Episode 216: The Underbelly of Global Football Academies

In this episode, Amira Rose Davis and Brenda Elsey start the show with their favorite football/soccer chants. Then, the historians talk in-depth about global football academies and the intentional invisibility of what goes on at them, which is exploitation, child labor, racial abuse and sex trafficking veiled as a school. They also discuss who is benefiting from this system and why reform is so slow and difficult. You'll also hear from African football scholar Gerard Akindes.

Following this discussion is an interview tease with journalist Chloe Angyal, author of Turning Pointe: How a New Generation of Dancers Is Saving Ballet from Itself. Next, they burn the worst of sports this week in the Burn Pile. Then, they celebrate the Torchbearers of the week including many Paralympians breaking barriers right now as well as Torchbearer of the Week Kali Reis, a Cape Verdean and Native American boxer who recently took the WBA junior welterweight championship, and who used her victory to raise awareness about the terror of residential schools for Indigenous youth and Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women.

They wrap up the show with what's good in their lives and they they're watching this week.

This episode was produced by Tressa Versteeg. Shelby Weldon is our social media and website specialist. Burn It All Down is part of the Blue Wire podcast network.

Links

FIFA to re-examine transfer rules for minors: https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-soccer-fifa/fifa-to-re-examine-transfer-rules-for-minors-infantino-idUKKCN1QG2NM

Football’s child sex abuse scandal: A timeline https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-49253181

Youth soccer sex abuse scandal causes uproar in Argentina: https://apnews.com/article/0a07ca76b3694a3482ce349b7e4ddca7

Ten people killed in fire at training ground of Brazilian side Flamengo: https://www.joe.ie/sport/ten-people-killed-fire-flamengo-657765/

Transcript

Amira: Welcome to Burn It All Down, the feminist sports podcast you need. I'm Amira, and today it's just me and Brenda here. The historians are taking over the show! Dun-dun dunnnn! I don't know. That was like our entrance music. [Brenda laughs] We’re very excited about this. We have a good show for you today. With the start of the 2021/2022 global football campaigns in various leagues, we have been thinking a lot about global football or soccer. On the show today, Brenda and I are going to be taking a closer look at youth academies – those systems that take kids at fairly young ages and put them on a pathway to the Premier League or to Bundesliga or to various professional sporting ventures. And they're kind of this weird shadowy thing that is there, but we don't know a lot about, so we're going to dive into it. It's not very pretty, I'll give you a fair warning. And then of course we're going to be burning some things. And then we'll get some light hearted torchbearers in. I'm really excited.

But first: with Premier League being back in action, it's very exciting waking up very early now in central time to watch Manchester United. But with the new season also comes new chants, and I love, love, love United's new chant for Edinson Cavani. I've been blowing up Brenda about this, and then I wanted to ask her what her all-time favorite football chant was. Now, to answer this question, of course many people might immediately go to the chants from Ted Lasso because they are certified bops. I mean, “Roy Kent! He's here! He's there! He's every fucking where! Roy Keeeent! Roy Kent! And like, I even don't mind Jamie Tartt’s chant, because Baby Shark is so annoying, but somehow when you're saying “Jamie Tartt do do do do do do!” it’s not as annoying! But outside of the world of fictional football, there are some bangers as well. So, Brenda, what is your go-to favorite football chant?

Brenda: Just to stay on brand, it’s political. [Amira laughs] Mauricio Macri, who was the terrible neoliberal president of Argentina, recently, he started his career as president of Boca Juniors, one of their big clubs. And so in 2018, when San Lorenzo played Boca, they basically had this chant that was like…This is the nicest translation, but, “What is the worst thing that your whore of a mother produced? Mauricio Macri, Mauricio Macri.” So they were like taunting Boca to say your club has given us this terrible president. The issue is that Macri is totally unpopular in Boca too. So it became every football club singing it to each other, Macri threatened to shut down the stadiums and stop games. It became like the whole on the streets protest of 2018, 2019 in Argentina. And he was summarily dismissed from office, like, he was so unpopular and they voted in a totally new political party. So, it's pretty awesome. You can just hear that fun rage. And of course there's a long history to it. The song goes back for generations.

