"If he scores another few, then I'll be Muslim too!" The politics of Liverpool's Salah ft. Salma Mousa

Footballers are global icons, and Mo Salah is probably the most famous Arab and Muslim one today. But does Salah's popularity affect the way that Muslims (and Arabs) are perceived? Guy and Francesco speak to Salma Mousa, Assistant Professor of Political Science at UCLA about the 'Salah effect': how hate crimes in Liverpool and anti-Muslim tweets by Liverpool fans fell after Salah joined the club. Salma also talks about her work in Iraq to measure the effectiveness and limits of football as a tool to bring together Muslim and Christian communities. Salma also gives the FootPol Podcast its first world exclusive by sharing the result of her latest study that examines players' popularity, combining data from fantasy football!

Salma's co-authored article on the 'Salah effect' is available here and her study of Christian-Muslim integration in Iraq can be read here.

Transcript

"If he scores a few, I'll be Muslim too!" The politics of Liverpool's Salah ft. Salma Mousa

Guy Burton 00:22

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the football podcast with football and politics meet. I'm one of your co -hosts, Guy Burton, I am also joined by my fellow cohost, Francesco Belcastro. How are you doing Francesco? 

Francesco Belcastro 00:32

I'm alright Guy. How about yourself? 

Guy Burton 00:34

I'm doing well, thanks. I've been fiddling around with the microphone, trying to improve it for the listeners, hopefully it's improved. Anyway let's just move on so...

Francesco Belcastro 00:44

Well, you have to improve that that because we had an excellent co-host a couple of weeks ago inEugenio so if you don't improve the quality of your audio your job is at risk, sso...

Guy Burton 00:53

Oh stop it! Anyway so do you know what we're talking about this week?

Francesco Belcastro 00:56

This week we are talking on about a very interesting country and one of my favorite footballers.

Guy Burton 01:00

Oh really? Who's that?

Francesco Belcastro 01:02

Mohammed Salah.

Guy Burton 01:03

Okay yes we gonna be talking About Mo Salah and to do that we've been joined by an excellent guest to help us navigate Mo Salah-ology, if we can call it that. 

Guy Burton 01:16

We're joined by Salma Mousa, who's an assistant professor at UCLA in Los Angeles. Salma, welcome to the show. 

Salma Mousa 01:23

Thank you so much for having me. 

Guy Burton 01:25

Oh, our pleasure. And so just to sort of let the listeners know, Salma, as I said, is based over at the University of California, Los Angeles. Previously, she had worked at Yale as a professor there and has received her PhD from Stanford University. 

Guy Burton 01:41

She's an Egyptian -Canadian and works on comparative politics with a focus on migration, conflict, and social cohesion. So football has been quite a strong part of her work. Obviously, we're going to be talking about Mo Salah and some of the work that she's done looking at whether exposure to celebrities like him has helped reduce Islamophobic behavior and attitudes. 

Guy Burton 02:05

That was an article that was published a couple of years ago and got quite a bit of citation, including an earlier piece of work that she did, which also looked at social cohesion generated by Muslims and Christians playing together in Iraq. 

Guy Burton 02:18

And that's something else we're going to be talking about. But before we get started, Salma, one of the things that we always like to ask guests is, I mean, do you have a football team or teams? 

Salma Mousa 02:27

I mean it's probably obvious to people that I'm a Liverpool fan because I am Egyptian and also have eyes and love football, so hard not to be! But my team in Egypt is Zamelek. So those are my two allegiances. 

Guy Burton 02:43

Okay, good. Well, great, it's great to hear that. So fantastic. Let's get started. So yeah, let's start by talking about Mo Salah and the country he was born into grew up in and then left to play abroad. 

Guy Burton 02:55

He's a compatriot of yours. He is from Egypt. Can you give us a little bit of context about Egypt and Salas relationship relationship with the country and the extent to which he's a political actor there? 

Salma Mousa 03:05

So he is definitely a homegrown player, had extremely humble beginnings and interviews. He said he was taking public transport like three, four hours each way to go attend trainings during away games and things like that. 

Salma Mousa 03:18

He would have to he slept on the pitch itself before with his friends when his accommodation fell through. So, I mean, he'd definitely typical in terms of kind of your... your typical Egyptian footballer trying to make it big, you know, had absolutely no privileges whatsoever. 

Salma Mousa 03:34

So you have to respect that grind and that talent that shone through. Eventually moved abroad, went to play in Switzerland and then picked up by the Premier League. As we know Chelsea was not a great time for him, but obviously had enough flashes of brilliance there to have a little stint in Italy and went back. 

