The World Cup and Global Politics:The Rise of the Masses

People of the world are anxiously awaiting the start of the biggest global spectacle, which comes along just once every four years; the 2006 World Cup to be held in Germany. The tournament, showcasing the beautiful game of futbol, as soccer is known, clearly overshadows any other sport far and away. Consider this, in December of 2005 the draw for the World Cup finals were conducted in Leipzig, Germany. More than 350 million people watched their television sets to observe the fate of their country. In contrast, less than 100 million people watched America’s biggest sporting event – the Super Bowl. To give further perspective, the drawing wasn’t even a sporting event!

To say it’s momentous, is understating the truth. For the next two months - oblivious to the average American – the World Cup phenomena will interrupt the daily work schedules of the laboring masses, suspend political campaigns of the powerful, disrupt domestic commerce and the international trade of goods, and grip the attention of the rich and poor in every corner of the world.

To be sure, the masses who will be following the World Cup see themselves as much more than mere sports fans. The impression for most of the billions who watch the matches is that the games create a rare opportunity for the participating countries to be showcased in front of a true global audience. And as crazy as it sounds to Americans, these “fans” are in a sense participants in an international infomercial where their country’s image to the world hangs in the balance pending their team’s performance (think Ivory Coast, Ecuador, Togo, Ukraine, Trinidad & Tobago, etc). Indubitably, National pride will surge when a country’s team demonstrates dominance by winning, and the morale of the masses will receive a crushing blow when its team demonstrates weakness by losing.

Many government officials in these smaller countries recognize their World Cup team’s performance represents much more than a simple win or loss as well. It represents national identity, and they know the outcome will enhance or diminish the Nation’s standing in the global community (or at least that is the impression; and we all know what they say about impression being reality). The performance of a National team on the pitch will also reverberate in different ways. England and Argentina’s rivalry has now reached mythic proportions for instance– sure the war over the Falkland Islands raised the hate intensity a notch between the two, but it’s in a World Cup match where they’re hatred is manifested in all its true ugliness (Think English football star David Beckham getting red-carded for stomping on his Argentine opponent and causing his team to lose the match in the last Cup). The game will be resurfaced as part of World Cup lore for time infinitum due entirely to that incident.

At minimum, the games will affect the collective work schedules of every nation’s labor pool and cause a spike in beer consumption on a massive global scale. At its extreme, the results will affect the national psyche and confidence of its peoples, and in some countries it will even affect National election results. This sounds far-fetched you say?

In Mexico for example, political strategists predict that the performance of the National Team will tilt the results of the tight presidential election race. According to many political insiders, the conservative party candidate, Felipe Calderon stands to benefit from a favorable performance by “El Tricolor” while the opposing candidate Manuel Lopez Obrador will benefit from a miserable result. Calderon even met with the team at its training ground in Mexico City. He traded jokes with the players, got a group photo while displaying the team shirt and gave them inspirational praises, all in front of the TV cameras.

The free market reformer, Calderon has been holding political rallies recently where he has made continuous remarks about the National Team, while Lopez Obrador, who promises to put an end to free market reforms by creating massive infrastructure projects and new welfare programs, has bandied gratuitous references to the World Cup as well in order to gain the favor of the masses.

It gets uglier people; many in the global community shudder at the thought of having team Iran beat the teams of freedom-loving democratic nations. Politicians around the world are aggressively pushing an effort to have the Cup’s governing body, Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), boycott Iran’s National team from the World Cup. To be more accurate, the reason for the request to have FIFA intervene is to pressure Iran’s hardline leadership into terminating their nuclear program.

In fact, pleadings are now falling on Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, to keep Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the President of Iran, from coming to Germany and participate in the World Cup. One newspaper, the Rheinische Post, said there had been “clear signals” that the governments of Britain, France and Germany, which have been involved in negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program, will ask the European Union to impose a travel ban on Iran’s political elite.

FIFA is trying to avoid the getting involved by delaying an answer and praying that the avid soccer fan, President Ahmadinejad, will announce he is too busy to watch Mexico beat Iran (wink, wink). Bottom line is I think it speaks volumes about the importance of the World Cup when political leaders leverage it as a tool to eliminate national nuclear programs.

I suppose it was inevitable that politics would rear its ugly head into such an immensely popular event when you consider that it is obsessively followed by the masses in every corner of the world. As absurd as it sounds, leaders will rise and fall based on the ability of its nation’s eleven man team to score more goals than the opposing nation’s eleven man team on a soccer pitch.

And so from now until the end of the games, politicians will look for clever ways to associate themselves to the good fortunes of the national team despite FIFA’s past attempts to avoid it’s premiere event from getting mired in politics. To borrow a cliché “If the World Cup masses won’t go to politics, then politics will go to the World Cup masses”.

I guess the World Cup turns out to be like everything else in life; you have to take the good with the bad.