How fans made Palestine impossible for sport to ignore in 2025

Over the last few years it has been increasingly difficult to follow and spectate on sport for entertainment purposes only, and in 2025 this felt heightened. Despite the expected dominance from those expected to win, there remains enough intrigue to stick around and stick it out. What is more difficult to locate is how we harness this communal act of seeing into something we can actually hold on to.

Since the genocide began in October 2023, after 75 years of brutal and unrelenting occupation, the world around us is indelibly marked by what Palestinians have had to endure and what we are complicit in inflicting upon them. Palestine is the fault line. Palestine is the answer that every question is now rerouted to.

It is difficult to consider the visibility of politics in sport in 2025 and not think immediately of the devastating number of Palestinian athletes killed in Gaza without barely a whisper of protest from their peers and administrators in the sporting world.

Hope amidst genocide & double-standards

Suleiman Al-Obeid, a decorated Palestinian footballer born and raised in Gaza, was killed by Israeli forces whilst waiting for aid. In the passive acknowledgement of his death and the response it elicited from the unusually direct Mohamed Salah, UEFA laid bare its own priorities - protecting Israel.

It is also futile to consider the radical possibilities of sport without acknowledging the deep failures of our existing systems to reckon with Israel’s wanton disregard for international law. There has been little movement within the sporting world to adequately respond to Israeli aggression, let alone to reimagine a world where it can offer us an alternative vision for our future.

Instead it has been left to individual athletes and fans to offer us an idea of what solidarity looks like whilst the institutions they belong to do little to materially offer the same.

There were rare exceptions to this as Athletic Club (Bilbao) hosted an emotionally charged friendly between Palestine and Basque country - the former pleading with the world for their freedom from occupation and genocide and the latter reinvigorating their efforts for official recognition of their national team. Whilst this match wasn’t purely symbolic (all proceeds went to aid efforts in Palestine) it provided Palestinian footballers an opportunity to publicly mourn their dead and recommit to their liberation with 50,000 people bearing witness.

This was echoed each time the Palestinian national football team took to the pitch, whether that was in a spate of dramatic World Cup qualifiers, friendlies or in the FIFA Arab Cup. A team pieced together of Palestinian refugees from around the world, carrying collective and individual grief as they reminded us of the power of possibility, and of hope.

Liberation movements must be resilient in their vision for freedom, and the Palestinian football team were able to distil this in every game they turned up to, every line-up and they showed us that the joy will not be extinguished.

The incredibly jarring cogs of football administration were never far off from trying, however. Israel continues to be members of both UEFA and FIFA and any discussions on the absurdity of this is yet to arrive on the agenda for administrators, despite calls from footballers, fan groups, journalists and large swathes of civil society.

Alongside this, Russia’s exclusion after invading Ukraine offers a clear precedent for how timely this can be executed should the desire be there. Whilst renowned artists from across music and film have signed pledges aligning with BDS to apply pressure to Israel, there is little similar momentum in the footballing world.

Politics at the centre

Outside of football, 2025 showed us that the battle will be waged and won on the streets and not the boardrooms. After inclusion of an Israeli cycling team in the Vuelta a España (Tour of Spain), pro-Palestinian protestors disrupted the three-week race so successfully that the final stage was completely abandoned amidst large-scale protests.

Although the governing body for cycling re-committed its stance of keeping politics out of sport, the people of Spain asserted their right to return politics to the very centre of it.

This idea will be a critical proposition to reckon with as we head into a year that will see the US as one of the host countries of the upcoming men’s football World Cup. A country that is racially profiling and actively disappearing its own residents, cracking down on protest, engaging in military aggression and creating a terrifyingly hostile environment is supposed to host thousands of fans in a matter of months.

It will be fascinating to see whether the journalists and broadcasters who have been pushing back against Saudi Arabia’s flagrant sportswashing will draw the clear line between these two countries laundering their reputations through shiny sporting objects.

Whilst the deliberate distortion of human rights abuses depending on who’s committing them remains a mainstay of British journalism, 2025 saw weaponised antisemitism overtake this in its egregiousness.

Fans of the right wing Israeli football team, Maccabi Tel Aviv, were correctly banned from attending a fixture against Aston Villa and likely inciting racial hatred in the surrounding community. Quickly, the story became a deafening dog whistle, surmising that Jewish people as a broad category were unsafe in Birmingham and in a neat throwback, that Muslims (over 70% of the population in Aston) were uniquely violent and antisemitic.

A local matter concerning residents unhappy about the prospect of fascists in their streets became a gaping hole between what people know to be true and how that same truth can be collapsed and fictionalised in service of Israel. This gross paternalism inherent in the structures that govern sport also manifests in smaller more insidious ways - loss of employment, exclusion and ostracisation.

Across the year and across various levels of sport, there were countless examples of people whose support for Palestine was challenged. People who were told to remove shirts or destroy flags - to erase the possibility of Palestinian support from their personhood and in effect, the space they were about to occupy.

The ongoing devaluation of Palestinian life by those committing genocide and those enabling it, necessitates state repressions of solidarity, however loud or quiet they may be. But Palestine shows us what happens when a drop becomes a flood. Palestine has laid bare the sleazy mechanisms of the sporting world and the cracks within it. What remains to be seen, however, is where there is inclination and nous to break these open further.

When the collective power of British running communities (through the boycott of a London event) forced Saucony to end its sponsorship of the Jerusalem marathon that took place in occupied territories in Palestine, a clear opening emerged. In recent days, Arsenal football club announced a sponsorship with Deel, an Israeli based tech company operating on occupied territories and heavily contributing to the Israeli military. Palestine has shown us once again the world we’re living in.

The question as we enter 2026 remains the same one we’ve grappled with since 2023 - what are we willing to do about it?

Sanaa Qureshi is a writer based in London and works in community sport.

Follow her on Twitter: @sanaa_mq

Have questions or comments? Email us at: editorial-english@alaraby.co.uk

Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.