Islam in Football: The Profound Effect the Religion Has Had on the Premier League
By Sam Cunningham
Mohamed Salah and Sadio Mané visit a local Liverpool mosque each week after training for Jumu’ah, the Friday prayer. It is an obligatory prayer for Muslim men, who are encouraged to wear their smartest clothes for the occasion.
The football-supporting Muslims - especially the children - are blown away by their presence. The players mingle. They pose for pictures.
In a recent photograph, Mané, who grew up in the small village of Bambali, south Senegal, within a deeply-religious family, is wearing a wonderful emerald green kaftan, a long top, with two youngsters.
People have posted on social media that they want to convert to Islam because of these players. It’s not only about the goals they are scoring – particularly Salah, the Premier League’s outright top scorer on 28 goals – but because they are spreading the message of what the Muslim faith is about: being open, welcoming, among the people; being humble and not thinking about oneself – which for a star footballer generally bucks the trend.
There are numerous Anfield terrace songs about “Egyptian King” Salah, including: “If he’s good enough for you/He’s good enough for me/If he scores another few/ Then I’ll be Muslim too,” which ends: “He’s sitting in the mosque/ That’s where I want to be.”
Manchester United midfielder Paul Pogba is known to regularly donate to charity. At the club’s player of the season awards last year, the midfielder donated a substantial sum to pay for 11-year-old United supporter Samuel, who has cerebral palsy, to be a mascot. On Pogba’s 25th birthday last week, he implored his 6.9million followers on Facebook to donate to Save the Children. Giving to charity is a staple of Islam.
Riyad Mahrez, of Leicester City, and Chelsea’s N’Golo Kante are also well-known, among certain communities, for their charitable donations.
Many of the Premier League’s greatest players nowadays are practicing Muslims.
Fan perspectives: Yet while Muslim players are adored and idolized by supporters today, the same respect is not always reserved for fellow supporters who share the same beliefs. Attitudes have changed over the years, but not remained on a steady trajectory towards acceptance; rather reactions in the terraces and around stadiums on matchdays have reflected the geopolitical environment of the time. Rimla Akhtar, 35, was the first Muslim woman to sit on the Football Association Council. She has always been involved in football: from finding it a safe space as a child in a racially-troubling time, to becoming a leading figure in developing role models and ambassadors to encourage Muslim women to engage with the game, to working for the FA. Faith and football, the subject of i‘s series this week, has been at the forefront of her work.
Akhtar is a Liverpool supporter. She has worn the hijab, the veil worn by some Muslim women in public, since 1992, but when she started going to matches she would take it off and wear a Liverpool scarf around her neck and baseball cap on her head.
“I didn’t think I’d be accepted as hijab-wearing woman of color in that place,” Akhtar tells i. “Part of that was perception, part of it was the actualities of what was going on around the time: 9/11 happened, there was a lot of anger and hatred building towards the Muslim community. There was a real risk for someone like me to be visibly Muslim at a game.” Her family did not want her attending football matches alone, but at the start of the millennium she would go with her two older bothers. They are big guys; big enough to dissuade any would-be assailant.
By the mid-2000s Akhtar, former captain of the British Muslim Women’s football team, grew tired of hiding her identity and started wearing the hijab to games. It was difficult for her brothers, she says, because they wanted to protect her and were concerned. Largely, bar a few stares here and there, she was not subjected to any serious feelings of animosity from her own or other fans. But, as they did around 9/11, things have worsened again for Muslim supporters.
“Part of me wonders, if my brothers weren’t around would I have had to deal with more? I do feel I would have. In more recent times, the increasing Islamophobia and Muslim hatred in society is filtering into football. I’ve not had physical attacks, but there have been verbal attacks about my presence at a game. If I get a ticket and someone doesn’t, they will take it out on me.
“I won’t repeat the words, but they are questioning how I can get into a game and they can’t. I feel I’m almost lucky I’ve not had to deal with a physically intimidating situation.”
Xenophobic behavior: She knows of Liverpool supporters who had to deal with anti-Muslim intimidation from West Ham fans at the old Boleyn Ground when they were praying under some stairs at half-time in a game. At Anfield, a father and son were praying in the stadium and somebody took a picture of them and posted it on Twitter, calling it a disgrace. Others on the site branded the poster a disgrace in return.
Akhtar believes around the time of Mido joining Middlesbrough, post 9/11, when bomber chants and others relating to Islamophobic abuse began, people started to realize there were prominent Muslim players in the Premier League and Football League. “Newcastle had a number there under Alan Pardew,” she says. “And Sam Allardyce at Bolton. This movement of players coming into the top leagues has had a positive impact. A lot of them had to deal with abuse from fans, though. Given the background, geopolitical issues, it was particularly difficult for a Muslim player to be accepted unless they were the star player.”
Now, she explains, there is a Muslim chaplain working with the Premier League, starting to travel across the country to clubs, providing information on Ramadan, fasting and how that might impact players from the first-team to the academy.
Welcoming and including Muslim players: She is concerned, still, that while clubs go out of their way to accommodate the biggest players, younger Muslims at academies remain wary that causing any kind of inconvenience because of their religion could damage their chances of earning a professional contract.
“Clubs are taking a look at how to accommodate needs of Muslim players,” she says. “If you’re an Özil, an Emre Can, a Salah, you will have support of the club in every way, shape or form, but when a Muslim player is born or brought up in Britain, at an academy they might struggle to get what they need, they will worry that if they identify as Muslim and make special requests it might affect their chance of a professional contract. A lot of adjustments have been made, but they’ve been made at first-team level.
“I use the multi-faith room at Anfield; it’s brilliant, easily accessible. People are in and out all the time. How do we take it to next level? From grassroots to the academy into the first team, how do we make sure the inclusion happens for everyone?” Many significant changes have been made already, even if more are needed. The face of English football has changed unimaginably through the impact of Islam since the league’s inception in 1992, when Tottenham’s Nayim was its only practicing Muslim.
The Professional Footballers’ Association give lectures to players at all 92 clubs about crossing the line between “dressingroom banter” and unacceptable behavior towards team-mates and opponents of different cultures and religions.
At Arsenal’s London Colney base and Liverpool’s Melwood training ground, they serve only halal chicken in the canteen. At Liverpool they have a special chef to cater for the Muslim players. Prayer rooms have opened up at the Emirates Stadium and Newcastle’s St James’ Park.
Changing attitudes: The game has evolved over the years as some of the world’s best players have arrived at clubs, their faith needing accommodating.
Allardyce, now Everton manager, and Pardew, now at West Bromwich Albion, were two managers who led the way in recruiting Muslim players: attracted by their attitudes and discipline, the way they conducted themselves, avoided vices such as alcohol and gambling and generally kept out of trouble. At Bolton, Allardyce could sometimes be found accompanying goalkeeper Ali Al-Habsi to the mosque.
When Liverpool won the 2012 Carling Cup final, before spraying champagne around their Wembley dressing room, they made sure head of medicine, Dr Zafar Iqbal, who openly shared his religion with the players, was not present.
The Premier League had to stop giving champagne as a man-of-the-match award because Manchester City’s Yaya Touré kept winning it. They changed it to a trophy instead.
The Muslim faith has had a profound effect on English football, and will continue to do so. – inews.co.uk
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