Responses to Politics and Sex in Football Fans' Antagonistic Discourse in Cyprus
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Dora Valkanova's Comments to Stelios Stylianou's Opening Statement
PART I
The study you describe, Stelios, sounds really interesting and pulls focus on critical questions surrounding football (i.e. soccer) fandom. In response to your first question: “...to what extent this happens elsewhere too. Do football fans use historically and politically sensitive derogatory (perhaps anti-patriotic, extremist, vulgar, etc.) terms to pique their opponents in the course of a symbols game?” I would say that what you describe sounds very similar to aspects of soccer fandom I have observed in Bulgaria.
Historically, Bulgarian soccer fandom has tended to concentrate around two main teams: CSKA & Levski, which are both based in the capital city Sofia. The rivalry between fans of both teams has tended to be intense and antagonistic. I had general knowledge of the use of swastikas in particular by Bulgarian soccer fans so as I was processing your opening statement, I did a brief search online on recent uses of swastikas and Nazi symbols by soccer fans in Bulgaria. As I anticipated, news and online media articles on the subject were readily available and they speak of a persistent and pervasive problem with the use of Nazi symbolism by soccer fans. Examples range from national games involving the two soccer clubs I mention above to European level (i.e. UEFA) games. CSKA was fined 37,500 Bulgarian levs ($22,373) in 2015 over the raising of a flag with an inscribed swastika during a game with another Bulgarian team (Lokomotif Sofia). In 2017 Levski was also fined 37,500 Bulgarian levs for a swastika banner and an additional 4,000 Bulgarian levs ($2,386) for thrown objects (including stones and small fire crackers), which reached the bench of the opposing team—CSKA.
To cite a more recent and more virulent example, a 2019 Bulgaria-England game, played in Sofia was halted twice after British players were subjected to racist abuse by Bulgarian fans, which included Nazi salutes and monkey chanting. Pavel Klymenko—Eastern Europe’s coordinator of FARE (Football Against Racism in Europe)—has reportedly named Levski as “one of the worst clubs” in terms of “neo-Nazi infiltration.” According to the previously hyperlinked article, in 2014 Bulgarian fans made their racism even more explicit with a banner that read: “Say yes to racism”—a pointed response to UEFA’s “Say No To Racism” campaign. As Klymenko notes: “The scale of the problem is quite massive.”
I also did a brief search in r/Bulgaria for threads on the use of swastikas in Bulgarian public space. I found two such threads, in which redditors generally express their disapproval of the trend. In the first thread (titled “We need this in Bulgaria”) one of the redditors expresses doubt that those paining swastikas on public property even “connect the swastikas with anything,” (i.e. specific ideology) and hypothesizes that to them it looks “funny and cool.” In the second thread a redditor under the alias Clowns_Sniffing_Glue comments (in Bulgarian): “Hahaha. If Hitler were alive, his moustache would curl up from laughter. What idiots in Bulgaria think that they are pure enough to be part of the Superior White Race, the Aryan Family? And we’re not even gonna get into whether these jerks are better than minorities and people of color… Shitpants.”
I should re-emphasize here that I selectively cite examples from a brief online search—examples related to the two main soccer teams in Bulgaria (CSKA and Levski) as well as examples of reactions to the use of swastikas I found on Reddit, which exemplify different positions. Beyond the cited examples the instances of Bulgarian soccer fans’ use of swastikas and Nazi symbolism during games are too many to list here and they require detailed study and analysis. It is clear, however, especially from the 2019 game against England (and similar examples from UEFA level games from the last decade) that the use of these symbols goes beyond attempts to egg fans of the opposite team on, to provoke, to transgress, to engage in adversarial and antagonizing discourse. The antagonizing discourse that we might anticipate around games that encourage an us—vs—them mentality in Bulgaria is also intertwined with racism and the use of Nazi symbolism expresses that entanglement.
Here it should be noted that racism in soccer fandom is not unique to Bulgaria or to Eastern Europe. Rather, it is endemic in European soccer. To cite another recent example, this past summer England’s black players were subjected to racist abuse after the Euro 2020 final, which England lost to Italy, 3-2. In that sense, I would anticipate the use of Nazi symbolism specifically (swastikas, the Nazi salute, etc.) by soccer fans to be entangled with that racism. Since Cyprus is part of UEFA, I would be curious how it relates to the larger issues of racism in European soccer and how the use of Nazi symbolism by Cypriot fans specifically relates (or does not relate) to that.
In regard to your second question: if the hegemonic masculinity that gains articulation around soccer persists or is declining, I think that an interesting way of addressing that question indirectly might be to interview fans familiar with the tv show Ted Lasso (2020--). Ted Lasso is a comedy-drama that uses the tv serial form to strategically engage with the toxic aspects of hegemonic masculinity (i.e. heteronormativity, misogyny, racism, etc.) that are widely known to be characteristic of European soccer clubs. Studying the audience for that show--especially those who overlap with soccer fandom in Cyprus—could reveal interesting insights that together with other data provide a snapshot of how soccer fandom is changing.
PART II
You make a number of excellent points, Stelios, and in this response I would like to address some of them and also echo some of the issues Nyasha raised in his thorough-going analysis above.
