Football - International Style

Back in 2004, Franklin Foer's How Soccer Explains the World examined the soccer culture in various countries and the soccer culture's relationship to the era of globalization.  Soccer has been a globalized sport for decades with many of the greatest players playing in, primarily, European professional leagues.  The anecdotes Foer shares are fascinating but the title is hype.  The anecdotes certainly don't explain the world but they do provide memorable and colorful examples of his basic premise - that there's an innate tendency towards tribalism and local culture that resists globalization.  Foer, at one point, seems to imply that maybe the furthest we can go as a species is an enlightened nationalism, at least at this stage in our evolution.

International competitions such as the FIFA World Cup and the upcoming Winter Olympics give us all a chance to exhibit our national pride in a non-belligerent manner.   The Olympics of  ancient Greece were a period of peace. Whatever city-states were fighting at the time put down their weapons and made a truce so that the athletes could travel safely to the games.  Of course, there were no Winter Olympics back in sunny Greece.  There were far fewer events (track and field, boxing, wrestling, and chariot racing), and the Olympics were as much a religious event as an athletic competition.  After all, the Greek gods resided on Mt. Olympus.


The World Cup was the dream and brain-child of Frenchman Jules Rimet, who was "of the generation that had gone through World War I, a conflict that left a monument in every French town with a list of the young men who died in the trenches....For his part, Jules Rimet came home with a dream: that rather than sending their young to gun each other down with machine guns and stabbing each other with bayonets, nations might instead compete on the pitch. They could celebrate their pride and difference while also sharing a set of rules and what he considered to be the most universal language on the planet: soccer." [SI/CNN/The Far Post]

So exhibiting a bit of my national pride, I must point out that the American team has one of the toughest draws in the tournament.  Of the field of 32, only Australia, Ghana and Costa Rica appear to face a more difficult challenge.  If the US advances out of the group stage, it will be a tribute to how far soccer has come in this country.  Not only are the highly ranked sides from Portugal and Germany in the group, the fourth member is the well regarded Ghana team.  Ghana matches up well against the US - they eliminated the US in the 2010 World Cup.  Here's the final draw for the group stage:

(Image is from the FIFA website.)

Foer wrote How Soccer Explains the World in 2004.  For an up-to-date look at the world's soccer scene, I'd recommend the Roads and Kingdoms series "The Far Post".  Every two weeks until the World Cup, they are posting an article on the teams and culture of "the beautiful game".