		Fields Of Dreams A look back at the tournament

		Seeing Red Red card after red card

		Win Or Lose You can see it in their faces

		Crowd Pleasers Brazil has fans like no other team

		Launch Party Glamor, spectacle in Munich

		Great Moments Scenes from World Cup history

		Fever Pitch Fans soak up the atmosphere

Past Issues

		Euro 2004 [06/21/2004]

World Cup 2002

[02/06/2006]

Matches

Sun, July 9 – 20:00*
FINAL: Berlin


Italy	v	France
1 (5)		1 (3)

*local time (CEST)

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early days >>>>
English private-school boys set the rules, but working-class devotion fueled football

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

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Posted Sunday, June 4, 2006; 11.24BST
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.

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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.

"In the beginning, there were the English." That’s the first sentence of a recent book on Italian football, but it could accurately start any history of the game, anywhere in the world. Humans have been kicking something round—an enemy’s head, an inflated pig’s bladder—since time immemorial, but it was in the English fee-paying "public" schools of the 19th century, with their commitment to muscular Christianity and mens sana in corpore sano, that rules were first established to regulate the mayhem of ancient ball games.

When young Victorians left their schools to go to university or to take employment, however, they found their attempts at football often chaotic, because each school had developed its own laws. At Harrow players could handle the ball, for instance, whereas at Rugby they could carry it while running, too. So attempts were made to systematize the way in which various codes of the game should be played. The most famous such effort took place on Oct. 26, 1863, at the Freemasons Tavern, a pub in London, where a group of former public-school men grandly announced that they would call themselves the Football Association (a title which, abbreviated, gave the world the word soccer), and went on to establish 13 laws of the game. Melvyn Bragg, a British novelist and cultural critic, recently argued that the football laws constitute one of 12 books—along with such others as Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica—that changed the world.

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How so? Because late-Victorian Britain was supremely self-confident, outward looking and determined to proselytize its own virtues. So wherever the sons of Empire and imperial commerce went, football went with them—a way both of maintaining their own standards of fair play in a foreign clime, and of inculcating them in those unfortunate enough to have been born in less happy lands than Albion. In Italy, the game took root in ports such as Livorno and Genoa where the English were frequent visitors; in Latin America, it followed British merchants and railway builders to Argentina, Brazil and Mexico. In the colonies, imperial civil servants such as J. George Scott, in Burma, used the game of the perfect sphere to stiffen the backbone of villagers who (if only they knew it) had been waiting for the manifold blessings of Victorian British society (see Fair Play in Burma). The British even took the game to the nation that, in conventional wisdom, was long thought to have been immune to its charms. The enormous, forgotten British migration to the U.S. after the American Civil War meant that football traveled across the North Atlantic, too. By the 1890s, so many Lancashire textile workers had settled in Fall River, Massachusetts, that games there routinely drew crowds in the thousands.

The friends and families that those Lancastrians left behind, meanwhile, were making their own contribution to football’s development. The game’s first organizers may have come from the few schools that educated the Victorian upper class, but they were soon overtaken. In 1885, the Football Association legalized payments to players, and three years later, the world’s first professional football league was founded, all of its first 12 teams drawn from towns in the industrial northwest and midlands of England. Within a few years, enormous crowds were turning out to watch games. As Rogan Taylor, director of the Football Industry Group at the University of Liverpool, puts it: "The rules were written by a bunch of guys whose fathers had run the biggest empire the world has ever seen, and then they were mugged by the working class of Lancashire. Suddenly there were 50,000 people at a football match for the sole purpose of hating their neighbors, smoking fags, betting on it, and getting down five pints of ale before and after."

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