Salma Mousa 03:51

But as in so far as his relationship with Egypt: he has resurrected the national team, I would say, so we had a great run where we won back -to -back African championships, did not make it to the World Cup, but we were in the Confederations Cup obviously, and so that was kind of the golden era, the kind -of mid -2000s. 

Salma Mousa 04:16

Back then, the main star player in Egypt was Aboutrika, who actually made it a point of principle not to leave Egypt. And so sadly, I don't think him and Salah ever really overlapped on the national team. 

Salma Mousa 04:28

But then there was kind of a slump and he resuscitated it insofar as he got us into the World Cup in Russia in 2018. And we hadn't been in the World Cup for like 30 years. But after the qualification, everything went downhill. 

Salma Mousa 04:42

I was at that World Cup. I saw a couple of games and it was difficult to watch. There were all sorts of reports of problems happening at the Egypt camp. You know, celebrities showing up, you know the middle of the night that the players were pressured to go hang out with. 

Salma Mousa 04:55

And Salah really had to bear the brunt of that. You could just see it in his face. He looks really, really miserable when he plays with the national team for the most part. And so that's unfortunate. 

Salma Mousa 05:07

He does come back often though. He has a lot of charitable endeavors there that his wife helps manage. He gets warmed fairly frequently, so that's also another issue for him. It's I think getting harder and harder for them to come home, but he does still come home. 

Salma Mousa 05:23

He recently came out, I guess not recently, maybe a couple of years ago now, when one of his teammates on the Egyptian national team had some kind of sex pest scandals come out about him, and he actually came up defending this young player, which was pretty controversial. 

Salma Mousa 05:38

I'd say in general, he stays away from taking any kind of controversial political stance or any other kind of stance. So I was a little surprised that he was willing to go out on a limb for this particular issue, but he did. 

Salma Mousa 05:50

In terms of his involvement in politics, I say zero, it's zero at home, zero abroad. He's deliberately, you know, extremely dedicated to being neutral, doesn't show any allegiance publicly. The last time and maybe the only time he did was actually when he played for Basel, I think in Switzerland, he took the he refused to shake hands when Basel l was playing an Israeli team, I think, or maybe he refuse to take hands with particular Israeli player. 

Salma Mousa 06:19

That's really the only time I remember seeing some backlash against him on lines. There was a lot of he got a lot of criticism for that. Since then, he's been extremely, extremely careful not to, not to take any stances that might alienate fans or get himself in trouble. 

Francesco Belcastro 06:36

Even with the current Gaza crisis has been very, very careful with a statement that they put out. 

Salma Mousa 06:42

Yeah, I mean, what I've seen online is people say he looks like he is being held hostage, basically putting out that statement. I think he looked so tense and just uncomfortable with the video that he put out. 

Salma Mousa 06:54

And even then he was very careful not to use words like, you know, occupation or, um, apartheid, anything that might get him in trouble. He just kind of was like a neutral, like let's end the violence, kind the most milquetoast thing someone could say. 

Salma Mousa 07:10

So he didn't really please people on either side with that. 

Guy Burton 07:13

But does it also help... I mean, does it also mean that because he doesn't take any kind overt political stance or partisan stance, that he can basically be, people can project onto him what they want, and maybe also, it also enables him to have that kind of identity that goes beyond actually Egypt, right? 

Guy Burton 07:34

He is the footballer for the Arab world when you think about it. 

Salma Mousa 07:39

I think up until October, 2023, that is definitely fair. You know, we don't have much representation as a region at the top top level, you have a lot of players in Europe who are of Arab descent. And so that's why in the World Cup you see everyone rallied around Morocco, for example, because we don't really have the luxury of having rivalries to the extent that Europe has, because if any of us make it, as Africa or as the Middle East, like we all kind of jump on that train and support them. 

Salma Mousa 08:09

And he was really such a, not just one of the very few representations, but one or the few very representations that was so universally positive. right? So positive in terms of he's one of the best players of his generation. 

Salma Mousa 08:21

He's world -class, but also he is this role model type person, someone to look up to. He is a family man. He doesn't have any controversies off the pitch, right. He has, he has humble. He was always smiling, right, just a very likable charismatic guy. 

Salma Mousa 08:34

And so we had, it was nice to have a representation of our people that was so positive, right not terrorism. It's not, you know, like women behind closed doors. it's like actually like a very likable approachable person who's really good at what they do. 

Salma Mousa 08:50

The flip side of that is, well first I've heard from some of my friends just kind of chatting that he's destroyed his legacy or some his legacy among Arab fans by not taking out a stance for Gaza. Like he is you know with great power comes great responsibility and has he really used his responsibility for any kind social justice mission? 

