Why Oakland Roots fans are demanding the team end its sponsorship deal with Puma
Oakland Roots fans are demanding the club sever ties with its new jersey sponsors, Puma, citing the sports apparel company’s working relationship with Israeli soccer clubs that have games in occupied settlements on the West Bank.
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The Roots’ primary supporters group, the Oakland Roots Radicals, posted a copy of a flyer on their social media channels outlining the specific concerns they have with Puma, and expressed their disappointment with the club itself. Included is a QR code which leads to an Al Jazeera op-ed from 2019 by Palestinian soccer player Aya Khattab which denounced Puma’s sponsorship of the Israel Football Association (IFA) when it first happened.
The group then took this message to the club’s stadium at Laney College, bringing a banner that read “ROOTS GIVE PUMA THE BOOT” while members brought physical copies of the flyers. As the group noted on Twitter, the banner was not allowed into the stadium, and neither were the flyers.
“PUMA is the main sponsor of the Israel Football Association, which includes teams in illegal Israeli settlements,” the Radicals said in a statement to SFGATE. “The injustice Palestinian people suffer as they are displaced by illegal settlements is in direct opposition to the values of the Oakland community, and the values espoused by the Roots that make us so proud to support them.We are calling on the Roots to stand up and confront injustice, by severing ties to Puma until they end their support for Israel’s regime of apartheid and military occupation.”
For what it’s worth, when Puma first announced its partnership with the IFA, it worked to distance itself from any political associations with its working relationship. In responses given to those who expressed concern at the time, the company gave responses repeating a dedication to supporting “athletes of all backgrounds, regardless of race, color, creed, religion, sexual orientation and national origin.”
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One might fairly wonder why there’s an organized outcry against Puma and not Nike, which was the team’s previous apparel sponsor. The organization addressed this briefly on Twitter, citing association with the BDS movement, a Palestinian-led campaign that calls for boycotting, divesting from and sanctions against Israel and businesses that work with the country as an act of protest against alleged violations of international law.
Longstanding tensions and violence between Israel and Palestine have received renewed levels of attention over the last several months. The most recent spark was an Israeli court’s ruling in May that was set to expel six Palestinian families from their homes in East Jerusalem. The ruling was quickly postponed, but resulted in protests erupting in the streets and, in turn, Israeli forces spraying skunk water and shooting stun grenades at a mosque on one of the final days of Ramadan. This was in addition to the ongoing bombings and killings that the conflict has produced for years now.
The club did not respond to an SFGATE request for comment.