If you love Egyptian cinema, you may still remember the scene: Mohamed Sharaf in Zarf Tarek, sitting beside Ahmed Helmy and Magdy Kamel as they watch Egypt’s national football team. A goal goes into Egypt’s net. Faces tighten with anger. Sharaf, against every expectation, smiles, cheers and applauds the opposing side.
The characters are bewildered and the audience laughs. Beneath the comedy, however, lies a question about belonging, disappointment and the strange pleasure of refusing to identify with something that is supposed to represent you. Think back to the whole scene. You may recognise something of the present in it.
The scene, it seems, has stepped out of the cinema and into everyday life. On social media, some Egyptian supporters openly turn away from the national team and say it no longer represents them.
What has changed? What has broken between people and a team they once saw as a symbol of their unity?
A different kind of cheer
To my mind, the shift in how we see football reflects a deeper change in consciousness after 7 October 2023. Palestine returned to the centre of attention, not as a passing news item but as an open wound in the world’s conscience.
Since then, images of devastation have followed one another: the disaster at Al-Ahli Hospital, the bombardment of Jabalia, families killed in Gaza and Tulkarm, and attacks on UNRWA schools, doctors, journalists and people digging through rubble. We have seen graves disturbed, accounts of field executions and a population subjected to starvation before the cameras.
Alongside that suffering, Palestinian resilience has brought the language of anti-colonial struggle back into view. Occupation is understood not as an exception to history but as part of a continuing history. Step by step, the Palestinian account has challenged the narrative promoted by Israel.
Palestine has again become a compass: a reminder that peoples’ struggles do not disappear simply because the rest of us become distracted.
Did you not feel that Wael Al-Dahdouh, standing before the camera after the deaths of his wife, two of his children and his grandson in October 2023, embodied something larger than his profession and even his grief? His endurance was more than a moment in a news bulletin. It was a lesson in humanity.
Our tears were not only expressions of sympathy. They reflected something reawakened in us: Palestine is a test of the world’s conscience, and of our own. That emotional reconnection also helps explain the boycotts of products associated with support for Israel, as people rediscover an ability to act.
I read this renewed awareness alongside Moroccan scholar Fathallah Oualalou’s work for the Policy Center for the New South on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a “history of injustice”. The point is not a single event but an enduring structure: the displacement of the Nakba in 1948; legal systems controlling land and resources; the occupation of 1967 and subsequent settlements and walls; and the blockade of Gaza.
Media narratives can reinforce that structure by removing context, presenting unequal parties as equivalents, or using passive constructions that conceal who acted. In that sense, a history of injustice is not simply a lament. It is an attempt to understand how power reproduces suffering, and why resistance and solidarity acquire an ethical urgency.
Salah and the supporters
Such a change in collective awareness inevitably reaches symbols of identity, including football. Some supporters no longer see national-team players simply as heroes carrying the flag. They see a widening distance between ordinary people and those expected to represent them.
Mohamed Salah stands at the centre of that tension because his stature extends so far beyond the pitch. Once held up as an Egyptian example to the world, he has also become a focus for arguments about distance, public responsibility and political restraint.
Before judging or defending him, remember how different things once seemed. In Zarf Tarek, cheering the opposition is treated almost as national betrayal. The comedy exaggerates, but it touches a familiar assumption: not cheering for the team meant not cheering for Egypt. Football loyalty and national belonging were tightly intertwined.
Today, someone declaring in central Cairo that they no longer watch the national team might encounter agreement as well as disapproval. Some would recognise their own feelings in the statement; others would hesitate out of nostalgia or the difficulty of breaking a lifelong habit.
The change concerns more than sporting taste. It concerns representation itself: whether wearing the national colours is enough, or whether public symbols must also earn an ethical connection with the people watching.
That tension was visible in the empty seats discussed after Egypt’s match against Djibouti in November 2023. Team director Mohamed Khaled Ghoraba complained about the absence of supporters, while Rui Vitória, the coach at the time, faced a sparsely populated Cairo Stadium. Hazem Emam, who remembered much louder crowds, stressed that national teams perform better with support.
A stadium that once reflected national feeling can also become a measure of trust. When that trust weakens, results and promotional images do not automatically restore it.
Salah’s appeal on ONTime Sports for supporters to return, and religious language describing support for the national team as a national duty, expose a paradox. When cheering becomes an obligation, it loses something essential: its voluntary nature. The answer is not to compel attendance but to recover the meaning that makes people want to attend.
Accusing supporters of appearing only when the team wins misses a harsher possibility. People offer support when they recognise something of themselves in those asking for it. Without that recognition, they may withdraw quietly.
This is not about Salah alone. It is about the relationship between representing people and resembling them. Players can appear to occupy a separate social world, speaking a language removed from the lives of their supporters. Appeals from Salah, Mido or Emam can then sound paternalistic: those above asking those below to applaud.
A factual distinction is necessary here. Salah did publish a video on 18 October 2023 calling for an end to bloodshed and for humanitarian aid to reach Gaza. References to “silence” in this argument are a criticism of the perceived scope and timing of his stance, not a claim that he made no statement.
His extraordinary success abroad does not, by itself, settle the question of solidarity at home. Egyptian supporters celebrate achievement, but they also ask what that achievement represents in terms of dignity, identification and moral position. When stars seem distant at a moment that calls for a voice, people can feel abandoned.
