Photography by DJ Wilson
Siahe Laurent, a 35-year-old Ivory Coast immigrant, drums with several of his fellow countrymen outside the Edward Jones Dome before the May 30 match between Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Ivory Coast.
Pele is 74 years old. Climate change is causing droughts, rising sea levels, and flooding across the globe. The United Nations has stopped updating the death toll in the Syrian civil war, ending with its last estimate of more than 100,000 fatalities. The United States has 2.4 million people in prison, up from 500,000 in 1980. People are still buying Justin Bieber’s music.
That’s the bad news. The good news is the World Cup starts at 3 p.m. Thursday in Sao Paulo, with Brazil playing Croatia. Game on.
Noam Chomsky likely won’t be grabbing a pint down at the soccer pub for the games, yet the MIT linguist and social critic years ago uttered his views on sports, describing it as a way to build up “attitudes of submission to authority, and group cohesion behind leadership elements—in fact, it’s training in irrational jingoism.”
Certainly, fanatically following any sport is irrational, and yes, the World Cup is jingoistic. It’s not player against player, or one city’s professional team against an opposing team from another city. The World Cup is country against country, as close as you can get to war without the bombs, bullets, and broadsides. Remember the World Cup game in 1986, Argentina against England? It was an epilogue to the Falklands War of 1982. England won the war over the Falklands Islands; Argentina won the soccer match. Which victory was more important depends on whom you ask.
That is the tense downside of international soccer. A lighter, better side of soccer is real, too, and was evident outside the Edward Jones Dome on May 30 before a game between Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Ivory Coast. Siahe Laurent, a 35-year-old Ivory Coast immigrant was drumming with several of his fellow countrymen at the corner of Convention Plaza and North Broadway. Quickly, a large group of Bosnians surrounded them, blowing horns and chanting. And then Bosnians danced with the Ivorians, smiles and hugs all around. You don’t see that every day, in St. Louis or elsewhere, and soccer was the trigger. About 30 minutes later, they would be inside the dome cheering and yelling against each other.
Soccer isn’t always about hooliganism and hate. It’s as much or more about the beauty of the game and the camaraderie of a shared interest and passion.
Where to Follow
All games will be on television, but only 10 will be on non-cable ABC, four this weekend (two Saturday, two Sunday, both days 11 a.m. and 2 p.m.). ESPN radio will broadcast the games, but how many games local affiliate 101.1 FM will air is uncertain. One alternate, often hilarious way to follow the action is at the Manchester Guardian website, where “minute-by-minute” accounts are typed by Brit wits. The humor is so dry, it’s granular. A recent account by Paul Doyle about journalists overreacting to paltry soccer news in Brazil was headlined, “No stone must be left unturned in the search for stones that could be turned.”
There is an audience for this. This every-four-year global frenzy draws an estimated 700 million TV viewers for the final match, about triple the global audience for the Super Bowl. It begins with eight groups of four teams, each team playing three games. The top two move to a single-elimination round of 16. It starts Thursday and ends July 13 with the ABC-televised championship final. Every game will be televised either on ESPN, ESPN2, or ABC. All games will be on Univision, in Spanish.
The Elitist Eight
If Brazil does not win this World Cup on its home pitch at the legendary Maracana Stadium in Rio de Janeiro, its entire team might have to go into the witness protection program. The Brazilians are the prohibitive favorites at about 2–1 odds, though Argentina (4-1), Spain (6-1), and Germany (6-1) are in the mix. Since 1966, every final game has had two of these eight teams playing: Brazil, Argentina, Spain, Germany, France, England, Italy, and the Netherlands. This year, possible long-shot hopefuls could be Chile, Uruguay, Belgium, and the Ivory Coast.
Enough Already About Landon Donovan...
