TIME: How Soccer Is Uniting the World -- Football: "the beautiful game"

The World Cup
The Global Game
How did a game that was once just a passion of Europe’s industrial working class spread around the world until its most sublime moments became the closest thing to an expression of a true global community there has ever been?
By MICHAEL ELLIOTT and SIMON ROBINSON


(Simon Robinson)
Simplicity: Ghanaian boys make do with a hard field and a tattered net

Posted Sunday, June 4, 2006

There is not a single blade of grass on the football pitch just off Independence Avenue in central Accra, the capital of Ghana. Its surface is pock-marked, and there are frightening undulations created where rivers of water wash across the earth every time it rains. The hard surface is covered with a thin layer of dust dotted with rocks and sticks and well-chewed mango pits and fluttering plastic bags left over from the market stalls that set up midfield on weekdays. The goal nets are tattered; knots pull straggly strings across gaping holes, and the net is pinned to the ground with large rocks. Along the western edge of the field stand 50 or so people, many of them kids eager for a chance to play. Behind the crowd, wire lines hang with clothes for sale: suit jackets, pressed trousers, colorful shirts, all of them coated with the white powder that kicks up underfoot and swirls and eddies and dies here and there across the dusty ground. Behind the northern goal is a makeshift bus station where minivans pull in and disgorge their passengers. At the southern end is a sprawling market where women squat behind tiny tables stacked high with bowls of rice and delicate little salted fish and larger fillets, smoked dry and stiff. There are baskets and plastic bins full of overripe tomatoes and dried red chilies and green oranges, neatly stacked beans and onions. One woman chews a mango and shouts out her prices to passing shoppers. Another saunters across the pitch, a large aluminum tub balanced effortlessly on her head, oblivious to the game under way and the shouts from the sideline for her to get a move on.

The children playing, 11- and 12-year-olds, have met for a friendly match on a Saturday afternoon. The sun is scorching and the ground hot to the touch. The play is even hotter: elbows, knees, bumps and shoves. But between the clashes there is real skill: beautiful passes, deft little pivots, nimble dashes down the sideline and even overhead scissor kicks, hard landings be damned. "When the boys are playing it’s too fine," says Believer Mahame, 46, who watches from the sideline, a shortwave radio tuned to Chelsea–Manchester United pinned to his ear. "When they are young they play pure football. It’s beautiful."

Take that little scene—a man watching children play with a ball, as technology links him to a game in Europe—and sprinkle it all over Africa, from the slums of Lagos to the beaches of Senegal and the Congo jungle. Then extend it over the oceans, to the favelas of Rio and São Paulo, to manicured fields in the suburban U.S., parks in China, school playgrounds in India, to dusty streets, a concrete space under a highway overpass, to any patch of ground vaguely level enough to mark out a field of play. And think for a minute what that magically distributed moment means. The game—the simple game, the beautiful game—has become the global game. On July 9, around one person in five on the planet—more than 1 billion people—will be watching the same images on TV, as the final of the 2006 football World Cup is played in Berlin. That will mark a new moment in world history. Never before has there been a single event which so united the interest and affection of so many—rich and poor, African and Asian, Islamic and Christian, black and white and every other hue in which humankind comes.

How did this happen? And what can we learn from it? These aren’t trivial questions; understand why football has grown and where it is going, and you’ll understand the modern world at least as well as you would by studying global markets and geopolitics. It may or may not always be beautiful, but football is a lot more than a game....

http://www.time.com/time/europe/2006/wcup/story.html

:sarcasm:

Sigh. The things that pass as "uniting the world" in the minds of white folks.

and I've never seen that happen, not once in 20 years of living in the UK. There is some European racism in the sport, but you're painting with too broad a brush.

Why, I'm not exactly sure.

I hate it when people who know nothing about international soccer first hand come in here and try to make it seem as if everybody behaves that way at football matches. It's nonsense and does nothing but spread ignorance. (I'm obviously not referring to you in my tiny rant, though!)

are totally nuts.

after beating Costa Rica yesterday, in Munich, 4-2. Several cars have German flags flying from them. It's rare to see the German flag on a typical day.

There were lots of Costa Rican fans in Munich's statium, all sitting together en masse. Every town in Costa Rica has a soccer field, with the Social Security office sitting on one end.

The US plays Ghana in its first match. Next Sat. will be particularly difficult--Italy.

back in 1969...

The predominant cause was the right-wing militarist/facist regime in El Salvador exploiting the working class, fomenting jingoism, and expelling peasants from farmland. The later Civil War in El Salvador finally expelled that facist regime. (I know some 'privileged' families who came to the US as a result. Right-wingers seem to have some things in common, no matter what their nationality - particularly a sense of entitlement and superiority.)

Nothing irks them more than the idea somebody's feeling good about something, and either they aren't really involved, or can't kill the buzz.

We must all be independent thinkers and choose our own way. Value difference. Diversity's key. How dare we expect others to act like us?

But wait ... we're not like everybody else? Exceptionalism, how dare the US differ!