James Montague is the author of When Friday Comes: Football, War and Revolution in the Middle East (de Coubertin). The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely his.
Another matchday, another morgue full of bodies; another crowd of mothers broken by grief, weeping for the souls of their dead sons.
Soccer should never be about survival, it should never be about counting coffins, but Sunday was another dark night in Egypt. Around 20 fans of Zamalek were killed outside the Air Defence Stadium in Cairo before a top of the table clash with ENPPI.
Egyptian officials announced that 19 people had been killed. Zamalek fans posted the pictures of corpses on social media.
A crush had developed outside the narrow, single entrance — more of a cage covered in barbed wire — through which the thousands of fans were expected to walk through. As the fans tried to push their way in, it appeared that riot police fired tear gas into the crowd.
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“They are not fans, they are criminals,” Mansour said in an interview with The Guardian last month. “They are using bombs, live ammunition and shotgun pellets … And last week they threw acid at me — but I continue because this is part of the nation’s battle against terrorism.” The acid turned out to be human urine. Several ultras were jailed for the incident.
The authorities announced that the leaders of the UWK would be rounded up and arrested. The UWK called Sunday’s incident a “deliberate massacre.” Fact and fiction seamlessly intertwine in the aftermath of chaos. What is clear is that the league has, once again, been suspended indefinitely as the funerals of those killed take place in the coming hours.
Meanwhile Egypt is again counting the numbers of the dead. It is far from the hope and optimism I had been lucky to experience in Tahrir Square in 2011. As George Bernard Shaw once wrote, “Revolutions have never lightened the load of tyranny, they have only shifted it to another shoulder.”
And the match the fans died trying to watch? It went ahead anyway. It finished 1-1.
