THE
ROVING EYE And all for a little round ball
... By Pepe Escobar
RIO DE JANEIRO - Not Christianity, Judaism
or Islam. Not Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism or
assorted animisms. The world's biggest
monotheistic religion is football.
It
doesn't matter the color of your skin, where you
come from, your political ideology, your
educational background, even your primary
religion; football belongs to Everyman. North
Americans, Australians and South Africans may call
it soccer: but the name of the "beautiful game"
(copyright Pele) is football, as it was invented
in England in the 1860s (it's also football in
France, fussball in Germany, and
futebol in Brazil).
Even as the
ultimate postmodern religion, football remains
tribal - but with a twist; there's always room for
a second favorite outside your own tribe, and the
world's unanimous second favorite
happens to be Brazil. The
Supreme Deity of football - a sort of Shiva with
boots - used to go by the name Pele, a Brazilian,
and then by the name Maradona, an Argentine. Now
it dances, Shiva-style, to the name Ronaldinho,
another Brazilian, fast as a cheetah,
unpredictable as a cat, lethal as a missile,
always sporting his trademark toothy grin.
Football is primal, ritual, hypnotic. It's
Greek tragedy. It's moralist drama (but never
moralistic). And at its World Cup apex, it's what
global performance art is all about; the whole
planet - literally - having a ball, a hedonist
frenzy from Islamic-controlled Mogadishu to the
deserts of Xinjiang, from
out-of-water-and-electricity Baghdad to the Andean
peaks.
At least 5 billion people will
watch the World Cup, which kicks off in Germany on
Friday, on television. The 2002 finals in
Korea-Japan were watched by 213 countries, in more
than 41,000 hours of programming. Media research
company Initiative Futures stressed that this
would be the most-watched TV event ever. Even
September 11, 2001, or "shock and awe" on Iraq
pale before a World Cup final.
Seventeen
basic and straight-to-the-point rules with
universal reach and springing myriad wells of
hope; no wonder the World Cup is a respite from
realpolitik. It's not even a mirror image. Two
permanent members of the United Nations Security
Council - Russia and China - are absent from these
finals and one of them, the United States, is a
football midget.
In the football world,
the Security Council is more like Brazil,
Argentina, Germany, Italy, France and England. The
sole superpower is Brazil. Unlike the one in New
York, this Security Council is sanctions-averse.
It's unlikely that Iranian President
Mahmud Ahmadinejad will show up on Monday in
Nuremberg - of all places - to judge for himself
the Iranian team's performance in their first
match, thus sparing unending trouble to German
diplomacy (exit neo-Nazis planning to rally in
Nuremberg supporting Iran).
But
Ahmadinejad's public relations benefits would be
immense, adding to the fact that he recently
allowed chador-clad Shi'ite women to watch
football live in Iran with no constraints.
Al-Qaeda will not attack; Osama bin Laden, when in
London in 1994, was an Arsenal fan.
Exalted jihadi masses - and Saudi Arabia
supporters - won't cry out loud for the actual
elimination of an apostate or infidel adversary,
be it the US or English national teams. During the
World Cup, defensive jihad will only mean teams
struggling to protect themselves from the
firepower of Brazil's "magical quartet" - Kaka,
Adriano, Ronaldo and world No 1 Ronaldinho.
When Argentina beat England in a
quarter-final in 1986, that was seen in Buenos
Aires as revenge for the Falklands (or Malvinas)
war. This year, the Ivory Coast's Elephants have
pledged national unity through football to forget
their own civil war. Angola, another first-time
African team to qualify for the finals, has
already done it. But Togo still prefers to engage
in voodoo.
Italians want to do well to
forget their biggest football-related scandal in
decades. "To win is to restore [our] dignity,"
said Gigi Riva, who was in the 1970 finals. Japan
- coached by Brazilian legend Zico - wants to
prove that the future of football, as well as the
world economy, is also in Asia.
