Soccer in Sun and Shadow

A Few Numbers

Between 1930 and 1994 the Americas won eight World Cups and Europe won seven. Brazil won the trophy four times, Argentina twice, and Uruguay twice. Italy and Germany were world champions three times apiece; England only won the Cup played on its home turf.

However, since Europe’s teams formed the overwhelming majority, it had twice as many chances. In fifteen World Cups, European teams had 159 opportunities to win, compared with only seventy-seven opportunities for teams from the Americas. What’s more, the overwhelming majority of the referees have been European.

Unlike the World Cup, the Intercontinental Cup has offered the same number of opportunities to the teams of Europe and the Americas. In these tournaments, waged by clubs rather than national teams, squads from the Americas have won twenty times to the Europeans’ thirteen.

The case of Great Britain is the most astonishing in this matter of inequality of rights in world soccer championships. The way they explained it to me as a child, God is one but He’s three: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. I never could understand it. And I still don’t understand why Great Britain is one but she’s four: England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales, while Spain and Switzerland, to take two examples, continue to be no more than one despite the diverse nationalities that make them up.

In any case, Europe’s traditional control is beginning to break down. Until the 1994 World Cup, FIFA accepted one or two token countries from the rest of the world, as if paying a tax to the mappa mundi. Starting with the ’98 Cup, the number of participating countries will go from twenty-four to thirty-two. Europe will maintain its unjust proportion in relation to the Americas, but it will have to contend with greater participation by the countries of black Africa, with their lightning and joyful soccer in full expansion, and also Arab and Asian countries, like the Chinese who pioneered the sport but until now have had to watch from the stands.

[Since this was written in 1995, Europe has won three more championships and the Americas one, giving Europe a 10–9 edge overall. Brazil has now won the trophy an astounding five times, Italy four. But geographical injustice persists: FIFA continues to allot three times as many berths to Europe as to the Americas. In 2014, the thirty-two contenders that meet in Brazil will feature thirteen from Europe, four or five from South America, five from Africa, four or five from Asia, three or four from North and Central America plus the Caribbean, and, if lucky, one will travel all the way from Oceania.]