Everyone knows them, for everyone has experienced them: those precious moments of clarity, where no words are needed, because the situation itself says everything.
Shkodran Mustafi is an Albanian-German professional football player, who won the World Cup with the German national team in 2014 and who currently plays for Valencia club de futbol. Mustafi was born in Bad Hersfeld, Germany to an Albanian family, originally from Gostivar, Macedonia.
He is clearly uncomfortable with the bottle of beer right in front of him, as he sits down for a press conference. The scene that unfolds couldn’t make it clearer: alcohol marketing is out of place in sports in general, and in professional football in particular. It puts many players in difficult positions. It glamorises a harmful product. It entices children and youth to use alcohol.
And we can all read these facts from the expression on Mustafi’s face.
Three more problems are brought to the surface by this short scene:
- Alcohol marketing is so pervasive in today’s hyper-monetised professional sports, that even if the bottle had been removed, there would still be all the logos around.
- Alcohol marketing is so aggressive that it doesn’t pay any aspect to people’s lifestyle choices, religious convictions or family backgrounds.
- The alcohol norm has pro football in such a tight grip that it contradicts football’s own messages.
Once Fifa made this film with one of the world’s best players. Cristiano Ronaldo advices kids: avoid alcohol. It’s healthy and it’s good for your performance. The problem with this is: the football clubs, the football leagues, the football governing bodies all contradict this important message – as Shkodran Mustafa has painfully pointed out.
But Mustafi and Ronaldo are not the only ones who diverge from the alcohol norm and allow us to see just how entranced alcohol marketing has become:
- A few years ago, Ivorian Yaya Toure forfeited his man of the match champagne on religious grounds.
- Football players regularly choose to show their opposition to alcohol in football, like Ribery and Benatia in this picture. Can you spot them?
If one thing becomes painfully clear: alcohol marketing in sports is unbearable – for many fans and spectators and for many athletes themselves, too.
Alcohol marketing in sports causes situations where personal choices, religious convictions, and intimate feelings are getting hurt. The players whose family members suffer(ed) from alcohol use disorder? The children whose parents abuse alcohol? The players who follow a religious belief? The fans who follow a religious belief? The people who just don’t want to use alcohol because they want to lead healthy lives?
They are all ignored and their needs and believes are all rejected because of alcohol marketing. Never before has one scene told this story so compellingly.
well if you would have reserched your facts you would have found that he is a muslim and its has nothing to do with his profession.
This is a dishonest article written by you.
Dear John Peter,
thanks for your comment.
It’s always difficult to reply to comments that accuse of dishonesty and failure to do research, but let me try my best.
There’s a hyperlink to a simple wikipedia page about Shkodran Mustafi, which should tell you that we’ve done research about who the player is. Furthermore, I’m a big fan of football and as a German also of the German national team. So, my knowledge about Shkodran Mustafi is on “nerd-level”.
That brings me to the point that this blog post is NOT so much about Shkodran as it is about an emblematic scene that highlights a concrete problem.
The problem is that professional sports in general (feel free to check out other blog posts about that topic) and football in particular are pushing alcohol – on children and youth, and even on the players.
In this case it is therefore not important why Shkodran does not use alcohol, or even whether or not he uses alcohol. What is important is that in this scene he doesn’t want to have a bottle of beer in front of him when meeting the press, talking about his job. But his club, his football association and the alcohol industry are pushing alcohol on him – quite obviously and quite in contradiction to what they say otherwise.
That’s the case that this blog post is making.
We respect all people and the choices they make concerning alcohol use: be it to use alcohol or be it to live free from alcohol. We don’t think that being a Muslim is by definition a sufficient “explainer” of why someone doesn’t use alcohol. That is another why it’s irrelevant for this blog post which religion Shkodran Mustafi follows and how he follows it.
I hope these explanation help to better understand the points made in this blog post and why some issues are not addressed, like which religion the player has. I didn’t write about Cristiano Ronaldo’s religion either, as you surely have noticed.
Best,
maik