Rommel, Carl. Egypt’s Football Revolution: Emotion, Masculinity, and Uneasy Politics. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2021, 312 pages

In this detailed ethnography, anthropologist Karl Rommel explores the intersections between politics, emotions, and masculinity in Egyptian football between 2007 and 2019. Based on several years of fieldwork in Egypt with players, fans, sports journalists, members of football associations, and ordinary Egyptian men during and after the revolutionary events, Rommel shows how events changed the perception of football in Egyptian society as well as related aspects of emotionality, politics, nationalism, and masculine identity: the growing attention to football in the late Mubarak era reached its peak during the international football championships in which the Egyptian national team participated. Football was literally everywhere, from everyday conversations in cafés to political talk shows on television. This “football bubble” grew, but after the tragic events in 2011 and 2012—police violence against protesters during political revolutionary events and the massacre at the Port Said football stadium—interest in football crashed and it lost its significance. Only recently has it been rehabilitated by the actors engaged in it. Again, and again, football-related emotions and affects have defined and redefined what it means to be an Egyptian man, what the Egyptian nation is, and what its members should be. The peculiarity of Rommel’s account is that he focuses on individual actors and specific events, thereby highlighting his work against the background of historical works that fit revolutionary events into large political-economic narratives. Football in Egypt is more than just a sports game. Football is a reality in which power relations and the effects they produce are initially embedded. The first part of the book is devoted to revealing how the close interaction of power, state support, money, the media, pop culture and bright victories on the football pitch in the late 2000s created a national emotional “bubble” that covered the whole of Egypt. Rommel’s understanding of bubble comprises a special emotional and affective space of football, which can grow and increase, can retract and even burst. This is a space of close emotional-political connectedness of things: “I picture the bubble as a social assemblage of qualitatively distinct mediators—humans, symbols, objects, and texts—that all mattered, and which worked on and off each other” (31). Rommel describes the formation of this bubble generated by the success of the country’s football teams, which engulfed both ordinary people and the political regime of Mubarak, creating a connection between the presidential family and the ordinary people. Sports generally, and football, in particular, created the Egyptian national sense of We, which surpassed each individual and their ideas about the national community. This initially built-in nationalism has contributed to the fact that football has become a powerful and effective political instrument. The growing football bubble determined how, when, and what normal Egyptian men, members of the national community, should and can feel. But, like any phenomenon related to the sport, this instrument cannot be completely controlled—there is always a moment of unpredictability and uncontrollability in sports. The emotional-national unity produced by the football bubble was not stable and hermetic. Unpredictability manifested itself when the national team was defeated in two matches in Algeria in 2009. After the unexpected defeat, the strength of the bubble was called to question. A critical reflection and assembly of the new perception of football began—the events in Algeria in 2009 prompted the formation of new emotional discourses about football. As soon as football begins to be increasingly perceived as political (siyasi) and fanatical (muta’assib), its emotionality is separated from the national project. The more political (siyasi) football became, the more it lost its ability to act as a unifying national-political force, forming a …