As you point out, “we seek to make empirical generalizations only through rigorous data collection and analysis.” I am not deeply acquainted with the literature on racism in soccer specifically, however, while preparing my notes for this response I came across the UK organization Kick It Out (originally established as Let’s Kick Out Racism in Football in 1993 “in response to widespread calls from clubs, players and fans to tackle racist attitudes existing within the game,” (Kick It Out, About Us). One aspect of their work is collecting annual statistical data and conducting analysis about the status of racism in soccer, which are then used by FARE (Football Against Racism in Europe), UEFA, and FIFA. According to Kick It Out’s 2018/2019 report, “discrimination in both professional and grassroots football rose significantly in the 2018/2019 season with reports up by 32% percent” (Kick It Out, 2018/2019). Online racist abuse is also on the rise with “some social media platforms (including Twitter, Instagram and Facebook) experiencing an increase of 600-900%” (Kassimeris, 2021, p. 37). It is precisely the increased incidences of racism among soccer fans that prompted UEFA to create Guidelines for Match Officials that enable referees to suspend a game in instances of persistent racist incidents on the field. Those guidelines, known as the three-step protocol, were used in the England-Bulgaria game previously mentioned.
Thus, while the prevalence and persistence of racism in Cypriot soccer may be declining as you suggest, it must be acknowledged that the trend across the wider European continent and globally is reversed. That in turn seems to lend support to the cultural hypothesis you mention above, namely—that soccer mediates broader socio-cultural structures and phenomena. As racist and discriminatory rhetoric increased in the wake of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election (according to data provided by the Brookings Institution, “support for the 2016 campaign was clearly driven by racism, sexism, and xenophobia” (Kassimeris, 2021, p. 44))—both in the U.S. and globally, the cultural hypothesis would suggest that soccer would mediate, or as you claim—make manifest—these broader social trends.
If we thus accept that the cultural hypothesis is operative here, we would expect soccer to make manifest the broader rise in discriminatory, racist, and anti-immigrant rhetoric we’ve seen in recent years. This in turn begs the question of how does soccer mediate these broader trends? As part of my brief research for this response I flipped through Christos Kassimeris’ Discrimination in Football (2021). One aspect of discrimination that he discusses is racism, about which he claims:
“[r]acism in footballs does reflect discrimination in society, yet it is more noticeable because the anonymity of the mass that is the supporters on the stands of any given football stadium allows any one fan to engage in concerted racist activities short of any sense of apprehension. Yet, not all football leagues experience the same degree of racial discrimination for much relates to their political, socio-historical, and cultural background.” (pp. 51-52)
Some of the points that Nyasha makes, specifically that there have been cases “where racist fans in the stands direct monkey chants at black players in the rival team EVEN though the racists’ own team has black players in it” echo Kassimeris’. The latter speaks of “the very likely possibility of ‘fans who racially abuse the black players who play for their opponents, yet cheer those who play for their own side,’ although ‘the ‘acceptance’ of black players and spectators by certain white fans can be contingent upon them demonstrating allegiance to the ‘right’ club or team’” (p. 33). In that sense, racist abuse becomes an instrument in the larger toolkit for abuse of players of the opposite team. Kassimeris further explains:
“[...] abusing players of the opposition is part and parcel of football culture. A black football player defending our club’s values is one of ‘us’ and is, therefore, celebrated for his performance and overall heroics. By contrast, the black footballer playing for our rivals is one of “them” and, if targeted would invite racist abuse to affect his performance” (pp. 33-34).
I believe this goes to support your argument, Stelios, regarding soccer’s inherently antagonistic discourse, however, going back to Nyasha’s point, an analysis of power is critical in this case. While the ostensible objective of the deployment of racist discourse (chants, monkey noises, throwing of bananas, etc) might be to annoy, distract, and/or antagonize the players of the opposite team, it goes without saying that these “instruments” have unintended consequences as well, namely—the very real dehumanization of nonwhite players, which they carry with them off the playing field.
That leads me to my next point about the framing/conceptualization of political symbols as an analytical category, which again aligns with Nyasha’s analysis above. Can the deployment of all political symbols be treated equally? Would the peace sign be considered a political symbol within the context of the study and, if so, can it be regarded on the same level as a swastika? Can it be said that as weaponized by fans to pique the opponent’s team and fan groups, these symbols stand apart from their broader cultural and historical meanings? I somewhat grappled with this question when thinking about Bulgarian fans’ use of explicitly racist language and imagery.
I suspect that to some extent Bulgarian fans’ use of such imagery and symbolism is intended as an act of defiance towards UEFA and their anti-racism campaign—an act of defiance performed in the spirit of soccer’s broader culture of antagonism that you describe in your opening statement. To briefly illustrate what I mean, I would point to this Reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/bulgaria/comments/q8sz2k/lets_upset_the_foreigners/ titled “Let’s upset the foreigners,” which features a picture of a packaged Bulgarian chocolate pastry (I believe they have been produced and sold in Bulgaria for decades) that would roughly translate in English as the n-word. The discourse that emerges from the comments to the thread is the idea that Bulgarians have had this pastry for decades, its name stands apart from and is completely divorced from the U.S. context, within which the n-word came to stand for racist attitudes and meanings, therefore, “the foreigners” have no right to come here and tell us that the name of this pastry is racist; in doing so, they show that they are ignorant of Bulgarian culture and history, within which the n-word does not have the charge, meaning, and connotations it has in the English language. There is a rejection here of what is perceived as Western—and specifically U.S.—logics of race and racism being “forced” onto the Bulgarian context. In a way, anti-racism itself becomes part and parcel with or enfolded into the broader phenomenon of U.S. cultural imperialism and defied under that pretext (as another patronizing overreach of an interfering and edifying West). What this discourse ultimately does is provide a cover for legitimately existing racism in Bulgaria by claiming some sort of an exception from the U.S. context. I suspect that this discourse is also involved to some extent in the use of swastikas and racist imagery whereby fans believe that they are challenging a Western conceptualization of racism that does not apply to them so all they are doing is “upsetting the foreigners.” Thus, the East-West Cold War divide (which in turn overlays deeper historical and cultural bifurcations) becomes operative in the way symbols are invested with meaning.
