44: Alain Sutter, Helvetia, USA ’94 World Cup, UK and Eire Edition

Today Richard Allinson takes us on a whistle stop tour of political protests in the beautiful game. However much certain armchair fans like to think that these worlds are completely separate, and that Marcus Rashford should “focus on tonight’s game instead of feeding the kids”, the links between football and politics are undeniable. Someone even dedicated a whole blog to the topic a few years ago before he realised he should just “stick to old stickers”. Over to Rich to lose us some Twitter followers.

The normal criteria for one of my pieces for A Sticker's Worth 500 Words are: a) did they play for Grimsby Town? and b) can I shoehorn a reference to my own junior football career in somewhere? Sadly, the catalyst for today's post doesn't fulfil either of these criteria. However, what he does have is a 'controversies' section on Wikipedia, and that is always interesting.

Alain Sutter was a Swiss international footballer that had the hair of Metallica frontman James Hetfield (or Bonnie Tyler, depending on your musical tastes) and came to prominence with his performances at the 1994 World Cup. He had a good career, playing 351 games and scoring 54 goals from his position on the left wing at club level, and earned 68 international caps, finding the back of the net on five occasions in the process. His career was cut short through injury when he stood in a divot whilst training on a high school pitch with his final club, Dallas Burn. So, a good career with a rather tame ending but what really stands out about Swiss Al is his antics during the build up to kick off for Switzerland against Sweden in 1995.

Now, I don't know much about the Swiss or Swedish national anthems, but I'm guessing they aren't as rousing as La Marseillaise or Il Canto degli Italiani (I definitely didn't have to Google what the Italian national anthem was called...). However, it was during the ceremonial patriotic singing that Sutter and his international colleagues unfurled a banner which read "Stop it Chirac" in protest against the French atomic bomb testing on the Mururoa atoll in the southern Pacific Ocean. Whilst this is obviously a very serious issue, what is spectacular about the protest is that they had written STOP IT in absolutely massive letters and then had to write Chirac on a diagonal in a much smaller font as they had run out of room, which sort of undermined their good intentions somewhat.

Swiss Al and company's actions are not alone in the world of footballing protest of course. For example, shortly before Crystal Palace v Bradford City in 1999, Eagles' midfielder Sasa Curcic, sporting a dyed blonde goatee ponytail beard, paraded a placard which read “Yugoslavia - Stop NATO bombing.” I was (naively as it turns out) of the understanding that Yugoslavia had been disintegrated seven years prior to Curcic's protest, and that this inadvertently resulted in Denmark winning Euro '92. However, it seems Yugoslavia did continue to exist as a nation state until 2003 (thanks to Manny for the history lesson), and it was in March 1999 NATO began bombing Yugoslavia in a campaign which lasted well into June of the same year. Curcic's protests began initially at Selhurst Park as mentioned above, but he also skipped training to go and protest outside Downing Street in a move which saw him in breach of his contract and ultimately brought an end to his Palace career as he was released as a cost saving exercise by the cash-strapped Eagles. 

Finally (because trying to make sense of politics is much harder than writing about how good Diamond Lights is as a song) we move on to Didier Drogba. In 2002 a civil war broke out in Drogba's home country of Ivory Coast and although much of the combat had stopped by 2004, things were starting to bubble up again in 2005. At the same time, the national side were on the verge of qualifying for the 2006 World Cup. All they needed to do was beat Sudan and hope that Cameroon didn't beat Egypt. Drogba et al. did their job and an injury time penalty miss by Cameroon in their match saw The Elephants into their first ever World Cup. Obviously, everyone was pretty chuffed at this, but Didier used this momentous occasion as a force for something more. Amidst the post-match celebrations, Drogba made a short speech to his teammates and to his country where he called on the nation to not descend into war, to lay down their weapons and to hold elections. His teammates followed this up by singing "we want to have fun, so stop firing your guns". Although it didn't happen overnight, the change that Drogba had pleaded for did eventually arrive when a ceasefire was signed. 

So there you have it, football can be a surprising game at times. And to think, when I picked Alain Sutter out of the USA '94 sticker book the intention was that this piece was originally going to be about players that looked like they wouldn't be out of place in a thrash metal band... maybe some other time.