The Global Game

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.

"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.

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 Burma box). 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."

And so a duality within football — one that is with it still — was established. The game's very simplicity means that it can be enjoyed anywhere. The rules are easy to understand, and no complicated equipment is required. To this day, many children in Africa use balls made of tightly wrapped plastic bags bound with string; in Ethiopia recently, kids could be seen playing with an outer casing of plastic bags that had been stuffed with condoms that, they said, gave the ball extra bounce. But second, and just as importantly, football very early became a mass-spectator product, one whose fans had a fervent identification with their chosen teams.

Fandom was originally — and most of the time remains — something reserved for local clubs. But as international competition grew, it quickly became associated with national teams, too. The first World Cup was played in 1930. Four years later, Mussolini's Italy hosted the tournament (and won it) and since then nationalist sentiment has never been far from the Cup's heart. Sometimes, naturally, this fervor takes on a nasty edge — witness the long-running rivalries, stoked by London's tabloids, between England and both Germany and Argentina. But just as often, the World Cup has allowed fans to find a "soft" nationalism, one that celebrates national success without spilling over into hateful politics.

The pattern was set with West Germany's unexpected victory over a gifted Hungarian team in the 1954 final, a moment that became the climax of filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder's brilliant analysis of postwar German reconstruction, The Marriage of Maria Braun. In the film's final scene, you can hear a radio commentator at the game crying "Deutschland ist wieder 'was" (Germany is something again). Football had become an acceptable way for nations to say they were great without using guns to do so.

It's not just big countries that think that way. For little Ghana, long a power in African football, but which had never qualified for the World Cup before this year, getting to Germany has been a source of astonishing — probably overdone — national pride. "Season after season we were just dying to get to the World Cup," says Kwabena Yeboah, editor of biweekly newspaper Africa Sports. "When it finally happened people compared it to the day Ghana won independence."

Outlets for soft nationalism are particularly important in societies where political expression is circumscribed. That's true for three Islamic nations that have qualified for Germany: Iran (see Iran box), Tunisia and Saudi Arabia. "Football is the unifying field for Tunisians," says Chahir Chaqroun, a sportswriter for the Tunis Hebdo newspaper. "It is not easy to discuss politics or sensitive issues, so football works as a release valve." Hassan Mezouar, a marketing consultant whose father was president of a Tunisian team, echoes the point. "In football, there is no influence from politics or religion," he says. "Tunisians are far more excited about success in football than celebrating Independence Day, which for them is just another reminder of how far they still lag behind developed countries." Subtly, football is changing Tunisian society — especially because more women now attend games. "Once women are in the match they feel they are like their counterparts anywhere in the world," says Mezouar. "If women are now going to the stadium, this means that society is changing, and that these small steps will eventually lead to more changes." In Saudi Arabia, says political analyst Mai Yamani, support for the national football team is "a very good, apolitical way [of showing pride in Saudi identity], especially in a country where you do not have freedom of expression or organization."

Football's simplicity, and the fervor of its fans, explain much of its popularity. But the World Cup would not have become such a focal point for the global community without a third factor: the worldwide spread of television. The first World Cup to be televised was the 1954 tournament in Switzerland, but it was the 1970 World Cup in Mexico, broadcast live to Europe in color, that really established the tournament as something you had to watch. (It helped that the Cup that year was won by a Brazilian team that was, in unshakable conventional wisdom, the finest the world has ever seen.) TV has been crucial in expanding the appeal of football outside its heartlands of Europe and Latin America. In particular, as the economies of India and China have modernized, giving millions of households the opportunity to watch TV for the first time, the audience for football has massively expanded. Neither India nor China qualified for Germany, yet the level of interest in the tournament in both nations is breathtaking. "Everyone is watching football on the telly now," says Baichung Bhutia, captain of the Indian national team. "Not just games where India plays, but all the games." In India, to love football — rather than cricket, the traditional sport of the subcontinent — is a sign of modernity. "Who has time for cricket these days? You sit in front of the TV for five or six hours," says Rajesh Karabanda, managing director of Nivia, a sporting equipment firm. "At élite schools in urban areas the kids wouldn't be seen dead playing cricket," says Bikram Singh, a sports coach in New Delhi. "Football is part of the new global India — it's much more aspirational [than cricket]." (In neighboring Bangladesh, also a cricketing nation, university students destroyed dormitories and burnt furniture last week to pressure officials to buy two new televisions in time for the World Cup.) The sports channel of cctv, China's state-owned broadcaster, started a 100-day countdown to Germany in February, and has has been broadcasting a daily program on the tournament ever since. Sohu, one of China's most popular Web portals, has offered 11 fans the chance to blog from Germany; last month, 150,000 Chinese entered a competition for the slots. There's no nationalism involved here at all — just a generalized sense of wanting to be part of something modern and global. "Whether the Chinese team is in the finals or not doesn't change a thing for me," says Liu Guolin, 28, who works in a Beijing travel agency. "There are great players and great teams out there. I can't miss it. It is the biggest sports event on the planet."