To return to my previous point, however, I wonder if all political symbols can be treated as equally problematic. This touches again on Nyasha’s point about the specific culture and history of Cyprus, which he so thoroughly laid out and how symbols interact with those.
Lastly, I wanted to address your point about CSKA in Bulgaria, its communist roots and how that communist history of the club is inconsistent with the current right-wing attitudes demonstrated by its fans. This is a great question, which in itself touches on the peculiarities of the communist regime and its administration in Bulgaria. Succinctly, communist ideology, while strictly enforced by the state and its institutions was only superficially embraced by the broader population for the purposes of career advancement and avoiding brushes with the police state. Thus, beyond a minority of party operatives who were devout believers in the communist cause and subscribed to its philosophical principles, broad swaths of the population were skeptical of the communist regime and saw it as an imperial extension of the Soviet Union, which wanted to keep its satellite states as a buffer zone against the West. The superficial allegiance to communism quickly collapsed after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the communist regime in Bulgaria the following year. CSKA’s affiliation with communist ideology can thus be said to have been in name only, which is why we are not seeing a continued legacy of that ideology in the current administration of the club or the behavior of its fan base. For a more detailed discussion specifically about the status of communist ideology in Bulgaria between 1945-1989, I would recommend Holly Case’s interview with Bulgarian scholar and journalist Dimiter Kenarov for Cornell University’s Blog: “East-Central Europe Past and Present” (Case, 2014).
References:
Case, H. (Host). (2014, December 29). Interview with Dimiter Kenarov. [Audio Podcast Episode]. In East-Central Europe Past and Present. Cornell University. https://ecommons.cornell.edu/handle/1813/39026
Kassimeris, C. (2021). Discrimination in football. New York, NY: Routledge.
Kick It Out. (2022, January 15). About us. https://www.kickitout.org/about-us
Kick It Out. (2022, January 15). 2018/2019. https://www.kickitout.org/faqs/2018-19
Nyasha Mboti's Comments to Stelios Stylianou's Opening Statement
I am fascinated by your construct, Stelios, of football fans’ antagonistic discourse, particularly in the context of an island fractured by heritages of empire and colonialism, and historically divided by politics and opposing political ideologies, but also where football dominates conversation for most men. Antagonism is a common trope in such a context. When I was making notes for this conversation, I read somewhere about the joke that if you want to know a Cypriot’s politics on the island, you just have to ask them which club they support. In my remarks, I am going to dwell on aspects of antagonistic discourse with illustration from the Nicosia derby between AC Omonia and APOEL FC (arguably the biggest event on Cyprus’s sporting calendar), but also Limassol’s three major football clubs (Apollon, AEL and Aris), as well as Anorthosis Famagusta, and so on. Please note that I have not proofread these notes, so expect some spelling and grammatical errors, and some uses of word choice that could be better. Also, I was writing as ideas came to me, so there is no unifying structure. The consistent thread is merely the theme of antagonistic discourse.
If I am correct that the Latin agonia means “a struggle for victory”, and agōn is a “contest”, where both sides are competing, therefore both sides are equally antagonistic towards each other. So, for instance, APOEL fans are antagonistic towards Omonia fans, and vice versa. There is a kind of equivalence and, even, tit for tat. Both are at odds. Both give as good as they get. That is, in as far as antagonism marks that which is mutually oppositional, antagonistic behaviour should be framed as flowing from both sides in a kind of tit-for-tat. In a sense, the mutually oppositional division of Cyprus into pro-Greek South and pro-Turkey North should perhaps be seen as expressing this ongoing, nested play of agonia and agōn.
But there seems to me to be a contradiction in the sense of two sides being mutually antagonistic if we consider the fact that, at least in writings on Greek drama, the agonist is a hero who is attacked in the play by an antagonist, meaning that antagonistic discourse opposes and disrupts normative discourse. “Anti” certainly means “against”. In this sense, you have usefully talked about the outgroup, which can be seen as embodying the “anti” or, even, the “Other”. So there has to be an outgroup and an in-group, those who belong and those who don’t. They cannot both equally belong or both be equally centred. One group is marked by alterity. One has to be disruptive of what is settled, and do so from the margins.
If we consider that the Greek prōtagōnistēs refers to an actor who plays the chief or first part (protos = first) in a story or drama, then the anti + agōnistēs is the disruptive rival and competitor to the prōtagōnistēs or principal character. So, while it may be fairly easy to see the North and South of Cyprus as mutually antagonistic, it may be difficult to see both sets of rival fans in a football context as locked in relationship that is mutually antagonistic. There must, rather, be one side dishing out the antagonism, and another receiving it, and perhaps the receiving side turning the tables, and the giving side transformed into receivers of antagonism, but with the back-and-forth never settling into equivalence. Instead, it is an either/or. Either one is receiving or one is giving antagonistic discourse – because there has to be protagonist who is in the chief position, whom the rival seeks to antagonise, perhaps from a position of disadvantage and weakness.
After all, it may be difficult to see how equally matched rival fan bases can be antagonistic. Where they are equally matched, then they would simply cancel each other out, and may opt for coopetition rather than competition (Coopetition is the act of cooperation between competing companies). For a “policy” of antagonism to be sustained, I think, there has to be something that the “other” side lacks, or is said to lack. In other words, I have a passing interest in finding out not only what it is exactly that antagonistic discourse targets, but also what provokes antagonism. Where antagonism is concerned, it seems to me that you can only antagonise the antagonisable or to antagonise that which is available to be antagonised. It seems that a sense of competition and rivalry is necessary for antagonistic discourse to take root.
