Bans on “retreating into the field”, “digging a hole”, being “covered with fabrics of all kinds” or even “exhibiting a talisman in the playing area”: the news Measures taken by the Senegalese Professional Football League to fight against occult practices are as much out of the ordinary as their objective goes beyond the sporting framework.
Mystical rituals may be common practices in the other king sport, Senegalese wrestling, but they are no longer welcome in local football. Long criticized by the public for its passivity, the league promises to crack down this year with sanctions ranging from fines of thousands of euros to the withdrawal of points or the loss of a match on the green carpet.
“The credibility and positive image of the championship are at stake,” judges Amsatou Fall, executive director of the Senegalese Football League, who considers that “out of five incidents, four have their source in these practices.” From then on, if nothing is done, “we will witness scenes of violence during each championship match,” predicts sports journalist Saikou Seydi. The latter believes that, because of these methods supposed to bring you victory, it is now “difficult to see more than 70 good minutes of play in a match. Sometimes it’s a player who will lie down over here, sometimes another who will throw an object into the opposing team’s goal.”
His colleague Cheikh Diop remembers a heated match between two big names in the championship, Casa Sports and AS Douanes. A bottle of water placed in the goals created controversy to the point of causing the match to be interrupted. “At each set piece, an attacker from AS Douanes came to take the bottle to send it off the field before it was recovered again and given again to the Casa Sports goalkeeper,” he says . Ironically, a goal was scored a few minutes after the “mystical” bottle was removed.
Funny scenes
These funny scenes were until now part of the folklore of Senegalese football, but they have become more visible with the Internet broadcasts of the local championship. If the footballers are the first actors, “it is the managers who give the instructions to the players since they are the ones who have access to the field”, relates, on condition of anonymity, Abdou, who played for several local teams before joining expatriate to Europe. According to him, practically all clubs are concerned.
This use of marabouts or fetishists is the “extension of societal realities and beliefs,” analyzes Doctor Hameth Dieng, professor and researcher in sports sciences at Saint-Louis University. “Players, coaches, managers… Everyone thinks that they are sources of improvement in performance,” says the co-author of a study on these practices called “xons” in the world of “Navetanes”, a popular championship.
Local professional football owes a lot to these tournaments between neighborhoods where young talents revealed themselves before becoming world stars. The recurring tensions during the meetings also pushed their coordinators to announce on October 15 the suspension of the Navetanes in the Dakar department after a weekend of “unbelievable and gratuitous violence”.
Several observers make the link between the scenes observed and the weight of supernatural beliefs, but for Hameth Dieng, the exclusion of these practices from local football will be difficult, because they are very “present in all spheres of Senegalese society”.
The league is aware of the scale of the task as the start of the championship is scheduled for October 28. “We are all Senegalese, we do not prevent there from being prayers before coming or in the locker rooms, but it must be done discreetly not on the field or in the surrounding area,” says Amsatou Fall. , the executive director of the Senegalese football league.