PEDRO MZILENI | Orlando Pirates missed a chance to stay true to their roots

Orlando Pirates has given a middle finger to the international call by the progressive formations of the football family to boycott its fixture with Maccabi Tel Aviv – a football club in  Israel where Palestinian people are dispossessed of their land, systematically marginalised and underdeveloped, and killed.

Orlando Pirates even went to the extent of hiding behind Fifa regulations for neglecting its civic duty for global justice. Their statement demonstrates the embarrassing manner in which global capitalism has infiltrated football – and depoliticised football clubs from their historical and contemporary positions as institutions of the people.

Fifa is a compromised institution that has suffered reputational harm in the past 50 years. The Netflix documentary Fifa Uncovered, produced and directed by Daniel Gordon, shows that the 24 years tenure of Joao Havelange as Fifa president since 1974 resulted in an unprecedented commercialisation of the game. Football shifted from being a people’s game that belongs to the working-class to become a capitalist multi-trillion industry where club ownership, sponsorships, ticket sales, and TV licencing among others all became commodities for sale.

These commercial trade transactions have created closer ties between football clubs and international corporations and big oligopolies. Football clubs have become international corporations themselves. By extension, football has also become an active role-player in the geopolitical games of neoliberalism, and it ceased being an organ for the progressive ideals of anti-racism and anti-imperialism.

It came as unsurprising when Fifa sided with Nato, the EU, and the US in sanctioning Russia for its military work in Ukraine. In addition, Fifa also stripped Indonesia of its right to host the U20 Ffifa World Cup in 2023 – because Indonesia supported the struggle of the Palestinian people by refusing to participate in a tournament with Israel as a participant. In other words, Fifa and world football is in the hands of imperialist, racist, and right-wing entrepreneurs who are motivated by profits.

The master's thesis of Richard Maguire, completed in November 1991 with Wits University, titled "The Peoples’ Club – A social and institutional history of Orlando Pirates Football Club, 1937 – 1973", does a thorough study on the history of the club and how it became integral in black people’s Struggle against apartheid.

His work reminds us that Orlando Pirates was formed in 1937, a few years after the township of Soweto was established as a residential township for black migrant labourers, who were taken from the rural margins of Southern Africa to service the white apartheid economy in the mines, farms, and factories of Johannesburg. Migrant labourers as well as young people in schools used football as a social activity to enjoy themselves, create communities of political conscientisation, and to psychosocially disengage, for a moment, from the daily brutalities of the apartheid regime.

The club’s popular appellation as being “Ezimnyama ngenkani ezika Magebula, ezagebula umhlaba kaMaspala” – originates from the community activism of James “Sofasonke” Mpanza, who led a shack dwellers’ movement that forcefully occupied a significant amount of municipal land from the apartheid local government – for the purpose of building decent housing for black people. These community credentials of the club cemented it as a people’s club.

Across the world, the history of the biggest football clubs is similar to Orlando Pirates. The deeper the connections that a club has with the struggles of its own people, the more footprint it has in the people’s consciousness as their heritage. Arsenal in England was formed in 1886 by 15 workers at the Royal Arsenal munitions factory. A few years earlier, Manchester United was formed in 1878 by workers at the Newton Heath Depot of Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway.

The international sports community also played a key role in bringing the apartheid regime to its knees. The International Olympics Committee (IOC) took a decision in 1970 to ban apartheid SA from taking part in the games. This ban would be in place for over two decades.

Three years later in November 1973, the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid was passed by the United Nations – and it declared apartheid a crime against humanity.

The recent statement issued by Orlando Pirates where they pleaded ignorance, neutrality, and "football independence" for refusing to boycott their fixture with Israel’s Maccabi Tel Aviv is a gross minimisation and misunderstanding of the power of football and sport in changing the course of history through popular campaigns – and it must be condemned.

 Dr Mzileni is a sociology lecturer at University of the Free State, writing in personal capacity