Photo by Rafael Alvez, through creative commons on flickr.com

While most of the attention around the recent World Cup bidding scandal has rightfully gone to the layers of corruption embedded in FIFA’s current process, that has obscured another interesting angle to the story: the bid bribery was embedded in the nebulous way World Cup bids are supposed to serve development goals.  The two officials at the center of the scandal—Nigeria’s Amos Adamu and Tahiti’s Reynald Temarii—were both ostensibly asking for funds to build fields and a ‘sports academy’ to develop the game in their home regions.  The absolute certainty with which most of us dismissed those presumably worthwhile goals as a mere front for lining pockets is telling.  Most of us want to believe the game can do some good in the world, but many tangible efforts towards that end are immediately treated with skepticism. 

That skepticism is often well-merited.  Many FIFA efforts to contribute to development goals are vague and lack accountability; they seem rife for money laundering.  They also often seem to emphasize marketing images over substance, as with the heavy rotation of promotions for “20 Centres for 2010” during last summer’s World Cup (claiming to fund 20 ‘football for hope’ centers across Africa) that conveniently downplayed the fact that only four had actually begun construction by the time of the World Cup and only four others were in any stage of planning.  The missing 12 centers give an impression—rightly or wrongly—of a classic FIFA ‘money-for-development’ boondoggle. 

Of course, I’d rather have World Cup bids make commitments to development goals—as they are required to do—than ignore the issue entirely.  But at the same time I had a suspicion that the goals embedded in those commitments would vary significantly in their seriousness and quality.  I also thought looking at those commitments might be an interesting chance to explore ideas about how football mega-events such as the World Cup might actually do some good in the world.  So as much as was possible with the internet connection in my home office, I’ve put together an evaluation of the development and social responsibility components of the nine World Cup bids for 2018 and 2022 (the results of which are to be announced December 2^nd).

The basic deal is that each World Cup bid is required to address (in addition to the more familiar information about stadiums, sponsorship, transportation, training facilities, etc.) how their hosting would help develop the game beyond just the elite level, and how the host would make use of the event for the greater good.  The detailed information on these bid components is presumably described in the full bid books—the hundreds of pages each aspiring host submits to FIFA for evaluation.  Those full bid books don’t seem to be publicly available, but each aspiring host does have a promotional web-site that outlines their bids and often offers an abbreviated ‘bid brochure’ with highlights of the full bid book. 

What follows is my effort to decipher that information, along with whatever related information I could find, to rank the World Cup bids on what is probably the hosting criteria of least interest to most fans: development and social responsibility (note that most bids do also offer information about their environmental impact—which I didn’t consider, though it could be construed as part of social responsibility).  In other words, I don’t imagine that these rankings will have much correlation with each bid’s actual chance of success (though it was clear in looking at the promotional materials that the favorites have more comprehensive bid information of all types).  I’d also emphasize that none of the publicly available information has much tangible detail about key issues such as funding commitments, so I’m judging mostly on concepts.  And finally, please keep in mind the rankings are my own subjective sense of those concepts: I’m just ordering them for the fun of debate.

Number 9 (ie, least impressive): Spain & Portugal

Maybe Spain and Portugal don’t need to worry about new development programs because they’ve already got it figured out (at least in terms of developing the game).  Or maybe they just didn’t make their plans available in English—the web-site was the least polished and available of any of the nine bid sites.  But what they did have just wasn’t much: “The Iberian Bid project seeks to become a great opportunity for integration by sharing with the whole world and with all the agents involved (delegations, spectators, mass media and FIFA itself) that the celebration of such an important event as the organisation of the Football World Cup is a real party.”

Aside from promising a good party, they do make a vague nod to “a range of programmes…to transfer our two federations’ experience and know-how to other countries…to support developing countries or people in need…[and] to promote development through football.”  They do also note a commitment to “dedicate 0.5% of its total budget to these and other projects,” which is certainly better than nothing.  But overall the available information gives the sense that Spain and Portugal are just paying lip service to this piece of the bid.

