The Game They Couldn’t Own: Football, Legitimacy and the Limits of Political Power in Libya

In August 2002, 40,000 people filled a stadium in Tripoli to watch Juventus beat Parma 2-1 in the Italian Super Cup. The match itself was real – both clubs wanted the trophy. However, its relocation to Libya had nothing to do with sport. It was made possible by state investment – the Libyan Foreign Investment Authority held a stake of around 5% in Juventus, and the state oil company Tamoil sponsored the club’s shirts – and by the ambition of Saadi Gaddafi, the former leader’s third son, who had joined Juventus’s board of directors and was attempting to build a career as a professional footballer. Perugia’s chairman later revealed that Berlusconi called him personally to encourage the club to select Saadi for the team, explaining it was helping Italy build relations with Libya.

This episode preceded by nearly two decades the emergence of European football as an instrument of Gulf diplomacy. It also illustrates, with unusual clarity, the logic that has governed Libya’s relationship with football ever since: the stadium as a place where political relationships are made visible, where legitimacy is projected and where the gap between the latter and the reality on the ground is most painfully exposed. Saadi made one substitute appearance for Perugia before failing a drugs test. An Italian newspaper wrote that “even if he were twice as fast, he would still be too slow“. The investment in football as soft power had produced a punchline.

The conventional explanation for this pattern is straightforward: politicians use sport to manufacture legitimacy. But that account misses the more interesting story. Football did not become politically valuable in Libya because rulers invested in it. Rulers invested in football since the sport had already accumulated something they struggled to produce themselves – trust built from the terraces upwards, through neighbourhood loyalties that survived governments and collective memory that have outlasted rulers and revolutions. Long before politicians discovered its utility, Libyan supporters had made football one of the country’s most enduring civic languages. What successive rulers have been trying to do, from Gaddafi onward, is borrow a currency they never issued.

A regime’s sporting logic

In 1975, Muammar Gaddafi’s Green Book dismissed stadium crowds as people who watched sport instead of participating in it themselves. His actions told a different story. Football’s ability to generate unscripted collective emotion, to produce loyalties that ran outside state control, made it an object of deep political suspicion. What he could not suppress, he attempted to capture.

Saadi installed himself as chairman, captain and mandatory penalty taker at Al-Ahly Tripoli. A law forbade commentators from naming any player on air – teammates were referred to only by squad numbers – so that Saadi, referred to by name, would always remain the sole protagonist. He employed Diego Maradona as his technical consultant and disgraced sprinter Ben Johnson as his personal trainer. Football became one of the regime’s most visible instruments of power, but also exposed its limitations.  In the summer of 2000, tensions between Saadi’s Al Ahly Tripoli and Al Ahly Benghazi reached breaking point. During a match in Benghazi, the home side led 1–0 before a series of controversial refereeing decisions, including two penalties awarded to the visitors. Convinced the game was being manipulated, the Benghazi players walked off the pitch in protest. Ordered to return, the players came back and lost. The match became a symbol of dissent and sparked protests. Fans burned images of the Gaddafi family and mocked Saadi by dressing a donkey in his Ahly Tripoli shirt.

In response, scores of fans were beaten, imprisoned and the regime ordered Al-Ahly Benghazi’s training ground and headquarters demolished, physically erasing decades of records and trophies. The club, whose identity traces back to the anti-colonial resistance movement, was suspended from football for fives years.

The Juventus stake, the Tamoil sponsorship, the Supercoppa in Tripoli and eventually Saadi’s Serie A career were all pieces of the same project: using football’s global reach to signal Libya’s opening to the world, well connected to the institutions of normal international life. No amount of investment could manufacture what the project ultimately required: a credible performance on the pitch itself, on terms set by the game that no regime can alter.

Two stadiums, one country

The 2011 uprising that toppled Gaddafi did not produce a unified state. Libya fractured into rival authorities: a UN-recognised government based in Tripoli in the west and a parallel administration backed by the Libyan National Army under Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar in the east. Both compete for international recognition, oil revenues and domestic legitimacy. Football has become one of the arenas in which that competition plays out most visibly.

The rebuilt Benghazi International Stadium opened in February 2025 with a ceremony featuring legends Luis Figo, Roberto Carlos and Michael Owen before a crowd of 45,000, overseen by the Haftar-aligned Development and Reconstruction Fund. Ronaldinho had appeared at a Benghazi summer festival the previous year. Mike Tyson performed at boxing events in the city. In October 2025, Inter Milan played Atletico Madrid in something branded as the Reconstruction Cup, a name carrying more irony than its organisers intended, in a country where infrastructure remains destroyed and real reconstruction remains largely theoretical.

Haftar declared the new stadium “belonging to all Libyans”, describing it as a place of unity in a country that “remains a single nation despite the challenges and difficulties.” The phrase deserves scrutiny. Since Haftar launched Operation Dignity in 2014, an estimated 13,000 families fled Benghazi. Human Rights Watch documented Libyan National Army-linked groups seizing property, torturing and forcibly disappearing residents and blocking thousands of families from returning to their homes. Many remain displaced today. The stadium belongs to all Libyans; the city beneath it clearly does not.

In western Libya, the Tripoli International Stadium was renovated and reopened in March 2024 with a match featuring AC Milan legends. Political networks surrounding major western clubs are dense. The play is the same on both sides: purchase spectacle, claim stability, convert European celebrity into external validation – borrowing, again, from a currency that was never theirs to issue.

When the borrowed currency runs out

In May 2026, the distance between spectacle and reality became impossible to ignore. During a league playoff between Al-Ittihad Tripoli – the club the Prime Minister once chaired – and Al-Swehli Misrata, whose chairman is his nephew, a referee declined to award a penalty in the 87th minute. The match was suspended. Fans stormed the pitch and injured stadium guards. Fans who had watched the match at their club’s Tripoli complex marched to the Government of National Unity headquarters and set the facade on fire. The Prime Minister is from Misrata. Al-Swehli is Misrata’s club, chaired by his nephew. The geometry of patronage was clear to anyone watching.

What looked from outside like a football riot revealed something deeper: a long-accumulated recognition that the official result and the actual result had diverged once too often. Libyan football has been managed, patronised and interfered with for decades – referees influenced and clubs owned by the same families that run the state. Both rival authorities are implicated. The May 2026 events were not irrational passion or just anger. They were a damning verdict.

The season’s closing act arrived weeks later in Cairo. Days before the final, Khaled Haftar – Chief of General Staff of the Libyan National Army and son of the eastern strongman – announced a 10 million dinar prize for the league winner. His adopted club, Al-Nasr of Benghazi, which he has financed for years, was in the final. The match was played in Egypt, a country long aligned with his father politically. Their opponents were Al-Swehli – chaired by his family’s political rival, the GNU Prime Minister’s nephew, representing everything the Haftar camp stood against.

Al-Swehli won on penalties. The prize Khaled Haftar had put up days earlier – confident, it seemed, that his club would collect it – crossed the country’s deepest political fault line and landed in Misrata. His money. Their trophy.

On the podium in Cairo, Haftar stepped forward to deliver the cup to Al-Swehli’s captain. Ibrahim Dbeibah got there at the same moment. Then the players arrived. Then the officials. Everyone wanted a hand on it. In the chaos of bodies and celebration, the trophy went up too fast – and came crashing down on Khaled Haftar’s head. It was the one outcome no one on the pitch could choreograph.

In Libya, football has always known something its rulers spend fortunes trying to disprove: you can rig the match, but you cannot buy the ending.