The World
Cup could have its own alter-globalization motto -
"another world is possible". Football geopolitics
means fun and drama are democratically
redistributed, not only to Group of Eight-based
multinationals, but under a different, more
equitable and certainly more entertaining world
order; under this parallel order, Italy lost a
game to North Korea in 1966 and the US a game to
Iran in 1998.
So the whole world would
rather forget the Washington agenda, the
Washington consensus, the "war on terror",
hooliganism, racist slurs, neo-Nazis on the
rampage, Iran's "nuclear threat". The Bundestag in
Berlin may have considered deploying the German
army during some sensitive matches; more likely an
army of 40,000 prostitutes from behind the former
Iron Curtain will join the more than 400,000 sex
workers already deployed around Germany.
Hundreds of millions in football-crazy
Asia will wake up at 2 or 3 in the morning to
watch dozens of matches. According to Smart-Trust,
4.5 million photos will be snapped during the
World Cup, and this just with camera-equipped
mobile phones.
Everyone will want to watch
Brazil. Every team - as FIFA (Federation
Internationale de Football Association, the world
football governing body) head Sepp Blatter stated
- will want to beat Brazil. A global macro-poll in
107 countries by the Internet community Hattrick
has ruled: it's Brazil against the rest of the
world. How come? World Cup (1970) winner Tostao
says that the secret of why Brazil is so good
(five-time winner) is "the imaginative unconscious
of Brazilian football, transmitted down from one
generation to the next".
The corporate
war No illusions. As far as being there,
live, in the thick of the action, this is a game
for the rich. The 15 official World Cup sponsors,
or FIFA "partners", received one in every six
tickets - 490,000, or 16% of the total. And these
tickets still had to be paid for. Each competing
nation, on the other hand, received only 8% of the
tickets for each match they play. The remaining
places go to global media, VIPs and security.
One in every nine of the 3.1 million
tickets is issued to a VIP, costing as much as
US$3,000 each. They are considered tickets to the
general public even though only corporations or
wealthy individuals may afford them. Only 36.2% of
the total number of tickets were sold to the
public by means of an Internet lottery.
How to dress up for the party is a matter
of war. Puma, founded in the tiny, northern
Bavarian town of Herzogenaurach in 1948, will
equip the national teams of Iran, Saudi Arabia,
Ghana, Ivory Coast, Togo, Angola, the Czech
Republic, Poland, Italy, Switzerland, Paraguay and
Tunisia. Adidas, founded in 1949 in the same town,
will equip the host nation, Argentina, France,
Spain, Japan and Trinidad-Tobago.
US
corporate giant and relative newcomer Nike,
founded in 1971, will equip Brazil, the US,
Australia, Mexico, the Netherlands,
Serbia-Montenegro, South Korea and Ukraine. And
Umbro, founded in 1920 in the United Kingdom, will
equip only England and Sweden.
Nike has
unleashed a massive Brazilian-themed campaign -
"Joga Bonito" ("play beautifully", in Portuguese)
- which has invaded virtually every inch of public
space from Beijing and Bangkok to Bahrain and
Buenos Aires. But then comes an unpredictable
suicide bombing; Ronaldo's boots - the Mercurial
Vapor, weighing less than 200 grams,
scientifically engineered in the US and hand-made
by artisans in Lombardy, near Milan - provoked
blisters in the former, three-time FIFA World
Player of the Year. Nike had to issue a mea
culpa.
Puma is smaller than Adidas but
has been making a killing in the stock market.
Pele won the 1962 World Cup wearing Puma. Adidas -
an official FIFA partner and maker of the official
World Cup ball - wants to win this year's cup
outright (preferably with Germany) even if it is
sponsoring only six teams compared with Puma's 12.
Puma for its part is investing heavily everywhere
in Africa and betting long-term on being the
winner at the 2010 World Cup in South Africa -
aside from configuring itself as the coolest among
the major sports brands.
Amid all the
carnival, it's easy to forget that the beautiful
game is all about 22 men kicking a ball. Sialkot,
in northeastern Pakistan, is the world capital of
the football. It takes a Pakistani - or an Afghan
- kid three hours to stitch a ball. At a rhythm of
three balls a day, he's paid 60 cents each.