Number 8 (ie, also don’t seem to be paying much attention): Australia

The general information available on the Australia bid site is more impressive than that on the Spain and Portugal site, but I was surprised to find little attention to development and social responsibility.  Beyond one news note about a documentary on a team of refugee children, all I could find from Australia was a generic note that: “The Football Australia Foundation would be established to effectively manage the finals legacy in terms of football development, together with sustainable social and human development activities…It will work closely with FIFA and our other partners to deliver positive change through football.”  Which sounds like saying they’ll just do what FIFA tells them to do.  That may be smart politics, but it doesn’t make for an impressive effort at a social development legacy.

Number 7 (ie, some good concepts with little heft): South Korea

The big hope for the contribution of the South Korea bid is that it might facilitate rapprochement with North Korea.  As the South Koreans note on their bid web-site:

“Modern sports have always contributed to world peace in one way or another by emphasizing the importance of sportsmanship, honesty, trust, and cooperation between the competing parties for the purpose of a common game despite political and philosophical differences – or even hostility – between nations. A World Cup hosted by Korea is one of such opportunities to highlight the role of football and the World Cup as a catalyst to lowering tension and bringing peace to the world. There already have been talks about the possibility of cooperation with North Korea, if South Korea wins the hosting rights for the World Cup 2022.” 

If only it were as simple as football ‘bringing peace to the world.’  As any careful follower of the game knows, there are as many examples of global football causing political tension than there are of solving it—and while it would be interesting to see how North Korea bought into a South Korean World Cup, it would undoubtedly be more complicated than it sounds.  But other than that hope, the South Korean bid does not seem to have great ambitions for social development: they do note worthy attention to ‘football for all’ including existing ‘Morning Football Clubs’ where Koreans get together before work for a friendly kick-about (I wish there were one in my neighborhood).  But overall most of the hope here seems wrapped up in the tempting but problematic idea of sport as something that might cross the demilitarized zone.

 Number 6 (ie, made gestures to development, but only vaguely): Qatar  

The Qatar bid is in an intriguing position as regards social development potential, being the rare Arab League nation to bid for a World Cup.  One could imagine themes of bridging cultural divides, or creating opportunities for constructive dialogues.  Instead, most of the focus in the Qatar bid information seems to be on their plan for gleaming new stadiums, complete with outdoor air conditioning, and their prominent employment of an eclectic collection of football celebrity ‘bid ambassadors’ including Zinadine Zidane, Gabriel Batistuta, Ronald de Boer, Pep Guardiola, Roger Milla, and Bora Milutinovic.  They do, however, also seem to be putting some emphasis on ‘social responsibility,’ describing efforts such as working “with more than 30 schools in Qatar, Lebanon, Nepal, Pakistan and Syria to further develop football in under-served communities. We’ve rehabilitated 16 football pitches and built two FIFA standard pitches.”  They also promote a program called ‘Generation Amazing’ as comprising “our most ambitious social responsibility and football development initiatives.”  So far the main effort here seems to have been sending a group of about 25 children to the World Cup in South Africa.  And in regard to football development they emphasize how the government opened the ‘Aspire Academy for Sports Excellence’ in 2006, graduating 15 footballers last year.  But overall, granting that Qatar is a much smaller place than most World Cup hosts, these efforts still seem a bit limited in their scope.  Reaching out to 30 schools or 30 children is not a bad thing, but compared to the size of a mega-event like the World Cup or the glorious plans for new Qatari stadiums it just doesn’t seem ambitious enough.