It is difficult, for instance, to imagine the kind of sustained antagonistic discourse from Aris, the least successful – though the oldest – of the three Limassol football clubs (it has no silverware). Only when Aris wins something (thus perhaps actively preventing others from winning it) can they become properly antagonizable – and antagonising. An also-ran, or a punching bag, offers little in the way of provoking contest. They are just a door mat, rather than a proper antagonist in an agonia and agōn. In Zimbabwe, the antagonistic discourse between the two biggest clubs, Dynamos and Highlanders, is driven by many factors, such as the clubs’ location in the two biggest cities (Harare and Bulawayo respectively), putative ethnic identification (“Shona” vs. Ndebele), and the historical fractures occasioned by such ethnic identification. History is always important. However, such a list of causes and factors in themselves cannot sustain antagonistic discourse. Instead, antagonistic discourse seems to be at its sharpest and highest when both rival clubs are at their strongest, and pose significant challenges to the each other’s plans for domination.
In other words, for antagonist discourse to remain sharp and usable, the rivals must be strong or make a show of being strong. When one rival is not doing well over a long period, and ceases to be a threat, the nature of the antagonistic discourse – at least in the Zimbabwean case – is less sharp. Success on the pitch, it seems, is the core factor that sharpens antagonistic discourse. As such, if we agree that antagonistic discourse constitutes a kind “provoked, provoking discourse” (it triggers and is triggered), it may mean that antagonistic discourse exists in a constant polarity with its normative opposite whose normativity provokes antagonism in the opposition.
Can the one in power be as equally antagonistic towards the one without power as much as the one without power is antagonistic towards the one with power? Or antagonism lies more with the rival who is increasingly on the margins? So, the antagonist would be the one who, in Stelios’ account of the game dimension, uses historically and politically sensitive derogatory terms and anti-patriotic, extremist, vulgar terms to disrupt and unsettle the protagonist’s settled or normative discourse. That is, this disruption locates the antagonist in the “outgroup”. However, since antagonistic discourse itself seems to be rather unstable, each side may consider itself the patriotic side while assigning to its rivals the negative semantic prosody of “anti”. If the power is well matched, can we still call it antagonistic discourse? Interestingly, in an “us and them” classification, “us” is the protagonist and “them” are the antagonists – the ones who antagonise us for being what we are. As such, the identification of an antagonist remains unstable and arbitrary.
A further point is that antagonism also functions in terms of two poles, where one thing acts, and another counteracts. This suggests that antagonistic discourse is not itself negative. It can be a good or at least productive thing, particularly where it counteracts something that is harmful. In pharmaceutical discourse, for instance, antagonistic substances are those that counteract the effects of another drug or substance. For instance, an anticarcinogen is antagonistic to a carcinogen. In Stelios’ account, it seems that the emphasis is on antagonistic discourse being negative and harmful. Can the account of antagonistic discourse be expanded to include beneficial acts as well, rather than just the negative and harmful?
You put emphasis on “a second way in which football fans produce and take part in the antagonistic discourse”, which you state is the application of “the us vs. them model”. In the “us vs. them” model, you point out that what some fans are or what they claim to be or identify with is defined in binary opposition to what they are not, what they detest and what they condemn. I wish to point out that “what they are not” is not necessarily or always what you detest; it could also be what you envy, what you would like to be but cannot be in the current circumstances for a variety of reasons.
One notable view popularised by Frantz Fanon in his seminal essay “The Pitfalls of National Consciousness” (In The Wretched of the Earth) is, for instance, that the opposition of some African nationalists to colonialism could have been because they wanted a seat on the table; as such they wanted to be like their colonisers. That is, they did not really detest colonialism. Rather, they just detested being kept away from the high table. Once they got into power, they immediately mimicked the oppressor and reproduced his ways. The oppositional positioning lapsed into disuse.
I have seen, in football, cases where rival fans are antagonistic towards a player who is in one team but who would celebrate him if he signs for their team. The same fans may even loathe that same player again if he leaves their club and/or signs for a rival. While rare, an APOEL player can move to Omonia and vice versa. In such cases, it can be expected that fans will shift from antagonising a player to cheering him if the player moves to “our side”, and vice versa. As such, it seems that antagonistic discourse is not stable and cannot be stable. It is not clear, ultimately, what holds antagonistic discourse together. There have even been bizarre cases where racist fans in the stands direct monkey chants at black players in the rival team EVEN though the racists’ own team has black players in it (whom they cheer or at least do not abuse as they abuse the black players on the rival team).
What role, if any, does envy play in antagonistic discourse? In Cyprus, with Omonia no longer the power it once was in the 1970s and 1980s, it’s power (interestingly, coincidentally) waning with the end of the Cold War, and APOEL now serial winners (regularly playing in Europe), with more money and linked to the ruling DISY, could it be that what Omonia fans detest in APOEL could be something which they could be glad to have if it were them in a position of power, financial success and ascendancy? Omonia last won the league title in 2010 (when the communist party was in power, and were supported by then president and Omonia fan Demetris Christofias). (In Limassol, also, AEL was successful before Apollon came on the scene).
Could the Omonia fans turn around and celebrate the very things that they now seem to detest and condemn in their rivals? Could it be a case of sour grapes driving some elements of antagonistic discourse? Would Omonia fans refuse to have the money or success that APOEL now have? It seems fair to speculate that Omonia fans would have been OK with creating history by becoming the first Cypriot team to reach the quarter-finals of the European Champion League (as APOEL did in 2012) and to be the only local team to reach the group stage three times. There is nothing (directly) antagonizable about (the success of) playing in Europe’s premier competitions. The fans would probably be OK with the money and the recognition as well.
