WHEN SPORT mirrors the real world, it frequently does so in a bizarre and distorted fashion. How else would you get the United States in the third world? For the world of football, like the real world, can be readily divided into three and, as with the real world, it is the third one that demands the best care, attention and love that the first and second can offer.
Soccer’s first world is Europe. This is where the game began, where its first skills were developed, where its culture and its philosophy took shape, where its commercial possibilities were recognised. There are 14 first-world nations here at the World Cup and if that seems a lot, plenty have missed out: Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Hungary, Romania, Russia.
Soccer’s second world is Latin America, starting at Mexico and working south to Tierra del Fuego. Here, the European game was taken, reinterpreted, redeveloped and, most would say, reached its highest form of expression — whether you are talking about potency or mere beauty — with the 1970 team from Brazil. There are six teams of Latinos in Germany and that’s without Colombia and Uruguay.
Football, then, was a war between these worlds: the old and the new, the rich and the poor, the pedestrian and the poetic. The best team in the world has always come from one or other of these worlds.
There was a time when the World Cup was invariably played in one or other of these worlds and, generally, whichever world had home advantage won. And if you wanted to have a gathering of all the best footballing nations in the world, you might as well stop there. You could say that bringing in teams from anywhere else is counter-productive, lowers standards and produces a lopsided competition.
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But as with the real world, the third was clamouring for recognition, for a fair chance, for an opening-up of the closed shop. The expansion to a 24-team competition in 1982 and then again to 32 teams in 1998 brought third-world participation in the World Cup to a level a good way beyond tokenism. They were the years that Fifa, the world governing body, legalised hope.
There are five African nations here, four from Asia, and then there are the United States, Australia and Trinidad & Tobago. At the weekend, six third-world teams were in action and five of them put on stirring performances, the US holding Italy and South Korea doing the same with France, Japan drawing with Croatia. Ghana beat the Czech Republic. I was at the Brazil game to see a marvellously spirited Australia side lose 2-0, and they were a shade unlucky to do so.
It’s been great to have the Australians here. They qualified by beating Uruguay on penalties and are relishing the adventure. Most of the side are adventurers, earning their living far from home. Unlike most Australian sporting teams, they are not world champions, or anything like — the football world being bigger than most — and they are doing their underdog stuff with heartening enthusiasm. They should make the round of 16, too, if they hold Croatia.
A qualifying tournament full of shocks kept the African big guns of Nigeria and Cameroon out of the finals. Ghana have given us the best football, Togo the best story as the players have threatened to boycott a match, the coach, Otto Pfister, has resigned at least once and the row about money rumbles on. “I think they have found a solution,” Pfister said. “But I don’t know what it is and I don’t want to know.”
The World Cup needs all this. It needs more than excellence, it needs the feeling that footballing people have gathered together in one country from all the four corners of the earth. Togo and Australia are as important as Brazil and Germany. Trinidad & Tobago matter as much as England — and, indeed, they have embarrassed England and given Sweden a bloody nose. Without the third world, the World Cup is just a football tournament. As it is, this is a tournament that means the world.
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The 2002 World Cup in Japan and South Korea was widely regarded as a “bad” World Cup. This was because there were a lot of upsets: Senegal beat France in the opening game, South Korea and Turkey made the semi-finals. When I expressed the view that this was in fact a good World Cup, I was rebuked by one of my colleagues in a manner that still rankles: “You like giant-killers. I like giants.”
In fact, both fire my imagination, the same as they do with most people. To dislike underdog victories is to support the status quo, to say that all change is bad, that progress must not happen, that the established order must be maintained and that any improvement in the lot of the less fortunate is a bad thing and must be discouraged.
The World Cup is replete with all the biodiversity of the real and the footballing worlds and the challenge of football’s third world is one of the most thrilling parts of the competition. And some day, a team from football’s third world will win the damn thing — and I’ll be cheering. I could even be doing so in four years’ time, when the World Cup is held on African soil for the first time.