How the game is played around the world and why? 

To the question, how has this current Football World Cup stood out from previous ones, the answer would have to be - primarily with glaring failures; the failures of the players and teams. We can talk of the successes of the tournament and world-class football later on. 

During the initial group phase the talk centered on the failures of the European game. Never had so many European squads, including noteworthy ones, been relegated to the sidelines, to return home. But, lo and behold, everything changed during the quarter finals. Three European teams had made the semi-finals and the failures of Latin American teams, including the favorites Brazil and Argentina. Had Uruguay become the champion, we’d again be talking about the defeat of Europe, but this didn’t happen.

As our local Armenian sports commentators like to say, Holland “in a dramatic struggle clinched a worthy victory” over Uruguay. For the first time, it will be a European team to win the championship in a World Cup played outside Europe. One thing hasn’t changed; the battle was again between Europe and Latin America. Asia and Africa still have a long way to go before seriously challenging them I can’t remember just why I started to lose interest in football some years ago. There were many good reasons for this in the 1990’s and this is the first World Cup in over twenty years that I am closely following.

For me, football conjured up the 1970’s and 1980’s. It was the game played by Johan Cruyff and Diego Maradona, the “total football” of the Dutch in the 1970’s and the game played by Yerevan’s “Ararat”, sometimes reaching the level of the Europeans. I have the impression that back then, we spectators to the sport also played the game more than today, even though we naturally couldn’t place bets on the game like now. Playing the game was not just a mere secondary component of our capabilities. A component that the play-by-play commentators of the game today do not adequately possess.

Their blow-by-blow reportage of the game unfolding on the pitch usually drags due to their inadequate practical football experience and emotional attachment to the game or the complete absence of these qualities. I am not out to glorify the old days and the football of that era, by say, comparing Messi with Maradona. First, I would like to reflect upon some developmental trends of today’s football – the commercialization, globalization and homogenization of the game. Firstly, football has become a game of more “set-plays”. No wonder, the talk is all about who can execute such “set pieces” the best. 

The globalization of football 

When speaking about the globalization of football, we must look at the spread and strengthening of the game in all continents as well as the weakening of national football. More than ever before, football is a club sport which means it’s a local (sub-national) sport, but at the same time a trans-national game. In the past, Madrid and Barcelona, Manchester United and Liverpool, were also rivals, but it’s been many years now that these rivalries have exited the national confines and entered upon the global (trans-national) stage, in terms of entering various continental and inter-continental tournaments and obtaining players and attracting fans from around the world.

There are two opposing tendencies on the face of it – localization and globalization, processes at work on the sub-national and trans-national levels. The main role player in contemporary football, the club, is both local, linked to a specific city, while at the same time global, with the entire scope of the football industry. What follows is that the significance of the World Cup, in a sense, has lessened, has become less principled for a large group of top-notch players, even though Maradona, in an interview given after the Germany-Argentina match rejected those views arguing that players in overseas clubs aren’t completely devoted to the national squads.

In this World Cup, many have tried to explain the poor play exhibited by the likes of Messi, Ronaldo, Rooney, Drogba and others. One of the primary reasons cited has been the club games and the heavy training schedule. It is impossible to play with the same level of skill and energy the year round. In addition, some of the players are photographed for advertising videos.

Every year we see the buying and selling of players, the seasonal migration from country to country, team to team. The lack of “patriotism” of a football player in all this constant dislocation is not surprising. They replace attachments with the homeland with other forms of belonging and cooperation. It is understandable then, that the nuances and differences between the styles of play between nations is disappearing, i.e. the Latin American v European style. In passing, to a certain degree this explains the success of the German squad and the failure of Brazil. Whereas the German team is mostly comprised of players who take part in the national championship, all the major players on the Brazilian national team play their club football in Europe.

Of course, this is one of the new forms of exploitation employed by the developed world against the developing one. One of the manifestations of this is the “darkening” of European football, a process that is occurring much faster than the overall change in the skin color of the population. In an interview after the loss to Germany, England coach Fabio Capello, while talking about what needed to be done, noted the lack of any young players coming up from the ranks. British football is focused on importing good players from overseas, including Africa, rather than preparing future players from within.

Back in 2006, before the World Cup kicked off, the BBC aired a series of programs about the state of English football. The programs raised the question why so many of the best players on the English team were “outsiders”. The state of football schools and camps in England was also touched up and it was clear that many of the kids in attendance were also non-whites. However, they were not migrants but British, born and bred. 

Football in the context of colonial relations 

Certain sports have deeper political layers that are not seen at first glance. If the scornful phrase, “The World Cup is World War III”, has any meaning, it primarily refereed to the implacable struggle between Europe and Latin America. In one of the chapters of a noted work (Playing with Modernity: The Decolonization of Indian Cricket," ) on the globalization of culture, Arjun Appaduria examines the decolonization of the game of cricket, a sport enjoying mass appeal,  in several of the former colonies of Great Britain (India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka). I have had the occasion in the past to cite the opening sentence of the chapter – “For the former colony, decolonization is a dialogue with the colonial past, rather than a simple dismantling of colonial habits and modes of life.”

He continues, “Nowhere are the complexities and ambiguities of this dailogue more evident than in the vicissitudes of cricket in those countries that were once part of the British Empire…But there is one part of Indian culture today that seems forever to be England, and that is cricket.” Let me forgo the details of Appadurai regarding the declination of cricket and present the main conclusions. He distinguishes between “hard” and “soft” cultural forms, where the hard ones are those that come with a set of links between value, meaning and embodied practice that are difficult to break and hard to transform.

One of these is cricket. In general, this hard quality is, to a certain degree, especially present in such competitive forms  that come to encapsulate the core moral values of the society in which they were born. Something similar can be said about the transfer of football from Europe to Latin America and about the long continuing football battle between these two continents. The European sport was indigenized in South America in such a way that Portugal (the former colonizer of Brazil) can be called “Europe’s Brazil”. The Argentine social anthropologist Eduardo Archetti examines football from such a perspective.

According to him, Maradona embodies the disobedient, anti-colonial native that plays another type of football. He is the urban equivalent of the rebellious gaucho, riding across the grasslands of the pampas, that does not submit to established rules. This free-wheeling improviser, with his dribbling and ball juggling skills, is contrasted  with the disciplined, machine-like football teams and players  who characterized the English originators of  Argentinian football. All this was exquisitely displayed in Diego Maradona, therebellious footballing genius whp lead Argentina to victory in the 1986 World Cup Final.

Touching on African football from this perspective, I believe we cannot talk about the Africanization of the game, even though holding the World Cup in Africa is also recognition of the continent’s contribution to the game during the past few decades.

That, which took place in the century of modernization in South America (and, in the case of cricket in several Asian nations) is hard to repeat in the conditions of globalization. On the one hand, a number of the best players coming out of Africa are snatched up by European clubs and, on the other; most Africans essentially do not know what football is, since they lack TV.

For example, in Nigeria, where the country’s president banned the national team from playing in any international tournaments for two years because it had such a poor showing in the 2010 World Cup, only one-third of the population owns a TV set in the home (mostly due to the fact the electric grid is limited). And this is a pretty high number for countries in Sub-Saharan Africa.