Recently, fans of Newcastle in England were celebrating the coming of “oil money” into their club from new Saudi owners, despite the fact that the influx of “oil money” has sometimes been seen as corrupting football in the sense of “buying” success. In response, some fans reason that, at least, football-corrupting money brings success on the pitch and so they can live with that kind of corrupted football instead of constant struggles on the pitch. They’d rather be corrupt and successful than be honest, broke and relegated.
Anyway, a consideration of fans’ shifting discourses suggests that antagonistic discourse itself alters and shape-shifts, and does not have singular or monolithic, fixed motivations. If the city of Limassol is on the margins of Nicosia, and plays second fiddle in terms of titles and supporters, the outcome could be that the football dominance of the city of Nicosia causes the Limassol teams to direct their antagonistic discourse, in a retaliatory sense, towards the dominant capital city teams. The reality, however, is that supporters of teams such as AEL and Apollon, seem to target a common dominant enemy from Nicosia, APOEL, differently to the way they target Omonia.
Thus, supporters of AEL, which won the league in 2012 (the last team other than APOEL to do so), have engaged in ongoing antagonistic discourse against APOEL for different reasons to those motivating Omonia fans to be antagonistic towards APOEL. Hence, AEL supporters, like those of Apollon, coalesce around a “differentiating antagonistic discourse” against the two Nicosia “giants”, with the worst antagonism reserved for APOEL. That is, AEL have reserved intense antagonism for only one of the Nicosia teams – APOEL. During a title decider in 2014 with AEL, the match was controversially abandoned following the alleged use of a “pistol-fired missile” directed at the APOEL dugout. The match was replayed at an empty neutral venue, with APOEL victorious, although the Cyprus football authorities then cancelled the result and awarded APOEL a 3-0 win anyway.
Fans of Apollon, who have won the Cypriot Cup three times in the last few years, have also found APOEL more antagonisable than other rivals. Thus, in 2016, an Apollon firework was fired across the running track behind the goal directly into a densely populated section of the APOEL support. Despite winning the match 2-0, Apollon were forced to play their next three matches in an empty stadium. The fact that the antagonistic discourse of Limassol supporters against the capital city teams actually targets APOEL almost exclusively suggests that the more dominant a club is (thus a constant feature in competitions for silverware), the more it becomes the target of antagonistic discourse. In England, I have seen Chelsea fans and Arsenal fans attacking each other (via song), and then “uniting” to attack Tottenham fans. However, Tottenham last won any silverware in 2008, and are the least successful of the three clubs, although their new stadium rivals Arsenal’s and is far better than Chelsea’s old Stamford bridge. Some fans claim to hate certain rival fans more than they hate other rival fans, suggesting that there are degrees of antagonistic discourse. Still, the point is that I do not think that we can definitively know all the reasons and all the motivations behind, say, AEL, Apollon and Omonia fans’ antagonistic discourse towards APOEL fans. The controversy in 2017, when state-run broadcaster Cyta were willing to pay for the television rights of APOEL’s Champions League qualifier away to Viitorul but not Apollon’s Europa League qualifier in Aberdeen, could be, for instance, valid motivation of a sense of injustice for Apollon’s supporters.
Not all antagonistic discourse is equal. Some of it, it seems, is more intense and long-lasting than other kinds of antagonistic discourse. It may also be triggered by different things, some of which are felt more keenly than others, and some having a longer pedigree than others, and so on. Considering that not all fans may express the same antagonistic sentiments, or the same antagonistic sentiments with the same intensity, there could also be scope for differentiating even within the antagonistic discourse of fans of the same team. Perhaps antagonistic discourse exists on a continuum rather than a binarity?
For instance, it may be that APOEL’s AU79 right-wing, ultra-nationalist, fan group, which believes strongly in unification with Greece (the enosis concept) actually express a brand of ultra-antagonistic discourse as opposed to the “usual” antagonistic discourse of other ordinary APOEL fans? If, perhaps, most APOEL fans are nationalists, and pro-Greece, it is not likely that all APOEL fans are AU79 types. The shortlived success of the ultra-nationalist Golden Dawn party in Greece, seeing some electoral support from 2010 to 2019, and advancing the old Megali concept of a Greek Empire which seeks – among other things – to incorporate Cyprus, shows what we have always suspected: that the extremists may not be in the majority.
The same consideration applies to Omonia’s fiercely left-wing Gate 9 anti-nationalist fan group which espouses a single united Cypriot state. They are not representative of all Omonia fans. Apollon’s blue and white colours may signify a pro-Greece positioning, but they are widely regarded as sitting in the centre of the political spectrum, while Anorthosis Famagusta’s blue and white signified a pro-Greece position that is far to the right off Apollon’s. Apollon’s Gate 1 fan group also has appreciable pro-union support. In the 2008 election, around 2,000 Apollon supporters decided to forgo their vote, although this was in direct protest at the supposed cronyism of the Cypriot Football Association (this is another notable example of how politically extreme football can be in Cyprus). Whilst slightly more political than AEL, Apollon are not defined by their radical beliefs in the way that, for instance, APOEL or Anorthosis Famagusta are. (Anorthosis are the other traditionally right-wing club in Cyprus).
I read somewhere that AEL’s Gate 3 fan group have adopted a rare apolitical position (although there are some left-wing elements within their support). Thus, during the presidential election in 2008, over 400 voting slips were allegedly spoilt by being marked simply for “AEL” rather than for any of the political candidates running in the election. Many of Gate 3’s street tags may be seen accompanied by anarchist symbols.
