Analysis | North Africa How Egypt Militarized Sports

From football to the Olympics, Sisi’s regime deploys athletes as foot soldiers in its war for control

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The Egyptian team’s performance at the Paris Olympics last summer was marked by failures in almost every category. Despite reportedly spending over 1 billion Egyptian pounds (around 19 million euro) to prepare for the competitions, the team returned to Cairo with only three medals.

Hossam el-Hamalawy is an Egyptian journalist and socialist activist currently based in Berlin. His posts appear regularly on Substack and Twitter.

A closer look at the profiles of the three medallists can be a good start to grasp the extent of the militarization of sports in Egypt. Gold medallist Ahmed el-Gendy, a 24-year-old pentathlete, is a graduate of the “Presidential Leadership Programme” organized by the National Training Academy, overseen by Egypt’s autocrat Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and his General Intelligence Service (GIS). Simply put, it is an eight-month programme targeting selected youth, where they are ideologically indoctrinated in an attempt to create staunch regime loyalists and informers who will then take over civil service posts. The 26-year-old weightlifting silver medallist Sara Samir is a graduate of a military sports school in the Suez Canal city of Ismailia, which she joined at the age of 11. Mohamed el-Sayed, a 21-year-old fencing bronze medallist, started fencing in Tanta at six, before joining a military sports team. Both Samir and el-Sayed are given an official military welcome at the airport following any championship competition.

The repressive apparatus’s grip on the sports sector follows a general pattern enforced by Sisi to militarize state organs and society. It corresponds to his worldview, which despises civilian institutions and sees the army as a superior, efficient, and more professional institution worthy of running the state and ruling the nation. However, as his country’s mediocre Olympic performance symbolized, this militarization is increasingly failing to deliver the desired results.

The Generals Take Control

The intervention of the army and security services in the sports sector predates the 2013 coup by decades. Since the 1952 coup, which first brought the Free Officers to power, Egypt’s senior brass has always shown a keen interest in professional sports, especially football.

In addition to being a personal passion among some officers, sports were also used as an ideological tool to market the army as a high-achieving professional institution and garner more social prestige, both locally and internationally. Field Marshal Abdel Hakim Amer, the country’s defense minister from the 1952 coup until 1967, was an avid fan of Zamalek SC, Egypt’s premier football team, and used his influence to pressure referees and sports journalists to ensure his team’s success. Meanwhile, the president of Zamalek’s archrival, Al Ahly SC, was Lieutenant General Abdel Mohsen Mortagi, commander of the Egyptian troops in Sinai during the 1967 war.

What changed after the 2013 coup, however, was the intensity with which the military and security organs intervened directly in professional sports. The repressive apparatus now works through several channels that ensure its control of the sector. Retired officers from the army, GIS, and the highly militarized Interior Ministry serve as presidents, sponsors, and managers of clubs, federations, and regulatory bodies. These include officers who have been involved in widely publicized grotesque human rights abuses.

Even the few civilians who make it to the sector’s top are ideologically aligned with the repressive apparatus.

For instance, the Egyptian Olympics “Values Committee” is run by Major General Sherif el-Komaty, a former State Security Police officer accused of torturing and sodomizing a detained activist blogger in custody. The Central Security Forces commander, Major General Hassan Moussa, who personally led the operation to break up the Rabaa Square sit-in, resulting in the biggest massacre in the history of modern Egypt, went on to become the executive director of Zamalek SC. Another is Major General Ahmed Soliman, a former prison officer accused of torture and sexual abuse while enjoying a flourishing coaching career with the national football team — and the list goes on.

Even the few civilians who make it to the sector’s top are ideologically aligned with the repressive apparatus. For instance, Ashraf Sobhi, the current Sports Minister, likens the national football team’s defeats to the “near collapse of the state in 2011”, in reference to the revolution.

The General Secretariat of the Ministry of Defence runs Ǧihāz al-Riyāḍa li-l-Quwwāt al-Musallaḥa, the Armed Forces Sports Agency, which is not only in charge of the physical fitness of military personnel, but also constitutes the institution’s direct arm in the sports sector. The agency runs several football teams, some of which compete in the Egyptian Premier League. Professional athletes performing their mandatory military service, especially footballers, are immediately conscripted to “serve” in the military’s sports teams as players.

Moreover, since 1993, the agency has operated “Military Sports Schools” where children are enrolled to receive basic education and intensive physical training to prepare them for national and international competitions. By the end of the 2019–2020 academic year, around 56,000 students were enrolled across the country. Achievements by these athletes are widely celebrated on army propaganda platforms.

Securing the Stadium

The repressive apparatus has also tightened its grip on the physical spaces where crowds gather for performances or sports matches. First, the security services went after Egypt’s ultras groups, killing and rounding up their leaders and members, forcing some of them to dissolve. A Cairo court shortly after the coup ruled that all ultras groups were “terrorist entities”.

The reason for this persecution is clear: during the 2011 revolution, many ultras helped organize teens and youth in their early 20s, mobilizing them in different confrontations with the security forces, and injecting dynamism into the political movements. Smashing the ultras was central to crowd control and depleting the potential for street mobilizations.

The GIS evolved after the coup to become the micromanager of the ideological state apparatus. The agency created a company dubbed United Media Service Group (UMS), whose subsidiaries control all aspects of thought production and entertainment in today’s Egypt, monopolizing and directing most media outlets, cinema, and drama production.

The increased militarization of Egypt’s sports sector has not necessarily led to more achievements, a fact that even Sisi himself has acknowledged.

One of the UMS Group subsidiary companies is Tazkarti (My Ticket), whereby fans attending music concerts or sports matches must register online in advance with their full personal details. Trials for the new service began in 2018 and it was officially launched in 2019. CCTV cameras were installed in stadiums. Facial recognition and Artificial Intelligence technology systems were imported to police the attendants.

The GIS also created a UMS subsidiary, Estadat Holding Company, which signed a contract with the Ministry of Youth and Sports in 2018, taking over the management of the country’s stadiums. Another GIS-owned company, Presentation, was later swallowed up by UMS and rebranded as United Sports, which became the official sponsor of the Egyptian Football Association, the Egyptian Handball Federation, and several of the most popular clubs in Cairo and the provinces.

The military generates income through the stadiums and sports facilities under its ownership, which are leased by civilian professional teams for training exercises and tournaments. The army companies also regularly receive construction contracts from the Ministry of Youth and Sports to build facilities.

Failed Sports, Failed State

The increased militarization of Egypt’s sports sector has not necessarily led to more achievements, a fact that even Sisi himself has acknowledged. Over the past decade, Egypt has lost more than one-third of its athletic community, according to government figures. In other words, the number of athletes registered with public and private clubs and youth centers declined by roughly 350,000 persons, while the number of registered sports teams declined by almost half.

These troubling numbers follow a general pattern of failures that have marked Sisi’s regime in all other spheres of governance, whether urban planning, foreign policy, the environment, education, or the economy. Unable to deliver real improvements to people’s lives, Sisi has been trying to turn the country into a military camp instead. This may have enabled him to squash dissent until now, but it leaves him with an inefficient failed state with no domestic legitimacy, totally dependent on foreign support for survival.

In that sense, Egypt’s miserable performance at the 2024 Olympics likely foreshadows more failures to come.