Awash with fossil fuel money, African football is sowing the seeds of its own destruction
This Saturday, the Africa Cup of Nations (Afcon) – or to give the competition its full title, the TotalEnergies Afcon 2023 – the continent’s biennial international men’s football tournament, will kick off in Ivory Coast. The main point of interest, in the British sports press at any rate, is the impact that this will have on the course of the Premier League, where the leading teams will, mid-season, be losing their African star players for up to six weeks. Less remarked on, perhaps, is that Afcon 2023 is actually being played in 2024, and that its title is so prominently linked to the French hydrocarbon giant.
For more than half a century, the tournament has been played in January and February but, in an effort to placate the needs of a few European leagues and clubs, the Confederation of African Football (Caf) had originally scheduled this edition for June and July 2023. However, those dates coincided with west Africa’s rainy season, and under conditions of climate crisis the region has become more vulnerable to more extreme weather events at this time of year.
So much so that the organisers felt it necessary to shift the event back to its winter slot, though now in 2024. It was not intended, I imagine, but like the efforts to rename extreme weather events after fossil fuel companies, it seems entirely appropriate that the TotalEnergies name should be so closely bound to this occasion.
Contemporary African football is hardly unique in its close and dependent relationship on the hydrocarbon industry. Over the past few decades Chevron (parent company of Texaco), Shell, BP (in the shape of its lubrication brand Castrol), Petrobras in Brazil and Eni in Italy have been major sponsors of competitions and clubs. Russia’s Gazprom, before the war in Ukraine, had sponsored the Fifa World Cup and Uefa Champions League, as well as clubs such as Schalke 04 in Germany and Serbia’s Red Star Belgrade. Azerbaijan’s state oil company, Socar, shared its largesse with Uefa and Atlético Madrid.
More recently, all these efforts have been eclipsed by the huge sums spent by three petrostates – Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia – which have not merely sponsored European clubs but bought them outright, and not merely sponsored tournaments but staged them. That said, even the 2022 World Cup was still the Fifa World Cup, not the Qatar Energy World Cup, and, although I am ready to be surprised, the 2034 World Cup is not as yet being sold as the Saudi Aramco World Cup. Perhaps it should be?
Oil money has certainly been fuelling African football for some time. A number of Afcon hosts – Angola in 2010, Equatorial Guinea in 2012 and 2015, and Gabon in 2012 and 2017 – have spent enormous amounts, overwhelmingly derived from their hydrocarbon industries, on new stadiums. These have all proved to be disastrous pharaonic investments, currently rotting for want of tenants and maintenance.
TotalEnergies’ involvement with the African game began in 2016, when it signed an eight-year sponsorship deal with Caf, for an undisclosed amount, covering all of its international and club competitions. Caf’s disastrous financial management, including the cancellation of a $1bn (£800m) deal with the French sport marketing agency Lagardère, have made it dangerously dependent on TotalEnergies.
TotalEnergies’ record in Africa is mixed, to say the least. As with all foreign extractive giants there, it has been accused of tax avoidance, malign political interference in domestic politics and problems of pollution and displacement. Its two most controversial projects are an LNG extraction facility in Cabo Delgado in Mozambique and the huge East African crude oil pipeline (Eacop) that will take oil extracted from Lake Albert in Uganda across Tanzania to the Indian Ocean coast.
Cabo Delgado required the displacement of thousands of residents, and, despite a variety of compensatory payments, NGOs report the widespread loss of livelihoods, relocation of communities now unable to fish and destruction of fish stocks and marine habitats. Eacop, due to be completed in 2025, is likely to displace tens of thousands of people, there has already been punitive and aggressive treatment of protesters, and it threatens fragile ecosystems with yet more pollution. And the project will involve the release of global heating gases more than 25 times the current annual emissions of Uganda and Tanzania combined.
Parallel to this deluge of hydrocarbon money, world football has been waking up to the threats posed by the climate crisis. Global heating, not least in Africa, will make football an increasingly hazardous sport to play outdoors. Extreme weather, sea level rises and flooding are already affecting schedules and infrastructure. Africa’s coastal cities and their stadiums are extremely vulnerable to these dangers. Consequently, Fifa, Uefa and some leading football associations and clubs have been signing up to the UN’s Sports for Climate Action framework, pledging to halve their emissions by 2030, and go net zero by 2040.
Environmental initiatives, such as the English Football League’s green football weekend, are multiplying. At best, some of these programmes are beginning to make a difference in terms of reduced emissions and changing public attitudes; at worst, they are profoundly disingenuous.
Fifa, for example, has had to stop describing the Qatar World Cup as a carbon-neutral event since a Swiss court found its claims to be unfounded. Either way, as long as the game and its most powerful organisation are in thrall to the greenwashing of states and corporations, it is impossible to see how it can make a positive contribution to this most urgent of global problems.
