Football's unifying strength and divisive fight for national team slots

Dutch coach Guus Hiddink. As coach of the Netherlands in the 1990s, he was accused by a group of black players in the team led by Edgar Davids of favouring their white teammates. REUTERS/Doga Yusuf Dokdok

What you need to know:

  • In some countries the composition of the squad is scrutinised for ascertain ethnic, racial and regional balance regardless of merit

The World Cup promises to provide fans with plenty of entertainment for the next one month.

There are four or five teams which could win the tournament and it should be a fascinating ride for supporters around the world.

Yet besides the usual factors on the pitch the talent of the players, their fitness after a long club season, the weather there are other factors beyond football which often determine how successful a team will be.

National sport is of course a highly charged political affair with countries seeking to make a statement of their power by winning.

The competition between the Americans, Russians and now the Chinese at the Olympics is an example of this.

Politics and wider societal relations in a country can also intrude into national teams and play a big role in the levels of cohesion within the team and also the amount of support they receive back home.

Here are a few examples of countries where the composition of the football team is scrutinised not just for a check on the individual talents of the players but also as a statement on wider social issues. How big an impact this will have on the pitch is anybody’s guess:

NATIONAL UNITY

Cote d’Ivoire: The Ivorians were once the envy of Africa. The country was peaceful and as a favourite colony of the French, it had some of the best infrastructure on the continent. Its largest city Abidjan was dubbed the Paris of Africa.

Unfortunately, a civil war fought along ethnic and regional lines broke out in 2002 and things fell apart.

For that reason, the Elephants as the national team is known is seen as a hugely important symbol of national unity.

When they qualified for the 2006 World Cup, fighting was halted for a few days as Ivorians across the country celebrated:

“We stopped so we can watch the Elephants at the Nations Cup. When they get knocked out, we will be on the streets again,” one poster read. The fighting did in fact resume and the country remains intensely divided on and off the pitch.

The BBC reported a former sports minister Genevieve Bro Grebe complaining a few years ago that there were “too many northerners in the team.”

Supporters of the former Marseille and Everton striker Ibrahima Bakayoko complain that he kept being overlooked because he was from the north.

All this cannot be a good thing for a team which has players from across the country and one hopes, as one of the few African teams given a kind draw this time, they will rise above these differences and make the continent smile.

RACE

Holland: The multi-talented Dutch national team of the mid 1990s has to rank as one of the finest teams never to win a major trophy.

Some blamed the problem on uneasy relations within the team. There was a group of black players Edgar Davids, Clarence Seedorf, Patrick Kluivert, Michael Reiziger and Winston Bogarde who had come through the ranks at Ajax and were considered key players.

However, they apparently felt that coach Guus Hiddink favoured the white players and, in one particularly stormy confrontation, Edgar Davids famously said Hiddink should, how to put this, get his head out of captain Danny Blind’s bottom.

He was sent home. Unsurprisingly, Holland lost 4-1 to England and continued their sorry tale of poor form in big tournaments.

One imagines these problems have faded, although it will be interesting to see how far Luis Van Gaal can take what is, by Dutch standards, a quite average squad this time.

REGIONALISM

Belgium: As Divock Origi must know by now, Belgium is a country that is strongly divided along linguistic and regional lines.

The south is mainly inhabited by French-speaking people known as Walloons while the north is peopled by Dutch-speaking Flemings.

The divisions between these two regions are so bad that at one point Belgium went without a government for several months amid much feuding.

Most reports indicate coach Marc Wilmots has managed to instil a sense of unity in his exciting young team which, according to this report in the Observer in January 2011, previously had a big problem with basic discipline.

“In some cases the players’ exceptional talent is matched by an even more exceptional bad attitude. Only last year the national team’s medical staff resigned in protest against ‘the sick attitude of childish snobs’, with one of the doctors complaining that certain players regularly demanded sick notes so that they could skip training and go partying instead. The team have been beset by infighting.”

ETHNIC RELATIONS

Nigeria: If you think Kenya has deep ethnic relations issues, just go to the comment boards of any Nigerian sports outlet online.

Nigerians frequently fight bitterly over the ethnic composition of the team with regular complaints in recent times that there are too many of coach Stephen Keshi’s Igbo people in the side.

When the squad for the last Africa Cup of Nations was announced, there was an outcry on the various websites.

“This man just packed the team with his town people,” ranted one. “Don’t want to sound too local but majority of the players are from the East. You want to tell me you can’t scout for players from Kano?”

Another one countered that the best Nigerian players came from the East and cited Nwankwo Kanu, Christian Chukwu, Agustine Okocha, Stephen Keshi and Emmanuel Amunike.

The critics were not impressed: “How come there is no single Muslim Yoruba boy? The likes of Yekini, Rufai are the ones who brought glory to Nigeria. This selection is tribal based. Almost 98 per cent of players are from the East.”

Although the critics predicted doom, Nigeria went on to clinch victory in the tournament. In the World Cup squad, the complaints revolve around the fact that coach Keshi only picked one Muslim. If he doesn’t succeed, you can be sure the knives will be sharpened.

There are other examples France, Italy but whatever happens you can expect that the politics of sport will be a major, largely unspoken feature over the next few weeks.