Number 5 (ie, trying, but still lacking something): Russia

When it comes to worthwhile development through sports programs, I have a soft spot for building fields and facilities to offer access to under-served communities.  So I like the fact that Russia’s main ‘legacy program’ seems to be their ‘Stadiums for Children’ initiative, “which shall secure within the next five years to have more than 1000 additional artificial football pitches in the country. This of course proves the interest from the government to enhance the quality of local football. Not to forget the “Futsal for School” program, which is supposed to grow until 2015 from a total of 320,000 participating players at present to about 1.5 million players.”  The Russian bid also identifies as one of its main ‘supporting partners’ the ‘Art and Sport Foundation’—which sounds better than your usual multi-national corporation, even if a bit vague in their goals or funds.  The bid information also outlines support for “An array of existing programmes” including “The Health; World Football Community; 1Goal; Leather Ball; Football as a Social Phenomenon; Stadiums for Children; Project Goal” along with “Dedicated programmes for the FIFA World Cup: FIFA World Cup Community; Endurance Plus; Kick Start; Public Service Announcements; Peace Through Football; World’s Best Fans; Football in a Box.”  While this sounds a bit laundry-listish, I am most intrigued to know what ‘Football in a Box’ has to do with social development.  But I couldn’t find much detail.  And I’m also aware of a broader critique, well articulated by Miriti Murungi on Nutmeg Radio, that the Russian bid is most conspicuous for what it avoids addressing: racism in Russian football.  Overall there is some promise in the Russian bid information, but also many questions.

Number 4 (ie, an impressive effort that relies too heavily on Brand Beckham): England

England’s bid information seems to take development seriously—offering relatively elaborate plans both for developing the game in England and for using the game for good around the world.  I give the England bid credit for their points of emphasis (though I also wonder if they’re not over-promising, at one point claiming implausibly that ‘A FIFA World Cup in England will result in…one billion people worldwide being reached by development projects”).  But their main global initiative is ‘Football United’ which they call “A New and Sustainable Global Fund for Football” that aims “to help develop football in disadvantaged areas, break down social barriers, improve health and tackle other social issues.”  Then we learn that Football United “will align with the themes of the FIFA Football for Hope movement” and will “complement FIFA’s existing projects and funding streams.”  It’s not clear how ‘new and sustainable’ it will be if it is focused on just chipping in to existing work.  England also promotes “access to football for every girl in England,” which, though potentially a bit too ambitious, is one of the few bids to make the inclusion of girls and women a point of emphasis.  England should also get credit for already being one of the world leaders in using football as part of global development, with an impressive slate of existing projects described on their bid web-site. 

My biggest complaint with the England bid’s development and social responsibility initiatives, however, is that their most prominent efforts focus on a man who is masterful at striking a football, but totally unqualified to lead an international development effort: David Beckham.  He’s on the cover of their ‘bid brochure’ with smiling happy (non-white) children, and promoted in the highlights of their bid book as central to their development plan: “The David Beckham Academy and England 2018 will create and deliver a bespoke football and life skills project every year in each FAFA Confederation between 2012 and 2017…David Beckham passionately believes in football as a gateway to social and human development.  He has great experience in these areas and is personally committed to this project.”  Unfortunately, I’m not sure jetting in to play football in poor countries really qualifies as ‘great experience’ and I’m quite sure that Beckham—while he may have good intentions—does not know the types of ‘life skills’ necessary for getting by day to day outside the celebrity bubble.  Particularly considering that Beckham and his team couldn’t successfully sustain a ‘Beckham Academy’ in Los Angeles, it seems like an insult to development professionals everywhere to claim he is the right person to make the game ‘a gateway to social and human development’ around the world.

Number 3 (ie, I liked it more than I thought I would): USA

As an American academic, I wanted to be cynical about the US effort: I assumed it would be too corporate and too celebrity-driven.  But I was pleasantly surprised: relative to other bids, the US plans for a social development legacy actually demonstrate some thought and substance.  There is a hokey, Morgan Freeman narrated, video titled ‘I want to show you something’ putting a rosy picture on the US as a nation of happy immigrants (“The world’s home away from home” – if you can get over the walls at our borders).  But I suppose it is better for the bid to celebrate the multi-culturalism of the US rather than portray other false notions of what it means to be “true” American. 

