Soccer in Sun and Shadow

The 2002 World Cup

A season of collapses. A terrorist attack had leveled the Twin Towers in New York. President Bush had rained missiles down upon Afghanistan and razed the dictatorship of the Taliban, which his father and Reagan had suckled. The war against terrorism was giving its blessing to military terror. Israeli tanks were demolishing Gaza and the West Bank, so that the Palestinians could continue paying for the Holocaust they did not commit.

Spider-Man was toppling box-office records. Well-informed sources in Miami were announcing the imminent fall of Fidel Castro, it was only a matter of hours. What did tumble was Argentina, the model nation, and down with it went its currency, government, and everything else. In Venezuela, a coup d’état overthrew President Chávez and, when a multitude reimposed the deposed leader, television, that champion of the free press, made like it had not heard.

Shattered by its own swindles, the corporate giant Enron, one of the more generous donors to the campaigns of Bush and most U.S. senators, came crashing down. And like dominoes, the stock of other sacred monsters went tumbling after: WorldCom, Xerox, Vivendi, Merck — all because of a few small billion-dollar accounting errors. FIFA’s largest business partners, ISL and Kirch, were also going belly-up, but their outrageous bankruptcies failed to keep Joseph Blatter from being installed, by a landslide, on the throne of world soccer. If you want to look good, find someone worse: a master at cooking books and buying votes, Blatter the untouchable turned Havelange into a Sister of Charity.

Bertie Felstead was tumbling too, done in by death. Felstead, the oldest man in England, was the sole survivor of that extraordinary soccer match between British and German soldiers on Christmas Day 1915 in no-man’s-land. Under the magical influence of a ball that appeared from who knows where, the battlefield became a playing field for a short while, until screaming officers managed to remind the soldiers that they were obliged to hate each other.

* * *

Thirty-two teams traveled to Japan and Korea to wage the seventeenth World Cup in the shiny new stadiums of twenty cities. The first World Cup of the new millennium was the first to be played in Asia. Pakistani children sewed the high-tech ball for Adidas that started rolling on opening night in the stadium at Seoul: a rubber chamber, surrounded by a cloth net covered with foam, all inside a skin of white polymer decorated with the symbol of fire. A ball built to lure fortunes from the grass.

* * *

There were two world soccer championships: one had athletes of flesh and blood; the other, held simultaneously, featured robots. The mechanical players, programmed by software engineers, waged RoboCup 2002 in the Japanese port of Fukuoka, across from the Korean coast. What do the businessmen, technocrats, bureaucrats, and ideologues of the soccer industry dream about? Theirs is a recurring dream, ever more like reality, in which players imitate robots.

Sad sign of the times: the twenty-first century sanctifies uniformity in the name of efficiency and sacrifices freedom on the altar of success. “You win not because you’re good, rather you’re good because you win,” noted Cornelius Castoriadis some years ago. He wasn’t referring to soccer, but he might as well have been. Wasting time is forbidden, so is losing. Reduced to a job, subjected to the laws of profitability, the game is no longer played. Like everything else, professional soccer seems to be run by the almighty, even if nonexistent, UEB (Union of the Enemies of Beauty).

Obedience, speed, strength, and none of those fancy turns: this is the mold into which globalization pours the game. Soccer gets mass-produced, and it comes out colder than a freezer and as merciless as a meat grinder: soccer for robots. Such boredom supposedly means progress, but historian Arnold Toynbee had already seen enough of that when he wrote, “Civilizations in decline are consistently characterized by a tendency towards standardization and uniformity.”

* * *

Back to the flesh-and-blood Cup. In the opening match, more than one quarter of humanity witnessed the first surprise on television. France, winner of the previous championship, got beaten by Senegal, one of its former colonies and a first-time participant in the World Cup. Contrary to all predictions, France was sidelined in the first round without scoring a single goal. Argentina, the other great favorite, also fell in the first exchange. And then Italy and Spain were sent packing after suffering armed assaults at the hands of the referees. All these powerful teams were done in by twin brothers: the imperative of winning and the terror of losing. The greatest stars of world soccer came to the Cup overwhelmed by the weight of fame and responsibility, and exhausted from the ferocious pace demanded by the clubs for which they play.

With no World Cup history, no stars, no obligation to win or trepidation about losing, Senegal played in a state of grace and was the revelation of the championship. China, Ecuador, and Slovenia also faced a baptism by fire, but were sidelined in the first round. Senegal made it to the quarterfinals undefeated and no further, but their unending dance brought home a simple truth that tends to escape the scientists of the ball: soccer is a game, and those who really play it feel happy and make us happy too. The goal I liked best in the entire tournament was scored by Senegal: backheel by Thiaw, deft shot by Camara. Another Senegalese, Diouf, dribbled the ball an average of eight times per match, in a championship where that pleasure for the eyes seemed prohibited.

The other surprise was Turkey. Nobody could believe it. The country had been from the Cup for half a century. In its first match, against Brazil, the Turkish side was high-handedly cheated by the referee, but the team kept flying and ended up winning third place. Its fervor and quality play rendered the experts who had scorned it speechless.

Nearly all the rest was one long yawn. Fortunately, in its final matchups Brazil remembered that it was Brazil. The team finally let go and played like Brazilians, slipping out of the cage of efficient mediocrity in which the manager, Scolari, had locked them. Then their four R’s, Rivaldo, Ronaldo, Ronaldinho, and Roberto Carlos, shone brilliantly, and Brazil at last turned into a fiesta.

* * *

And they were champions. Just before the final, 170 million Brazilians stuck pins in German sausages, and Germany succumbed 2–0. It was Brazil’s seventh victory in seven matches. The two countries had each been finalists many times, but never before had they faced each other in the World Cup. Turkey took third place, South Korea fourth. Translated into market terms, Nike took first and fourth, while Adidas came in second and third.

The Brazilian Ronaldo, recovered after a long injury, led the list of scorers with eight, followed by his compatriot Rivaldo and Germany’s Klose, each with five, then the Dane Tomasson and the Italian Vieri with four goals apiece. Sükür of Turkey scored the fastest goal in World Cup history, eleven seconds after the match began.

For the very first time, a goalkeeper, the German Oliver Khan, was chosen as best player of the tournament. Such was the terror he inspired that his opponents thought he was a son of that other Khan, Genghis. But he wasn’t.