Caf and TotalEnergies, wisely, are making no such claims about Afcon 2023. The absence of this kind of hypocrisy and greenwashing brings little solace though. TotalEnergies and the rest of the hydrocarbon industries offer Africa only more extraction, more pollution and more global heating. They are distributing profits and dividends that massively outweigh the climate mitigation funds available to Africa.
Africa needs energy, but it does not need more fossil fuels, yet, like Caf, it has few options. Despite the continent’s immense potential for deploying renewable energy sources, it receives just 2% of the world’s investment in the sector. That one of Africa’s great cultural treasures, its vibrant football cultures, and this great pan-African tournament should serve the continent’s agents of destruction is not just a tragedy, it is a crime.
David Goldblatt is the author of The Ball is Round: A Global History of Football and The Game of Our Lives Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk
Contemporary African football is hardly unique in its close and dependent relationship on the hydrocarbon industry
among the left with the Democratic party over a range of issues has seen interest in the PSL grow.
“We have an understanding that we are on the side of justice, that we are on the side of people who are oppressed, who are colonized, who are exploited,” De la Cruz says.
“But I think it also has to do with the fact that people are tired of the same thing. Of broken promises. [There is a] sentiment of dissolution, of outrage and hopelessness.”
De la Cruz adds: “So we’ve definitely seen an upsurge that has to do with the inability of the Democratic party to keep up with their promises.”
In recent years the closest the US has come to a countrywide leftwing wave came in in 2016, when Bernie Sanders, the independent Vermont senator and a self-described democratic socialist, ran for president. Sanders was credited with galvanizing progressives and arguably laid the pathway for the election of “the Squad” – the name given to a group of left-leaning Congress members including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He also did well in the 2020 primary but was then overtaken by Joe Biden who became the Democratic nominee on a more moderate ticket and then beat Trump for the White House – with Sanders’ public support.
The presence of newly prominent progressives in the House of Representatives represents hope for some, but De la Cruz says they won’t effect change.
“There’s always been progressive politicians,” she said.
“That’s not enough because we should not shortchange ourselves, as working=class people thinking that that’s like, the be all and end all, because it’s not.”
Ocasio-Cortez et al have shown no sign that they will sign on to De la Cruz’s signature plan to to seize 100 corporations – which would amount to the government gaining trillions of dollars in revenue and “serve as the foundation for a total reorganization of the economy”, the PSL says. The US remains the only western country that does not provide free healthcare for its citizens, and that would be an immediate focus. The money would also be used to provide housing, improve education and offer free childcare.
“Even with just the top 100, imagine what we could do,” Garcia says.
“[We should] put them under public management, so that we can have democratically elected people to manage those things, who are accountable to their constituencies. And we can decide: ‘Do we want to spend hundreds of billions of dollars for Raytheon [a defense manufacturer] to be stinking rich? Or do you want to improve the infrastructure in this crumbling country?’” They would also work to end the problem of mass incarceration – the US imprisons people, particularly people of color, at rates far higher than the rest of the western world. (A slight inconsistency emerges here, as the PSL’s electoral program also insists that “war criminals and Wall Street con men would be locked up”.)
De la Cruz and Garcia are engaging company. They speak passionately and animatedly, but both seem more comfortable talking about the ills of capitalism than presenting tangible plans for change.
A question about how seizing 100 corporations would actually work leads to a lengthy dissection of American society, taking in the fact that some Walmart workers have to rely on the government’s supplemental nutrition assistance program (Snap), formerly known as food stamps, to survive; the ills of the electoral college system; and the issue of why the constitution has not been significantly updated since 1789.
A conversation about Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite communications network swiftly turns to the deregulation of industry, then to the Federal Reserve bank, finishing with a dissection of alleged corruption at the supreme court.
One thing that is clear is the uphill battle De la Cruz and Garcia face. The PSL has increased its share of the vote in each of the last four presidential elections, rising from fewer than 7,000 votes in 2008 to 85,685 votes in 2020. (That was enough for sixth place in the popular vote, with 0.05% of votes cast.) The number remains minuscule, however, and ballot access is just as significant a problem.
Candidates typically have to present a list of thousands of signatures of support to a state to get their name printed on a ballot. That takes time and money – a group connected to Robert F Kennedy Jr, who is running an independent campaign for president, recently committed to spending $15m to get his name on the ballot in 10 states – and there is little sign that the PSL has much funding. Financial summary reports show that De la Cruz’s campaign had $11,900 cash on hand at the end of September.
Despite the obstacles, De la Cruz predicted that her name would be on the ballot in “30-40” states in November, way above the 15 states Gloria La Riva, the 2020 PSL candidate, managed.