The US bid also elaborates on more specific ideas than other bids (partially because the US bid seems to have made those entire chapters of their full bid-book available on-line: something I couldn’t find on any other bid site).  These “social change” initiatives are put under a schmaltzy slogan of “One on One, One by One” – but they do offer more specific and manageable goals than most other bids.  These include a “FIFA World Cup of Life” to promote worldwide access to clean drinking water, along with a “A social networking site that matches individuals and entities around the globe with projects in the developing world.”  They also promote some kind of partnership with Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs—who has been a major figure in an ambitious United Nations affiliated project of ‘millennium villages’ designed to be demonstrations of how focused use of resources and best-practices can enhance community level development in marginalized global communities.  The US bid thus includes a “an expansion of the 20 centres for 2010’ concept to promote the millenium villages” (though, as noted above, I have mixed feelings about the 20 centres intiative).  Finally, rather than turning over the social responsibility to a celebrity such as Beckham, the US bid also promotes “the establishment of the FIFA Institute for Social Change, a think- and action-tank designed to identify football-based practices and offer a variety of services to assist educators and community groups.”  I like the idea of trying to use actual experts (rather than just footballers) as a resource, even if a “FIFA Institute for Social Change” might end up an Orwellian paean to a multi-national organization that often seems determined to avoid internal change.

Number 2 (ie, some admirable ideas): Holland & Belgium

One of the kitschy themes of the Holland and Belgium bid presentation is ‘Seven Great Goals’ – of which two are prominent ‘social goals:’ “Creating 2,018 Open Football Clubs in Belgium and the Netherlands; [and] Setting up an extensive WorldCoaching (football) programme in developing countries.”  I’m ranking the Holland and Belgium bid highly because of the first of these goals.  Creating over 2000 open football clubs as ‘a contemporary local sports community centre’ with a “focus on health, respect and education, and…a crucial role to play in tackling current issues such as youth unemployment, obesity and the integration of minority groups” sounds like an initiative worthy of a World Cup—it focuses on using the game to provide broad-based access and resources that people can use in their own community.  It does seem that these centers would essentially be enhancements of the many existing football clubs in ‘the low countries,’ but I still really like the idea: successful development work is as much enhancing existing community strengths as it is about swooping in with paternalistic new prescriptions. 

I’m more hesitant about the second of these goals, phrased elsewhere as involving the creation of “10 WorldCoach Academies in collaboration with ‘Football for Hope Centres’ between 2010 and 2018” as part of a broader goal of training 2018 coaches around the world.  Though I can’t speak to Belgian coaching, my experience with the Dutch is that their coaches specialize primarily in explaining the superiority of the Dutch system.  After 2010, however, we have to wonder if that means training in how to break legs and insert studs into opponent chests without garnering any red cards.  Of course I shouldn’t stereotype—I do like the idea of using coach training as a part of community development, and the Dutch do have a proud tradition of good coaching.  I just hope they let the Belgians offer some suggestions.  

Number 1 (ie, most impressive): Japan

Partially because the Japanese bid has mostly gotten hype for its integration of technology, I was surprised to find their information suffused with ambitious goals related to development and global social responsibility.  Their primary tag line seems to be “Our dream: A world united through football” with a bid theme of ‘208 smiles:’ “Through the FIFA World Cup Japan wants to bring a smile to the faces of people in all FIFA’s 208 member countries.”  Ok, it’s a little saccharine, but I’m giving credit for the explicit effort to think about and integrate the rest of the world.  They also have ways of putting that thinking into action, including inviting “6000 children representing all of the 208 countries and regions affiliated with FIFA” to the final tournament as ‘World Cup Ambassadors’ with the chance to attend games, visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki, play in a kids tournament, and take part in workshops.

