Politics of the group draws in football. The case of restricted team clashes

Abstract

ABSTRACT The article is dedicated to the issue of restricted team clashes in football drawing procedures – the situations in which two teams cannot be drawn into the same group, either in the qualifications or in the final tournament, owing to security reasons. In recent history, there were seven of such restricted clashes: Armenia–Azerbaijan, Russia–Georgia, Gibraltar-Spain, Bosnia and Herzegovina-Kosovo, Serbia–Kosovo, Ukraine–Russia, and Russia-Kosovo. All of them stemmed from estranged international political relations. The research aimed to review the history of prohibited team clashes in UEFA and FIFA men’s tournaments and to discuss it in reference to the international sports organisations’ traditional rhetoric of separation between politics and sport, as well as their actual behaviour concerning the collisions between these two spheres. According to the central argument of the article, separating teams based on political reasons should be interpreted as ‘surrender to politics’ by international football governing bodies.