Perspective: Morocco's soccer team represents a long-overdue liberation movement at the World Cup.
For most of the time that we’ve heard of it, soccer’s World Cup has been, in name and reality, a misnomer. It wasn’t about the world, per se. It was about Europe — and its colonialization of the world.Italy. France. Spain. Portugal. England, of course. And all the colonies and places to which Europe exported the game, not in some noble effort but to impose European aesthetics and sensibilities. In South American countries including, most notably, Brazil and Argentina.
Morocco freed itself from Spanish rule in 1956 after 44 years. On Tuesday, it represented a new liberation movement in global sport.For as Michael Murphy, a Queen’s University political scientist reminded in a recent paper on soccer in Africa, the game was “introduced into the African colonies by the Western capitalist colonial powers in an effort to make manageable the populations of the newly conquered territories.
: “The ghosts of globalization, of forced migration, the refugee, the aspirant postcolonial type seeking greener, that is, European, pastures, whose sons are now wearing the colors of what was once an imperial flag. The contradictions abound.After all, it is rare that a European pummels his European birthplace, though it has happened. The great German striker Miroslav Klose was born in Poland.
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