Last week, on ESPN radio, Hope Solo of the women’s side said it was “heart-breaking” that Landon Donovan was cut from the U.S. team by coach Jurgen Klinsmann. “Donovan has more World Cup goals than Lionel Messi,” she said, referring to the star of Argentina and Barcelona. Let it be noted this was probably the first and last time that Donovan and Messi were mentioned in the same sentence. (For the record, the 32-year-old Donovan has five goals in eight World Cup games, and the 26-year-old Messi has one goal in eight games. Klinsmann had 11 goals for Germany. Pele had 12).
Soccer broadcaster Bill McDermott, who will do daily updates and five one-hour shows on KMOX during the World Cup, said he was not surprised by the Donovan deletion by Klinsmann. “In 2013, he said he didn’t have his mind straight, so he had to go have a sabbatical. That was the beginning of the end,” says McDermott. “If you take him to Brazil and don’t use him, then your entire World Cup is clouded by answering questions over there—that you want no part of.”
A more risky cut was leaving Eddie Johnson off the team. During qualifying play, Johnson had four goals and an assist in just 579 minutes of play. If Ghana beats the U.S. in the team’s first game next Monday June 16, at 5 p.m., Jurgen and his boys can start packing their bags, with Portugal and Germany left to play.
Bosnia, Our Bosnia
Safet Susic, the coach of Bosnia-Herzegovina, comes off a bit gruff, but he is not without a sense of humor. He was quoted in the Manchester Guardian (again, an excellent place to follow the Cup) that his team “will play for second place” in group play. That sounds unambitious—and realistic. Argentina is in the same group. If Bosnia—whose second-leading scorer is Roosevelt High School alum Vedad Ibisevic—finishes second, then it would play the first-place finisher of Group E, which France is favored to win. Bosnia beating France is not impossible. For the young country’s first trip to the World Cup, getting that far would be a stratospheric success. Susic was quoted in the Guardian giving his team a seemingly impossible directive: “There will be no sex in Brazil. They will have to improvise. This is not a holiday.”
Early Games Not to Miss
• Spain v. Netherlands: Friday, June 13, 2 p.m.
• Argentina v. Bosnia-Herzegovina: Sunday, June 15, 5 p.m.
• Portugal v. Germany: Monday, June 16, 11 a.m.
• Brazil v. Mexico: Tuesday, June 17, 2 p.m.
• Spain v. Chile: Wednesday, June 18, 2 p.m.
• Colombia v. Ivory Coast: Thursday, June 19, noon
• Uruguay v. England: Thursday, June 19, 3 p.m.
Players to Watch
Other than the obvious mega-stars Cristiano Ronaldo of Portugal, Lionel Messi of Argentina, Neymar of Brazil, Didier Drogba of the Ivory Coast, and Luis Suarez of Uruguay, McDermott likes Yaya Touré, an Ivory Coast midfielder who had “an absolutely fabulous season for Manchester City.”
McDermott suggests appreciating the game and anticipating what’s next: Watch the midfielders and “where they show for each other to get the ball out of the back field to the forwards.”
Why Soccer Rules
It’s a cheap, simple game to play. Kids love to kick and run. All that's needed is a ball and markers for a goal. Being tall or short, strong or slim, doesn’t matter much. Argentina’s Messi is 5-foot-6, and his nickname is “La Pulga Atomica” (the atomic flea). Once they have played the game at any level, fans watch in part because they remember how it felt to play. The nonstop play can have a hypnotic effect on viewers. Suspense builds.
In The Ball is Round: A Global History of Soccer, David Goldblatt wrote that the “continuous motion operates in perpetually changing three-dimensional space and balances the exhilaration of flow with the orgasmic punctuation of the goal.” Brazilians might like that analogy.
In his 1997 book Soccer in Sun and Shadow, Uruguayan poet and author Eduardo Galeano admits his addiction to the sport. In the opening page, titled “Author’s Confession,” he says it transcends nationality or team loyalty. “Years have gone by, and I’ve finally learned to accept myself for who I am, a beggar for good futbol,” Galeano writes. “I go about the world, hand outstretched, and in the stadiums I plead: ‘A pretty move, for the love of God.’ And when good futbol happens, I give thanks for the miracle and I don’t give a damn which team or country performs it.”
