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The World Cup | The Global Game   subscribe to TIME Printable Version email this story

Posted Sunday, June 4, 2006; 11.24BST
Needless to say, the biggest sports event on the planet offers rich benefits to those who align their commercial interests with it—and are prepared to pay for the privilege. TV and new-media rights for the 2006 Cup were sold for $1.5 billion, roughly the same amount fetched for the 2004 Summer Olympic Games in Athens. FIFA’s top 15 Official Partners for the tournament, including tiremaker Continental, brewer Anheuser-Busch and automaker Hyundai—alongside six official suppliers—have contributed around $900 million in return for exclusive marketing rights. (Organizers of the Olympics had to call on more than 100 firms for the $1.5 billion in sponsorship revenue generated for the 2002 Winter Olympics and 2004 Summer Olympics.)

But football is more than a commercial magnet; in the last few years, it has become a neat and cheap way of advancing economic development. In a United Nations report in 2003, sport was said to bring "individuals and communities together, highlighting commonalities and bridging cultural or ethnic divides." The field of play, the report continued, is "a simple and often apolitical site for initiating contact between antagonistic groups." Adolf Ogi, a former President of Switzerland who is Special Adviser on Sport for Development and Peace to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, says, "There is no other instrument that has such traction to youngsters than a ball. All over the world, boys and girls, often traumatized—you play with them, they can forget the situation they are in."

Football, says Mel Young, who co-founded the Homeless World Cup (which does just what you would think it does) in 2001, says that football works well as a development tool. As his homeless players—often drug-dependent—develop self-esteem from the game, he says, "we get them into projects and lift them to a point where they can connect with the world again." Rachel Baggaley, the head of hiv at Christian Aid, says, "Football is the perfect way of getting hiv across to kids." In Sierra Leone, Christian Aid made a football program a focal point for activities with boys and girls. "We get them to work together as a team and build self-esteem," she says. "By being successful on the pitch, girls can break down the stereotypical roles."

London-based charity Alive and Kicking uses football to promote aids awareness among young Kenyans. The ngo makes footballs in Kenya, each one marked with the slogan play safe, the red aids ribbon and the word aids. Distributed through schools and clubs, the idea is to get kids thinking about the connection between fitness, health and safe sex. "These kids don’t listen to teachers, don’t listen to parents and don’t listen to preachers," says Jim Cogan, Alive and Kicking’s director. "So we get them in an informal atmosphere and give them the absolute basic details about what a virus is, how it spreads, how to be safe." Yomi Kuku, who works with the ngo Search and Groom in Lagos, has a similar tale. Search and Groom attracts poor children to its football training and games, where it offers them vocational training, and teaches them the basics of social service and their rights as citizens. Kuku says that football is an incredible tool for development. "It’s something that you can’t quantify. It’s possible to teach so many things, just through their interest in this game."

Not even its biggest fan would claim that the world’s love of football is an unqualified human good. There are plenty of ugly aspects to the beautiful game. The European club season that has just ended was marred—as, truthfully, every European season is—by disgusting racist chants from some spectators, especially in Spain, Eastern Europe and Italy. Italian football is mired in one of its frequent scandals. The explosion of Asian interest in the European leagues has led to a boom in the market for betting on games that should have sensible administrators worried.

And though football is the global game, there’s no doubt where its power center lies. The five big West European leagues—in England, Germany, France, Italy and Spain—saw their total revenues grow from $2.5 billion in 1995-96 to an estimated $8.2 billion in 2005-06, according to the Deloitte Annual Review of Football Finance. That’s given teams the clout to hire at will from anywhere in the world; the 28 players who took the field for Arsenal and Barcelona at the European Champions League final last month came from 12 nations. Not only has football become the world’s game; individual teams are now globalized. Consider: every member of the legendary Brazilian team of 1970 played for a Brazilian club. Of the 23-man squad chosen for this year’s tournament, just two do—and when team manager Carlos Alberto Parreira announced the names of those picked, he said, "Don’t be shocked to see all 23 Brazilian players coming from non-Brazilian clubs in future World Cups. It’s going to happen because players are going overseas at an increasingly young age."

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