I like the hittin!
Posted on 06/04/2006 4:40:45 PM PDT by NZerFromHK
As Australia prepares for the World Cup frenzy, John Huxley wonders if a game out of control may score an own goal.
BY ALL accounts, Brazilian footballer Ronaldinho is a down-to-earth sort of boy. He lives with his mother, Miguelina, in Barcelona, says his favourite food is her concoction of meat, rice and beans, and relaxes by playing the bongos and walking his dogs.
His earnings, though, are out of this world. Salary, sponsorship and advertising deals this year will push his income to about $38 million - more than that of the entire star-studded Socceroos, more even than David Beckham.
"And at just 26, with his best football still ahead of him, Ronaldinho's value is sure to increase," says Dirk Kall, of the international management consultancy group BBDO, looking at lucrative spin-offs into fragrances and men's fashion.
That a modest young man, once criticised by coaches for being clumsy, can effectively earn, say, half a million dollars for every match he plays is just one of many mind-boggling figures that defines a sport that talks, increasingly, in billions.
The 64 World Cup games are expected to attract a cumulative TV audience of 32 billion. The German sportswear giant adidas predicts football sales this year of $2.4 billion. Pay TV companies recently paid $4.1 billion for rights to the English Premier League.
And so on.
John O'Neill, chief executive of Football Federation Australia, who came late to the sport, admits he has been astounded by the impact of World Cup qualification won after a penalty shoot-out last November.
"I went to my orthodontist the day after that game and he said, 'You know, this is the greatest thing to happen to me'. I never realised, and I still don't think most Australians quite realise, the size of this thing we have become a part of," he says.
O'Neill is not the only passionate convert. Last month, the US President, George Bush, admitted: "When I was young, I did not see a single soccer match. The sport simply did not exist. Now some of us, the old guys, are beginning to understand how important the World Cup is for the entire world."
So just how has football become so big? And is there a danger, as many insiders now allege, that it is beginning to eat itself?
Not everyone "gets" the game formerly known as soccer. Americans, and others accustomed to instant and repeated gratification in life, are bored by the relative paucity of scoring shots, the long gaps between goals. Even an English writer, Peter Ackroyd, complained that, "like sex, the movements in football are limited and predictable".
He does a disservice both to football and to sex, with which the sport is frequently, and favourably, compared. Why, researchers at the University of Utah have even quantified the "testosterone rush" experienced by men watching their teams play in the World Cup finals.
The point is that the game is not just about goals - "the orgasms of soccer", as a French intellectual described them. Because it is relatively unstructured, football gives unequalled scope to spontaneity, to improvisation, to individual virtuosity.
The dazzling run. The timely tackle. The impossible save. The goal-line clearance. The defence-splitting pass. The unstoppable shot. The breathtaking vision. And, yes, almost always, the winning goal.
Because its rewards may be miserly (on the scoreboard, at least), football has greater potential to spark surprise results, amazing comebacks, romantic victories, when underdogs bite back. Winning and losing, agony and ecstasy, sick as a parrot and over the moon. Each is only a kick away.
And because much of its seductive devil is in its detail, football thrills come from the most unlikely players.
But the internal mechanics are only a fraction of football's winning formula. As another English writer, J.B. Priestley, put it: "To think of football as 22 hirelings kicking a ball is merely to say that a violin is wood and catgut, that Hamlet is so much ink and paper."
Other sports - most successfully cricket, because of an in-built randomness which can provide some players with perfect conditions, or cruelly cut down others mid-stride - may imitate life. Football, for millions, is life itself.
"All I know most surely about morality and the obligations of man I owe to football," the French existentialist writer Albert Camus said. As a former goalkeeper with Universitaire d'Alger, he would know.
It is also death. Though police subsequently claimed the killing had more to do with road rage than football, the Colombian defender Andres Escobar was murdered after scoring an own goal in the 1994 World Cup finals.
But it is also more. As the late Liverpool coach Bill Shankly famously commented: "Some people think football is a matter of life and death. I don't like that attitude … it is much more serious than that."
It is war, most infamously between El Salvador and Honduras, whose hostility escalated alarmingly after a disputed match. And it is peace. In flashpoints such as Iraq, reconciliation has been sought through the reintroduction of football.
It is beauty. The grace, speed and power of players such as Ronaldinho, Romario and Pele, Brazilians whose fans first dubbed football "o jogo bonito", the beautiful game. And it is ugliness: the hooligans, no longer just the English, who threaten to shame the World Cup.
It is spectacle. The self-styled "greatest show on Earth", watched worldwide by billions, enjoyed by 350 million registered players, male and female, contested by some 250 nations, 205 of which started this year's World Cup. Bigger than the Olympics.
And it is tragedy. Remember Heysel, in Brussels, where 39 Italian fans of Juventus were killed after fighting broke out during a match against Liverpool? Hillsborough, in Sheffield, where panic and bad policing saw almost 100 fans crushed to death?
