Wallpaper legitimacy, sport washing, and the innocence of bystanders
How Juventus players looked on as US president Trump espoused his views on conflict in the Middle East, and on gender and trans rights
With US football players Timothy Weah and Weston McKennie in town to play for Juventus in the FIFA men’s Club World Cup, it presumably made perfect sense to officials for them and their team mates to meet Donald Trump in the Whitehouse.
Especially given the American president’s new found love of football.
Yet the encounter was anything but perfect.
For a start, having players adorned with the Juventus name and logo standing behind the president betrays an ignorance of the fragile politics that nowadays lurk just beneath the surface of football (and of geonomics).
For the last eighteen months, the football club’s majority owner - the Agnelli family - has been locked in a feud with Italy’s prime minister Georgia Meloni.
With Meloni’s adoption of a nationalist economic agenda, it has been reported that:
“Over the past months, [Meloni] has engaged in a widening array of conflicts with [Agnelli owned] Stellantis — the heir of Italy's iconic carmaker Fiat, now one of the world's biggest carmakers — for not investing enough in Italy.”
It is believed that Meloni sees Stellantis as being unpatriotic.
Meloni is close to Trump, indeed some Washington observers refer to her as his ‘chosen one’.
Perhaps the Whitehouse visit was Juve’s attempt to build bridges, or may be the visit was ill thought through in the first place.
A sense that is was the latter deepened when Trump began talking about Iran, and gender and trans rights.
Juventus’ players looked on largely in silence, presumably unsure how to react, innocent bystanders in what rapidly became a political and geopolitical episode.
Yet this is the 21 century’s new narrative: athletes, teams, and sport in general some times serving as instruments of policy rather than as people or mere organisations.
As such, it is worth noting that athlete voices have increasingly been silenced, the era of activism appears to be at an end - when individuals speak, it undermines the wider messages that more powerful people in sport are trying to convey.
So, it’s better to control what they say.
Some have characterised the use of athletes and sport in such ways as sport washing, an attempt to cleanse image and reputation, though whether this is an appropriate characterisation remains a moot point.
Sport nevertheless often shines a light on a country’s deviance rather than erasing it.
Instead, sport serves the purpose of legitimising the views and behaviours of those who choose to associate with it
Legitimacy involves a process of making something acceptable, driven either by a need for acceptance, a desire to maintain order, or the quest to exert power.
Hence too often, the likes of Weah and McKennie find themselves cast as little more than wallpaper, a backdrop against which attempts to legitimise can take place.
Not just in the US, nowadays many countries are playing the same game - it’s a sign of our complex, sensitive, geopolitical times.
Footnote
The above image was sourced from: https://x.com/AroundTurin/status/1935442771805888663/photo/2