Those who still watch the car-theft-like international tournaments may still have fresh memories of World Cup 2018 hosted by the human right’s role model, Russia.
One of the biggest upsets at the competition was Germany going out after the group stage. They lost 2-0 to South Korea but only few people could have predicted that it would be the last international game for Mesut Özil.
But as usual, Özil, who created a chance after a chance for his incompetent strikers, was pointed out as the weakest link in a German team. As one of rare top German footballers who has never played for Bayern, Özil has been under a heavy attack from the Bayern camp, especially the Bayern president Uli Hoeness, who tried to hide the fact Germany failed to progress from a rather straight-forward group with eight Bayern players as the team spine.
Özil reacted to those attacks by retiring from the international football (which is of course great news for Arsenal). Özil pointed out at racism in the German football and awful comments about the German players of the non-German ethnic origin coming from the very top of the German FA (DFB).
Özil’s agent Dr Erkut Sogut, a man who earns every penny Mesut pays him, made a brilliant and astonishingly detailed reply – in very Untold Arsenal style! – to all the mocking comments from Hoeness that included Özil’s stats from the German national team.
And he didn’t stop there as he further questioned statements of Toni Kroos, Thomas Müller and Manuel Neuer (to simplify things: three aforementioned white German players were either pretending to be stupid or…they were not pretending at all).
As if that wasn’t enough, another Arsenal player of the immigrational heritage has been questioned by “the pure one”. Granit Xhaka, the Swiss international of the Albanian origin, has been considered as a captain of the national team once Stephane Lichtsteiner calls a day. It didn’t go well with Stephane Henchoz, a former Liverpool! player, best known among Arsenal fans for his unpunished handball clearance in the FA Cup Final 2001.
Henchoz claims that players who represent “traditional Switzerland could feel excluded” as well as the fans of the national team. The most idiotic part of the interview is the one when Henchoz claims that a captain must represent Switzerland and the team, which Xhaka apparently doesn’t.
If Xhaka (and quite a few Swiss players of the Albanian origin like Admir Mehmedi, Xherdan Shaqiri and Granit’s brother Taulant) don’t represent Switzerland, does it mean goals they scored against Serbia at the last World Cup shouldn’t count?
Switzerland progressed to Round of 16 thanks to goals from Xhaka and Shaqiri in a 2-1 victory over Serbia and I’m pretty sure that neither Henchoz nor any of traditional Swiss people complained about the outcome, never mind asked for a result to be disallowed on the grounds that Xhaka and Shaqiri don’t represent the national team.
The same thing can be said about Germany and Özil’s contribution in their World Cup glory in 2014. Mesut wasn’t the only player with the immigration background – Sami Khedira, Lukas Podolski, Miroslav Klose, Jerome Boateng were all members of the national team that won fourth World Cup for Germany.
The main issue with all these questions that civilized societies should be ashamed to ask in 21st century, is that it is becoming a part of the fight against multiculturalism as a convicted concept that is already deemed as a failure by the alt-right and far right across Europe. Between two centuries, players of the immigrant origin were questioned – Le Pen questioned the French national team at World Cup 1998 and there were questions about Eduardo da Silva’s naturalisation in Croatia – but it didn’t have the political environment that would cultivate those narrow-minded ideas. Now, with immigration and integration as the specters that far-right politicians use to scare their voters across Europe, the whole concept gets more serious and more dangerous.
Here is the final coincidence with the dark times:
Back in 1920s, when the world was still convinced The Great War wouldn’t become World War I, they formed League of Nations that should have been capable of preventing the further conflicts between the nations. Now, the football bodies introduced…Nations League.
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What further blows my mind is the way in which this has supposedly given English fans a reason to jeer and boo Ozil, as if somehow he has done something wrong here. He has done literally nothing wrong, yet suddenly he has become enemy no.1 for an entire nation, as well as many English fans. This outcry and hatred directed at Ozil just blows my mind and there is something deeply insidious and repugnant about this entire ordeal.
I would absolutely love to hear the rationale from English fans as to why Ozil deserves to have a whole stadium booing and abusing him (it’s equally as disgusting when the German fans attack him, but at the very least you can see their extremely misguided and immoral reasons for doing so). I would love to hear them try to explain their way out of that, when it is clear that it is most probably just a case of kicking a man whilst he is down and what basically amounts to bullying on a nation-wide level.
Jammy. It’s because football is run by too many incompetent morons. Reported on by too many malicious idiots. And followed by too many brainless cretins.
Incompetent or morally bankrupt? I’d wager it’s a bit of both. Unfortunately what you just said could be referencing almost every aspect of our society. Sports like football should be one of the few places where you can actually get a bit of respite from all the hatefulness, but alas these parasites and the brainless cretins who follow them do their best to corrupt yet another outlet of freedom and expression.