MOU-ed Over

"Football, the beautiful game, is in a world of it own and follows the mores that exist in a typical bureaucratic system."

The above quote is a lie.

Football...well, sure it is the beautiful game, but it also has high end politics that are powerful enough to bring up a nation in the eyes of the world, unite social groups, raise the players' social status to that of idols, and even bring down a community or country that takes the sport very seriously.

However, a football club is, in reality, a bureaucratic, for-profit company that sells tickets and merchandise to fans who come to watch the players who are marketed as celebrities. The clubs hold assets, with annual profits that can go as high £255.7 million as Arsenal Football Club in England reported last season. FC Barcelona of Spain, though, reported 420.2 million euros in the 2009-2010 season. They spend on the stadium, facilities, staff, players, their home and away kits, and managers. Every penny spent has to be calculated for carefully due the ridiculously high amount of risk involved.

Steve Macfarlane @ Arsenal FC (source: Flickr)

Interesting, isn't it?

So what happens when they don't spend right? Quite naturally, they report losses. In extreme cases like the Glasgow Rangers, it can even lead to bankruptcy. The footballing spirit of the community falls because hearts are broken. Ticket sales drop sharply, and players leave to save either their own careers or even to bring some much needed cash into the  club, as Kaká famously did for AC Milan back in summer of 2009. He moved to where losses and the global recession did not exist: FC Real Madrid, currently managed by the uber-popular José Mourinho.

Mourinho's case needs to be highlighted, with regard to bureaucracy. A football club is formally run by the President or Board of Directors, who make the decisions as to what manager to bring in, kits, and most of the other things I mentioned in the start of this post. Mourinho prefers to have a lot of dominance in any social grouping he is put in. It doesn't matter what the hierarchy declares he is. He likes to have things his way.

The characteristics of a bureaucracy are pretty clear cut. There is a set division of labour, authority is always hierarchal, positions are filled based on objective criteria only, every decision made is duly recorded and there are written rules.

In Real Madrid, the hierarchy and bureaucracy exist, but, at the same time, they don't really. President Florentino Pérez actually (and unnaturally for him) broke the mores of this type of stratified organization by actually giving Mourinho (a.k.a. The Special One) full rein. This way, Mou now makes larger decisions than what would normally be allowed. He also disregards Perez's warnings and defames others in press conferences if he, or his team, were attacked in anyway - that's him exercising some informal negative sanctions.

Well, yes, he does protect his players. Although, there is a sense of alienation where the President is involved. 'If you don't win, you are axed'. The players become tools for various marketing strategies for the sake of high profits in an organization where only few monopolize the power. Classic oligarchy.
Mourinho does not really seek to eliminate this, but he does not abandon the players either. He serves as a link between the two groups. In the end, the players end up weeping like girls when he decides to leave (Drogba custard, anyone?) .

This is just an example of how an organization actually works in reality.

To be very honest, wherever I look - for me, and for Mourinho - true bureaucracy is either extinct, rare, or completely non-existant. Oligarchy, however, does commonly exist in a lot of places, and certainly so at Real Madrid.

Brian Davidson of brazilfooty asks this:

"Is a little bureaucracy a good thing?"

That I don't really know. Perhaps you might have an answer for him~

McDonaldization in Your Homes!

As soon as you walk into someone’s house you could automatically get a sense of the culture. Some houses even have a particular smell that could identify where the residents are from. Walking into my friend’s house I mindlessly recognized the scent I smell in all Sudanese houses I enter. This is actually the scent of some products they use in the house that are shipped in to Qatar from Sudan. The next thing I notice is the color and brightness of the house. It’s usually white and more blunt than my house for example, which gives their space a more temporary feel. A lot of the Sudanese houses I’ve been to use white lights, in contrast to mine, where we have warmer lighting.



You get a sense that the Sudanese residents don’t really consider this house in Qatar their home. Whereas for Palestinians, who constantly struggle to live in a subculture, try to make these houses their homes. When I say subculture, I mean a smaller culture within another culture that Palestinian usually live in. Palestinians use warmer colors, a lot of carpets and really design their houses in a way to make it feel like a home to them. In my home, and a lot of Palestinian homes I’ve visited, we try to add a lot of Palestinian elements to the house as a reminder of that place we “belong to,” even if we didn’t buy these objects from Palestine.




Sudanese usually have a lot of African and tribal objects around their “temporary” house that are bought back from home, to remind them of that place that they will eventually go back to, their real home.






However, the households did have some things in common. To begin with, there was a feel of alienation, which could be defined as a state-of-being where human life is dominated by the forces of its own inventions. The houses were machine-dominated. The families weren’t connecting in conversation, but most of the family members were watching TV. While the teenagers or working children were on their laptops, connected to the Internet. Some of the younger children were playing video games.




When the mother or housemaid cooked or even made tea, they would use a kettle, microwave, gas-run oven and so on. Everyone in the house was using a machine. Some of the siblings even communicated through the use of their cell phones, instead of verbal communication. So, even if the culture is different or the dialect they use is different, whether you’re Sudanese or Palestinian you are influenced by this idea of “McDonaldization.” In sociology, McDonaldization is a process where society is increasingly run like a fast-food restaurant. This means that we’re all being influenced by the idea of rationalization and even households could be modernized some way or another. This definitely can’t sound very literal, where a household could never really be a McDonald’s. However, all homes try to be as efficient, predictable and controlled as possible. They have a set of rules to be followed, try to be as efficient as possible with time, money etc. and predictable with honesty and the open relationship everyone has with one another. With time, the children in the house and the parents start demanding more. Here, control and calculation come in, where they need to monitor the amount of things they buy and consume.