A veritable game of the nation: on the changing status of football within the Egyptian national formation in the wake of the 2009 World Cup qualifiers against Algeria

Abstract

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.