Again, this is the global economy in
action - at least 2,000 workshops, sheds and back
yards stuffed with members of the global
proletariat, their owners subcontractors for Nike
or Adidas. The average salaries in Sialkot are
about $1,000 a year, about twice the Pakistani
average. Thus the poor Pakistani kid's work
enables the rich Chelsea fan in London to buy an
"affordable" ball (for about $130) and enables
Nike or Adidas to deploy massive global campaigns
featuring Ronaldinho, Thierry Henry, Michael
Ballack and a millionaire cast of
footballers-as-pop-superstars.
The future
of the football is literally in Asia - namely
China, where wages may be even lower than in
Pakistan, working hours even longer and the
workplaces even more Dickensian.
Machine-made-in-China footballs are churned out 10
times as fast as in Pakistan - and they are of
course much cheaper. Meanwhile, Thai producers are
attacking from above with their high-tech glued
footballs. The official 2006 World Cup football is
not a hand-stitched Adidas made in Pakistan; it's
a glued concoction made in Thailand.
The thrill of the chase German
philosopher Peter Sloterdijk defines football as
"an experimental anthropological scheme" revolving
around hunting. As he tries to reach "with a
ballistic object, a target which tries to protect
itself by any means", man relieves the primal,
ritual feeling of the hunter.
Not for
Brazilians. For them, it's much more complicated;
it's the thrill of the chase, plus ritualized war,
plus having fun, plus ritual as an art form. It
all has to do with Brazil's racial and cultural
cauldron, the "all-encompassing jelly" sung by the
1960s Tropicalist wave.
In some selected
latitudes, football is a great popular narrative -
Argentina, England, Italy, Spain - but nowhere
more than in Brazil. Football as a narrative may
be extremely subjective. But the difference is
that the Brazilian narrative is always gay -
almost like a dream. In the "imaginative
unconscious" evoked by Tostao, sublime moments
read like poetry.
Like midfielder Didi
being responsible for 48 long-range and
short-range assists in the 1958 World Cup final,
all of them perfect (Brazil won against Sweden,
5-2), thus his nickname "The Black Napoleon",
coined by the French; or what the English
consistently vote as the greatest goal of all time
(right back Carlos Alberto at the 1970 World Cup
final; Brazil won against Italy, 4-1).
Arguably the best place to watch the World
Cup - apart from live in Germany - is Brazil. The
whole nation is entirely draped in a
green-and-yellow frenzy. In everyone's hearts it's
all about the magical number 6 - a sixth World Cup
victory. For millions it's already a given - even
if the minor matter of winning seven matches still
has to be addressed.
And it has to be a
victory in style - by playing futebol arte
(art football). Brazilians don't care about their
fourth World Cup victory in the US in 1994; too
dull. They prefer to celebrate the sublime 1982
team - which lost to Italy 3-2 before reaching the
finals - but is still widely ranked as the best
football team ever, apart from the Pele-led 1970
world champions.
UN-affiliated Ronaldo -
even though referred to as El Gordo (The Fat One)
by Spanish media - remains the most popular
sportsman in the world. If by any chance the
Brazilian national coach - a wise fellow who reads
and applies Sun Tzu's Art of War - would
leave Ronaldo out of the team, sponsor Nike would
eat him alive. A Spanish bank has draped huge
walls with some of the Brazilian superstars -
Ronaldinho, Ronaldo, Robinho, Roberto Carlos, Cafu
and Kaka - appearing from nothing like colossal
ghosts (the current Brazilian team is the most
expensive national squad ever: 450 million euros -
$575 million - and counting). But most fans
dismiss with a shrug the official, Nike-sponsored
team jersey selling for about $85 - more than half
the monthly minimum salary; they prefer pirate
copies.
