The Business of Sports in the Gulf Cooperation Council Member States

This chapter presents an overview of sports business in the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states. GCC member states stage mega-sports events and invest in global sports through the acquisition of football clubs, for example. Shirt sponsorship and stadium naming rights deals of the region’s national airlines aim to create favorable perceptions of the companies and their nations as well as to diversify economies beyond oil and gas. This chapter also provides a statistical profile of sport in each GCC member state and shows that Bahrain, Kuwait, and Oman are lagging far behind Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar in terms of sport industry size. Fluctuating oil prices, political tensions between GCC states, and weak attendance at games are serious threats to the future growth of the sport industry. Our conclusion is that the private sector needs to develop extensively in order to replace the state as the industry’s central focus.

Qatari Female Footballers

Female Qatari footballers are being encouraged by government policies to pursue sports careers in accordance with pressure from international organizations. At the same time, they are subject to a conservative in which it is largely unacceptable for women to play football. This tension has driven many female football players in Qatar to create a safe space for their activities through forming university teams. Using interviews with young women engaged in football activities, this chapter shows that these safe spaces do not carry the same negative connotations of masculinity as the official clubs and national team do – which subsequently enables women to challenge the perception that it is impossible for them to play football, while preserving their femininity and adhering to societal moral codes at the same time. By establishing women’s football as a university activity rather than something that conflicts with their academic priorities, they are able to play football without getting into conflicts with their families. These women seek the freedom to pursue their objectives and shape their own lives.

Introduction

Sports in the Middle East have become a major issue in global affairs: Qatar’s successful bid for the FIFA World Cup 2022 (won in a final vote against the United States), the 2005 UEFA Champions League Final in Turkey’s most populous city Istanbul, the European basketball championship EuroBasket in 2017 in Israel, and other major sporting events, such as the annually staged Formula 1 races in Bahrain and Abu Dhabi, have put an international spotlight on the region. In particular, media around the world are discussing the question of whether the most prestigious sporting events should be staged in a predominantly authoritarian, socially conservative, and politically contentious part of the world....

Turkish Sports

This chapter examines Turkish sport policy with a particular emphasis on the period since 2002 when the tenure of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government began. Based on in-depth interviews with former Turkish sport ministers and other sport authorities, as well as a review of academic literature, government files, and press articles, this chapter concludes that a main focus of Turkish sports policy is gaining domestic and international prestige rather than increasing sports participation. While Turkey was unsuccessful in its bids for the Olympic Games, it could boast of several other accomplishments, including having hosted other high-profile international sporting events such as the 2005 UEFA Champions League Final, constructing football stadiums, and achieving elite sport success at international championships and the Olympic Games, with the naturalization of foreign-born athletes as a main driver. This chapter stresses the central role of the state, and the sport sector’s dependence on government subsidies since most financial resources come from the sports betting company Iddaa. It also argues that the government has failed to properly integrate sports with the education system, making school sports one of the most problematic areas of sport development in Turkey.

Mapping the ‘Sports Nahda’

This chapter traces the formation of a “sports awakening” in the Middle East during the late nineteenth century until the interwar period. This sports awakening consisted of government and private schools, fashionable sports clubs, a bustling multilingual sports press, and popular football matches and gymnastics exhibitions. The institutional and discursive trajectory of sports was not confined to a specific nation state; rather, it was a regional phenomenon. Educators, sports club administrators, students, club members, editors, columnists, and government officials helped turn sports into a regular fixture of the urban landscape of cities across the Middle East. These developments reveal the profound intellectual and ethnoreligious diversity of the individuals and institutions that shaped the defining contours of sports throughout the Middle East.

The World Cup and Freedom of Expression in Qatar

This chapter elaborates on the effects of the upcoming 2022 FIFA World Cup on Qatar’s restrictive media system, seeking to answer the question: how does the World Cup affect rights of expression and publication in a country that criminalizes, for example, blasphemy and criticism of the emir? Our analysis is based on conversations that we have had with newspaper editors in Qatar, assessing internationally known indices of press freedom and the growing body of academic literature on Qatari sport and media politics. Being home to news broadcaster Al Jazeera, Qatar is the most progressive member of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) on matters of free expression, but ranks low on international indicators. Qatar’s successful bid to host the 2022 World Cup has brought the country both new attention and criticism, with the latter focusing especially on the kafala labor system. Neither China nor Russia’s media regimes changed after hosting the Olympics in 2008 and 2014 respectively, but despite this trend, this chapter argues that Qatar has been relatively open to its critics, and the award of the World Cup has advanced conversations about sensitive subjects within the country.