Salma Mousa 09:12

Well he has like these non -controversial charitable endeavors like a lot of footballers do, but did he use his voice in a way that, you know, most Arabs would would like to see? Maybe not. So I think time will tell. 

Salma Mousa 09:25

Time will tell to what extent this this latest episode is going to be something that actually taints his reputation and people kind of feeling betrayed by him not using his platform more openly. 

Francesco Belcastro 09:36

It's interesting what you mentioned, because in way like there is an aspect of him that is the one that you and Guy mentioned which is sort of is being a star in the Arab world but he's also a global icon so obviously speaks to different audiences. 

Francesco Belcastro 09:51

So my question was more on this particular aspect. I mean your work focused very much on what we could call the sort -of Salah effect. So how having a visibly Muslim football player or soccer player, according to where you're based, impact society and in particular the view of Muslims in society. 

Francesco Belcastro 10:11

And I think the study you've done there dealt specifically with Britain, if I remember correctly. Could you tell us a bit about that? 

Salma Mousa 10:19

Yeah, sure. So this really started with me and some of my friends. We were just grad students at Stanford and we were following, you know, football very closely. There were some games in the Euros, I think, and we saw this viral clip of these Liverpool fans. 

Salma Mousa 10:35

I think they were at the Porto away game or something and Liverpool just, you know, crushed that game. And then the video of the these fans in a pub or something singing, "If he scores another few, then I'll be Muslim too." 

Salma Mousa 10:47

"And sitting in a mosque, that's where I want to be." And we were just flabbergasted. Like, it's I mean, it was very tongue in cheek, but it was still talking about Muslims and Islam in a pretty positive way. 

Salma Mousa 10:57

You know? And that and not to, to generalize all football fans as being racist hooligans or something. But that's a little surprising to see from football fan. It's the sport that has had problems with racism and continues to have problems with the racism. 

Salma Mousa 11:14

So we started to ask ourselves, is this a real effect? Or is it just one video? To what extent is a is real pattern that we can observe in the data? And around that time, you saw a lot of reporters from the New York Times, from The New Yorker, We're starting to comment and catch on to this saying, oh, Salah is reducing Islamophobia one goal at a time and headlines like that. 

Salma Mousa 11:35

And so we thought, well, we have a very particular skill set, this computational social science skill that to actually be able to test it right beyond the anecdote and beyond the claims from journalists. 

Salma Mousa 11:47

And so we asked ourselves, if Salah reduced Islamaphobia, how would we know? So the strategy was to compare trends among Liverpool fans to fans of other similar clubs. And so we wanted to prepare before and after Salah joined and then look at that change compared to other, similar fan bases. 

Salma Mousa 12:08

So how we did that: So first we want to look a Islamophobic tweets and second we looked at hate crimes. And for the Islamophobia tweets we compare tweets about Muslims or Islam that were tweeted by Liverpool fans, to other tweets about Muslims or Islam, tweeted by fans of the other top five clubs, plus Everton, because that was an interesting comparison we were interested in, like how rival teams respond. 

Salma Mousa 12:33

And then for the hate crimes analysis, we look at hate crimes committed in Merseyside, which is the county where Liverpool is in compared to other counties that had very, very similar hate crime trends before Salah joined. 

Salma Mousa 12:46

So we're trying to make sure we have like a really tight comparison group that had really similar trends, both in terms of Islamophobic tweets and in term of hate crimes in the pre period, the pre Salah period. 

Salma Mousa 12:57

And so what we see is that after Salah joined, we see that Islamophobic tweets basically halved among Liverpool fans relative to the trend among the fans of other similar clubs. So we kind of expect that without Salah, the trend would have been the same as those other clubs, right? 

Salma Mousa 13:12

Because they were tracking very similarly beforehand. And we don't, we can't think of anything else that happened in June of 2017 when he signed that would potentially cause that. And then for the hate crimes data, we see the same thing. 

Salma Mousa 13:23

We see this drop in the rate of hate crime relative to other counties that were tracking very, very similarly to Merseyside before he joined. And so we feel this kind of striking result across these two completely different data sets, like these millions of tweets and these hate -crime records that we got from all the different police departments around the UK. 

Salma Mousa 13:44

And so then we asked ourselves, well, why did this happen? Why does how you feel about one guy translate to an entire group of people? So we recruited around 10 ,000 Facebook users. We put these ads that we targeted to Liverpool fans who live in the UK. 

