Resumo de Planet Football - HINDU EDITORIAL

Planet football

In his play Galileo, the German poet and playwright, Bertold Brecht, makes his protagonist utter these memorable words: "Unhappy is the land that needs a hero." On June 9, in Germany, there will unfold the FIFA World Cup, a month-long event held every four years. Beginning in 1930 in Uruguay, the greatest sporting event on earth has created a succession of heroes ? Just Fontaine, Pele, Franz Beckenbauer, Gerd Muller, Johan Cryuff, Mario Kempes, Paolo Rossi, Gary Linekar, Diego Maradona, Roger Milla, Zinedine Zidane, Ronaldo, and Ronaldinho, among others ? who have fired the sporting and aesthetic imaginations of billions of people across countries, continents, and classes. Global football is about a sense of anticipation by common folk of the sightings of some great heroes and the emergence of a few new ones in a world where public figures and elected heads are losing the allure, charm, and pulling power of old. Global television and corporate industry, smelling the vacuum, are cleverly marketing the 2006 World Cup to countries involved in the great contest as well as to gigantic football-consuming markets such as India and China.
If the Olympic Games can be called the United Nations of sport, the FIFA World Cup presents itself, to most parts of the world, as a fishbowl of extreme emotions and passions. The travelling contingents of fans, including the football ruffians who somehow get through the checks, and the multitudes watching the game back home on television celebrate, laugh, cry, and agonise with the players. There is no duality between the self and the amphitheatre of the stadium where their hopes and prayers will be answered. And this is true not just of the 32 participating countries; Kolkata and Kerala become Brazil for a month. Whereas much of the competitive interest in the Olympics was shaped by a bipolar world order, the magic of the FIFA World Cup, for most neutrals, lay in the strong Latin American teams ? first Uruguay, then Brazil and Argentina ? who have won nine of 17 editions to date. Here is a statistic that showcases the world-conquering power of `the beautiful game': the final of the 2002 edition between Brazil and Germany had a television audience of 1.5 billion. About 37 million people are estimated to have watched the 1998 World Cup in France across its duration; for the final, there was a global audience of 1.3 billion. Even the Euro 2004 final between Greece and Portugal had a higher viewership (153 million) than the Athens Olympics of the same year. Germany 2006 has witnessed a constructive, unifying move: FIFA decided to postpone its presidential elections, usually held just before a World Cup, to the year after the tournament. In the past, unsavoury rivalries and divisions generated by these elections have spilled into the tournament. The change should make sleaze and manoeuvring of the type that robbed South Africa of the opportunity to stage the 2006 event a thing of the past.

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