‘Footballer jihadist’ fantasy puts the game at the centre of all our ills again

http://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2015/feb/04/footballer-jihadist-fantasy-marina-hyde

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“The militia man turned his back on a footballer’s playboy lifestyle after becoming radicalised two years ago.” Even by the standards of fanciful transfer gossip, this claim in a Mirror story last April felt something of a high-water mark. Like the many other news outlets that carried the story, the paper had a picture of the chap in question in his new strip – the black mask of Islamic State – which was taken from a video in which he was described as “an ex-football player (Arsenal of London)”. No snaps dating from his stint at the Emirates, alas, and a slightly disappointing absence of insiders claiming he had been lured to Syria by the guarantee of first-team action.

Still, the reports all offered an early glimpse of a strangely hard-to-kill character type: the footballer jihadist – in this case a Portuguese by the name of Celso Rodrigues Da Costa, who now calls himself Abu Issa al-Andalusi, apparently, though little about his persona seems particularly verifiable. But back then, I imagined him turning his back on the aforementioned “footballer’s playboy lifestyle”, a bit like Paula Hamilton in the 80s Golf advert – only instead of shedding a fur coat and a mews house, he’d be divesting himself of the trappings of the Premier League. The bling, the birds, the monogrammed media rooms. Then maybe having second thoughts and hanging on to the Louis Vuitton matchday washbag, tucking it under his arm as the passport to a new life of unspeakable acts on the frontline.

Other people, it turned out, were imagining something quite different. I don’t pretend to understand the precise dynamics of the collective brainmelt that, within days of those reports, saw Lassana Diarra issue a formal statement in denial of rapidly calcifying social media speculation. But in one of the more surreal moments of modern football culture, the erstwhile Premier League midfielder felt forced to clarify that he would be playing as usual in a Russian Premier League game that week. “He has never set foot in Syria,” his lawyer expanded. “It’s absurd. He is not a jihadist, he is a footballer with Lokomotiv Moscow.”

Easy mistake to make, I expect. Less easy mistakes to make, perhaps, were all the reports that this individual had played for Arsenal. If Isis is credulous enough to lap up those sorts of CV claims, then that is a matter for itself – it casts the Levant as perhaps the last territory on earth where some bloke can claim to have had trials for someone and not be greeted by the chinny-reckon gesture.

Or the second last, if you count Fleet Street, which seemed keen to assist with the mythologising, despite the fact that club archivists are famously encyclopaedic, and can usually tell you with certainty whether someone has been on the books. Humiliation always awaits those whose imaginations write cheques the historical records can’t cash, as evidenced by the demolition of Gordon Ramsay’s cavalier boasts to have played first-team football for Rangers. Over the years, this claim has been commuted down to “played three times for Rangers’ first team”, to “played in a testimonial” to “Gordon’s memory is hazy because it was all 25 years ago”. It now stands at “rejected trialist”. And so with the “Arsenal jihadist” – also said to have “grown up with [Cristiano] Ronaldo” – of whom Arsenal’s official records could find no trace.

But let no one throw the baby out with the discredited bathwater. The Isis “footballer” has not been retired as a concept, you see – in fact, he is resurgent, having now morphed into one member of a notional five-a-side team. Or as a Times headline last week had it: “Footballers may be linked to beheadings.” Well, if any group in society were to be, then you’d be mad to bet against it being footballers. It was “the footballers”, you may recall, who were among those blamed by Iain Duncan‑Smith for the 2011 riots, and who have been held responsible for menaces as diverse as rising inequality and public spitting, by blamers as diverse as poets and police chiefs. Footballers now ushering in a barbarous 21st-century caliphate seems a perfectly reasonable progression. You realise the warning signs were always there when you read a profile of the Isis leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi headlined: “How a talented footballer became the world’s most wanted man.”

So let no one suspect that Isis’s burgeoning football connection is the bizarre final frontier of a particular parochial skein of commentary, which sees certain pundits at international tournaments unable to discuss players without rooting them in the English game. You know the sort of thing: “… Neymar, who of course once turned down an offer from West Ham …” “… A homicidal terror cultist, whose cousin once saw Cristiano Ronaldo play in a youth game …”

Quite how we’d get our head around events in Iraq and Syria without football is unclear – luckily, it seems we won’t have to. The latest reports on the five “footballers” turning out for Isis highlight claims that one of them possibly played for Sporting Lisbon’s youth academy. He certainly played for an amateur side here – a bit like people lots of us might know, but perhaps wouldn’t describe as footballers – while the others are certainly footballers in the sense that they apparently “would often meet in a Portuguese-run cafe in London to watch matches”. So there you have it. Plans for an Isis currency are thought to have stalled; plans for a Panini sticker album must be fast tracked in their stead.