The Japan bid also seems to want to use the World Cup as a platform to promote existing efforts (rather than re-inventing the wheel) by, for example, offering a ‘Universal Fan Fest in 208 Nations’ offering “an opportunity through which various international and domestic organisations and bodies such as the United Nations, NPOs, local governments, and the private sector will be able to conduct activities to build the base for social development and a brighter future for all the countries and regions involved.”  They also note that “On 7 July 2009, JFA became the 93rd Japanese organisation to register with the United Nations Global Compact. Although FC Barcelona of Spain was already a participant, JFA was the world’s first sports organising body to sign up.  The United Nations Global Compact is a platform for UN agencies, private-sector companies, and non-profit organisations to address problems in the international community, in particular wealth inequalities resulting from globalisation.”  This was the only time in any of the bids where I saw any specific attention to wealth inequality—rather than just focusing on “poor countries” in isolation.

There were some things about the Japanese bid I didn’t care for; in their secion on ‘Contribution to World Football and Society,’ for example, they focus on how their “‘Freeviewpoint Vision’ 3D technology will expand business opportunities for FIFA and member associations.”  But overall I just got the sense that their whole approach to football was suffused with a long-term perspective and a global awareness: even the J-League has a ‘one hundred year vision’ that includes “Creating sports clubs where you can enjoy whatever sport you want, not only football.”

So if the sole criteria for hosting the World Cup was planning for development and social responsibility, I’d go with Holland & Belgium in 2018 and Japan in 2022.  Of course, the odds makers tell us those two bids are among the least likely to actually win—which may say as much about modern sporting mega-events as it does about the potential good that could (hypothetically) come from a World Cup.

Though I’ve written previously on Pitch Invasion about women’s soccer in Africa, I don’t claim any special expertise on this specific event—particularly as I write from my distant home office on another continent.  But given all the attention to the men’s World Cup in South Africa last summer, and various vague claims that the event would help develop the game at all levels, I do find myself intrigued by the women’s championship as an opportunity to fulfill that promise.  Also, given the many social, historical, and structural obstacles to the women’s game in Africa, I just admire the pluck of many African women’s players who do succeed.

Nevertheless, although it will determine Africa’s two representatives to the 2011 Women’s World Cup in Germany, the 2010 African Women’s Championship promises to be a relatively modest endeavor (the eight competitors are South Africa, Tanzania, Nigeria, Mali, Equatorial Guinea, Cameroon, Algeria, and Ghana). Not only are none of the 2010 men’s World Cup stadiums being used, but almost all the games are being held at one 15,000 seat stadium in the far eastern townships of the greater Johannesburg area.  That stadium was refurbished for the men’s World Cup and served as the training base for New Zealand—though it’s most notable World Cup moment may have been when cooking smoke from the nearby township forced the Kiwis to modify their training. (Another small neighboring stadium will be used for two of the last group stage games, presumably to accommodate concurrent kick-offs).

Even these arrangements were only made public last month—a circumstance Peter Alegi rightly identified as an “inexcusable delay [that] makes it more difficult for fans and media to participate in and cover the premier event in women’s football on the continent.”  As if to substantiate that point, as of the week-end before the tournament begins the official tournament page on the Confederation of African Football (CAF) web-site had only been updated once since September—and ironically that update was to announce that the deadline to apply for press credentials had been extended.

CAF does have the excuse of not having much practice in hosting continental championships for women.  Though there were official competitions in 1991 and 1995, those were played on a home and away basis, so the first centrally hosted tournament was played in Nigeria in 1998.  Since that event, the African Women’s Championship has been hosted biannually in either Nigeria or South Africa—with the lone exception of the 2008 tournament hosted in Equatorial Guinea.

Equatorial Guinea also happens to be the only country to win the continental women’s championship besides Nigeria—which had won every African women’s championship prior to 2008, and is the only African team to attend every Women’s World Cup.  In my mind, this raises two interesting questions: why has Nigeria been so good, and how could Equatorial Guinea be their only competition?