Salma Mousa 14:01

And we just said, hey, we're some researchers. Can you help us take a survey about Liverpool? And, uh, we actually embedded an experiment in that survey where half of the respondents saw, um, some text about Salah that really reinforces his Muslim identity. 

Salma Mousa 14:15

So it was a picture of him praying on the pitch and saying, well, we all know Salah is a great player, but also he's a very observant Muslim and his daughter's name is Mecca. His wife wears a headscarf. 

Salma Mousa 14:28

He prostrates in prayer when he scores a goal. He observes the main Muslim holidays. So we reinforced this link between Salah and Muslims and Islam in general. Whereas the other half of the respondents didn't see that prime. 

Salma Mousa 14:42

They just saw some kind of, the standard text about when he joined the club, what position he plays, and that's it. And then we then asked respondents some questions about how they feel about Islam in Britain, how do you feel that Muslims in the UK. 

Salma Mousa 14:55

And what we find is that the group that was exposed to this little prime that reinforced Salah's Muslim identity, they were more likely later on in survey to say that they think that Islam is compatible with British values compared to the group that didn't see that crime. 

Salma Mousa 15:10

So in this little kind of controlled way, we're able to get some evidence of the fact that it's, it Salah's typicality as a Muslim, an observant Muslim. That's the thing that's enabling fans to draw that mental link between him as an individual and all of Muslims and all of Islam because he is so typical. 

Salma Mousa 15:29

And so we think that this is why you don't See similar effects with Zidane, for example. Like Salah is not the first Muslim footballer to make it, right? Definitely not. But he's definitely the first observant Muslim footballer to make it. 

Salma Mousa 15:42

And so we think that that is public religiosity is the thing that makes these effects generalize to have people feel that Muslims in general. You can't really get away with saying he is not typical. 

Salma Mousa 15:53

He is actually very typical if there is such thing as a typical Muslim. 

Francesco Belcastro 15:57

Can I ask you one thing? I know that I that's not exactly the focus of your study, but is there a component, perhaps building on what you said before about the service, non -being political, of him being sort of a kind of a good Muslim or a Muslim that integrates well in Western societies as opposed to other, I don't know, Benzema or these players who are kind, from a sort, almost bad Muslim from a Western integration point of view. 

Francesco Belcastro 16:24

Does this difference exist, would you say? 

Salma Mousa 16:28

I think that's a great point. So I think there is a bit of a tension here between being a model minority and having these effects, you know, all these positive effects. Like, is this actually something we want to advocate that other players do, you to be basically perfect? 

Salma Mousa 16:45

And what does perfect mean when you say they integrate badly? Like what is it mean? I mean, part of it is that these other players you mentioned like Benzema, Ozil, they have these controversies off the field. You know, that objectively like they don't look great, you know. Like there they seem to always be... But at the same time we don t really know when is the media gonna choose to focus on particular players and portraying them in a negative way, right? 

Salma Mousa 17:07

So like that's also a hard thing to understand like when that will happen, when the media will make it a big deal. But the other part of integrating badly I would argue is also maybe being quiet about social justice issues, right? That's part of the kind of dark underbelly of this model minority idea is basically, when you we need, we want you to assimilate, not just to integrate. 

Salma Mousa 17:27

And when you assimilate, you kind of drop all your commitments to these other struggles that affect your particular community. And I think that's a big reason why he's so likable. It's by definition, he is not taking a polarizing stance. 

Salma Mousa 17:42

So comparing to Colin Kaepernick in the US, for example. Now, you know, after the Black Lives Matter movement and all that, you look back and you think, well, it's, you know, taking a knee in to protest police brutality in America, it seems, you know really very harmless. 

Salma Mousa 17:58

I mean, it's the kind of the least you can do is just it is only symbolic. It's not. And yet, right, he is a his entire career blew up because of that. And so clearly, there is a cost or there's at least sometimes the cost of taking these stances. 

Salma Mousa 18:12

And so do we want to then say that the policy implication of this paper is to shut up and dribble, you know? I wouldn't say that and the reason why I wouldn t say is because I think actually the effect can go in two ways. 

Salma Mousa 18:26

So a lot of fans who are watching these players, that might be their only exposure to people from a certain background because they live in a very homogeneous area because some minorities just numerically are very small, right? 

Salma Mousa 18:39

So they form these parasocial relationships, they call it. It's almost like a friendship, but it's one -sided because obviously the person doesn't know that you exist, but you are exposed to them all the time. 

Salma Mousa 18:50

Match interviews during the game, maybe on social media. And so that exposure for a lot of fans might be that might be the only Muslim they know, or that may be the only black player they know. Right? 

