Explained: Why the Argentina vs Morocco chaos was really good, and really bad, for the Olympic Games
Attracting eyeballs comes at a cost
Pitch invasions, projectiles thrown, anthems being booed, players and coaches hounding the referee, a match being suspended and then resumed with no fans in the stadium.
Who said the Olympic spirit was dead?
The farcical scenes at the end of the football match between Argentina and Morocco - which was the very first event of the entire Paris 2024 programme - left fans furious, players confused, and historians scouring the records to try find any precedents for the wild events that took place.
For those still catching up, Morocco were leading 2-1 when the fourth official indicated there would be 15 minutes of stoppage time. More than 15 minutes later, Argentina eventually scored after hitting the crossbar twice in a matter of seconds.
The goal sparked jubilant celebrations among the Argentina players, who were immediately pelted with bottles by Morocco fans behind the goals.
Some supporters went a step further, with several running onto the field, while at the same time, a firework appeared to be let off dangerously closed to the substitute benches.
Players quickly left the field and virtually everyone in attendance, including the official match commentators on the global broadcast feed, assumed the game had finished as a 2-2 draw.
But eventually word came through that the game had actually been “interrupted”, rather than finished, and a message appeared on the big screen at the stadium saying “your session has been suspended, please leave the stadium".
More than an hour later, players and officials returned to the field for a short warm-up, with all fans now outside the stadium. With the game set to resume, the referee jogged over to the Video Assistant Referee (VAR) screen to review the goal, which he promptly ruled out for offside.
This came as no surprise to the players, who in the intervening time had already watched the replays and knew the goal would be overturned.
Play eventually resumed for three minutes, before full-time was finally blown, almost two hours after most people thought the game had finished.
Now that you’re fully up to speed, let’s dive into why these shocking scenes might actually be a blessing in disguise for the Olympic movement.
‘CHANGE OR BE CHANGED’
The Olympic movement is having a midlife crisis.
Instead of buying a sports car or getting plastic surgery, it’s instead acting like your friend’s mum who lets you drink alcohol when you’re a teenager and joins in when you gossip about who’s hooking up with who.
In other words, desperate to remain cool and relevant to young people.
There are many ways in which the Olympics are doing this, the most obvious being the inclusion of sports such as skateboarding, surfing and, for the first time in Paris, breakdancing (or “breaking” as the purists insist on calling it).
But something that has flown under the radar is the IOC’s big push into online gaming and esports. At a speech this week, IOC President Thomas Bach revealed that the organisation plans to hold the first ever Olympic Esports Games next year (in Saudi Arabia, of course).
Bach made it abundantly clear what was behind this curious march into the unknown.
“We can and we must change before we are being changed,” he said. “For this change, we need to change our mindset. We need the mindset of the digital natives.”
“If we want to continue to inspire the next generation with our Olympic values, then we have to go to where the young people are.”
Bach says three billion people are “familiar” with gaming, which seems like a strange way of measuring interest in something. I’m familiar with Justin Bieber but I wouldn’t say I’m a Belieber (even that reference shows how out of date I am).
But if we’re going with tenuous stats, let’s go with FIFA’s claim that five billion people “engaged” with the 2022 FIFA World Cup.
Those are a lot of eyeballs, and the IOC is desperate for them. That’s why football will never be in danger of being cut from the Olympics. It’s simply too popular.
But the IOC does still have a challenge of getting those billions of football fans to be interested in the Olympic tournament, when it is clearly not the pinnacle of the game - particularly for men’s football, which is restricted to under 23s (with a couple of overage players allowed per team).
And, in this digital age of short attention spans, what better way is there to get people interested in your event than drama and chaos?
Given the opening ceremony was still two days away, and major tournaments in Europe and the Americas had just wrapped up, most football fans across the world wouldn’t have even known that the Olympic football tournament had started.
They do now.
‘PEACEFUL COMPETITION’
Bach went on to mention how, in order to speak directly to the new, young audiences the Olympics are desperate to reach, the Games need to be more “inclusive”.
This is where things get tricky.
Of course, inclusivity is already the hottest of hot-button topics in the never-ending culture wars.
But in a sporting context, inclusivity can also conflict directly with the IOC’s over-arching goal of “peaceful competition”.
For example, Argentina’s national anthem was roundly booed at the start of the game against Morocco. So, too, was Israel’s when they played against Mali a few hours later.
Booing the opposition team’s anthem is standard practice in football. At the Olympics … not so much.
The same goes for lighting flares, physical altercations between fans, and refereeing controversies. All par for the course at major football tournaments, but pretty much the opposite of what Bach was talking about when he spoke of a desire to “further disseminate the Olympic values”.
If the Olympics want to keep attracting those young eyeballs, they might not be so comfortable with what those eyeballs want to see.
Yet if they try restrict the boisterousness that football fans bring with them, they run the risk of alienating the very people they’re trying to attract. They can’t very well say “the Olympics are for you - but only on our terms”.
And so, the IOC is left in a position where it can hardly condemn the shocking scenes that followed the Argentina-Morocco clash.
“It is only by living our Olympic values of solidarity, equality, human dignity for all - that we can manage to bring the entire world together in peace,” Bach said at the conclusion of his speech this week.
There was nothing dignified or peaceful about the scenes in Saint-Etienne last night. But at least the kids now know the Olympics are on.
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