Although no West Indian teams have made it to the finals, there are good reasons to believe that the upcoming FIFA World Cup, Africa’s first, might well be one of the best. For even if no African side can upset one of the more fancied European or South American teams, the fact that a nation which only adopted full democracy 16 years ago, against staggering odds, could host an event of this magnitude is a major success by itself. At the very least the next two weeks will show a vast television that Africa is not simply a fount of bad news. In fact, even before the tournament began the host nation could congratulate itself on disappointing foreign skeptics by finishing ten new stadiums on time – albeit with an eleventh hour US$100m supplement from FIFA. South Africa should also take pride in the fact that its budget for protecting 31 foreign teams for a fortnight is a small fraction of the nearly $1 billion which Canadian taxpayers will presently cough up to secure just four days of the G8 and G20 summits in Toronto.
One major difference between the coverage of this World Cup and the last will be due to the rise of social media networks. Since the last tournament ended, Facebook alone has signed up around 100,000 new users each day. Today, if the site’s half a billion users formed a virtual nation, only China and India would have a larger population. Football has long been a completely global sport – a large majority of the 736 competitors in this year’s tournament earn their livelihoods in European clubs – and football fanaticism is well suited to online networking. Even seasoned expatriates know the guilty pleasure of reverting to what the writer Arthur Koestler called ‘football nationalism’ at times like these. This World Cup offers anyone with an internet connection unprecedented opportunities for exchanging predictions, gossip and wagers with like-minded surfers. The blogosphere and twitterverse also stand poised to deliver several billion words of nearly simultaneous commentary on every aspect of the competition.
Beneath the televised spectacle which delights so many viewers, there is often a darker side to the beautiful game. A few years ago the American political journalist Franklin Foer published a fascinating study of the ways in which globalism has affected football. How Soccer Explains the World opens with an account of the takeover of a Serbian football club by the notorious warlord Arkan. During his reign, Arkan used the club’s matches as a training ground for bands of thugs who later helped him with ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. Other European countries furnish Foer with similarly depressing evidence of how political hatreds can insinuate themselves into sport. In Glasgow, for example, he watches fans of the predominantly Protestant club Rangers taunt their Catholic rivals, Celtic, by singing “We’re up to our knees in Fenian blood.”
But political tension is hardly the only reason for football violence. Twenty years ago the American editor Bill Buford wrote a searing account of the organized hooliganism at the heart of British football. Aptly entitled Among the Thugs the book described a culture of casual nihilism in which support for local clubs was often just a pretext for criminals to indulge their appetite for violence and vandalism. Stricter policing has helped to curb some of this violence, but it has never disappeared completely. The Anglo-Dutch writer Ian Buruma has also written about how the vicious heckling “of Ajax supporters as rotten Jews [has] degenerated into actual violence, sometimes accompanied by a collective hiss, mimicking escaping gas [at a concentration camp]…”
Fortunately these dire examples of racial and sectarian hatred have been offset by occasional examples of ethnic transcendence, most notably in the case of the 1998 French team, which contained players with Algerian and Arab backgrounds. That side’s victories greatly diminished the rising political fortunes of the racist Jean Marie le Pen since the team’s success made nonsense of the idea that immigrants could not contribute to the glory of France. In recent years the trend towards trans-national inclusivity has become almost an article of faith. All of Europe’s major leagues – most notably the English Premiership – have profited from an international labour market of superstar managers and players. Their success has the potential to fundamentally alter the ways that fans look at the game.
Two journalists from the Financial Times recently produced a detailed if somewhat tongue-in-cheek analysis of why England might reasonably expect to win this year’s tournament. Commenting on the success of the new England coach, Italian Fabio Capello, they observed that “Our numbers suggest that the Football Association should keep upsetting xenophobes by importing foreign knowledge. From 1990 to 2010 England have had two foreign managers (Capello and Sven Goran Eriksson) and seven English ones, including two caretakers. On every measure, the foreigners have done better.” The FT journalists concluded that if they can overcome the national tendency to lose on penalties, the current squad has as good a chance as any of redeeming the disappointments of the last half century. (Somewhat confusingly, two well-known American investment banks had their mathematical sages run similar forecasts; one foresaw victory for England, the other tipped Brazil.)
Today football is more globalized than ever and its players all come with multiple identities. Consider the superstars Fernando Torres, Cristiano Ronaldo, and Lionel Messi who will shortly lead their countries proudly into the 2010 World Cup. Nobody who has ever seen them in full cry for Liverpool, Real Madrid or Barcelona can ever watch them dispassionately, whatever their national affiliation. Thousands of Englishmen will cheer Torres; thousands of Spaniards, Ronaldo. Everyone who loves football will root for Messi. Perhaps this is the most powerful lesson of football in a global age. However much the game has stirred heated nationalist passions – in 1969 Honduras and El Salvador engaged in a 100-hour conflict after a controversial match – it has thrived because of a wide dispersal of international superstars. For that reason alone, it feels symbolically right that South Africa – a country which emerged peacefully from apartheid, by transcending ethnic hatreds under the visionary guidance of Nelson Mandela – should host Africa’s first World Cup. South Africa is unlikely to have much success on the pitch, but it thoroughly deserves the honour of staging a tournament that is, after the Olympic Games, the most prestigious sporting event in the world.