Salma Mousa 19:01

Or like all sorts of other groups. And so the reason why we don't want to say shut up and dribble just because it worked for Salah is it might actually be really positive for players to for fans to see players like Raheem Sterling, for example, talking about his experiences with racism or Rashford or because they might not get that from anywhere else, right? 

Salma Mousa 19:21

And it's a very personal story. It can induce empathy, so potentially it can really have a positive effect. The flip side of it is if you say something that goes against people's whatever pre -existing opinions they have, it could backfire and actually increase prejudice. 

Salma Mousa 19:38

And we just don't know. No one's done that study yet on the effect of coming out with a political stance in particular. So we don't actually know whether that's on average a good or bad thing. 

Francesco Belcastro 19:50

That is very important. Guy, before I pass it to you, could I just remind listeners, two things. First of all, thanks, Salma, for mentioning that. And it seems to me that this is not really, I mean, we spoke about Muslim, but Muslim applies to every minority, every group, which is visibly different from mainstream, right? 

Francesco Belcastro 20:06

The same argument can be made for other groups. And also the other thing is I wanted to remind the listeners that we had an episode a few weeks ago with Shireen Ahmed, the Canadian journalist that discussed a lot of the issues that you mentioned here from a media perspective, more than a kind of global star perspective. 

Francesco Belcastro 20:25

Guy, please. 

Guy Burton 20:27

Yeah, no, but also what you said, I mean, we were alluding to this, you know, sort of that discussion about the good versus bad Muslim as well. I mean that also sort of transcends into race. If you remember, we did an episode a few months ago looking at race in Brazil and how Pele you know, sort of exemplified a particular, you know, good or, you, know sort of productive black person versus Garrincha who was seen as lazy and had all the stereotypes associated with him. 

Guy Burton 20:54

So it sort of does transcend, but the question I suppose I wanted to ask is of course, you've worked on Salah and so there's the work you'd done about sort of how the Salah effect, in the UK and in Europe and in West, but we also mentioned in introduction that you've done. 

Guy Burton 21:11

You've looked at football in other ways as well. So you're interested been interested in looking at football as a tool for integration and coexistence. And in particular, you know, how people of different faiths playing together, whether that brings them together. 

Guy Burton 21:23

And I think if your your own work in Iraq, could you tell us a little bit about that research that you did? 

Salma Mousa 21:30

Yeah, so this was a study done in the aftermath of the ISIS occupation of northern Iraq which involved this ethnic cleansing campaign against a lot of ethnoreligious minorities and so these Muslims and Christians were actually all targeted by ISIS. 

Salma Mousa 21:47

They were all displaced by ISIS and then we had this problem of this totally broken social trust in this area because people were affected by this really terrible trauma and it actually just ingrained these in -group boundaries. 

Salma Mousa 21:59

So rather than this shared victimhood experience bringing people together, it actually made people turn inward even more. And so working with a lot of local partners who are from the Christian community in Northern Iraq, we wanted to provide a program that people wanted. 

Salma Mousa 22:15

They were displaced at the time and we want it to do something that would be scientifically valuable. So looking at this idea of intergroup contact and whether it can build social cohesion, but also something that can provide a programme that actually people care about. 

Salma Mousa 22:28

And the resounding response that we got during the focus groups was football leagues. Please set up some football leagues, right? And so that's what we did. And so we recruited these pretty much homogeneous Christian team. 

Salma Mousa 22:41

They were all Christian. Um, and what we did was we then randomized whether they would receive an added three or four Muslim players. That's what we call the treated group so that they now have contact with Muslims versus the receiving an added three or four fellow Christian players and all these added players were kind of free agents from other teams that weren't in the league. 

Salma Mousa 23:00

And they then competed together and trained together for a two month league, it was kind of a round robin and then there was a knockout stage. So two months is pretty, that's a pretty intensive form of contact. 

Salma Mousa 23:13

You're seeing your teammates like at least twice a week for training in actual games. Because they were pre existing teams, they had identities, names, following, coaches, people were invested, there were stakes in this isn't something that you're just not going to show up to. 

Salma Mousa 23:28

So really force that element of cooperation and getting to know each other. And so what were the results of the study? Well, I talked before about this idea of generalization of effects. So when does contact with one particular Muslim, let's say, or any person from a social outgroup, when is that contact generalized to how you feel toward the entire group? 

Salma Mousa 23:49

So I wanted to test this in particular. And so I had a set of outcomes that captured trust and tolerance toward your teammates and the other people you encountered in the league environment, versus trust intolerance towards strangers from the outgroup. 

