Arsenal might not be any good at parking the bus, but they sure know how to throw Mesut Ozil under one.
Imagine the frantic boardroom conversations on Friday last week after Ozil expressed his horror at the imprisonment of millions of Uighurs in China.
The fear of losing profits from shirt sales, commercial deals and pre-season tours must have choked senior executives like Beijing residents in smog season.
Photo: EPA-EFE
In the club’s rush to post on Chinese social media site Sina Weibo that Ozil’s comments were merely his “personal opinion” — before a simpering reminder that “Arsenal has always adhered to the principle of not involving itself in politics” — all that was missing was a white flag.
Appeasement is never a good look, even if it is cloaked by apparent indifference.
Just his personal opinion? Hardly.
Ozil was entirely in tune with a UN panel and multiple human rights groups, who have spoken out about the imprisonment of millions of Uighurs in internment camps without trial for “re-education,” in what has been described as the largest incarceration of one ethnic group since the Holocaust, with multiple accounts of torture, rape and abuse from eyewitnesses who have passed through.
Arsenal’s reaction might have been proportionate if Ozil was posting about the need for more healthcare spending in Britain, or voicing his views on whether Brexit is a good idea, but when human rights groups are warning of systematic “brainwashing” — and when one Uighur who badgered colleagues at work to pray more and not watch porn is tried for inciting ethnic hatred and jailed for 10 years — it just sounds callous.
Only last week, Anthony Joshua was widely criticized for not speaking out about human rights in Saudi Arabia. Yet can you blame sportspeople for staying quiet when they see Ozil bravely raising his head above the parapet, only to be shot down by his own club?
As for Arsenal not involving themselves in politics, what did the club think they were doing when they agreed a ￡30 million (US$39.6 million) deal with the Rwandan government to promote tourism?
Yes, the same Rwandan government that Human Rights Watch warns is guilty of “arbitrary detention, ill-treatment and torture” — and is one of 38 nations where human rights defenders face reprisals for cooperating with the UN.
Of course, in trying to be apolitical Arsenal were desperately trying to put a lid on the problem before the top blew off. They would have seen the fate of the Houston Rockets — who plunged from being one of China’s most popular NBA teams to being blacklisted after general manager Daryl Morey tweeted his support for pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong — flashing before their eyes.
The Rockets are already a textbook study of what happens when you upset the Chinese government, which, according to NBA commissioner Adam Silver, also made the extraordinary demand that Morey be sacked.
The NBA has also suffered blowback, with China Central Television replacing coverage of US games with highlights of the Chinese league.
The decision by the state-run broadcaster not to show Arsenal’s match against Manchester City on Sunday was another reminder that there is no middle ground here. No way to stick up for human rights and free speech without angering China. You are either for such values or against them.
“The world is in the midst of an ideological battle: Western liberalism versus Eastern authoritarianism, and sport is one of the front lines,” said Simon Chadwick, professor of sports enterprise at Salford University who specializes in China. “This case reveals a great deal about China’s growing power, how it seeks to exercise it, and what it deems to be acceptable and unacceptable. It also reveals how far the balance of power has tipped away from Europe and towards China.”
So what should Arsenal have done?
Of course, the club were placed in an invidious position, but surely it was not beyond them to find a similar form of words to those used by Silver in the midst of the Morey firestorm.
He pointedly told the Chinese government that US values traveled with the league wherever it went.
“And one of those values is free expression,” Morey said.
Failing that, the club should have said nothing — just as they did when another Arsenal player, Hector Bellerin, voiced his support for the Labour Party on the morning of the British general election on Thursday last week.
Meanwhile, this issue is clearly not going away.
Last week, it was Joshua who faced accusations that he was being duped by a Saudi Arabian regime paying him about ￡60 million to “sportswash” the kingdom. This week, it is Arsenal in the firing line. In the days ahead, Liverpool are bound to face questions in Doha when they play in the FIFA Club World Cup.
Clearly clubs and organizations need to think harder about finding an elegant way to walk the tightrope if they decide to take the money of certain regimes, but as the backlash over Ozil’s Instagram message intensifies, some at the Emirates Stadium might just wonder about replicating the That Mitchell and Webb Look sketch in which two Nazis ask themselves: “Are we the baddies?”
On this issue there is only one answer.
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