From the Public Square to the Stadium
The latest World Cup was not simply another major sporting event, nor merely an occasion on which Arabs celebrated the qualification of an unprecedented number of their national teams or the remarkable performances some of them delivered. More than that, it revealed a deeper shift in the Arab public mood. The scale of popular engagement in streets, cafés, homes, and across social media showed that football is no longer a passion confined largely to young men. It has become a shared language that brings together families, women, and children, creating rare moments of collective feeling that Arab societies have increasingly struggled to find elsewhere.
The World Cup has, of course, long been the most widely followed sporting event in the world. Yet Arab interest in football has risen sharply in recent years, alongside the growing presence of Arab teams in international competitions and their transformation into sources of national pride, identity, and symbolic achievement. It was therefore hardly surprising that Arab governments joined this wave, granting their national teams unprecedented political, media, and symbolic attention. The aim was often to incorporate sporting success into the national narrative and to link it to stability, state performance, and the effectiveness of public policy.
The question, however, reaches far beyond football itself. Have Arab regimes succeeded in turning sport into a substitute for politics, and into a space capable of absorbing the energies of societies that, only a decade and a half ago, were preoccupied with democracy, reform, and freedom? Or is the reverse closer to the truth: that Arab societies, after most avenues of direct political action were closed to them, found in football and the stadium a new space for reproducing a public sphere, expressing themselves, and creating other forms of solidarity and belonging?
The issue here is not to judge the sporting performance of Arab teams, nor to debate whether qualifying for the World Cup or achieving certain results amounts to full success, partial success, or, in some cases, failure. That is a matter for football specialists. What concerns us is that these teams have managed, in recent years, to accomplish what many political and social institutions have failed to achieve. Even if only temporarily, they have become symbols of national unity, spaces in which people divided politically, socially, and regionally can meet and feel that they belong to a single story.
This phenomenon cannot be separated from the wider Arab context. A region emerging from a decade and a half of uprisings, coups, civil wars, and profound divisions, only to confront the war in Gaza and the daily exposure of official Arab impotence in the face of mass killing and destruction, was bound to become intensely thirsty for any moment of victory, even one achieved on a football pitch. Sport, in this sense, is no longer merely entertainment. It has often become a symbolic compensation for a long succession of political failures, and a temporary restoration of a collective sense of dignity and the capacity to achieve.
This perhaps helps explain the dense political presence surrounding Arab national teams in recent years. Governments no longer view football simply as an autonomous sporting activity, but as a new source of symbolic legitimacy. Official receptions, awards, political speeches, and extensive media coverage all seek to integrate sporting achievement into the state’s national narrative, as if victory on the pitch were a natural extension of successful public policy, or evidence of administrative competence and political stability.
None of this is unique to the Arab world. Many states have long understood that sport can be an instrument of soft power, an effective means of building national identity, and a way to improve a country’s international image. What distinguishes the Arab case, however, is that this political investment in sport has coincided with an unprecedented contraction of the public sphere. Fifteen years ago, politics dominated Arab streets, shaped everyday conversations, and competed with football for the attention of young people, sometimes overtaking it altogether. Today, the scene has been reversed. The crowds have returned to the stadiums, while politics has withdrawn from most public squares. The question is not whether politics has lost the match, but whether it has simply changed the field on which it is played.
The first answer appears straightforward: yes, Arab regimes have succeeded in using football as an instrument for producing national consensus, easing social tension, reproducing legitimacy, and diverting public attention from accumulated economic and political crises. This interpretation is supported by numerous Arab experiences and echoed in political science literature on the relationship between sport and power, and on the way sporting success can be converted into political capital.
Yet this explanation, valid as it may be, remains incomplete. It assumes that society is merely a passive recipient and that crowds behave according to scripts written for them by the authorities. The Arab experience, even during its most politically closed periods, has never been quite that simple.