Salma Mousa 24:03

That was really what I was interested in. Like, is your experience on the field generalizing to how you now treat strangers from out group when you walk away from these leagues. And So what i found was being assigned to a mixed team made players far more likely to be training with out group members, to sign up for a mix team next season, and to nominate an out -group member for sportsmanship award. 

Salma Mousa 24:28

So that's all the kind of on the pitch outcomes, you can say. But these effects didn't really generalize off the field. So they were much, much smaller when it comes to things like, are you now more comfortable going to Mosul, which is like this Muslim dominated city that was the outgroup city. 

Salma Mousa 24:43

You're not more likely to overcome segregation and go to these areas that are dominated by the outgroup. You're are not likely more to attend social events where you know that strangers from the group are gonna be there. 

Salma Mousa 24:57

And you arenot more likely to make a donation which we embedded in the survey to a group that benefits everyone versus an organization like the church, for example, that only benefits your group. So this for me, the kind of pattern that stood out was when you were working in these environments that are still very insecure, right? 

Salma Mousa 25:15

And there's no, we haven't addressed the institutional or structural problems, right? So these minorities still don't have structural protections, they don' t have reparations from what happened. There's still this really deep trauma and lingering insecurity in Iraq, and so football's not gonna fix that, right so, these grassroots interventions, they're really, they' re good at improving like everyday behaviors to where people who meet and can kind of vet each other and you know that that person is cool, like I know that guy, I played with him, he's great. 

Salma Mousa 25:44

You're not now suddenly going to engage in like riskier behaviors with strangers because it's not really rational to do that. The environment around you is not conducive to that. So for me, it kind of showed the promise, but also the limitations of relying on grassroots interventions like sports to be kind of a cure -all for conflicts that are actually deeply structural in their roots. 

Salma Mousa 26:05

They're not really about individual prejudice for the most part. 

Guy Burton 26:09

I think that's fascinating because one of the things that we do- We have been sort of interested in as we've been going through the various work that we're doing on this podcast, there is always this sort of question floating out there as to whether football can be used for sort of peace -building, peace making. 

Guy Burton 26:29

You're giving a really kind of complex answer to that, but if we were to sort of push you a little bit further, so the consequences of that study, I mean, if we were to focus specifically on Iraq, what's the message coming from there? 

Guy Burton 26:45

What policy implications are there, as well as maybe more generally with this kind of study? 

Salma Mousa 26:51

Yeah. So, I'd say you have to look at the nature of intergroup relations in a given setting. It changes, right? It's so different from context to context. Where the nature of intergroup conflict is deeply structural, I would not recommend doing like these kinds of grassroots interventions. 

Salma Mousa 27:11

I mean, they're nice when you can do them. You can create kind of a handful of friendships here and there, like that's probably good. But don't rely on that, right, to solve the problem. I'd say these interventions are much better suited in places where the structural part has already been dealt with. 

Salma Mousa 27:26

And actually, the main source of the lingering problem is actually getting the interpersonal interactions to improve. So one example is like Northern Ireland. They've dealt with the structural part of the problem. 

Salma Mousa 27:40

There is a formal peace agreement, right? The violence has ended. So there's not like this occupation and power imbalance. And so that part has been dealt with. But yet, someone described it to me as like when you're on the beach and you have a bucket that you build the sandcastle and then you remove the bucket but the castle is still in the same shape. 

Salma Mousa 27:58

So the kind of social segregation is still there even though the structural part has been dealt with. So that's actually a good case for something like intricate contact through sport because the main crux of that problem is actually now at the grassroots level. 

Salma Mousa 28:13

But in other cases where it's structural, I would not recommend this. Having said that, because on average, contact is positive, I would say if people are in a position to embed contact in a really kind of unobtrusive way using these national institutions, so things like classrooms, like military barracks or conscription programs where they exist, other kinds of civic programs, like all else equal, you know, if you have at your fingertips like the opportunity to mix people versus keep them separated, you should mix them and try to do it in a way that optimizes for positive contact. 

Salma Mousa 28:49

So, if you have the power to do it, you should do, it's better than like homogeneous spaces. But I would say these things are much more, your return on investment is going to be much greater in cases where the structural roots of the conflict have been dealt with already. 

Guy Burton 29:02

Yeah, that's fascinating. And it also sort of reminds us, I think, Francesco, of, a few weeks ago, we talked to Pete Watson of Leeds University about Colombia and how they've been trying to use, at least since the 2016 peace agreement. 