Hapoel Tel Aviv and Israeli Liberal Secularism

This chapter analyzes the rhetoric of hardcore Hapoel Tel Aviv (Israel) football and basketball fans, and quantitatively examines the many people who sympathize with various teams. Our study reveals that stadium rhetoric is actually an expression of fundamental struggles between competing definitions of Israeliness. The rhetoric of Hapoel fans in the realm of Israeli sport is an uncommon combination of socialism, anti-nationalism and anti-racism. However, rather contradictorily, this rhetoric also lined with violence, sexism, classism, and Germanophobia. In addition, hardcore Hapoel fans use terminology associated with the Holocaust in a provocative manner. This rhetoric is partly related to the demographic of both the hardcore fans and the wider circle of sympathizers who tend to be mostly middle class and far more secular than the fans of other teams. It is argued that the transgressive rhetoric of Hapoel fans is partly related to the decline in the political power of the secular elite in Israel. These insights are based on an online survey that was conducted in September 2012, and the website and forums of Hapoel Tel Aviv fans, fans’ songs available on YouTube, as well as interviews with fans.

Football’s Role in How Societies Remember

Based on several phases of ethnographic work over two decades, this chapter demonstrates how football creates the ideal conditions for debates over national social memories related to the Palestinian-Bedouin divide in Jordan. Social memory processes in football arenas represent two related social phenomena. Firstly, collective, historical memories are produced; Secondly, these collective memories are also enacted and embodied during football matches, through their symbolic and physical confrontations. Palestinian-Jordanian encounters on the football field have been especially important in this context, having embodied the memory of the 1970 civil war and having served as a medium through which to reprocess it. For Palestinians, as a stateless ethno-national group who lack the formal national institutions to preserve their national past in the form of museums or archeological digs, football, and particularly the al-Wihdat team, has become an important alternative. While until the early 1990s the fans’ lyrics emphasized identification with the armed struggle, today the dominant themes are Palestinian common descent, unity, and refugee identity. At the same time, al-Wihdat’s alter-ego, FC Faisaly, has been a focus of East Bank Jordanian nationalism, emphasizing tribal roots and values, Islamic tradition, Hashemite loyalty, and the tribal roots of the monarchy.

Legacies of Mega-Sporting Events in Developing Countries

This chapter engages with the scholarship that emphasizes the benefits of mega-sporting events to host countries, from increasing their international prestige and influence on global politics, through to mobilizing national pride, and serving as a tool of economic development. This chapter also investigates the benefits gained by Lebanon as a result of hosting four regional mega-sporting events since the civil war ended in 1990. Additionally, it examines the similarities and differences between these four events by exploring, in particular, the tangible and intangible legacies. Apart from a review of academic and press articles, primary data was collected by interviewing key stakeholders in the Lebanese sports sector who were involved in the events. Our conclusion is that while the events provided Lebanon with some short-term promotional benefits, they introduced a heavy financial burden, especially in relation to stadium and sports hall construction. Resources to maintain those facilities became a source for corruption.

Developing a National Elite Sport Policy in an Arab Country

Lebanon has never qualified to the FIFA World Cup, and has only won four medals at the Olympic Games since it started participating in 1948. This chapter investigates why Lebanon is failing in international sport and argues that the promotion of elite sport has never been a priority for the Lebanese government. It also reviews the academic literature on elite sport success, and discusses political, economic, demographic, and cultural factors that contribute to Lebanon’s failure in international sport. It is argued that the meagre annual budget allocated to the Ministry of Sport by the Lebanese government is a necessary but insufficient explanation for Lebanon’s failure in international sport. The Ministry of Youth and Sport issued their “Sport Strategy 2010–2020,” but never implemented the policies proposed. Beyond the government there is the problem that corruption is prevalent in the national sport federations. This chapter highlights how administrators are occupying key positions based on their political affiliations, rather than on their skills and capacities.