Amira: I love it. It's a bop. [laughs] It’s a bop. Now, here's the fun thing about chanting, is like, for those who don't know, I'm completely tone deaf, very tone deaf, but there's something about the heartiness of a collective chant. I love them. Always been my weak spot. My favorite thing about summer camp was the chants and the songs. My favorite thing about softball was the chants as well. And even soccer when I played at the youth level, like it was like, “B-E-A-T beat ‘em, beat ‘em!” Like, like all of the chants. I just love it. And I feel like it sometimes disguises that I'm tone deaf…Maybe not so much. Maybe it's just all in my head. But that's the other reason I love it, is the collective chanting. So, as I said, my favorite chant at this moment is the new chant for Cavani. And I don't know why I like it so much. Maybe because it’s a complete banger. But also, he was so happy when he heard it the first time!

Brenda: So cute.

Amira: And that always makes me happy. Like, that acknowledgement, right? That feeling of like, hell yeah. That's my chant! That's my chant. I love it. I LOVE IT!

Brenda: It’s good stuff.

Amira: I LOVE IT! 

Brenda: It is! It’s great.

Amira: It’s good! And as Brenda pointed out, which is surprising, because usually European chants aren't good! [laughter]

Brenda: They're usually so bad. You know, you go to like South America and people are like, they never sit down! And it's like, no, there's a whole drum section. There's the whole barra brava. Yeah. The chants just don't feel as…But this one, I feel like this has a certain swagger. 

Amira: Okay, before we leave this, I do have to shout out Austin FC, who, as y'all know, are in their inaugural season here in Austin. Jessica and I were at Q2 when they opened, and Jess has been to a few games. The atmosphere is amazing. And part of that reason is for what Brenda just mentioned is you have a drumming section. You have fans who never leave their feet. It’s a really incredible site, especially in the MLS, to see. But they also as a new team, it's been very interesting to see how they're engaging with local musicians and coming up with chants and having Los Verdes and other supporters clubs helping people learn it. So that's my other answer to my favorite chants, Austin FC and the way that they're pulling people into a kind of soccer community here. My favorite is “Dale, dale, dale ATX!” [claps twice] And so then it keeps going. [Brenda laughs]

I want to talk about youth academies. Now, I first started thinking about this, like most things, when I was watching Ted Lasso, and I was watching a character on Ted Lasso talk about entering into a youth system when he was nine and how it got him from a shit neighborhood and his grandfather sent him off with a blanket. And it was kind of in jest, but one of the things he kind of muttered offhand is that he never saw his grandfather again, right? Because he was in this academy system now. And that was quick, it was a quick moment in the show, but it got me thinking about how young people enter these systems. And of course I called up Dr. Elsey to pick her brain about these youth academies.

We have seen these emerge in other sports; certainly, we know in the Dominican Republic, baseball youth academies are huge. Shoutout to recent Burn It All Down guest, Dr. Javier Wallace, who has also done work on this in Panama and basketball. But global football seems to be the leader in this, in many ways the model of these youth systems. So I wanted to start by asking Brenda to just talk to me a little bit more about what these youth academies look like. 

Brenda: So, what our youth academy is, is a euphemism for a dormitory, basically, where young players, minors, live, so that they can train and develop into professionals full time. And because they violate every labor law of every country in which they exist, they’re not really open [laughs] about what they do very often. And so they start sometime in the 1950s and it's kind of piecemeal, right? You've got these clubs that form and get quite large in the capital cities of South America – in particular Rio, São Paolo, Buenos Aires, Montevideo – and then you have provincial talent, especially because Brazil is so large. Really, I look at Brazil as the central place for this. They have to have a place to live, you know? How are they going to train in the club? They don't have fancy families that can just relocate, are willing to relocate.

And so they started out sometimes just as like, oh, there's this family that's willing to take in people – and women's teams still do this, right? Just, do you have housing? And it grows into this kind of system where now we have dormitories with hundreds of boys, and sometimes girls, depending. And they live there through their years and sometimes they go as young as pre-adolescents and then sometimes they arrived by like 12, 13. And they're supposedly going to school, but question mark on that in a lot of cases.

Amira: Right. This is one of the reasons why it all kind of seems very vague and kind of secret and that we have a kind of loose sense of it, because it kind of feels like “youth academy” is just football speak for like sweatshop or child labor. I mean, it's kind of wild once you start peeling back the layers of this. Has there been, you know, attempts to regulate or reform…? Like, how is it still a thing? 