Only in Brazil there's at least $1
billion in World Cup-related promotion floating
around. Ronaldinho alone is the star of no fewer
than 12 publicity campaigns - selling deodorant,
vegetable jelly, soft drinks, Gatorade, chewing
gum, video games, mobile phones, ice cream and the
Cartoon Network. Francesco Totti, in Italy, is the
star of five promotional campaigns. That's
football as the biggest and most profitable show
on Earth.
Ronaldinho
geopolitics If football is war, Brazil has
the ultimate lethal weapon - Ronaldinho, the human
equivalent of the bunker buster. Since 2002, he
has won absolutely everything in sight; world
champion, South American champion, Confederations
Cup champion, Spanish champion (twice, with
Barcelona), European champion, FIFA World Player
of the Year (twice in a row). According to an MSN
poll, 70% of Spaniards would die to have him on
their national team.
Hindus at the
Nakuleswar Temple in Kalighat, Kolkata, have
performed a ceremony so Ronaldinho and his
teammates reach the magical number 6 in Germany;
even in cricket-mad India, millions will be glued
to ESPN and Star Sports broadcasting the World Cup
- in Hindi.
Futebol
internacional What a billion TV
viewers always want to see is encapsulated by an
unforgettable goal. Something like these four
seconds of supreme catharsis recently provided by
Ronaldinho.
On March 7, 2006, 98,000
people are crammed at the vertiginous five-tiered
stands of the Camp Nou and hundreds of millions
are glued to their TVs around the globe watching
European giants Barcelona against Chelsea playing
a do-or-die match for the Champions League.
Seventy-eight minutes past, the match is still
0-0. Then, Cameroonian Samuel Eto'o - the
third-best player in the world - spots Ronaldinho
dashing toward the penalty box. At this moment
there were no fewer than three Chelsea defenders -
including John Terry, arguably the best in the
world - between Ronaldinho and Peter Cech -
arguably the best goalkeeper in the world.
As soon as he got the ball, Ronaldinho
went turbo, moving with three very fast steps with
his right foot so much as caressing the ball. The
brute force of John Terry appeared in front of him
like a tank. In an intuitive split second,
Ronaldinho swayed to the right and, with his eyes
totally focused on the ball, prepared himself for
a clash. As Terry tried to knock him down at the
edge of the box, Ronaldinho evaded him like a
toreador, changed direction, left Terry on the
ground and struck a swift, powerful shot that
whizzed past Cech.
This was not only a
goal as a work of art. It was a lesson on how a
single man topples an empire - not so much the
British but Russian billionaire tycoon Roman
Abramovich's, who had spent more than half a
billion dollars to build Chelsea into a
world-class team. It was also the reason the
bright, canary-yellow Brazilian jersey - the
canarinho, as it's affectionately called in
Brazil - is capable of marveling taxi drivers in
Baghdad, customs officers in Dubai, guerrillas in
Timor and Hindus in Kolkata.
And there's
always an added bonus. This is no US Army invading
Iraq. As Germany's Der Spiegel nailed it, "The
Brazilians aren't omnipotent, so the others have a
chance of winning as well ... Arrogance is alien
to them. Their victories are often so inspiring
that the whole world wants to don a yellow shirt
and be a Brazilian. And that is globalization at
its best."
To the back of the
net Football's symbolic clashes may leave
permanent scars. The English are still reeling
from Maradona's legendary "Hand of God" goal in
1986 - even though everyone else is still
marveling at the other goal the Argentine scored a
few minutes later.
In the World Cup,
elimination is lethal and final - like shock and
awe over Baghdad. Always ready to capitalize on
the popular narrative, governments around the
world will use the World Cup for political ends.
All over the developing world, their strategy may
be to capitalize on bread and circus - while for
the excluded hordes, football remains the field of
dreams that leads to escape from misery and
reaching the stars.
To win a World Cup is
the postmodern equivalent of winning a war. But
with no target bombings, no deceit and no
"collateral damage". So on Friday in Berlin let
this war, this religion, prevail - leaving
history, realpolitik and social conflict, at least
for a moment, with a red card.
(Copyright
2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
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