Exploring the football fanatic culture of the Middle East

Dur­ing the 2022 FIFA World Cup, Romaisa Bad­dar, along with mil­lions of oth­ers of Arab descent, was swept up in a wave of eupho­ria. Host­ed in Qatar, it was the first time the major glob­al sport­ing tour­na­ment had come to the Mid­dle East, and in a great under­dog sport­ing sto­ry, Moroc­co defied all the odds and made a run to the final four teams in the tour­na­ment, killing goliaths includ­ing 2018 tour­na­ment win­ners France along the way.

In the process, they had become the first Arab team and first African team to reach the semi-finals of the tour­na­ment. ​“For us as Arabs, and even for non-Arabs, it was such a shock to expe­ri­ence an Arab team play like that, and come so far,” Bad­dar recalls. ​“It sparked so much dur­ing and after the World Cup, every­one was real­ly involved and it was great to see how hap­py all the non-Moroc­can Arab coun­tries were. It made me realise how much of a uni­ver­sal lan­guage foot­ball is.

Bad­dar is the founder and cura­tor of Mid­dle East Archive – a project that aims to reframe under­stand­ings and con­cep­tions of the Mid­dle East through pho­tog­ra­phy. Morocco’s his­toric run sparked the idea for its lat­est pho­to­book, Foot­ball كرة القدم. The book draws togeth­er the pic­tures of over a dozen pho­tog­ra­phers from the late 1980s until the present day, from coun­tries includ­ing Moroc­co, Alge­ria, Turkey, Egypt, Oman, Syr­ia, Iraq, Yemen, Sau­di Ara­bia, Pales­tine and more, to explore the MENA region’s vibrant foot­ball culture.

The pic­tures – tak­en by the likes of Rachid Ouet­tas­si, Karim Sehib, Jinane Ennas­ri, Alex Webb and Salah Malka­wi – are full of joy and engag­ing warmth, from women wear­ing hijabs hav­ing a kick­about, and chil­dren chas­ing a ball down a nar­row street, to fans cheer­ing on their favourite teams while watch­ing a match on a tele­vi­sion box from decades past. It’s a sur­vey of foot­ball cul­ture for ordi­nary folk and show­cas­es just how inte­gral it is to dai­ly life in the Arab world.

“Football’s super impor­tant. I feel like every street you go to, every cor­ner, if you hear peo­ple scream then you know football’s being watched some­where,” Bad­dar says. ​“Peo­ple are so pas­sion­ate about it, they are will­ing to throw par­ties, or make fights, because it runs deep – this goes for the nation­al team, the city league, or [glob­al clubs]. I’m half Moroc­can so when I go to Moroc­co I see all these kids wear­ing like Barcelona, Real Madrid shirts. It’s almost a religion.”

When research­ing the project, she found that foot­ball was ever present with­in pho­tog­ra­phy from the Mid­dle East, sim­ply because of how vis­i­ble and loved the game is in the region. ​“It was inter­est­ing for me, because every street pho­tog­ra­ph­er [that I looked at], none of them went to Pales­tine or Iraq to pho­to­graph foot­ball – it’s always like the Beirut Civ­il War, or Pales­tine struck by war,” she explains. ​“But it was always there, it was nev­er miss­ing in these projects. And that was cool because I felt it proved that it was such a big thing.”

The project helps to paint a rounder pic­ture of life in the Mid­dle East, which is often left out of the TV reports and news­pa­per cut­tings that make their way across shores. ​“I think what a project like this book does is human­ise peo­ple,” she says. ​“They’re very demonised in the media, like we only talk about the region in the num­bers of deaths, the amount of casu­al­ties, and the tragedies that hap­pen. You rarely hear good things in the news.

“So to come back to books like Foot­ball كرة القدم, it shows them in a light where they’re liv­ing in the same way as me day-to-day, like I have hob­bies, so I think that can play a role in fight­ing the Islama­pho­bia exist­ing now.”

Foot­ball كرة القدم is pub­lished by Mid­dle East Archive.

As the Euros kicks off, check out Huck foot­ball con­tent here.

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