But share of the vote is almost irrelevant in the movement the PSL envisages. De la Cruz and Garcia are realistic that the kind of changes they want to see – abolishing the Senate, seizing billions of dollars from the richest Americans, hobbling the likes of Bezos and Musk – aren’t possible through presidential decrees alone.
“Will it happen only through electoral politics? It has never happened through electoral politics,” De la Cruz says.
“It’s always necessitated mass movements. It’s always necessitated political organizations outside of the two-party system. And that goes for any reform that we have won, whether it is abortion rights, whether it is the right for the LGBTQI community to be able to have access to the most basic rights as people to live in a union; whether it is desegregation, whether it is the end of slavery, it necessitated mass movement to force the hand of reform.
“Because these people will never give us anything willingly. It will necessitate millions and millions and millions of people in motion to transform society, electoral politics won’t do it alone.”
The PSL believes that “fully developed socialism” is necessary in the US before the aim of a communist society can be achieved. De la Cruz says that “communism, ultimately, is the creation of a communist world” – where nations no longer compete against each other for money and resources.
Something that has given the PSL hope is that the recent resurgence in industrial organizing in the US, which has seen labor unions win impressive contract settlements across the health industry, school districts and car manufacturing, has demonstrated an energy and enthusiasm for systemic change.
“It takes different levels of participation and struggle. It takes different instruments, being creative. And by that I mean, organizations, unions, different forms of organized struggle,” De la Cruz says.
But for all the talk of attracting the disaffected working class, evidence suggests that people unhappy with the status quo are going elsewhere. Countries in Europe and South America have elected rightwing populists, and in the US the specter of a Donald Trump second term looms.
Polls show that white Americans who did not graduate from college – the imperfect shorthand pollsters use to identify blue-collar voters – far prefer Trump to Biden. Researchers have attributed this long-running trend of working-class people moving towards the Republican party to attitudes about race as well as economics, but it seems clear where the politics of the dissatisfied worker lie. (In September a New York Times/Siena poll found that Biden’s lead among non-white voters who hadn’t graduated from college had also declined.)
The current success of the far right, including Trump, is “a result of the failure of bourgeois democracy, a failure of capitalism”, De la Cruz says.
“It’s the failure of neoliberalism and capitalist systems to provide for the majority of people. And not only that, [they] have constructed a narrative of ‘the enemy’, ‘the other’ – that element of society that is dehumanized constantly,” De la Cruz said.
It is widely accepted that Trump and his acolytes have tapped into the fear of “the other” – people including immigrants, women and the LGBTQ+ community. Trump and other Republicans have repeatedly blamed immigration for crime and for America’s economic woes, while stokinga so-called culture war that has seen the introduction of laws limiting the rights of gay and transgender people in states around the country.
That fear, De la Cruz said, “has been instilled in the way that we’re educated in schools, in the history we learn, in the churches we go to, the temples we go to. It is a social conditioning of attacking the other.
“And then you have someone like Trump, that ultimately taps into that, and says: ‘OK, all of the things that you’ve learned, I’m gonna regurgitate that, I’m gonna blame them, and I’m gonna fix this.’
“Obviously, he’s a threat. And we will continue to say he’s a threat, and we’ve known he’s a threat. But he is the result of a system that created him, which is the same system that people think he’s going to fix.”
De la Cruz and Garcia’s vision of the future would require the kind of mass uprising rarely seen in the modernday west. But in the shorter term one challenge De la Cruz and Garcia, whose father emigrated to the US from Mexico, face is their race and gender.
All 46 US presidents except one have been white men. In 2020 Kamala Harris became the first female, the first Black American, and the first south Asian American to be elected vice-president, but the Democratic and Republican parties are currently on track to nominate white men for president yet again next year
“Our biggest obstacle is precisely what makes us who we are, which is the fact that we are working-class people, that we are women of color. And it is a shame to say that in a society that claims to be a democracy, that claims to have freedom, that claims to have equity, that is an obstacle,” De la Cruz says.
Garcia believes that their experiences, not just as women of color, but as people from working-class backgrounds, “is actually something people can actually relate to”.
She adds: “Are there going to be haters and people who disrespect us because we’re women? We’ve dealt with that all our lives. The anti-immigrant, anti-black, all that stuff, we’ve dealt with it our whole lives. We’re not afraid of that, we’re not intimidated by that.
“If anything, those experiences just connect us more to the millions of people across the globe who have experiences where capitalism is killing them and killing their families. And we have a responsibility to fight against it, to do everything that we can in our lifetime to change that.”
We can decide: ‘Do we want to spend hundreds of billions of dollars for Raytheon to be stinking rich?
Karina Garcia