The emotional gap is not necessarily hatred of Salah. It is the feeling that someone once seen as “one of us” has become “one of them”. In that reading, even victory cannot fully warm the stands.
Football in Egypt has long overlapped with politics. The people who cheer in Cairo Stadium also have beliefs about justice and public life. Belonging cannot be reduced to raising a flag; it also involves raising a voice. The cooling of enthusiasm may therefore signal a reassessment of what deserves it.
A message that has lasted seventeen years
“Sympathy with Gaza”: the words Mohamed Aboutrika revealed beneath his shirt in 2008 still live in collective memory seventeen years later. Egypt were playing Sudan at the Africa Cup of Nations. A footballer chose that moment to say something that reached far beyond the result.
Aboutrika later recounted on beIN Sports how he thought through what he could do, prepared two shirts bearing the message and kept them out of sight. He came on as a substitute, scored and lifted his shirt before the cameras. The photograph outlived the goal.
The gesture showed that a player could also be an active citizen: that a body running across a pitch could become a voice against injustice.
For many who watched, heroism was measured not simply in goals but in a person’s connection to something beyond himself. Aboutrika’s act mattered because it broke through fear. It presented doing what one believes is right as more important than waiting to learn what is permitted.
According to his later account, he expected a reprimand from coach Hassan Shehata. Instead, Shehata asked why he had acted alone rather than telling the team so that more shirts could have been prepared for everyone.
The story captures a moment in which the imagined boundary between the team and the country dissolved: coach, players and supporters seemed to share the same emotional language. The generation remembered as the “team of those who prostrate” represented, for its admirers, something beyond the thanksgiving gesture after a goal. It suggested that winning without principles was an incomplete victory.
The contemporary stadium can feel very different. Higher ticket prices and security restrictions have changed who can attend. What once resembled a popular gathering risks becoming a space accessible only to a narrower public.
In the past, the terraces offered a miniature portrait of Egypt: different classes, accents and faces momentarily united by a goal. When attendance increasingly depends on purchasing power, the game’s relationship with its public changes. A shared symbol begins to resemble a privilege attached to a seat.
The image of the player has changed too. Individual advancement and commercial identity can eclipse collective meaning. Where the Aboutrika generation is remembered for a shared moral vocabulary, today’s star is often managed as a brand. A photograph, a post and even an ethical position become carefully calculated acts.
I see Mostafa Mohamed’s gesture of holding up Salah’s shirt after scoring in that light. Beyond an expression of loyalty to a teammate, it can be read as a symbol of allegiance directed upwards towards a star rather than outwards towards supporters. That is an interpretation of the gesture, but it helps explain why some viewers felt less represented by it.
The issue is not simply that people have stopped cheering. It is what has made them turn away. When football’s social meaning is weakened and emotional bonds are replaced by market relationships, silence in the stands becomes eloquent.
What is happening in Cairo?
Perhaps the most important change is in how people see the wider world. The war has reordered priorities. Things once treated as self-evident symbols of national pride, including football, now face different moral questions.
Patriotism, in this view, means more than displaying a country’s flag during a match. It involves standing with people subjected to injustice and making national belonging an extension of humanity rather than merely a badge on a shirt.
That is why footballing greatness does not guarantee moral consensus around a player. Some supporters are looking for a person who speaks with conviction, not only an athlete who excels.
Conversely, South Africa’s support for the Palestinian cause has earned it admiration among Arab audiences. Supporting its team can acquire a meaning beyond sporting competition: an expression of ethical solidarity. Who people want to cheer for changes when the grounds of that identification change.
The war has also drawn young people towards history and politics. A generation often dismissed as superficial has sought out writers such as Ilan Pappé, Rashid Khalidi, Gideon Levy and Abdel Wahab El-Messiri, connecting what appears on a screen with broader structures of power and lived experience.
In this reading, supporters no longer applaud goals alone. They applaud those who appear to carry a cause. Patriotism becomes a practice connecting Cairo with Gaza, and sporting loyalty with a public stance.
Sudanese supporter Adam Omar expresses that view this way: “Whoever supports Palestine loves his own land, whatever its name; whoever cannot feel for it has an incomplete love of his homeland.”
What happens in Cairo is part of a wider argument over justice, belonging and what it means to act humanely. People need not wait for a directive from above before recognising that an individual act can have an effect.
When a woman stands alone in a crowded Cairo street and chants for Palestine, the act can be understood as more than protest. It is also an attempt to recover the meaning of a free voice, and to decide for herself who represents her and what deserves her support.
What we are witnessing, then, is not necessarily a revolt against football. It is a revolt against football stripped of its social meaning. Enthusiasm cannot be summoned by command or religious exhortation. It depends on a sense of honesty and connection.
Representation is earned. Anyone who wants the public’s applause must first belong to that public in a meaningful way, rather than addressing it from a distance.
Perhaps Mohamed Sharaf’s scene in Zarf Tarek anticipated something we did not recognise at the time. He was not merely celebrating a goal against Egypt. He was laughing at a reality he did not feel was his. Years later, some of us may find ourselves in the same scene, laughing bitterly at a team that no longer seems to play in our name, and waiting to recover the meaning of joy.