Brenda: [laughs] I mean, part of it is because starting in the 1920s you have what's called the transfer system, and the transfer system means that players need to get permission from every level up to FIFA to be transferred over country lines. Okay? So it's going to at first be like, you're going to be in the woods with me  for a minute, and you're going to be like, how do those things connect? And this is sort of how it connects. So, there's attempts to do things like reform and say, okay, we're not going to let players start until they're 17. Or we're not gonna let them start until they're 16. But every federation is going to jockey to be able to set those rules, because what happens is once you have the transfer certificate that's necessary, you get a fee. Now, for example, Messi couldn't leave Barcelona because there was an $850 million – we did an episode on this – fee, just for the transfer. He doesn't get it. The club gets it. And then all the clubs he played for before he was 21 get a piece of that transfer fee.

So that means even today if you trade Neymar, Santos in Brazil, who runs that youth academy, get a piece of that pie. And that therein lies the kind of incentive that you have both to keep the academies going, because those federations get a piece of that pie, not just the academy! Then the country of Brazil, the football federation of Brazil gets a piece of that. Guess who else gets a piece of that? FIFA gets a piece of that, because it's so hard to draw up that transfer certificate, it must just be impossible. So these are all the ways in which it gets real wild and it is an incentive for federations to keep pushing for them to exist, for FIFA to keep allowing it, and then for those clubs. And the idea is the clubs will make this argument, “We developed those players. We deserve a piece of the pie for training them. We shouldn't just be a drain to Europe.” So there's a weird anti-imperialist argument that somehow gets spun around to make it not feel unclear what the right thing to do is.

Amira: Right. Now, we of course love nuance and mess. So I think it's important to acknowledge that certainly for some players these systems have been very beneficial and a path of upward mobility. Of course, I immediately think of Marcus Rashford, who joined the Manchester United academy system at seven. And when he was starting his anti poverty and hunger campaign, one of the things that he recalled was that him and his mom really pushed him to move up within the academy system, to the United school boys’ scholar program, which usually is something that you can qualify for when you're 12, and they had him do it a year early when he was 11, because once you get into that level of the academy, you move closer to the training facilities and you get meals. And one of the things that he reflected on was that his mother pushed him and worked with United, who were because of his talent more than willing to bend the rules and let him come earlier to that program. And the benefit for the Rashford family was that he knew that it would help his family out because they wouldn't have to worry about feeding him and he would have a full belly.

And then of course you still see him playing with Manchester United now, and that is the kind of best case scenario, right, for this system. Except it very rarely works. Something like 0.02% roughly of young kids within these systems make it to the first team, make it to the level that Rashford’s at. And, you know, you hear the chants, you hear the way that there's an immense pride, especially around United, for the fact that yeah, he's a born and bred Manchester United player. He came up through the system. He was there since he was seven. There's a lot of rhetoric and narrative around that. And I keep thinking, seven…Like SEVEN. Like, my kid is eight. He likes Minecraft. Last year, he liked Roblox. Zachary liked dinosaurs. Now he likes Avengers. Like 11, right?

When we talk about athletic labor, it can be hard to define athletic labor and see it. But when I think of it broadly, this is the type of thing I'm thinking about. Like, knowing full and well as you're participating in the schoolboy scholars at 11, that your performance there guarantees that you're well fed and you’re housed and takes a burden off your family for that. Then that's a knowledge that goes into every touch of the ball. That's a knowledge that you know your performance, your labor is directly tied to your ability to generate food for yourself and lift the burden from your family. And that is a lot to shoulder at 11 in a system that continues to reward you and acts like it's benevolent in doing so. And even the Cinderella cases here kind of feel less shiny to me. And Brenda, correct me if I'm wrong, but a lot of these academies can also be places of immense harm with no accountability and very little regulation. 

Brenda: Yeah. Think about the fact that Brazil is pumping out 800 players a year from its development academies abroad, you know, where they'll leave. So yeah. You know, they're displaced from their home towns, from their countries, sometimes they're very, very far from their parents. I mean, also like Cinderella story, I think about Pelé, right? He was pushed up to the senior men's team at 14. Messi couldn't because of regulations, but they certainly would have loved to try him out there. And you know, there's something inherent to the sport too, where you develop in football differently than you do in baseball, right? Like a pitcher's arm doesn't really come to fruition at 16. Like, we just haven't seen throwing 101 miles an hour that can just go anywhere at that age. So, the sport itself is sort of dangerous that way. And there's an incentive to scoop up this talent cheaply as quickly as you can. And they remain, yeah, very shrouded in mystery.