Guy Burton 29:15

They've been trying to use football as a tool for bringing communities together. 

Francesco Belcastro 29:21

The other thing I wanted to ask you is, obviously we spoke about Egypt as a football -mad country and their passion for football is everywhere. But you're based in the US and you live part of your life in Canada, which are countries where the football culture is very different and football isn't as prevalent there. 

Francesco Belcastro 29:40

Yet they are very multicultural societies. What would you say it is or it can be the role of football in this context in relation to some of the issues of social cohesion that you mentioned, that is there a role for football there or there's just not enough of an impact? 

Salma Mousa 29:57

Oh, there is absolutely a role. There's absolutely a rolle. So it's only, I mean, football and the US is just growing and growing and going. One big driver, especially here in California, is the Latinx or the Latino population here is significant and obviously they have ties to countries all around Latin America and South America. 

Salma Mousa 30:18

And so you have a group that's already born into being football mad on average. And they're really helping promote the game. Among young people, it's one of the fastest growing sports. So young that are not watching basketball and baseball and football as much, they are watching soccer more and more. 

Salma Mousa 30:34

And I think I look at it from two angles. I looked at football from the fan perspective perspective and from you as an amateur player perspective. And both of those have different channels for building social cohesion. 

Salma Mousa 30:46

So as a fan, I think having the World Cup be here is going to be just huge for, it's almost like a rally around the flag kind of thing, but in a much more positive way, like it will kind of bring the whole country together because everyone likes to see America win and the US national team has only been getting better. 

Salma Mousa 31:03

And so I think that is gonna get a lot of people engaged. And then from a player perspective, the US has actually always been really good at just producing players up through high school and college. 

Salma Mousa 31:14

So at the amateur level and the youth levels, the US is actually really good. It's just never... It's the MLS, I think that's, that the jump that the like quality kind of traditionally has dropped off a bit. 

Salma Mousa 31:26

But American kids are more often than not playing soccer, right? They understand it and they play it. And if you go on any given Sunday in California, like every field is going to have like eight different teams like trying to play on at the same time. 

Salma Mousa 31:40

And so that I think is also really powerful because football what's so great about it is as a player it's an identity that you can opt into. It's something that anyone can do and you just have to be good, right? 

Salma Mousa 31:52

But you can opt in to it as opposed to other kinds of social organizations that are based on an identity you have no control over. So like religious groups or like language based groups like, you know, that they're not actually great for building social cohesion, because they don't have that cross cutting component. 

Salma Mousa 32:13

Whereas football, like it has the cross -cutting element, where and you can opt in, it's not based on some immutable identity that you can't control. And so you're more likely to get intergroup contact in spaces like that. 

Salma Mousa 32:24

And especially in the US, where we have this culture of pickup games, where anyone actually can just jump into a game, usually in basketball, but more and more in soccer too, it's very common that someone can just jump in. 

Salma Mousa 32:35

And so that's where you're going to get the contact element too from the player's perspective. 

Francesco Belcastro 32:39

Okay. Can I ask you a final thing? So if it gets to say Egypt, Canada, and the US, who would you be cheering for? 

Salma Mousa 32:47

Oh, well, I guess you can say that I'm badly integrated! Because I will always support Egypt! I just cannot imagine ever supporting another... Yeah. I mean, if even, you know, when I went to, attended a talk like maybe 15 years ago about why the world doesn't want to see America do well in the World Cup. 

Salma Mousa 33:06

And this person was arguing that it's because America dominates everything else in global culture, right? Like they dominate Hollywood, they dominate every other sport in the Olympics, the military, politics... America is the hegemon. 

Salma Mousa 33:18

But actually, the one thing that is, belongs to the rest of the word that America can't quite capture is soccer. I think a part of me still has that feeling, you know, where I'm like, let's leave something to rest of the world! 

Salma Mousa 33:32

But if I stay in this country long enough, I might change my mind. 

Francesco Belcastro 33:35

As a badly integrated migrant myself, I sympathize with that. Guy? 

Salma Mousa 33:41

Yeah, you just can't! 

Guy Burton 33:43

So if i could just ask Salma: obviously the work that you've been sort of talking about, I mean, it's been published already and we're going to link to it on the show notes as well, if listeners want to read more. 

Guy Burton 33:58

But one of the things I'm also curious about is what kind of work you're currently doing right now and particularly when it as it relates to football? 

Salma Mousa 34:04

Yeah, so actually after this Salah paper came out we had one piece of feedback that just kept coming back to haunt us which I think was an extremely valid piece of feedback, which is: what happens when Salah stops scoring? 

