The Arab Spring goes cold in Egypt

Not their first fight

Domestic football returned to Egypt yesterday after a three-month hiatus, but like so much else in the country, the league is still sorting out its place in the post-Mubarak era.

Unmoved, though trailing in the standings, is storied Al-Ahly. Champions 35 times in 53 seasons, the Cairo giants only bolstered their national standing during the revolution. Already favored by an estimated 50 million Egyptians, Al-Ahly, from the boardroom to the pitch, was vocal in its support for the protesters.

Across the way, at Zamalek, the transition has been more painful.

With board members closely tied to the Mubarak machine, the club has found itself on the wrong end of popular history. Zamalek defied an army ban on training, kept a “rigorous” schedule throughout February, then backed a plan to resume league play behind closed doors. (Almost comic in retrospect, the idea was to enforce normalcy with a resumption of the games… but to keep out the fans, who would have turned Cairo Stadium into a less orderly Tahrir Square.)

For their part, the players are now engaged in a very public feud with team officials who backed Mubarak. The fight is ostensibly over lost wages, but it’s hard to miss the public relations angle. While their supporters were being beaten in the streets, Zamalek players, unlike their counterparts at Al-Ahly, remained mostly silent. By taking on known Mubarak apparatchiks now, the players are surely trying to win back the favor of their own, disillusioned fans.

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Ultra groups from both clubs led the line during some of the most difficult days in Tahrir Square. In a country with no legal opposition, they were the most organized revolutionary bodies on the street. And they knew the enemy, having for years fought a shadow war with Central Security on the terraces of Cairo Stadium.

(Drunk on their newly found freedom, and perhaps other stuff, those same Ultras stormed the pitch and attacked the referee and opposing players during a CAF Champions League match earlier this month. There was, reportedly, a noted lack of security at the match. Those hated police were nowhere to be found.)

As Zamalek works to re-align and re-establish itself with its supporters, the rest of the top flight will fight for its place in the new Egyptian order. That could mean major changes for clubs like El-Shorta, which has long enjoyed the backing of Mubarak’s police.

They lost, 2-1, to Al-Ahly yesterday, but a hiccup in this year’s quest for a place in the African Champions League will be the least of their problems going forward. Take this pathetic plea from the manager:  “The team is independent from the Ministry of Interior—we’re a separate sports entity that has nothing to do with politics. So please there is no need to be hostile against our club.”

Clubs with ties to the old civilian government (Petrojet is another example) will also have to reconsider the source of their funds. The army, its power now unfettered by Mubarak and the police, is politically astute. They simply will not be seen backing a club with ties to the old guard even if that club really is just a “sports entity.”

The reality, though, is that most of the teams are, like much of the country, drifting back toward their old places.  The fever dream of revolution has come and gone and it’s looking more like a case of “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss,” with the heavy artillery that directed the country through three decades of authoritarian rule not far removed from where we left it in late January.