Simon Chadwick reminds us that Football has changed even when it plays with familiar tropes - It is interesting given all the American investment in European Football that for the most part (and we saw it again last season at the highest echelons of European football that it is those who feel most entitled to success tend to be the ones that most repeatedly get it because they rarely conform to logic of reason. The new owners of Chelsea think they can extract huge value returns in a relatively short space of time - this might be the case if the Premier League remains strong - but UEFA and the ECA are working together to try and break that - Meanwhile Real and Barca (along with Juve) continue to exercise their own sense of entitlement in the European Courts, while getting their own League (who they spend so much time fighting with) to join in on the battle against nation states owning clubs, conveniently forgetting that is exactly how they have operated in the last 70 years or so. Perhaps they are upset that Man City and PSG are actually making huge strides to catch up on their multi-decade head start
https://medium.com/@simonchadwick_15086 ... 85f20e1a72
QATARI SOFT POWER GETS RAPPED-UP IN FOOTBALL
Professor Simon Chadwick, Emlyon Business School, Paris
As a kid in the 1970s, several of my first experiences watching football in North East England involved me asking my father about a group of fans who looked different to the rest of us. Dressed in Harrington jackets and Fred Perry polo shirts, this Doctor Marten boot wearing clique seemed cooler than everyone else and, in truth, looked more menacing. I can recall my father, who was always a big music fan, explaining something to me about Northern soul and ska music.
These small encounters on cold, English Saturday afternoons nevertheless established a template for my life, which has forever linked football, fashion and music. Across my journey there have been some high points, for example Half Man Half Biscuit’s ‘All I Want for Christmas is a Dukla Prague Away Kit’. There have also been some low points, a baggy shell suit wearing Paul Gascoigne rap collaboration with English folk band Lindisfarne in the 1990s immediately coming to mind.
Yet more recently, the connections between football, music and fashion seem to have moved on from simply being a matter of local sub-cultures, wanting to look good at matches, and listening to the latest music. One reason for this is that there has been a rapid recent convergence of sport, music, fashion and lifestyle, with clubs, brands and others blurring the boundaries between them. However, there also appears to be an additional dimension influencing this convergence — geopolitics.
The French rap industry is one of the biggest and most lucrative in the world, indeed it has become a staple of popular culture in France. To get a flavour of the music being made, a good starting point is the video for this track: ‘Bebeto’ by Guy2Bezbar. After even just ten seconds of watching it, one is left in no doubt about those who are making the music and those at whom it is targeted. Urban, Generation Z consumers; lots of sportswear brands, notably Nike; and laden with culturally iconographic references (for instance, Grand Theft Auto and Michael Jordan are openly referenced).
It’s not until the final scenes of the video that one can definitively conclude that the video is shot in Paris, at which point we get our first sight of a Paris Saint Germain branded jacket. Rather more PSG visibility is apparent in rapper Niska’s track ‘Freestyle PSG’, which is less a rap track than a socio-cultural homage to the French capital city club’s recent excesses. The premise of the video that accompanies this track is all about success, lots of money, big houses and expensive cars.
Such is the apparent power of PSG’s iconography, that it has even spread across La Manche to Britain. Rapper Dave’s 2016 video, ‘Thiago Silva’, not only takes its name from the French club’s then team captain, it is in its entirety a celebration of everything PSG. From the Parc des Princes and its retail store to Nike and the club’s association with Air Jordan, it is clear once more that PSG is all about being young, stylish, urban and cool. If you are still in any doubt about the power of PSG, instead try the video for Sugar MMFK’s track, ‘Trikot von Paris’ (a German shout out to the club).
For a club with a relatively short history (it was established in 1971) to have achieved such status is an amazing feat. Even more so when one considers that for most of the last fifty years, PSG has often languished in the shadows of both its domestic and European rivals. But then in 2011, something significant changed: new owners took over, Qatar Sports Investments (a subsidiary of the state’s Qatar Investment Authority) spending around €100 million on the acquisition. Ever since, the money lavished upon the club has broken records and established PSG as both France’s and one of Europe’s top clubs.
As one drives around Qatar, one often sees banners and posters attached to buildings, upon which are adorned the words ‘Qatar Deserves the Best’. Whether or not one agrees with the sentiment, it is a vision that many Qataris have bought into and a basis upon which PSG as a business is now being built. How else can a forward line of Neymar, M’Bappe and Messi be explained?
French football domination has partly delivered on Brand Qatar’s central proposition, though Champions League Final success has thus far evaded PSG. Nevertheless, the club’s commercial performance has been impressive in the ten years since its acquisition. Back in 2011, PSG was turning over less than €100 million per year. Now, that figure exceeds €600 million per year and it is conceivable that the figure will exceed €1 billion by the end of the decade.
As a rentier state (one that is gas and oil revenue dependent), this money helps to diversify Qatar’s income streams. However, given the country is one of the world’s largest liquified natural gas producers, with more than three hundred years of LNG stocks left, €600 million seems inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. Which implies that there are other motives for the country’s ownership of PSG.
One reason could be vanity — QSI’s chairman Nasser Al-Khelaifi wouldn’t be the first person in history to have bought a football club for this reason. Also, the Gulf region is often characterised by mimicry; if one nation does something, then others follow. It is therefore worth remembering that by the time Qatar bought PSG, Abu Dhabi had already owned Manchester City for three years.
