The Hindu : World Cup

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, May 31, 2002

Opinion

Opinion - Editorials

World Cup

LATER THIS AFTERNOON, at 5 p.m. IST to be precise, the ball will start rolling in a state-of-the-art stadium in Seoul, South Korea, signalling the start of the first World Cup of football to be played in Asia. And, over the next four weeks and a little more, usual business will not be business as usual in many parts of the world, from the swanky business districts of Paris and London and Rio de Janerio to the noisy, crowded lanes and bylanes of old Kolkata and the impoverished tiny towns and villages in the heart of Africa, places where seven-eighths of life is an argument. In London and Manchester and Marseilles, beer will replace cereal and fruit on the breakfast table, pubs will open before the summer sun's rays break through bedroom curtains, and most offices would not even bother to open for business at the usual morning hour of 8-30 or 9. In the poorest parts of Africa and Asia, suddenly antiquated black and white television sets will begin to command a higher price and many man-hours will be lost in farms and factories and Government offices. In Buenos Aires and Sao Paulo and Bogota, crime rates will suddenly drop and all worries about sky-rocketing inflation and loss of businesses and jobs will be pushed to the background as men, women and children respond to alarm clocks set for wee hours of the morning and then switch on the television to watch football.

In the high noon of globalisation, not even Coca Cola and McDonalds may have managed to bring the world together quite like the World Cup of football does. The phenomenal reach of modern sport, driven by television and commerce, never seems quite as all-encompassing as it does for four weeks every four years when the World Cup is staged. By the time two of 32 teams play their way through to the big day, June 30, when the destination of the 36 cm high, 18-carat solid gold FIFA World Cup weighing 4,970 grams will be decided at the Yokohama stadium in Japan, 35 billion people in 190 countries would have watched the action from Korea and Japan on television compared to the 33.4 billion who tuned in to France `98; by then, too, revenue from ticket sales alone would edge close to $490 million and over three million people would have watched the matches on-site, an average of over 48,000 per match in the 64-match mega-event.

Indeed, football is a game like no other. More emotional capital has been invested on it by more number of people in the world than perhaps in any other human activity barring love and courtship. And the sport's quadrennial showpiece, the World Cup, brings the whole world together in a sort of tribal bonding that all the greatest statesmen of our times together cannot achieve. It is a coming together of the sort that the human race seldom experiences as people from vastly different backgrounds, rich and poor, black, white and brown, Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Buddhist and Jewish, as well as the agnostics and the atheists, live through a set of shared emotions on a vast scale for 90 minutes, and perhaps more, during every match. How will such incredible loyalty on such a universal scale be rewarded over the four weeks as the superstars of the most popular sport in the world begin to display their wares in Korea and Japan? No individual megastar in this World Cup may have the genius of a Pele or a Maradona and no team may look quite as outstandingly brilliant as was the 1970 Brazilian team spearheaded by Pele but there are several teams of tremendous quality featuring players who can single-handedly decide matches — men such as France's Zinedine Zidane, England's David Beckham, Argentina's Gabriel Batistuta, Brazil's Rivaldo and Ronaldo and Portugal's Luis Figo, to name only six. And if at least two or three of the acknowledged heavyweights such as Argentina, Brazil, France, England and Italy progress to the semifinal stage, fans can look foward to a glorious climax to the most popular event in the world of sport. Then again, whoever makes it through to the later rounds of this World Cup, two clear winners have already been spotted before the first ball has been kicked in competition. The event's organisers in Japan and Korea have proved that Asian nations can match the best in Europe and the Americas when it comes to running major international sporting events — and it doesn't get any bigger than the World Cup of football.

Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Opinion

Stories in this Section

The elusive diplomatic divident

World Cup

Misplaced jingoism

Investigation as collusion — I

The Kashmir quandary — II

A road map to peace

Voters confused, apathetic