So, you know, the fact that they're called academies…Ugh. We’ve already mentioned that, but it grosses me out, the implication that they're going to get school and things. And we've had two major sexual abuse cases, and it's not just in South America. England had this huge series of cases where people were…I think they totaled into the hundreds of cases of boys that reported various clubs for this. The same in Argentina – they had a sex trafficking ring with minors that was discovered at Independiente. And one person did go to jail for grooming, trafficking and assaulting boys. But tons of people complicit in that, it becomes very hard. Who are you going to hold accountable, you know? Are you going to hold accountable a vice president of the club that may have just looked the other way?

We know this from other types of sports and how this happens, and we've covered gymnastics and Nassar. You look at these institutions and they're much more powerful than USA Gymnastics. And so it's hard to crack these cases. River had another well-known case of trafficking, and it didn't bring real reform to these clubs. You didn't see somebody need to overhaul, like the commissioner of human rights of Argentina, or gender equity should have been all over this. And yet I think even they have a hard time sorting it out, because these people have really strong lawyers and systems in place to keep you from knowing. It's been really hard to get to the bottom of it. 

Amira: So if young kids performing athletic labor, churning out players into a labor market, and also in places where they're vulnerable to racist abuse, sexual exploitation and trafficking. And on top of that, you also have other unexpected tragedies, right? Most notably, a fire at academy in Brazil…

News report: A fire is reported to have killed ten people and injured three more at the training ground of one of Brazil's most successful football clubs, Flamengo. The fire broke out at the Ninho do Urubu facility in Rio de Janeiro, in a building which houses the club’s youth team players.

Brenda: That was just terrible. And you hope that that is going to do something, shake something up. And certainly for a while it looked like it might. So what happened is in 2019 in the club Flamengo, 10 teenaged boys died, and this is, you know, one of the richest club academies in the world. It tends to take provincial, poor, Afro-Brazilian players by and large. Flamengo’s in Rio. They were either in full training or undergoing trials and they were staying in ship containers. And I know there's some sort of hipster, small, tiny house shows about that that made that look like it might be cute, but it really fucking isn't in this case. And the pictures were horrific, and there was a makeshift – because I don't know if you remember, but Rio's pretty hot – and there was a makeshift kind of air conditioner that started an electrical fire, and there wasn't proper exit from these ship containers and they died from asphyxiation. Just a horrible, terrible tragedy.

It was all over the news. There was, you know, of course like the parents grieving and all of these pictures. And then the Brazilian team, many of the national players come from these academies and they would dedicate their wins that year to these boys. And so many of the players themselves expressed profound solidarity and grief. At the end, nothing happened, nothing was reformed. People did not go to jail for this. 

Amira: It’s like…How!?

Brenda: [laughs] I mean, it's also Bolsonaro’s Brazil. So there's larger issues at play, which is Bolsonaro was able to also kill the queer city councilwoman Marielle without retribution too. It's a culture of impunity right now. And that really makes it thrive in this way. And you do see a lot of top flight professional players that did try to call attention or use it as an example, but they're playing outside of Brazil. So it's not like they have all this power within Brazil to do much about it. And they are the winners. They are the people who made it out. They’re the 0.02%.

Amira: This is what's so hard, right? Because we're talking about the experiences of like the 99 point blah, blah, blah, in these systems, which are exploitative and harmful. And I'm sure there are friendships and joys and things like that, but then when we even focus on those 0.02%, right? When we focus on the Rashfords, I can't stop thinking about…Great, he's on first team, and he's just subject to – him and Sancho – to ridiculous chants about their missed penalties and the racist abuse that they got after that. And it reminds me, one of the things you taught me about for instance, was Malcolm, who is a Brazilian footballer, who came up in the youth club of Corinthians and went into the transfer market, as you said. And he had two years ago just like, what, 24 hours? 48 hours, something like that, a few days after moving to Zenit St. Petersburg, the Russian club, was met there with banners during his debut that were basically racist, telling him to go away, and saying that they must “uphold the tradition” to have no Black players there.

And I'm thinking about like, even that, right? Like even “making it” and making it out – that’s what you're making it to! We've talked about the harm at the highest level! So, I mean, I think that's sometimes what its hard but also very necessary about talking about youth systems. And we have said that we want to start talking about youth sports more in a variety of ways, but when we know that there's so much corruption and abuse in it and all these things at the highest levels, of course it's going to be there [laughs] within these institutions at the lower levels as well.