However, it seems more apparent that Qatar’s engagement with the French club is for geopolitical purposes, the signing of Neymar being evidence of this. Back in 2017, PSG didn’t just break the world record transfer fee paid for a player when it signed the Brazilian, it obliterated it. By paying €222 million, the sum more than doubled what Manchester United had paid the previous year to Juventus for Paul Pogba.
Given the prevailing transfer market conditions at that time, there was no need for PSG to do what it did. However, the important contextual detail is that several of Qatar’s near neighbours, including regional powerhouse Saudi Arabia, had just instigated a diplomatic boycott of Qatar and were intent on economically and politically isolating the country. In response, government in Doha wanted to send a signal that it was prepared to fight its rivals and had the resources to do so.
But there was still more to the matter than this. At the time, Neymar was arguably the best player around hence by signing him, Qatar was also signalling to the world that it deserves the best whilst at the same time providing a means through which people across the world could engage with the country. As Saudi Arabia threatened to dig a ditch between the two countries and fill it with nuclear waste, Qatar was signing a leading exponent of the beautiful game in order to entice the world.
Rather than being aggressive or coercive, government in Doha instead chose to play a game of attraction. In simple terms, the former is concomitant with hard power, the latter with soft power. What Qatar did through its signing of the Brazilian player was an attempt to influence the behaviour of others by using the power of attraction. Whether he has realised it or not, Neymar was (and remains) an instrument of soft power, deployed by the Qataris to secure a strategic and competitive advantage over its rivals.
Four years on and QSI were at it again, last summer signing Lionel Messi from FC Barcelona, thereby adding to PSG’s roster of Les Galactiques. Of course, we’ve already been told that Qatar deserves the best, but there’s additional soft power value in Messi. At the end of 2022, Qatar hosts the FIFA World Cup, the culmination of a national project that has been fifteen years in the making. If Messi can help PSG lift the Champions League trophy this year as well, then Qatari soft power will be greatly enhanced.
Football is the world’s favourite game and here is a very small, geographically vulnerable state that is centre-stage in promoting it. The essence of soft power is that it helps countries to convince others that they are just like you. In Qatar’s case, this is very important; it is only fifty years since the country ceased to be a British protectorate, a period during which many people across the world may well have asked ‘who?’, ‘what?’ or ‘where?’. For decades, the country was anonymous to many across the world. Now it isn’t, nor do many people remain in any doubt about who Qatar is or what the country stands for.
PSG, Neymar, Messi, and being deserving of and representing the best is a powerful proposition for any nation brand. Yet Qatar’s soft power credentials are being further burnished by this year’s hosting of the World Cup, football’s most prestigious competition. Despite prevailing stereotypes, especially amongst football fans in Europe, there is a local football culture thus the tournament provides another opportunity for this country of only three million people to tell the world again that it wants the same things as we do.
In its quest for legitimacy, however, Qatar sometimes appears to have — using an English phrase — ‘bitten off more than it can chew’. From the outset, its bid to host the 2022 World Cup has been mired in controversy. Concerns about the bidding processes for the 2018 and 2022 iterations of the event quickly became synonymous with FIFA corruption and ultimately led to the ‘House of Blatter’s’ downfall.
Later, rights groups began expressing their worries about the treatment, sometimes deaths, of migrant workers. It remains to be definitively established how many such workers have actually died, either in Qatar generally or whilst working specifically on World Cup projects, though this issue remains a millstone around the neck of government in Doha. Furthermore, whilst some concessions have been made towards promoting LGBTQ+ rights (for instance, organisers will permit rainbow symbols to be displayed in stadiums during the World Cup), Qatar remains a country in which conservative Islamic values are often vigorously upheld.
All of which would appear to stand in stark contrast to the macho bravado and largesse evident in the video for Niska’s ‘Freestyle PSG’ video. This is about as far removed from concerns about migrant construction workers as it is possible to get. For a Qatari domestic audience, the challenge ahead for government is to somehow reconcile traditional beliefs with a desire for modernity, especially amongst younger members of society. Overseas, the target audience and messages being communicated are of an entirely different nature.
PSG’s image cultivation emphasises an aesthetic that appeals to diverse urban communities, for whom football, rap music and fashion are important, thereby helping strengthen the soft power of Brand Qatar. Government in Doha wants to convince people that it wants the same things as they do and, of course, they all want the best. This means that when young generations of fans look at, think about or act in response to Qatar, they don’t see labour market exploitation or the suppression of human rights. In fact, they probably don’t see anything other than ‘cool’. PSG may not have achieved the ultimate European prize on-the-field, but Qatar is nevertheless winning over Generation Z audiences.
For Dr Marten’s in 1970’s Middlesbrough, read Nike Air Jordan in downtown Paris, 2022. Perhaps some things never change, maybe football, fashion and music have always had a symbiotic relationship. Equally, one imagines that Paris’ Generation Z population is as proud of its city and its club as I was of my town and my club, back when I lived at home. What has changed however is that my engagement with Boro back then was a socio-cultural phenomenon and not someone’s soft power project. It seems that football has changed, but then so too has the world in general.