger of Syrian parentage, received death threats after conceding a decisive free-kick. Some onlookers suggested that France’s triumphant squad, 15 players of whom have African ancestry, had won the continent’s first title. In response Benjamin Mendy, one of those players, tweeted each of their names accompanied by a tricolore emoji.

These incidents reflect two threats to integration, one sporting and one social. The first is football’s increasingly flexible eligibility rules. A star could once switch between countries easily. Laszlo Kubala, a Barcelona forward in the 1950s, represented Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Spain. In 1962 FIFA banned such switches if players had participated in competitive fixtures. But it relaxed the rule again in 2004, so that youth internationals could change allegiance at senior level. Presnel Kimpembe, a defender who appeared for Congo’s under-21s, won the World Cup with France this summer.

Laurent Dubois, a historian at Duke University who chronicles footballing politics, says this rule raises the possibility of betrayal. Flitting between flags, depending on which offers the best career, exacerbates the suspicion that immigrants are mercenaries. Messrs Özil and Gündogan were joined in their photoshoot by Cenk Tosun, who played for Germany as a junior but now represents Turkey. France has lost a particularly large pool of talent. By Mr Dubois’s count, 52 players at the latest World Cup grew up there, but only 23 represented Les Bleus. French officials were so concerned about defectors that in 2011 they considered a maximum quota at academies of 30% for dual citizens.

The second trend reflected in these racist incidents is Europe’s heightened anxiety about Middle Eastern and African immigrants. Giving Mr Erdogan helpful propaganda was reckless, but Mr Özil would hardly have received such grief if he had been a German of Venezuelan heritage, for example, posing with Nicolás Maduro. His statement pointed out that Lothar Matthäus, a Bavarian who won the World Cup in 1990, received little condemnation for his pre-tournament photoshoot with Vladimir Putin. Mr Özil’s harshest critics have been the Alternative for Germany (AfD), a far-right party that often bashes Muslims, and Bild, a tabloid with similar views.

Germans are divided on the issue. According to a DeutschlandTrend poll, 14% think that the football association is chiefly responsible for the fallout, compared with 29% who primarily blame the player (rising to 59% among AfD supporters). The rest believe that both parties are at fault. Perhaps the most interesting question posed by the incident, however, is whether football actually helps to tackle racism—or simply perpetuates it.

I just don’t think you understand

Optimists argue that the sport provides multicultural role models, who demonstrate to a conservative audience that people of foreign ancestry can contribute positively to their chosen country. Viv Anderson became England’s first black international footballer in 1978, nine years before Westminster gained its first black MPs. Mehmet Scholl, a German midfielder with a Turkish father, won the European Championship with Die Mannschaft in 1996, just two years after the country got its first German-Turkish parliamentarians. The diverse French “black, blanc, beur” World Cup winners in 1998 defied Jean-Marie Le Pen, the leader of the right-wing National Front, who said that they were not worthy of the team.

Yet that riposte did not prevent Mr Le Pen reaching the second round of the French presidential election in 2002. And football crowds have long been a cesspit of intolerance. Black players around Europe, and especially in the east, still have bananas and monkey chants hurled at them. In Britain, the abuse on the terraces was particularly vile when Mr Anderson was playing. Christos Kassimeris, a social scientist at the European University Cyprus, notes that hooligans used to compete with each other to climb the “League of Lout”, a ranking published by the National Front, a right-wing party, of the most racist clubs. Today, thanks to the efforts of Kick It Out, a British anti-racism organisation, the abuse is less blatant and easier to report. But the group still identified 134,400 social media posts about football that contained racist, sexist or homophobic language in an online study between August 2014 and March 2015.

Academics are sceptical about the sport’s ability to promote harmony, pointing to substantial evidence to the contrary. Dirk Halm, a social scientist at the University of Duisburg-Essen, has documented the history of segregation between German- and Turkish-only amateur clubs in Germany. Between 1985 and 1997 the share of single-ethnicity teams in grassroots leagues doubled. 80% of Germans with Turkish heritage prefer clubs from Turkey to those in the Bundesliga. Mr Halm identifies a “false assumption that participation in sports has an integrative effect per se”. Mr Kassimeris concurs that football is more of a mirror of society than a force which shapes it. If that is true, then it is not surprising that Europe’s recent xenophobic anxieties have flared up on the football pitch. Nor, alas, is it remarkable that Mr Özil has been left to wonder: “I was born and educated in Germany, so why don’t people accept that I am German?”