Thus, there could be scope for continuously differentiating antagonistic discourse itself, and allowing more nuance.
It seems, too, that antagonistic discourse can bypass the “us vs. them” binarity and find locus in sites of negotiation. An interesting example of this would be how, in 2014, when the Cypriot government introduced proposals requiring biometric identification of everyone entering a football stadium in the form of ID cards (those with criminal records would be forbidden from entering), representatives of every major fan group in Cyprus, including Gate 1 and Gate 3 – but not including, interestingly, APOEL’s AU79 (who chose to stage their own protest) – gathered at the parliament building in Nicosia under one banner, where they put forward a unified peaceful protest.
Is there a sense in which antagonistic discourse is in fact, strategic, or strategically antagonistic? The different clubs from different cities – again with the notable exception of APOEL – were willing to put their antagonistic discourse aside and work together when the situation demanded it and when threatened by what they regarded as a common enemy. It seems that APOEL, at least in the 2014 example of the ID card protest, was the exception to this strategic setting aside of antagonistic discourse. It might also be that APOEL is the club that all the other clubs’ fans love to hate, and they can set aside their differences as long as it is not with APOEL. What could be behind such “specialised” formations of antagonistic discourse?
So how exactly does the “us/them” binarity play out where the rival teams would accept happily what the other side enjoys? I do not think that the source of Omonia’s antagonism towards APOEL is because APOEL have comparably fewer fans or are not people centred, as this would not count as antagonistic discourse (since this is an absence rather than an existing thing to detest). The identity of Omonia as having more fans and being more people-centred than APOEL does not in itself directly counteract the reality that APOEL are now serial winners (compared to Omonia), materially successful, successful on the field and with more money. One can still have more fans and more money at the same time. Omonia could be people centred and still enjoy being serial winners also, if they could have both. These elements are not mutually exclusive.
If it is true that in Cyprus one knows your politics from the team you support, is there recognition, within antagonistic discourse, that what is going in is more than just a football game? That is, how is antagonistic discourse in football fandom an emotive proxy for a general “policy” of mutual opposition in Cyprus? What role, if any, do Graeco-Turkish relations, and the Graeco-Turkish schism, for instance, play in fanning antagonistic discourse? Does the fact that it is nearly 50 years since the unhealed division of the island into a Turkish-held north and Greek Cypriot south suggest a waning salience of history or its continuation, evolution and metamorphosis? What sort of role does the unfinished business of history and the past in Cyprus play in provoking antagonistic discourse and in shaping its form, style and content?
The account that you have given, Stelios, seems to regard antagonistic discourse as non-serious in that it merely seeks to annoy and irritate the other side, rather than to reflect or entrench a long-lived national schism. But, if it is correct, for instance, that Omonia’s success coincided with the political success of the left in the 1970s when the right was discredited and blamed for the 1974 Turkish invasion (itself triggered by the Greek-engineered coup to unite the island with Greece), and if it can be argued that APOEL has now risen to the top as the right gained favour in Cyprus politics, then it may be a fair expectation that history plays a more salient role in feeding and sustaining antagonistic discourse.
Since the shadow of Greece and Turkey looms large over the rivalry between Omonia and APOEL, for instance, to what extent can antagonistic discourse also be considered to exhibit traits of a proxy conflict? After all, some of the salient divisions directly express the Greece/Turkey division:
• APOEL fans (nationalists) vs Omonia fans (anti-nationalists)
• APOEL = Hellonocentric; espouses Greek identity and ideas
• Omonia = Cypriot-centric; Turkish Cypriots; Turkish-leaning;
• Omonia fans = waving Cyprus flags (Che Guevara t-shirts)
• APOEL fans = waving Greek flags
• Anorthosis Famagusta (blue and white colours)
How deep (or how shallow) does the antagonism that feeds antagonistic discourse run? When APOEL play in Europe, for instance do Omonia fans support them as patriotic Cypriots, or is the domestic dispute extended to Europe as well? When Greece became European champions, did APOEL fans celebrate while Omonia fans were not happy? With Greece failing economically, is there a sense of schadenfreude amongst some of the anti-nationalist football fans in Cyprus?
Does the “us vs. them” schism run so deep that there is no possibility of bridging the breach? Or are there certain shared Cypriot traits that can be seen in both Omonia and APOEL fans alike? For instance, one can talk of the putative Cypriot tendency towards stubbornness – is there reason to believe that both sets of fans have the same shared trait and therefore could be alike in certain senses? In Ireland, fans of Celtic and Rangers may perhaps still be expected to enjoy Irish beer and have certain “Irish traits” that cross the perennial divide. Consider the fact that at one point Omonia and APOEL were once one team until, in 1948, Omonia members and players split from APOEL over politics. If they used to be one club, then perhaps there are some prior shared values that have been buried under more recent animosity? If they used to be one team, to what extent is the antagonistic discourse mere sibling rivalry rather than fratricide?
How much of the antagonistic discourse in Cypriot football is anchored in the deep-level history of “Hellenic-Christian Civilization” vs. “Muslim” (i.e., dating back to Ottoman hegemony over the Hellene), the contest of enosis vs. taksim, and of an internal Cold War (i.e., if the Cold War model cannot be sustained because all major players and guarantors of the 1960 independence – Britain, Turkey and Greece – were all on the “Western” side of the Cold War divide, and Turkey and Greece are both members of NATO, still the Cold War divide may be reprised in the division between the right vs. left, the nationalists vs. the Communists). The divide between Omonia and APOEL seems to be an “internal Cold War” divide between the pro-Western, pro-Greek right and the Communist left. But it seems that it is impossible to entangle the various strands of these deep level histories until one can say which ones are evident in such and such expressions of antagonistic discourse. The clash of enosis and taksim, however, seems most significant from the point of view of the agonia (“a struggle for victory”) and agōn (a “contest”), with the internal Cold War between the right and the communists assisting in sharpening the antagonistic discourse.