And so that even when you're climbing, even when you're that golden child, even when you've made it, what did you make it to?

Brenda: And does making it justify, you know, racial abuse?! So, this happens all the time. Like Malcolm, “Malcolm's getting millions of dollars, you know?” So!? None of this takes away the pain and the harm that's being done. That's one area. So we're talking about this and it's like, yeah, depressing, depressing, depressing. But historians are like this, because we're actually secret optimists, because we think that somebody's gonna listen and somebody is gonna figure it out and people are going to want to change things – and they do. They do. You know, the fact that the three step protocol is in place for racist abuse, I can tell you right now, my time is fair. It has worked to a certain extent. It’s not worked as fast as it should or as good as it should, but it does work.

The Russian clubs have been punished for, you know, had to play with no fans and closed stadiums and fines. And it's not enough, but they don't love it. It definitely puts a little bee in one's bonnet. It may not be the sledgehammer that we want to racism. We see it in the Italian leagues all the time. And so, you know, you still want to shout from the rafters, you know, these are children! So they're walking onto a field, like, they're still 17, and you know, they're crying when they see stuff like that! They’re crying and you're just like, oh, geez. You know? How does that make you want to go on Twitter and say, “Well, they're making a million dollars!” I don't care. You know? What…!?  

Amira: I like that you said one of the reasons why we do this as historians is because we're secret optimists. And I think that is very true. And it's because one of the next questions is what kind of gets us there? Which is when we say, why is this still a thing? And who's benefiting? And what does this tell us about power? And it feels like two steps forward, three steps back a lot of the times.

Brenda: And as much as South America for a long time has been the talent pool that Europe has looked to outside of its own developing academies, they have also looked to African academies. And so we have Gerard Akindes to help us understand that.

Gerard Akindes: My name is Gerard Akindes. I teach and research sport management and sport in Africa. Football academia started in the 1990s, mostly in French speaking Africa – Cote d’Ivoire, Mali, Senegal, Cameroon – and in Anglophone Africa, it was essentially Nigeria, Ghana and South Africa. The intention was to develop youth were going to play for the local clubs, local leagues, and reinforce the quality of the game while providing education to these young players. And the other intention was to be able to provide a five-year professional path in football for these young players. With the success of these early academies – well structured, well-funded, like ASEC Mimosas’ academy in Cote d’Ivoire – many more people embraced the academy system as a business to generate revenue. And we end up with a wide range of types of academies, from the well-structured ones to the neighborhood academy with limited resources.

If we can talk about risk of migration through academies, the academies with limited resources, limited capacity. I had one who represents the highest risk for young players in Africa, because they are targeted by predatory agents, predatory recruiters, who are going to try to lure the kids, to take them to Europe, and try to make money out of them. That way the risk is when the well-funded and well-structured academies provide a more stable and legal environment for young players to migrate to Europe to have a better organization that's going to take of their interests and not dump them in European football with nowhere to go when they try and don’t succeed.

Amira: So, who is benefiting from this, we’ve kind of said, and are there places, or are there things that represent kernels of hope, seeds of hope for more reform in the future? Or are there kind of canaries in the minefield about the fact that it's getting worse? When we're looking at these systems globally, or when we're considering how this is unfolding on the women's side, or, you know, if it is at all. Like, looking forward, what do we have to grasp?

Brenda: Yeah, I do think about the women's side and the fact that because women are actually subject to the very same transfer market, and I've long thought to myself that's pretty fucked up. Though the men's game might generate, you know, let's say a trillion dollars a year in the transfer market, the women's might generate about $375,000, but they're still subject to the same governance structures, which is not good. And when we think about the growth of the women's game, this is one area where I’m like, ugh, you know? Can we not? Can we not replicate this really terrible thing in the women's game, please!?

Amira: So this all seems very intentionally invisible. This is something that's happening, that’s all around us, right? That we hear in kind of whispers or in little narratives here or there, but it's easily flying under the radar because of A) the way that we don't think a lot about youth sports or we don't think about youth. We especially don't think about brown and Black youth. We don't think about marginalized youth in the global south. It's very easy to overlook this. But I think the more we overlook these things, especially sport-minded people, helps fuel them to continue, right? Like, when they can do so shrouded in the shadows. So I appreciate, Brenda, you having this conversation with me – and flamethrowers, you tuning in – so we can start having it. So we can be louder about this, so that we can have more eyeballs on these systems. And we can talk not just about the 0.02% that it quote unquote “works for,” but the 99.8% who are at some point in these systems and often emerging with, with many scars.

