I’m not that much of a soccer fan. I don’t follow a club team, though by proxy, I suppose my obsessed Liverpool-loving Swedish best-bud Eric Sundstrom would claim me for his side.
But I love the World Cup.
To put this in perspective, my World Cup love pales in comparison to my Notre Dame football obsession, an illness that transforms the otherwise mild-mannered, level-headed gentleman I consider myself into a stark-raving lunatic on 12 Saturdays in the fall. (It’s bad. I drop F-bombs in front of eight-year-olds; I now know myself well-enough to warn their parents.) My Notre Dame addiction allows me to speak the same language as my soccer-loving brethren. Read Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch (a great memoir about his love of English club Arsenal that was translated into “American” in a horrible film with Drew Barrymore and Jimmy Fallon about the Red Sox), and you see where I’m coming from.
The soccer affair started in France, like all wonderfully cliched romances. I did an internship outside of Paris in 1998, the summer between my junior and senior year of college. When I arrived that May, I was only vaguely aware that the planet’s greatest competition/festival was about to kick off underneath my nose. A naively conceived, cellphone-less attempt to meet with Kate Sullivan, the only other American I knew in Paris that summer, on the Champs Elysees in the wake France’s 3-0 victory over South Africa turned out to be as fun as it was initially frustrating. The spontaneous gathering of 400,000 French football nutters made our rendezvous, er, challenging.
Suffice it to say that the combination of good sport, a month-long French national fete, and what I would discover to be World Cup’s intriguing ties to politics, demographics and diplomacy had me hooked.
Frank Foer’s How Soccer Explains the World and Soccernomics by Simon Kuper and Stefan Syzmanski can explain. This year’s tournament hasn’t disappointed, and the star has been North Korea. Seriously, who else would have paid 1,000 Chinese fans to travel to South Africa and cheer for Pyongyang? This was after Kim Jong-Il made the disasterous decision to air his country’s match against Portgual. We joked that the 7-0 public drubbing that must have landed the team in a concentration camp for “re-education.” I fear that may be closer to reality than we’re comfortable with.
Dictators struggle with such a broad, uncontrollably open international stage. Pyongyang was playing with fire — what if self-exiled protestors exploited the opportunity to beam their grievances back home? Iran routinely blocks soccer broadcasts out of such fears. And it was shocking to me that last year’s qualifier between Egypt and Algeria had to be moved to neutral Sudan due to violence against the Algerians in Egypt. Can’t Hosni Mubarak extend his police-state’s writ to football crowd-control? Or is he letting Egyptian hooligans blow off steam that would be otherwise targeted at him?
Then there was the “most politically charged game in the world,” that occurred during that amazing French summer of 1998: USA vs. Iran. Here’s a taste:
Iranian-born Mehrdad Masoudi was a FIFA media officer for the match but, given the diplomatic and security issues surrounding the game in Lyon, his responsibilities were far more wide-ranging.
“One of the first problems was that Iran were team B and the USA were team A,” explains Masoudi. “According to FIFA regulations team B should walk towards team A for the pre-match handshakes, but Iran’s Supreme Leader Khamenei gave express orders that the Iranian team must not walk towards the Americans.”
Masoudi eventually negotiated a compromise which saw the Americans walk towards the Iranians…
Iran won, 2-1, but the game wasn’t all lost from the American side: “We did more in 90 minutes than the politicians did in 20 years,” said U.S. defender Jeff Agoos at the time.
That’s it. I revel in the split-second excitement of a well-struck goal, and appreciate the enduring frustration of so, so many near-misses. But the World Cup’s true allure is how it means so much more, to so many billions of people, beyond just the final score. That just happens to be why Notre Dame means so much too.
