May 31, 2002
The World Cup kaleidoscope
The World Cup kaleidoscope. A London pub conversation between four friends on the eve of the soccer World Cup in Korea and Japan which starts on 31 May.Philippe: What is the World Cup about? Money, pure and simple. This is a beanfest for global corporations. The statistics on sponsorship, advertising, and merchandising are staggering. The top fifteen sponsors – McDonalds, Budweiser, NTT, Gillette, the usual suspects – will pay FIFA, the world governing body, £375 million to display their images at the tournament. Adidas is paying ten teams around £60 million to wear their products. And the money is not just decoration – it has colonised the very soul of the game. Brazil is a franchise of Nike. When injuries to key players are discussed – Ronaldo in 1998, Zidane in 2002 – the sponsors are in the wings, pulling the strings. It used to be a game. It’s now a global business.Nice provoking thought eh? Nevertheless, dont't forget the opening ceremony this evening!!
Rita: The heart of it all is still passion, the sense of belonging to something wider than yourself – a team, a cause, a country. The focus on commercialism forgets that there are twenty-four national squads each of whom represents an epic national story for the people back home. From Slovenia to China, the smallest participating country to the largest, people will be gathered round their TV sets and radios, brought together in a spirit of intense, positive togetherness. The game is the connective tissue of the nation. At the end, win or lose, people will have travelled together on a journey and feel differently about themselves. It is an emotional depth charge in the imagined community.
Ali: For me it’s about globality rather than nationalism. We hear a lot about ‘shared national experiences’, but these are often top-down, highly-orchestrated events, without spontaneity, and by definition confined to a single territory. By contrast, the World Cup is one of those rare occasions when the idea of a global citizen becomes real. This is a world party that everyone wants to be at. People are not limited in their allegiance – you are free to choose a country to support, to discover new heroes, to experiment with different identities. This is the postmodern world. And this freedom extends to the participating nations – where else do you have Senegal or Turkey competing with Germany or the United States on an equal stage? No-one is privileged, the playing-field is level, only the best wins, and nobody gets killed – the essence of the World Cup is global justice!
Yolande: The World Cup is about television. It is a mechanised spectacle, nothing more – the world reduced to the confined, static, managed dimensions of the TV set. The event becomes an intense daily effort to capture, process, and package a multifarious but messy reality into a form that is easily digestible – and of course sellable – for the various ‘domestic’ (meaning family and national) audiences. It is about the impoverishing of life by television – done often with awesome expertise and sophistication, but a compound lie nevertheless. The real ‘real thing’ is infinitely more interesting. But television can never come near it.
Posted at May 31, 2002 02:20 PM | Soccer
