World War on the Soccer Field

I have a pretty good idea where Osama bin Laden will be on June 14 -- and June 19, and again on June 23. Not his exact location, but it's a safe bet he'll be in front of a TV tuned in to Saudi Arabia's World Cup soccer matches with, respectively, Tunisia, Ukraine, and Spain. Legend has it that soccer is one of bin Laden's guilty pleasures. He's unlikely to miss the spectacle of the men from the land of the Prophet taking on the infidels of al-Andalus. He probably has a soft spot for Tunisia too, that country being the only one on record thus far to see one of its professional soccer players attempt to join al Qaeda's martyrs.

Nor will bin Laden be alone among America's enemies in spending June engrossed in the quadrennial spectacle of the World Cup, staged this time in Germany. Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmedinajad has even threatened to show up if Iran progresses beyond the first round. Seeking to burnish his populist credentials at home, Ahmedinajad recently allowed himself to be photographed in sweats kicking a ball around with the Iranian team during a training session. You can bet Kim Jong-il will watch, too, even though it is South Korea that represents his nation's hopes this year.

President Bush may give the event a miss -- one can only wonder what he would make of a game in which the U.S. has a negligible chance of being world champion; for Americans with qualms about their country's imperial role, by contrast, supporting the plucky and rather well-liked outsiders of Team USA is an opportunity for guilt-free patriotic fervor. But you can be sure that Bush allies like Tony Blair, Angela Merkel, Jacques Chirac, Junichiro Koizumi, and Silvio Berlusconi (who actually owns AC Milan, one of Italy's top teams) will watch their countries' every game.

No global event commands anything close to the attention paid the World Cup on all five continents. As many as 3 billion people are expected to watch some of it on TV, while 250 million more will cluster around radios to follow every play. Having caught the 1974 and 1978 tournaments by radio from a South Africa without TV coverage, I can sympathize with the TV-less Angolans, Togoans, Ghanaians, and Ivoirians of today. (I took in the live drama via the BBC on short-wave, then waited two weeks for the visuals, courtesy of the White House Hotel, a Cape Town brothel that was diversifying its revenue stream by showing imported pirate videos of the games.)

The billions who tune into the World Cup are watching a game that, at the highest level, largely negates all advantages of social class or even physical stature -- the combination of speed, skill, imagination and organization required to prevail is a great leveler. But at the World Cup, soccer is far more than a game.

"What do they of cricket know who only cricket know," wrote the legendary Trinidadian historian and socialist CLR James, insisting that the spectacle of men in white flannels on a grassy oval engaged in a five-day contest of bat and ball, with strictly observed breaks for lunch and afternoon tea, could only be properly understood in the context of the political and cultural conflicts of the British Empire. If James had lived long enough to see the national team of his beloved Trinidad qualify for the elite 32 teams that will contest the 2006 World Cup, he'd surely have made the same point about soccer (even if, like most of humanity, he'd have called it "football").

James recognized sport as a ritualized combat, matching only war in its ability to channel national passions. Those passions are tied, for better or worse, to an almost mythic connection fans make between their team and their national narrative -- when facing Germany, English fans routinely chant lines like: "Two World Wars and one World Cup" (linking their defeats of Germany on the battlefield and the soccer field).