Guram Kashia seems to epitomise everything you might want in a national sporting hero. A fierce competitor on the field, and a family man off it, Kashia’s career took him first to the Netherlands and now to the US, yet he has always remained proud of his Georgian roots. As captain of the national team,… Continue reading “Marching On, But Not Together: The Georgian Far Right versus Guram Kashia”
“Police confirms: Mallorca thugs are Leipzig hooligans“: This headline – caused by two henchmen of the extreme right hooligan scene of the Leipzig-based club 1. FC Lokomotive Leipzig (Lok Leipzig) – was the most recent one to cause massive repercussions in public and media. Both men attacked a Senegalese bouncer during a disco attendance at… Continue reading ““A past still present?”: Lokomotive Leipzig and its fan scene”
The hateful actions of the furthest fringes tend to be tolerated, downplayed or even ignored. In October 2019, England’s national football team played what should have been a humdrum European Championship qualifying match against Bulgaria in Sofia, the country’s capital. But the match soon made headlines for all the wrong reasons, being stopped twice because… Continue reading “Football fandom and fascist generals: Bulgaria’s radical right”
On March 9th, before the German 4th division football match between Chemnitzer FC (CFC) and VSG Altglienicke, supporters of the CFC were holding a moment of silence including a pyrotechnical display for Thomas Haller, the former chief of the notorious hooligan gang “HooNaRa” (Hooligans Nazis Rassisten, or Hooligans, Nazis, Racists), who died the day before.… Continue reading ““HooNaRa”: Football Clubs in (East)Germany and their problems with right-wing extremism”
Britain’s far-right undertow turns hostile currents against ethnic and religious minorities into a tsunami of hatred. Pause a moment to register two unloved anniversaries. This spring marks a decade since the first anti-Muslim street movement, the English Defence League (EDL), emerged on British streets. Slowly but surely, the Democratic Football Lads Alliance (DFLA), now a… Continue reading “The DFLA: a(nother) new UK far right movement?”
Racism and anti-Semitism remain problems in global soccer. At the 2018 World Cup in Russia supporters of the Moroccan national soccer team fought with fans holding Israeli flags at the end of Morocco’s loss to Portugal. David Whelan, the former owner of Wigan Athletic, was also accused of making anti-Semitic statements (He repeated a common… Continue reading “Anti-Semitism in global soccer”
Özil, like many others, has repeatedly stated that he would prefer to play for both national football teams if international football regulations made it possible. The recent case of Mesut Özil has shown a severe rupture in relations between German-Turks and German natives, which has been a long time coming, but went unrecognized while the… Continue reading “Radical right backlash against Games of Belonging: the case of Mesut Özil”
The affair might have passed relatively quickly had it not been for the success of the far-right Alternative for Germany party in the 2017 federal election. Germany’s performance in the FIFA World Cup in Russia was nothing short of a disaster. The 2014 champion came in dead last in its group, losing the final match against… Continue reading “What the Özil Affair Tells Us about Contemporary Germany”