Coming up on Thursday for Burn It All Down, Jessica talks to Chloe Angyal about her new book, Turning Pointe: How a New Generation of Dancers Is Saving Ballet from Itself. They discussed if ballet is a sport, the role of masculinity in it, and the future of ballet, among many other things. Check it out.

Chloe Angyal: When I set out to write this book, I was like, okay, I can't write a book that is naive and shocked to find that there's like a dirty, ugly underbelly to this beautiful art form, because like, well, yeah, the dirty, ugly underbelly is part of the mystique. It's part of the appeal. It's part of that dichotomy. It’s part of what fascinates people about ballet. And so I didn't want to write a book that was like, did you know the ballet is secretly fucked? [laughs] Like, well, yeah, it's not that much of a secret!

Amira: Okay, before we get really burning things, I have a little bit of kindling for the burn pile this week. ESPN, which, you know, has a lot of trouble airing women's sports, apparently has no trouble airing high school football, including a football team that may or may not even exist! ESPN this week on their high school football showcase aired game featuring IMG Academy playing a school named Bishop Sycamore. At the second quarter, they were already down 30-0 and people started asking, who is this random school from Ohio? Well, um, it’s unclear. Let's just say that. They maybe are online charter? Most of the athletes on the team are not actually in high school. A lot of them are junior college players and/or former junior college players. They're not high school age. The coach is dubious at best. But here they are on national TV, in a showcase game, getting blown out. Everything about it is absurd.

ESPN is punting the responsibility on this – pun intended – to the marketing group that organizes the Sunday showcase. I mean, there's so much more to this story that I really want you to go dig into because it's literally layers and layers of absurdities, but I literally can't stop thinking about how hard it is to get women's sports on TV, especially on that station. And when you think about that through this lens, it's just…It makes something that's absurd that much more ridiculous. And that is why it's my kindling to the burn pile this week.

Now it's time for the burn pile. I will go first. I've tried to be indifferent, but also just simmering rage at the way, unsurprisingly, especially the Boston sports media has been so clearly trashing Cam Newton and trying to pull for Mac Jones to start at quarterback for the New England Patriots. The Patriots fans who are not the Black ones [laughs] are also very clearly gleefully cheering for Mac, but Scott Zolak, former Patriots' quarterback, now Boston media personality, really just…I wouldn't even call it a dog whistle. I would call it like a fog horn or something. When, in his kind of daily praise of Mac and admonishment of Cam Newton, asserted that maybe Cam is so distracted that what the Patriots really need to do is ban rap music…Because he's dancing to rap music…In practice…And he's distracted and not…Focusing. But that's just quote unquote “what he does.” [laughter] Like what!? What?

And then, you know, in the same breath, like, “Matt Jones is here to work and everything's attention to detail, but that's not Cam’s style” and you know, etc. But like, It's ridiculous. It's just…We know it's ridiculous, right? First of all, everybody listens…You know who listens to rap music in the Patriots facility? Tom Fucking Brady listens to rap music in the Patriots facility. Did you have a problem then, Scott? And also what the fuck do you know about what it takes to be a quarterback! Anyways, let me not go there. But the point is that, like, this is just ridiculous. He is a professional quarterback. He has focus, he knows details. Like, you're not going to be at this point and not pay attention to details. If, in between throws, you are reacting to your teammates or to music, okay.

If he was listening to country, would you feel better? If he was listening to Aerosmith, would that be acceptable? No, it wouldn’t, because it's a Black man and doing anything. That's what you're mad about. But the fact that even now, get on Beyoncé's internet in the year 2021 in the middle of a damn panini to say, “rap music is the distraction” is like, hello? Is this 1992? What is even happening here? [sighs] It’s so predictable. It's almost comical in how predictable it is. But it's also racist. So, burn it all down. Burn. 

Brenda: Burn. That’s dumb.

Amira: It’s so dumb. Bren, what are you torching this week? 

Brenda: I am torching the reduction of the penalty on the Mexican national men's team to play two of the World Cup qualifiers behind closed doors, as we say, or with no fans, which was a punishment for the ongoing p-chant, which is a homophobic slur that Mexican fans chant every time the opposing goalkeeper touches the ball. And so FIFA had given them a penalty of two games. They had appealed several times. The Mexican federation had questioned if maybe the women could serve the penalty. And in the end FIFA came back and said, oh, fine. You can just play one of the games behind closed doors. It is infuriating. Burn It All Down has been covering this since episode 8. That's 207 episodes and four years ago. And it is just…I’m so mad. It's such garbage, and it's just violent and it's stupid.