So everything is just perfect on Planet Football? Not at all. Rather it seems suddenly to be spinning out of control. Sordid details are just beginning to emerge of an extensive match-fixing racket in Italy, one of the world's football superpowers. For Sepp Blatter, German chief of the world organising body, FIFA, who has denounced it as the worst scandal in the game's history, the timing could hardly be worse.
The English Premier League, one of the world's most watched, has been denounced as "stupefyingly boring" after the runaway success again of Chelsea, or so-called "Chelski" - success allegedly bought with the billions of petro-dollars of Russian businessman Roman Abramovich.
Everywhere, there is deep, grassroots concern over the way in which old clubs, with long histories and loyal supporters, such as Manchester United, are bought and sold "like commodities", and over the obscene salaries paid to irresponsible, selfish players, with soap-opera lifestyles.
This was epitomised for football's true believers last year when two Newcastle United players, each paid more than $100,000 a week and loaded with a poor disciplinary record, started fighting each other on the pitch.
Such is the extent to which football has penetrated the world of high culture, through music, movies and literature, it was no surprise last month when one of Germany's leading writers, Gunter Grass, attacked the growing commercialisation of the game in his homeland.
"There's no fair competition any more … the championship has become boring," Grass, who used to play on the left wing, told his local newspaper, Lubecker Nachrichten.
Despite dire warnings from supporter groups that clubs are living beyond their means, and the best intentions of officials to "give the sport back to the people", commercialisation seems set to gather momentum.
Not only is the game continuing to grow worldwide, both in terms of players and couch potatoes, but it is hopeful of making the long-awaited breakthrough in the most lucrative market, the United States. Its men's team is ranked sixth in the world, its women's team first.
For Australia, making only its second appearance in the World Cup after a break of 32 years, long-term worries about the viability of different parts of the game, in different parts of the world are wonderfully irrelevant.
Unlike elsewhere, if Australian football is to kick on, it needs all the exposure, all the money, funny or otherwise, that it can command.
As Socceroos coach Guus Hiddink said last week in Melbourne, where more than 95,000 fans turned up for a friendly match against Greece, the challenge here is to exploit the hype and the hullabaloo of the next few weeks.
John O'Neill needs no reminding. He compares the shape of Australian football with a pyramid. "For some time we've had a great, broad base of grassroots players, young and old, male and female. There's a strong club scene in all the states. We've now added a national league.
"What we've lacked for the past 30 years or so is a pointy end. Now, with the Socceroos at the World Cup finals, we've got one."
Personally I think we just have too much other sports stuff going on for soccer to really take off in America. Americans will watch it but the matches take place all over the world at all hours of the day or night. It's in the same boat as F1 racing, we can't follow it because we only see it at random times.
I've watched soccer games with some enthusiams, but it will never live up to American football in my eyes. I love the physicicality of football, the strategery, the styles so very evident when one squad meets another.
I think that I could like soccer more than baseball, more than basketball.
Maybe equal to hockey.
As for Camus and learning all about morality from soccer, well, I wish that someone would have spoken to those morons at the pub I was at in London that sent a cascade of pint glasses smashing into walls, tables, and patrons. Or that Chelsea fan who.... oh, nevermind.
(Denny Crane: "Every one should carry a gun strapped to their waist. We need more - not less guns.")
I think, though the game is entrenched in American youth, not enough adults know how to watch a game because so much occurs off of the ball. Seeing a match "live" is exponentially better than watching on television.
Particularly when full of Guinness and wearing the home "kit".
The World Cup rocks. Even casual American sports fans will pay at least a little attention.
Is there a more gay sport than soccer?
I've got bad news for you. The first game isn't until Friday.
ML/NJ
Is there a more gay sport than soccer?
No, well said
[i]Is there a more gay sport than soccer?[/i]
Wow, such an original comment and a well educated comment to say the least. It's either that, or you're trolling.
American Football:
- Tight uniforms
- Men bending over
- Quarterback reaching between center's legs to receive the ball.
No, that's not gay at all.
JP
(Dares anybody to come over and play a little real football with him. Bring Neosporin and bandages.)
22 men killin' grass.
He's doing it wrong.
Soccer is not a sport, it's an Italian aerobics exercise.
"Is there a more gay sport than soccer?"
Soccer is an excellent sports for young girls.
MEN play American and Canadian football, Aussie Rules Football, and Rugby.
yep... the best athletes usually drift over to football, basketball, baseball, even tennis once they get to about 13-14..
I can appreciate the game due to the fact that 2 of my kids play, one of them a travelling squad. But the boy likes tennis, football and boxing better now. The girl likes swimming....
I do think if they change the ball or rules to increase the scoring it could change the monetary incentives and then it'll still be behind American Football.
IMHO
Ausie Rules Football with the refs and the long duster overcoats is "kewl".
What is the point in watching two teams play to a 0-0 tie? The fans are a whole lot more fun to watch than the teams most of the time.
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