Pour l’amour du foot?
10 June 2016
Euro 2016 kicks off today and professional and personal agendas may be adapted to fit around the timetable of this European and global event. Hopefully the Euro in France will remain peaceful, free not only from terrorist attacks, but also from the sort of hooliganism we saw in France in 1998 with the brutal attack on the French policemen Daniel Nivel who still suffers from the serious injuries sustained at the hands of German hooligans.
Football is still the same game with more or less the same rules it has had for more than 150 years. But it has also become the game of global capitalism: private investors (individuals or groups) from Arab and Asian countries buy European teams or television broadcasting rights. Euro 2016 will again be the global market place for players who like the Belgian player Bosman who went to the European Court of Justice and was winning on the freedom of sportspeople (the Bosman case in 1995), could change his employing club and put a unilateral end to their contract. Since then the market has exploded and massive capital investment concentrates power in the hands of the same few clubs playing the final rounds of the Champions League. The rich teams buy the confirmed players and the less rich train good players to sell them on the market. Only the happy few are able to win the national championship.
Surprises can happen, as we saw with Leicester City this year. The consultants for the big players are making big money by selling their players to the most financially attractive clubs, feeding marketing machine. Identification with the club that employs them is now considered outdated romanticism. Club teams today look rather like a global than a local selection. Luckily national teams today include and translate the diversity of their societies: we remember bleu, blanc, beur.
For the sake of marketing and money making, UEFA has driven up the number of teams competing in this tournament to 24, thereby increasing the number of games. Players from leading clubs take part in around 60 competition games in one season. The biggest question is when their body will strike back – although modern sports science is deployed to constantly increase both physical and mental capacity.
At the end of the day, we are still left with 22 players on a field running behind a ball for 90 minutes, faster and more effective than ever. Even if industrialisation and capitalisation have taken over football, the passion for the game is global and football has still a societal role, not in the sense of nationalism, but in the sense of community building and a sense of belonging.
Our passion for the game will not make us blind to the perverse effects of the corruption still present in football structures (UEFA and FIFA), or confuse a sense of belonging and team loyalty with the worst expressions of racism. It remains just a game. Let us enjoy the tournament which will hopefully see an unexpected very diverse winning team! For the romantic “amour du foot”!
SOLIDAR Silver Rose Awards – Join us on 14 June
In a world of rapid political and social change, mounting conflict and inequality, the need for progressive politics to ensure social justice and global solidarity is greater than ever. The 2016 edition of the SOLIDAR Silver Rose Awards presents awards to our four winners for their courageous political choices, working on highly sensitive and very current political issues
As for the past 14 years the ceremony will take place in the European Parliament in Brussels. The ceremony brings together a wide audience of like-minded individuals with backgrounds in civil society, trade unions and politics, for a very much needed and timely celebration of global solidarity and progressive engagement. The SOLIDAR Silver Rose Awards is held under the patronage of the European Parliament and made possible thanks to the support of the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats and the Party of European Socialists (PES) and the media support of EurActiv.
Is it just another prize – one of many? By no means! Watch here how SOLIDAR’s Secretary General Conny Reuter describes it.
Together for Social Europe
European Commission launches communication on integration of third country nationals and revision of the Blue Card Directive
09 June 2016
This week, the European Commission presented two important proposals regarding the integration of third country nationals: a communication on the new Action Plan on Integration and the proposed revision of the Blue Card Directive. The communication states that successful integration is a process that happens across many different policy areas. The Action Plan is based therefore on five key policy priorities, namely pre-departure/pre-arrival measures, education, labour market and vocational training, access to basic services and active participation and social inclusion. The European Commission presents a list of actions to be implemented in 2016 and 2017 including launching new project proposals to support pre-departure/pre-arrival measures under the Asylum, Migration & Integration Funds (AMIF), promoting the upskilling of low-skilled persons in the context of the New Skills Agenda for Europe and funding projects to improve the labour market integration of women and refugees under the EaSI programme. The proposal for a directive on the conditions of entry and residence of third-country nationals for the purposes of highly skilled employment, better known as the “Blue Card Directive” aims to improve the EU’s ability to attract high-skilled workers by proposing an EU-wide harmonised system as well as more inclusive and flexible conditions.
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Building Learning Societies
Innovative apprenticeships for NEETs
09 June 2016
According to the latest statistics, more than 5 million young people aged 15-24 are unemployed in the EU today, and the number of those who are below 30 years old and who are Not in Employment, Education or Training (NEETs) is estimated at 14 million. This striking phenomenon has been high on the policy agenda for several years now, and has a heavy impact on the autonomy and well-being of an entire young generation.
It is of particular concern that more than 33% of NEETs have been unemployed for more than a year, and 42.7% of young people in employment were on temporary contracts compared to 13.8% of the overall working population. These numbers demonstrate that young people are at a greater risk of becoming and staying unemployed for the long term.
There is a strong need for more sustainable policies in this field and actions to support the integration of youth into the labour market and education.
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Organising International Solidarity
An EU strategy to implement the 2030 Agenda urgently needed!
08 June 2016
This week (6 June), the SDG Watch Europe, an alliance of 70 organisations including SOLIDAR, CONCORD, the Social Platform, the EEB and many others, sent an open letter to the European Commission’s President Juncker calling on him to urgently adopt an overarching strategy to guide the implementation of the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda.
The SDG Watch Europe’s call is backed by the European Parliament’s Resolution of 12 May 2016, which asked the Commission to “come forward with a proposal for an overarching Sustainable Development Strategy encompassing all relevant internal and external policy areas, with a detailed timeline up to 2030”.
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