MWC News (U.S.)
19 October 2016
- RSIS
- Media Mentions
- The Continued Closure of Egyptian Stadia
The Continued Closure of Egyptian Stadia
While the grumbling is unlikely to mushroom any time soon into a popular revolt similar to the one that toppled President Hosni Mubarak in 2011, it goes a long way to explain why Mr. Al-Sisi has refrained from lifting the ban on spectators attending Egyptian soccer league matches. The ban has been in place for much of the last five years.
With an anti-government protest scheduled for November 11 and sporadic ones already occurring, Mr. Al-Sisi fears that like in 2011, stadia, if opened, could again become rallying points for the discontented and disaffected.
Militant, politicized, and street battle-hardened soccer fans played a key role in the walk-up to the 2011 revolt, the protests on Tahrir Square that forced Mr. Mubarak out of office, and subsequent demonstrations against successive governments.
… Dr. James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, co-director of the University of Würzburg’s Institute for Fan Culture, and the author of The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer blog, a recently published book with the same title, and also just published Comparative Political Transitions between Southeast Asia and the Middle East and North Africa, co-authored with Dr. Teresita Cruz-Del Rosario.
RSIS / Online
Last updated on 20/10/2016