And we talked about chants at the top of this show, so I'm just going to circle back. It's not creative. It's not interesting. It's a curse on the men's national team. I don't know what to say.

The fact that both of the incidents occurred in the United States should tell you something. And that's not to dismiss the importance of it, but it is important that it happens in the US because you should know how pervasive it is, how transnational it is, how it's seeped into the game and really sullied the minds of people that are willing to say, “Oh, no, you gringos are coming in and telling us what's homophobic.” No, no, no. Activists in Mexico who have been working tirelessly to get rid of the discrimination and the violence towards the LGBTQ community in Mexico have told you again and again and again that it's violent, that it's discriminatory, that there shouldn't be any place for it in football. I want to burn the fact that they reduced the punishment. I want to burn the fact that the federation is so sin vergüenza, so without shame that they would even appeal this, is just maddening. And I want to burn it all down. I want to burn, burn, burn that. Burn.

Amira: Burn! After all that burning it's time to highlight some torchbearers of the week. I'll start. I want to shout out Avani Lekhara, who is India's first woman to win a Paralympic gold medal. She won it in shooting with a score of 249.6 points in the final event, which sets a Paralympic record and ties the world record. So, congrats to you, Avani. Brenda, who you got?

Brenda: Literal flamethrower, Dinesh Priyantha Herath, wrote history for Sri Lanka. The 32 year old javelin thrower came up with his best throw of 67.79 meters to set a new world record in the men’s F46 category and clinched the country's maiden gold in the Paralympics on Monday. The temperature reached a crazy 33 degrees Celsius.

Amira: I also want to take a quick second to shout out Tatyana McFadden, which I'm sure we will shout out more as the Paralympics continue, but Tatyana won the 5000 meter T54 bronze at the Paralympic Games, which was her 18th – yes, one-eight, 18th – Paralympic medal. She is now a six time Paralympian, 18 time Paralympic medalist, 20 time world medalist. It's just wild, and what’s even more wild about it is that she has five more events to potentially medal in. So yes, Tatyana McFadden, shout out to you. Brenda? 

Brenda: Chinese teammates Shumei Tan and Jing Bian became the first ever women's saber Paralympic champions on August 25th, as China swept all four gold medals on offer on the opening day of wheelchair fencing.

Amira: And now, can I get a drum roll, please?

[drumroll]

Boxing announcer: Your winner, by majority decision, and now holding the WPA IBO super lightweight championship of the world, from Philadelphia, PA: Kali Reeeeeeis!

Amira: And our torchbearer of the week goes to Kali Reis, who defended the World Boxing Association junior welterweight title, was the first Indigenous woman to earn this title, and just last week defended it with the majority victory over Diana Prazak. Reis is a member of the Seaconke Wampanoag tribe, as well as Cherokee, Nipmuc, and Cape Verdean. Reis is also two spirit, and took to the ring and competed in a custom designed ring outfit with the insignia of three organizations: Every Child Matters, Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, and the Red Spirits women's motorcycle riding club, that dedicated and are fighting for causes that Kali wants to bring awareness to. Kali used her platform after winning the match to say, “Those of you who know, I'm wearing orange for a reason. All of our children have now been discovered in unmarked mass graves. Over 5000 children were stolen from us. I fight not just for these, but for our children, our rights, missing and murdered Indigenous women, and Stop Line 3.” Line 3 is an oil pipeline that would pass through the territory of Indigenous groups in Alberta in Wisconsin.

So, we just wanted to big up Kali for your accomplishments, for your championships, and for using your platform to speak up and represent multiple causes and multiple battles that Indigenous people are fighting across borders. And we are all here at Burn It All Down in awe and in celebration of you, and standing behind you as you continue to shine. So congratulations, Kali Reis. You are our torchbearer of the week. For more information on Kali to read more about Kali's story, please check out Corey Erdman’s piece in CBC, and also catch her performance as a boxer in Catch The Fair One, which premiered at Tribeca earlier this year. All right. So, what's good in your world, Brenda? [pause] Brenda never knows what's good in her world!

