Carl Rommel

This article explores men at a state-owned youth center in Cairo, struggling to cope with uncertainties and change in the aftermath of Egypt’s January 2011 Revolution. Conceptually, the article critically engages anthropologist Laura Bear’s suggestion that an ethics of productivity saturate neoliberal masculinity. As my ethnographic stories about football coaches and state bureaucrats illustrate, being a good man recurrently surfaced as a problem of how to work productively in and on time: as ambiguities between discordant futures that left material needs, familiar care, and development of football talents difficult to reconcile. Often, my interlocutors linked this conundrum to a wide-ranging opacity, conjured as “corruption” (fisad). My analysis of this male predicament allows me to spotlight one of the Egyptian revolution’s most luring promises: a transparent and meritocratic system, where a man’s work would finally be allowed to work on all futures deemed morally and materially significant.

This ethnographic article explores the politics of Egypt’s Ultras football supporters. The Ultras have frequently been heralded as some of the Egyptian Revolution’s most prominent rebels, in particular, after the Port Said stadium massacre in February 2012, when 72 Ultras members were killed. However, this essay focuses on the earlier phase of violent clashes in central Cairo when the Ultras were highly ambivalent about the ongoing protests. As the article shows, the fan groups were hesitant to join the demonstrations, which at the time were heavily associated with “thuggery” (balṭaga). Only after the death of one of its members did the Ultras whole-heartedly take on their rebellious subjectivity.

This thesis explores transformations of emotionality and national subjectivity in the realm of Egyptian football. The research traces developments from the late Mubarak era, when football experienced an unprecedented boom, into the years immediately after the 2011 Revolution, when the sport became politically contested and lost much of its appeal. Approaching football as a social assemblage, encompassing clubs, players, fans, media infrastructures, pick-up pitches, cafés, stadiums and unpredictable match results, the dissertation examines politically charged emotions and subjects that emerged, transformed and broke down. Contestations over the contingent subjects and feelings of football were part of an ongoing battle over the Egyptian nation, before as well as after 2011.
The first chapters explore how state-financing, booming sports media and unprecedented success on the pitch assembled in a ‘football bubble’ – a dominant complex of emotions and national subjectivity – in the late Mubarak era. It is also shown how this emotional nationalism around football became increasingly questioned after a bitter loss to Algeria in 2009. The middle parts trace the development of the Egyptian Ultras. I argue that the younger Ultras fans constituted a novel ‘emotional style’ that challenged the bubble’s homogeneity. I also highlight how the Ultras – following a stadium massacre in 2012 – turned into one of Egypt’s most adored revolutionary forces, embodying a respectable and purposeful masculine subjectivity. Shifting scales, the final chapters attend to emotional attachments to football among a few key interlocutors. I argue that changing rhythms, occasions and connotations contributed to processes of ‘ruination’ that made it difficult to feel for the sport. However, I also detail how and why some dimensions of football – what I theorise as ‘debris’ – remained emotionally charged.
Taken together, the thesis is simultaneously an emotional-political narration of Egypt’s revolutionary transition and an ethnography of the reassembling of the nation’s most popular sport.

This article details the agitated emotional reactions and heated public debate that surrounded Egyptian football in the weeks before and after two World Cup qualifying games against Algeria in November 2009. During the late Mubarak era, Egypt experienced unprecedented successes on the football pitch, triumphs that together with a rapid increase in media attention, created a politicized and highly nationalist hype around the game. Drawing on press material from autumn 2009 and ethnographic interviews from fieldwork conducted a few years later, this article argues that the Algeria games constituted both the pinnacle of this hype and the point in time when football began to lose its central position in many Egyptians’ lives. In particular, this article shows how the social and political role of football, in the weeks after the matches came under increased criticism from Egyptian intellectuals and Islamists. During a brief and intense period, this debate over the appropriate status of football turned into a struggle over how Egyptian nationalism and Egyptian national subjectivity should best be constituted and embodied. In this contestation, ‘respectfulness’ stood against ‘vulgarity’, and different notions of Egypt's position vis-à-vis continental Africa and the rest of the Arab world were repeatedly employed.

This article looks at football as a vehicle for identity formation among Suryoye, a Christian, Middle Eastern migrant community in Sweden. Two Suryoye second division football clubs from the small town of Södertälje – Syrianska FC and Assyriska FF – constitute the core of the analysis, which is based on fieldwork among fans from both clubs. The two clubs mirror an ongoing identity conflict within the Suryoye community between those who call themselves ‘Assyrians’ and those who prefer ‘Syriacs’ as their collective identity. Theoretically, dominant conceptions within football studies of football and fandom as ‘liminal spectacles’ are challenged, and a Butlerian notion of identity as constituted of repetitive performativities is instead adopted. In the ethnographic discussion, Suryoyo football is conceptualized as a ‘performative space’ that facilitates utterances and practices that divide Suryoye into Assyrians and Syriacs. A variety of aspects of football as such a performative space is explored, and it is argued that dividing performatives come in many different forms: from complex narrations of ancient historical narratives on the terraces to unconscious, highly mundane practices and utterances. Finally, some examples are also given for how and why it is important for the two sides to shape the space of football in a suitable manner. Because, by struggling to allow some football related actions and prohibiting other, Assyrians and Syriacs constantly negotiate what one can do and say at and around the terraces in Södertälje, and in effect what it means to be Suryoye in Sweden today.

Both a symbol of the Mubarak government’s power and a component in its construction of national identity, football served as fertile ground for Egyptians to confront the regime’s overthrow during the 2011 revolution. With the help of the state, appreciation for football in Egypt peaked in the late 2000s. Yet after Mubarak fell, fans questioned their previous support, calling for a reformed football for a new, postrevolutionary nation.

In Egypt’s Football Revolution, Carl Rommel examines the politics of football as a space for ordinary Egyptians and state forces to negotiate a masculine Egyptian chauvinism. Basing his discussion on several years of fieldwork with fans, players, journalists, and coaches, he investigates the increasing attention paid to football during the Mubarak era; its demise with the 2011 uprisings and 2012 Port Said massacre, which left seventy-two fans dead; and its recent rehabilitation. Cairo’s highly organized and dedicated Ultras fans became a key revolutionary force through their antiregime activism, challenging earlier styles of fandom and making visible entrenched ties between sport and politics. As the appeal of football burst, alternative conceptions of masculinity, emotion, and politics came to the fore to demand or prevent revolution and reform.

“Egypt’s Football Revolution is a fascinating and ethnographical account of Egypt's famed soccer fans and their struggle for dignity, freedom, and justice. But it is much more than ly rich account of the country’s that. Rommel expertly reveals a tension between Egyptian nationalism and ideal concepts of politics (siyasa)—a tension that ultimately constrained the liberatory possibilities of the 2011 uprising. This book is critical reading for anyone seeking to understand how people make sense of the concept of politics in their daily lives and how that process shapes political possibilities, revolutionary and otherwise.”
Jessica Winegar, au of Creative Reckonings: The Politics of Art and Culture in Contemporary Egypt

“The political resonance of Egyptian football has long been obvious yet opaque. Egypt’s Football Revolution brings both the sport and its political significance to life—its connection to masculinity, nationalism, neoliberal culture, and revolution. But the true brilliance of this book lies in the fact that for many of those who love the game, football is intrinsically connected to joy. A mere sociological dissection of it never quite captures that essential quality of the game. Rommel’s account of Egyptian football is a tour de force, illuminating both the passion and the politics of a crucial element of contemporary Egyptian society.”
Walter Armbrust, author of Martyrs and Tricksters: An Ethnography of the Egyptian Revolution