Could we speak in terms of higher intensity antagonistic discourse and lower intensity antagonistic discourse, if, say, we consider that the huge rivalry between the Limassol clubs is still not as big as the rivalry with the Nicosia clubs or the rivalry between the Nicosia clubs? Could the expression of antagonistic discourse on many street corners and doorways in Limassol, illustrated by huge 1s and 3s often painted over each other in a contest for prominence, be a form on antagonistic discourse that is more accommodating and banal rather than all-out? We see that, once APOEL come into the picture, the antagonistic discourse with the Limassol teams – especially Apollon and AEL – becomes intense and even settles into iterations of aggression.
A few other talking points:
How is antagonistic discourse distinct from football banter and bragging rights? Do Cypriot rival fans banter and troll each other in addition to antagonistic discourse? Or are football banter and bragging rights elements of antagonistic discourse itself? Banter and bragging rights, however, tend to be friendlier (or at least less hostile) than antagonistic. If an image of a Che Guevara or a swastika is displayed with the prime or sole intention to irritate and pique the opposite team’s fans, rather than to promote what these symbols historically or politically stand for, how is this intention not indicating that antagonistic discourse is harmless banter?
Could you say a bit more about the antagonistic discourse driven by “Gate” fan groups (Gate 9, Gate 1, gate 3 etc.)?
What is the gendered dimension of antagonistic discourse? Kartakoullis, Kriemadis and Pouloukas, in Soccer and Society (2009) have said that 77% of men between 21 and 70 years support a football club. So is antagonist discourse male?
As unification overtures continue to ebb and flow between the North and South, and the infamous Ledra street opens to north-south crossings, does the nature of antagonistic also change or, at least, is it inflected by these ebbs and flows of tension?
Finally, I am interested in “us vs. them”, also, from an apartheid studies (AS) point of view because “us vs. them” is a decimalising operation. The fact that, after the violence of 1963, Turkish Cypriots started living in their own enclaves within Cyprus itself, the expulsions of Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots from North and South, the persistent division between North and South, the existence of the Turkish Cypriot quarter in Nicosia, and the reality and symbolism of Ledra Street and the division of Nicosia by the Green Line, also interests me from the point of view of the Apartheid Studies framework of decimalisation). With the little reading I have done on the so-called “Cyprus Problem” or the “Cyprus Question” as I was preparing notes for this conversation, I have to say that there are some traces and echoes of such persistently irresolvable “Questions” as the Palestinian Question, the Irish Question and, in colonised Africa, the Native Question, and so on. This makes me think that the study of antagonistic discourse in Cyprus has relevance for the global framework of apartheid studies.
Does the performative element of antagonistic discourse in the terraces also include throwing of flares and fireworks, as happened in 2016 when an Apollon firework was fired into a densely populated section of the APOEL support or, like during the title decider in 2014 with AEL, when the match was controversially abandoned following the alleged use of a “pistol-fired missile”, targeted at the APOEL dugout?
Of the two domains of politics and sex that you have identified, that of politics is more readily identifiable, due to the prevalence and visibility of deeply marked ideological formations in Cyprus. However, I wonder if the domain of sex is easily identified in the political domain except as a convenient improvisation to emphasise a political and ideological point. The derogatory language of pussies, fags, pussies, sluts, and bastards, for instance, seems to me to function to humiliate and delegitimise those that may be thought of as “weak” and “sensitive”. If this reading (that sexual insults are improvised) is correct, then the domain of sex is in fact not a separate domain. Instead, it can be read as a subdomain of the domain of politics.
As you correctly point out that in football “scoring involves the physical violation of a designated territory, which conceptually invites penetrative metaphors”, this interpretation accords with rape more than it does with sex. It is a language of violation, not of love-making or enjoyment. As such, I am doubtful that the subdomain of sex makes sense only if contextualized in a heteronormative sexist milieu, specifically one that promotes hegemonic, or otherwise dominant masculinities. That is, unless you are regarding rape to be an element of heteronormativity and hegemonic masculinities. But the pairing or association of sex and rape is a bit of a stretch.
The contests in the domain of politics seem to coalesce around unresolved questions about what is means to be Cypriot. Hence, a number of domains present themselves to the performance of antagonistic discourse:
CYPRUS IS TURKISH (taksim)
CYPRUS IS GREEK (enosis)
CYPRUS IS CYPRIOT (ambivalent, patriotic)
CYPRUS IS --- (ongoing quest for resolution of the “Cyprus Problem”)
These contests can be accommodated in the subdomain of sex, but perhaps if we considered not just sex but rape. Because sex is consensual, it may not be useful in the attempt to interpret the contests outlined above. Rape, on the other hand, can accommodate the often-violent historical schisms that today still sustain antagonistic discourse.
In the game dimension, how do you conclude that rival fans, in their use of political symbols in an auxiliary-instrumental mode, may be trying “to win over the opponent”, instead of keeping the opponent at bay? If the objective is to win over the opponent, won’t this game dimension in itself result in the dissolving of antagonistic discourse? Suppose I succeed in winning over my opponent, then what? Perhaps you can explain further and also illustrate what you mean by “to win over the opponent”. Do Omonia fans try to win over APOEL fans? What for? How? When the “pistol-fired missile” was targeted at the APOEL dugout by AEL fans, leading to the abandonment of the match, or when an Apollon firework was targeted at APOEL fans, was this an attempt to win over the opponent? There seems to be a contradiction when you state that, in the game dimension, “these messages are just convenient and effective means to effectively attack the opponents”. How, then, can one win over an opponent by attacking them?