Brenda: I know. Well, you know what? The thing is, I have an upbeat personality actually. And so it doesn't seem like it from this segment of the show. Maybe it's just there's so many good things going on. So, this is the way it works for me. There's a county fair – it’s the Duchess county fair – I went with the kids. I love the rides. Was I a little concerned it was a superspreader event? Yes. And so there are ways in which all my what's good feels a little fraught right now, because I don't know the right decisions, but I had tons of fun with my 8 year old daughter spinning around and feeling sick and, like, she just discovered what losing her stomach really is again, you know? Because you forget it, you’re a kid, you forget it every time. I did fly around the fair on a pink elephant. It was very exciting. I love a county fair. I really, really do. And no one made me play the dumb games that are rigged, which I know are fun for some people, but I just find sad. So, that was really awesome.

There's a lot of animals at the fair here in New York. And so, yeah, that was really, really fun. And I hate to say this, but school starting on September 8th is going to be hopefully a finally, finally – again, a little fraught – but I'm psyched about it, and above all, and this is my great, huge amount of gratitude to Hofstra University, I am beginning sabbatical and I'm not doing syllabi, and it feels very sabbatical-y. So, there's a lot. There’s a lot good. 

Amira: Woo! Sabbatical! 

Brenda: Woo hoo! Book writing!

Amira: We need a sabbatical chant.

Brenda: We do! That's such a good idea. 

Amira: Write that book, do do do do do do! [laughter] Anywho. Yeah. Well, school is right up there on my list. My kids started school here in Austin about 10 days ago. So far, so good. Samari's school is mostly vaccinated because they're older, except for the poor sixth graders, but seventh and eighth grade's good. And the little ones are in masks, but they're in person. And they're out of my house! So that’s what's good for me. And it was Zachary's birthday! Zachary turned five. My Virgo, Leo cusp-er, he is headstrong and determined and creative, and he's just so sweet and also a bit terrifying. [laughs] I’m not gonna lie.

And this was the year he…I mean, half his birthdays basically have been pandemic birthdays. And it's like right at the beginning of the year, anyways, it's kind of an awkward birthday time when you're a kid, because you like don't really have friends yet in your class, whatever. So they've always been very low key for him, but this was the year that he really got the concept of birthdays, but not in a cute way, not like, oh, this is great, but like, telling his brother and sister, like, “It's my birthday, I make the rules, so…” He would just tell people, like, “This is my birthday list.” And it wasn't like a, “I would please like this.” It's like, “This is my expectations – meet them.” And it was so cute. It was just great to see him center himself. [laughs] This is him singing happy birthday to himself, because again, he doesn't need people. At all! [laughs] 

Zachary: [singing] Happy birthday to me! Happy birthday to me! Happy birthday to Zachary, happy birthday to me! [laughter] 

Brenda: Aw, that is so cute! 

Amira: He’s so cute. And he's five. The baby is five! I don't know how that happened, but he's a whole hand. And that is absolutely my what's good. What we're watching this week: well, we're getting to that time in the sporting calendar where there's a lot of things happening concurrently. So of course the Paralympic games are ongoing, lots of athletics and swimming events happening this week, as well as the quarterfinals of wheelchair basketball, of table tennis, and sitting volleyball. Please check those out. The US Open is starting. Many people have pulled out. Naomi Osaka will be playing. However, among other people, in addition to that you have the Premier League and La Liga and global football that we were talking about for much of today's episode is rocking and rolling on to match week four now. World Cup qualifiers for the men are starting. AU, Athletes Unlimited softball is continuing. Baseball is rocking and rolling into the postseason. Yes, there's a lot of sports on. So, pick your favorite ones. Settle in. Watch it. A lot of events coming up.

That's it for this episode of Burn It All Down. This episode was produced by Tressa Versteeg. Shelby Weldon is our web and social media wizard. Burn It All Down is part of the Blue Wire podcast network. You can follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Listen, subscribe and rate on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. For show links, transcripts, check out our website, burnitalldownpod.com. You'll also find our link to our fire merch at our Bonfire store. Just a reminder, partial proceeds go to our partner organizations. We've just donated money to Athlete Ally, to the sports task force of the Asian American Journalists Association, and to our friends over at the Black Women's Players Collective. And thank you to our patrons. Your support continues to mean the world to us. If you want to be a donor to our show and get extra content – fireside chat invites, watch parties – visit patreon.com/burnitalldown. And in the words of my fellow co-host today, Brenda Elsey, burn on and not out.

Shelby Weldon