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."

It follows that Europeans watching the 32 nations taking part in this year's Cup will be cheering on players they watch every week — though they may be representing nations very far away. Europe's top clubs scour the globe for talent because it's harder to find at home. As Europe's youngsters enjoy the myriad home-based entertainment opportunities now open to them — and become "slaves to the screen," as one top sports administrator puts it — so they are less likely to spend hours kicking a ball around. "Kids don't play in the streets or in their backyards anymore," says Jürgen Klinsmann, Germany's coach. "A 10-year-old today won't be playing 20 to 25 hours per week anymore — every afternoon, for three to four hours, just banging the ball off a wall somewhere." And so to continue to provide top-level entertainment, the best European clubs have had to go much further afield to find their future stars.

Baby snatching has been a particular problem in Africa. In the 1990s, scores of teenagers were leaving countries such as Ghana and Nigeria to play in Europe — many of them in France and Belgium — only to have their dreams dashed when they proved not quite good enough. Many of these kids ended up on the streets of European cities, dropped by the lower division team that had signed them, and were unable even to afford the airfare home. Brazil's Pelé likened the business to a new slave trade. Over the past few years FIFA has tightened up on the international transfer of players younger than 18. Officially, younger players can now transfer only if their parents also move to the same country "for reasons not related to football," or if the transfer occurs within Europe and the new club makes sure the player still gets an education. Still, interest in young African players continues. Democratic Republic of Congo coach Claude LeRoy says he posted two guards on the hotel elevator during the African Nations Cup in January, to stop agents trying to get to his younger players.

Not all European interest in Africa is bad. Some big European clubs have set up academies in Africa to scout for and train future stars. Many French clubs see former colonies such as Cameroon, Ivory Coast and Senegal as great hotbeds for players as good as Chelsea's Ivorian star Didier Drogba or Barcelona's Samuel Eto'o, from Cameroon. But even clubs in nations with weaker ties to Africa such as the Netherlands use the continent as a talent source. Feyenoord set up an academy in Ghana in 1999, while Ajax uses a team in Cape Town as its African base.

In a deliberate attempt to yoke football to development strategies, South Africa will host the 2010 Cup. Sepp Blatter, the president of FIFA, explicitly wants the tournament to act as a driver for African development. In one sense, that's an odd claim, because South Africa boasts well-developed cities and infrastructure and a sophisticated economy not found in any of the 48 other nations south of the Sahara. So the African country that least needs development won the Cup designed to develop Africa. But South Africa still needs to improve its economy, and the promised development before the Cup — including an ultramodern train line connecting Johannesburg, Pretoria and Johannesburg International Airport — may help. Beyond that, Blatter has said that the 2010 tournament should belong to all of Africa, not just its southern tip.

FIFA plans to spend $100 million on football in the developing world in the next four years, much of it in Africa. Certainly there's no hesitation on the business side; sponsorship deals finalized with just five of FIFA's Partners for 2010 and 2014 are already 25% bigger than the deals done with all 15 Official Partners for Germany this summer. "The market trusts Africa," Blatter pointedly said in April. Outside its borders, most of the world thinks that Africa is poor, full of wars and disease, famine and horrors. A successful 2010 Cup might help, just a little, to change such attitudes.

Fans, of course, already know what Africans can do. At the pitch off Independence Avenue in Accra, the first game of the afternoon is Walaga FC against Savers Academy FC. Walaga are the reigning champions, as they will tell you at every possibility. And no wonder — they are fast, skillful and confident. At half-time, Walaga are 4-1 up, and Savers' goalie seems to have given up, his shoulders sagging and his movements slow and halfhearted. Savers' coach rips into his charges and the kids stand around, scuffing their boots into the ground. Under a tree, the boys from Kingdoko FC change into their bright orange shirts, preparing to take on the Tudu Boys. The players from Kingdoko say they love Thierry Henry and Zinédine Zidane and want to play in Europe one day. "I want to make a name for myself," says one, "an international name. In Africa it's hard to make a name." If football helps him do it (and why not?) that would be one more reason to remember that whatever adjective you put before it — simple, beautiful, global — what's taking place on the dusty, hard-baked field in Accra is a lot more than a game. But you knew that already.

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