Abstract
Künzler shows several persistent elements in the relation between football and politics in the Ivory Coast, lost in the isolated studies available in the literature. The instrumentalisation of sport and particularly football by the political elite already started during colonial rule and is a common theme across the presidencies after independence. There is a distinct focus of this instrumentalisation in each period, including international aspirations and national citizenship. It repeatedly also backfired as football matches, teams and individual players such as Didier Drogba are unstable signifiers whose meaning cannot be fixed top down. Since independence, many presidents of football clubs and the Ivorian Football Federation are part of quite persistent elite patronage networks that cuts across political parties and generations.
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Künzler, D. (2018). Ivory Coast. In: De Waele, JM., Gibril, S., Gloriozova, E., Spaaij, R. (eds) The Palgrave International Handbook of Football and Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78777-0_20
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78777-0_20
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