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"I congratulate Mesut Ozil who has left the most beautiful team against the virus of fascism," Abdulhamit Gul, Turkey's justice minister proclaimed as news broke out of the Arsenal player's retirement from the German national team. Ozil, undeniably naive about the political repercussions of his photo session with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan This past May, has been dealt with by the DFB owing to his Turkish ancestry. Increasing backlash from all circles of German football forced the gifted midfielder to withdraw from national duties with immediate effect as Ozil cited 'racism and hypocrisy' in a hard-hitting statement.
File image of Mesut Ozil. Reuters
While the world reeled over in shock, the political debate surrounding immigration and national integration is a new leaf – a western countries continues to face the re-emergence of right-wing political ideologies in the popular context, Mesut Ozil's choice Born in Gelsenkirchen, Ozil is a third-generation Turkish-German and a practising Muslim-his ethnic lineage and his religion being a point of contention Among them, their thought-process driven by deep-rooted stereotypes, with their belief in sectarianism dominating over common rationale. Ozil has never been someone who has had his way to his legacy, "How do you get it?" (19659005) Football Adolf Hitler's reign, but this is the country where the Gauliga came to exist during Hitler's reign, but this is also the nation where today Hitler salutes in stadiums are met with anger and rightly so. Due to its convoluted past with anti-Semitism, modern Germany has made a conscious effort to embrace the cosmopolitan way of life, gaining a reputation for being one of the most tolerant societies in Europe, yet the undertones of distrust and prejudice towards ethnically and racially various residents persist
Gerald Asamoah, the Ghana-born German international, who represented the European nation for six years. A person of color and an immigrant, Asamoah faced countless incidents of discrimination from clubs like Hansa Rostock in 2006 to players like Kevin Großkreutz in 2012. Even the Borussia Dortmund keeper Weidenfeller Roman
faced allegations of racially abusing Asamoah. The forward's miserable experiences were not unfortunate, isolated incidents as a prevalent problem around Germany for decades.
On one hand, clubs like Hannover 96 were forced to hand out punishments to a vile group of fans who performed the Hitler salute 88 songs, reminiscent of 'Heil Hitler' slogans. On the opposite spectrum, there have been such clubs as Energie Cottbus who have repeatedly dabbled with this abominable aspect of the game and yet not introduced worthy measures to counter them. In one of the most shameful incidents of German league football in March 2006, Adebowale Ogungbure, pleading his trade for fifth-division club Sachsen Leipzig, responded to racist 'monkey' songs from Hallescher FC fans with a Nazi salute, the behavior of both parties
Footballing badociations have made an honest attempt to kick it out from the beautiful game in recent years, Ozil's case is a prime example of discrimination on the basis of race or ethnicity of a footballer, but mostly due to the perception of his abilities during failed campaigns. "In the eyes of (Reinhard) Grindel and his supporters, I am German when we win, but I am an immigrant when we lose," Ozil wrote in perhaps the most damning sentence in his announcement. Nine years with Germany in which he made 92 appearances, Ozil was one of the lynchpins of the ethnically, racially, socially diverse German national team which lifted the 2014 FIFA World Cup.
In a year when a multi-culturally diverse French national team filled with footballers with an immigrant past triumphed at the World Cup Russia, one can not simply ignore the roots of the Deutscher Fußball-Bund or DFB and its role in Nazi Germany. Jonathan Duffy, in his comments about the coercive, corrupt, manipulative side of football "Europe's right-wing dictatorships pounced on the working man's sport as a means of drumming up support for their politics."
It speaks volumes the forlorn state of affairs in German football, which is not necessarily effective, but rather the most important part of the world. In their national team, the DFB needed to send a message of unity to their entire diaspora, but their political and motivational decisions would only be made to deal with the situation, especially in the current geopolitical schism raging through Europe
"Football does not generate anti-social behavior, let alone racist feelings; However, because of the game's popularity, soccer has been used as a powerful vehicle for discrimination against society, "Christos Kbadimeris had opined in his book" European Football in Black and White ", his conclusion that" politicization of football and footballing of politics are obviously intertwined phenomena "ringing true in case of Mesut Ozil.
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