Whereas in the game dimension that you describe, the historically established meaning of antagonistic messages may be said to have become irrelevant, what exactly makes historical meanings irrelevant? Is it a quest to forget the past or to heal the past or is it just the onset of a tendency towards wilful historical amnesia? Is the irrelevance arising from the fact that this is just a football match? My experience in Zimbabwe is that history remains politically charged, even many decades after an event such as the Gukurahundi genocide that killed thousands in the south of Zimbabwe. Football games between Dynamos and Highlanders are tense events, sometimes flaring up in violence.
I agree with your argument that in the cultural hypothesis what we see and hear in and around football games could be manifestations of underlying normative structures. You identify sexism, heteronormativity, and patriarchy as these underlying normative structures. I wonder, however, why you do not include politics here, or ideology, since Cyprus is visibly ideologically divided, but also since you identify the political domain as being salient alongside the domain of sex. Where does the political domain fit into these three underlying structures of sexism, heteronormativity, and patriarchy? I still need convincing that there is no politics in the underlying normative structures. If anything, politics seems to be the golden thread that cuts through all the other themes. In any case, even if you succeed in making the cultural hypothesis exclude politics, the earlier point you made about the game dimension which makes history and politics irrelevant might also end up making the normative underlying structures irrelevant. Can we eat our cake and still have it? If the game dimension succeeds in making history and politics irrelevant, how does sexism, heteronormativity, and patriarchy survive? Shouldn’t they also be rendered irrelevant by the same process that, in the game dimension, render history and politics irrelevant?
I disagree somewhat with your contention that “Cyprus was a society in the periphery of the East-West antagonism”. I do not think that there is warrant to this claim of Cypriot exceptionalism in geopolitics. The historical evidence seems to suggest that Cyprus was, in fact, at the heart of it. A core reason for this is that Cyprus was, is, and remains a STRATEGIC LOCATION in the Eastern Mediterranean. Let us not forget that this location was the crucial main route to India, then Britain’s most important overseas possession. This mere fact means that it cannot be on the periphery of global geopolitics, of which the East-West antagonism is a part. Consider that the modern “Cyprus question” properly begins (in my view anyway) with the Russo-Turkish War (1877–1878) (the same one after which Bulgaria gets its independence from Turkey) and the Congress of Berlin after which Cyprus was leased to Britain and became an important part of the British Empire. This fact links Cyprus to the events in the Balkans which Dora is looking at because the events in Bulgaria, for instance, centred Russo-Turkish and great power geopolitical contests which involved all of Europe, Russia and Turkey at the centre of which was the question of the “sick man of Europe” (the headache of the imminent breakup of the Ottoman Empire).
In the post-war “agreement”, Britain was going to use Cyprus seemingly to protect the “sick man of Europe” (the Ottoman Empire) against possible Russian aggression. Cyprus would serve the British Empire as a key military base for its colonial routes. Famagusta harbour was completed during the heyday of the British Empire, a strategic naval outpost overlooking the Suez Canal since 1906. There is a clear East-West thread here. So, Cyprus, like Bulgaria, enters the 20th century as a pawn in a “great power” game of exit from one waning empire and entry into another rising empire. Britain used (and later, by extension, NATO) and still uses Cyprus as a military base, retaining the two Sovereign Base Areas of Akrotiri and Dhekelia.
Secondly, I feel that there is scope to retrieve some salient features in Cyprus’ history that may suggest that there is no need to treat Cyprus as exceptional. For instance, the irredentist claims around the incorporation of Cyprus either into Greece or Turkey are reminiscent of the Balkans theme that Dora is examining. After all, the link between Dora’s study of Bulgaria and Stelios study of Cyprus is actually Turkey/Ottoman empire. Cyprus was ceded by the Ottomans to the British, thus inserting Cyprus into the East/West contest perhaps not directly but by inversion. Cyprus seems to be an inverted Bulgaria or an inverted Balkans, but with the same outcomes.
The over three centuries of Ottoman rule of Cyprus between 1571 and 1878 (de jure until 1914), then becoming a British colony (1878/1914) (ceded to Britain by the Ottomans at the Congress of Berlin in 1878), until the Zürich Agreement of 1959, followed by independence of Cyprus (1960) and decolonisation, are, rather than exceptional, mirroring both the Balkans in miniature and also colonial and decolonising Africa, with all attendant fractures, partitions and colonial hangovers. The ceding of Cyprus to Britain by the Ottomans at the Congress of Berlin in 1878 is interesting in its timing and location as it is also very close to the Berlin Conference of 1884 where Africa was sliced up as if it were a cake by European powers. Most African problems begin at this time, in a conference room in Berlin. The independence of Cyprus in 1960 also bears close resemblance to the independence and decolonisation happening around this time in African countries such as Ghana. The problems that followed in the 1970s mirror the problems that followed independence in Africa in countries such as Nigeria, including the scourge of military rule.
I believe that the “Cyprus Problem”, which includes the military rules, coups, social strife, partition and north-south division, is a manifestation of what I would call the delayed “hotness” of the Cold War, best exemplified by what took place in once “non-aligned” Yugoslavia.
My view would be that history is not irrelevant to antagonistic discourse in Cyprus. Rather, it is at its heart.