Salma Mousa 34:18

Is this because he's basically perfect, right? Like, is this the standard? Is this a standard that minority players have to be held to, right, in order to reduce prejudice? And actually, what about the opposite? 

Salma Mousa 34:30

If they stop scoring, are we now going to see backlash effects? So we felt this was actually really important to understand, because in real life, people have bad days. And it just happened to me that our study period for the Salah paper was during this time where Salah was doing incredible stuff at the individual level, club level got the national team, drag them to the World Cup, right? 

Salma Mousa 34:52

So this kind of study period is actually not representative necessarily. So with the same set of co authors, we're actually working on a follow up now, where we look at last season in the Premier League, and we have data on every single player, and their minority status. 

Salma Mousa 35:09

So we looked at whether they're an ethnic minority, and also if they are foreign, those are the two ways we are defining kind of minority or being an out group. And then we also have data on their performance, which we get from the fantasy app, the Fantasy Premier League app. 

Salma Mousa 35:23

And what we then do is see if you've had a bad day, so if underperform relative to what you did the previous week, or if just get lower points, like in terms of the distribution of players that week. 

Salma Mousa 35:36

Are you punished more by journalists and by fans for having a bad day if you're a minority? So if you are an ethnic minority, if you were foreign? And so we scraped like these tens of thousands of newspaper articles from the top newspapers in the UK. 

Salma Mousa 35:50

And then we also have millions of Reddit and Twitter posts to see how fans respond. And we also have data from the fantasy app. So our fantasy user is more likely to sell players or bench them if they are minorities and have a bad day as opposed to if they're not minorities and have a bad day. 

Salma Mousa 36:06

And I can preview the main finding of that paper, which is not even out yet. So you heard it here first! We were very surprised to see that we actually don't see that much evidence of discrimination based on minority status. 

Salma Mousa 36:20

So fans and journalists are equally toxic and equally terrible basically to everyone when they have a bad day! So is that a good thing? I don't know, but that that's the result. 

Guy Burton 36:31

Yeah, okay, that's...

Francesco Belcastro 36:32

The great thing is that the podcast is the first place where these results were announced! So we got... 

Guy Burton 36:38

We, got a world, world exclusive right there!

Salma Mousa 36:41

You actually do! You can say that you have the, you have a scoop on the follow -up paper, which is not even out yet. 

Guy Burton 36:47

That's fascinating. Well, thank you so much, Salma, for taking the time to, you know, to come in and talk to us about Mo Salah, about, about social cohesion in Iraq and the football tournament you organized there, and also your latest, latest work as well. 

Guy Burton 37:02

So I, we really appreciate you coming in and talking to us, about these things. 

Francesco Belcastro 37:05

Thank you very much, Salma. 

Salma Mousa 37:07

Of course, there's nothing else I'd rather do. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to share. 

Guy Burton 37:12

Yeah, we might hold you to...

Francesco Belcastro 37:14

Guy, this was absolutely fascinating. Such a rich episode. So what do we need to remind our listeners? 

Guy Burton 37:21

Well, as we usually do, we always ask listeners at the end of these episodes to, you know, if they liked what they heard, to review us, to show it, to subscribe, Even let us contact us and let us know about future episodes that you'd like us to do and potential guests that we could reach out to. 

Guy Burton 37:40

And of course you can do that through all the various social media that we are based on. So we have a Facebook page, we're on Twitter or X depending on which side of the fence you belong. We also have a Blue Sky account, We've got an Instagram one and you can either reach either me at LinkedIn or try and find Francesco there as well. 

Francesco Belcastro 38:01

Yeah, I'm not much on LinkedIn. But they could let me know if they want me to keep you as a as a co host. So whether... 

Guy Burton 38:09

Oh stopn it! So okay, so yeah, that's about the listeners. But beyond that, Francisco, what are we talking about next week? 

Francesco Belcastro 38:17

So the topic of next weeks episode is the politics of football in Thailand. So we move to a different part of the world and different topic, definitely. And we're gonna have two guests to discuss this topic. 

Francesco Belcastro 38:28

Arjin Thongyuukong and Matt Riley. So it's going to be an interesting one. As usual, Guy, this is dropping Monday morning. First thing, listeners with their coffee. 

Guy Burton 38:37

But anyway, it was great, great listening to you talking to yourself. See you again next week. And also, Salma, thank you again for appearing on our show. 

Salma Mousa 38:43

Thank you. 

Guy Burton 38:44

All right. Take care. Bye

Francesco Belcastro 38:45

Bye. 

Salma Mousa 38:46

Bye bye.