Such a discussion inevitably brings to mind the work of the Iranian-American sociologist Asef Bayat, particularly his influential book Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East. Bayat argues that politics is not limited to parties, parliaments, and elections. It can also inhabit the small details of everyday life. When the doors of direct political action are closed, people do not cease to act. Rather, they devise quieter, less confrontational routes through which they preserve a degree of freedom, meaning, and hope. Bayat describes this as the politics of everyday life, where ordinary practices become indirect forms of reshaping society.
If we take this perspective seriously, football may not be a substitute for politics so much as another form of its presence. Stadiums are not merely places of support and spectacle; they are spaces that generate collective feeling, rebuild social ties, and allow individuals to escape, even for a few hours, from their political isolation.
This interpretation gains further depth when considered alongside Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life. De Certeau distinguishes between the “strategies” of power, exercised through institutions, laws, and the media, and the “tactics” of ordinary people, who lack such instruments and therefore reuse spaces created by authority in ways that were never intended. They do not necessarily confront power directly, but neither are they passive consumers of what it offers.
From this perspective, football can be understood as one of these everyday tactics. The state may view it as a tool for reinforcing legitimacy, while citizens may see it as an opportunity to reclaim public space, create joy, and rebuild a collective feeling they have long missed. This is why it is difficult to claim that only one side is using the other. The relationship appears more complex, resembling a continuous contest between state and society.
These questions have increasingly been recognised as important features of Arab social and political life. In recent years, they have attracted growing attention in Arab scholarship, particularly at the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies, whose interest coincided with the Qatar World Cup and the major tournaments that followed. It became clear that the central question was no longer merely about match results or the technical quality of national teams, but about what football itself reveals concerning changes in state-society relations, the evolving relationship between authority and the public sphere, and the way sport has become an entry point for examining national identity, soft power, and new forms of social mobilisation. The Center devoted seminars and research dossiers to these intersections, signalling football’s transition from the margins of social research to one of its increasingly important subjects.
Among the most recent and significant contributions is the Moroccan researcher Youssef Daai’s book, Sport and Politics in Morocco between Control and Resistance: Football as a Case Study, published by the Arab Center. The importance of the book lies in its challenge to the conventional view of sport as a neutral sphere detached from politics. Through the Moroccan experience, it shows that stadiums have always formed part of the political sphere, though they have played different roles at different historical moments.
During the reign of Hassan II, football was one of the state’s instruments for producing national consensus and absorbing social tension. After the 2011 protest movement, however, the picture gradually changed. Stadiums became contested spaces shared by state and society, and the authorities could no longer fully monopolise the production of national symbols or the direction of collective emotion.
Daai goes further in his discussion of ultras groups, which, in his view, are no longer merely organised groups of football supporters. They have become one of the most important youth subcultures in Morocco. Collective chants, banners, graffiti, and rituals of support no longer express loyalty to a club alone. They have also become a language of protest against unemployment, marginalisation, corruption, and the narrowing of the public sphere.
The stands have consequently evolved into a space parallel to conventional politics: a sphere built not around parties or trade unions, but around horizontal youth networks that are difficult to contain, represent, or absorb. These groups rely more on symbolic forms of resistance than on direct political action. The book even suggests that stadiums have, at certain moments, become arenas of symbolic struggle between a state seeking to monopolise the meaning of patriotism and young people attempting to redefine belonging and citizenship from outside official institutions.
This brings us back to the central question: who is using whom? Have Arab regimes managed to make football a safe substitute for politics and to redirect social energy into seasonal sporting celebrations? Or have societies themselves repurposed the game, turning it into a space through which they can breathe, regenerate solidarity, and reclaim part of the public sphere they have lost over the past years?
There may be no conclusive answer yet. The relationship between power and sport, and between society and sport, is too complex to be reduced to a single theory. What is clear, however, is that football in the Arab world is no longer just a game. It has become a mirror of deeper transformations in the Arab public sphere, revealing more clearly than almost any other activity that politics does not disappear when its doors are closed. It changes its language, tools, and locations.
This may be why the match is no longer played solely within the boundaries of the pitch. It extends far beyond them, into questions of state, society, identity, and the vast emptiness left behind by retreating politics. Sport has entered to fill part of that vacuum—or perhaps merely to reveal that it is still waiting to be filled.