The Champions

The reasons Nigeria have tended to be so good is probably at least partially attributable to the simple fact that Nigeria is a populous place with a lot of talented women.  According to a 2003 case study by Martha Saavedra, “women have been playing football on a regular basis in Nigeria only since 1978” but since there have been several iterations of reasonably successful women’s clubs and leagues—which is more than can be said for many African nations.  In addition, Saavedra notes, the relative strength of Nigerian women’s soccer may relate to a more general “history of activism among Nigerian women, especially in the South.”  More recently there has been some concern that the full women’s national team has lost some of its dominance, and that broader problems in Nigerian soccer may hurt further improvements, but there are also signs of hope: as was noted here on Pitch Invasion over the summer, the Nigerian U-20 women were an impressive success ending up as the first African team to reach the final of a FIFA World Cup of any sort.

The case of Equatorial Guinea is harder to figure, partially just because it seems to be a generally curious place.  I’ve never been there, and don’t feel able to fully pass judgment, but in the world of African politics Equatorial Guinea is known mostly for suspicious oddities.  A former Spanish colony comprising a tiny set of islands and land near the coasts of Cameroon and Gabon with only around 600,000 people, it has massive oil income that the United Nations computes to a GDP per capita higher than that of Italy or Bahrain (at $30,627), but a human poverty index worse than Haiti (according to IRIN News, estimates suggest that “60 percent of its population lives on less than US$1 a day”).  This extreme discrepancy is often attributed to massive corruption, particularly among its dictatorial ruling family—whose son Teodoro Obiang is known for buying a $35 million mansion in Malibu and paying $700,000 for a spin on a yacht to impress sometime girlfriend/rapper Eve, and whose patriarch has been in the news for promoting a multi-million dollar UNESCO prize to publicize science and perhaps distract people from his poor human rights record.  The problems of the ruling family even emboldened a group of mercenary South African plotters with few local connections, linked famously to Margaret Thatcher’s son, to attempt a (failed) coup in 2004.

So how did a place like Equatorial Guinea end up hosting a women’s African championship tournament, and becoming the first winner other than Nigeria?  The event generated so little media attention that it is almost impossible to know, but I’d be interested to learn.  I’m particularly intrigued by how a country of only 600,000 people—which wouldn’t even qualify as one of the top ten most-populous cities in Nigeria—manages to produce a continental class football team.

I do know what the Nigerians said: that the Equatorial Guinea women’s team succeeds by not limiting itself to women.  In another curious twist that was mentioned by Jennifer Doyle here on Pitch Invasion, and discussed in a bit more detail on the TransGriot blog, the Nigerians claimed at least two of Equatorial Guinea’s players were men (a claim that doesn’t seem to have any evidence other than appearance).  Sadly, these claims seem to get flung around fairly casually in African women’s soccer—in a 2009 story that TransGriot described as “Nigerian Gender Chickens Coming Home To Roost” a Nigerian women’s player was excluded because “while being given her medical exam for the national team they discovered she was intersex.”  These and other events led to the claim that CAF was going to institute ‘gender testing’ before the 2010 championship—something that I’ve not seen any news of since 2009, and suspect fell prey to the realization that ‘gender testing’ in sports is far from an objective scientific process (something particularly loaded in South Africa after last year’s messy Caster Semenya controversy).

So barring the gender bending argument, my best guess is simply that Equatorial Guinea has actually decided to support women’s soccer—possibly as a part of a larger strategy of soccer diplomacy that includes its status as a co-host of the 2012 men’s African Cup of Nations (with Gabon—another oil rich neighbor).  If you’re rich and dictatorial, what better PR boost than good old-fashioned sport success?  Though this is just a guess, it is supported by the silver medal performance of a youth women’s national team from Equatorial Guinea at last summer’s Youth Olympic Games.  How else could a tiny oil dictatorship whose prior athletic fame derived entirely from mocking ‘Eric the Eel’ have turned itself into a presence in African soccer?  And that is not meant only as a rhetorical question—does anyone out there know the whole story?

Other Stories and Legacies

One other curious story from the 2010 African Women’s Championship that may actually get some documentation is the first appearance of Tanzania’s ‘Twiga Stars.’  In fact, the only two films I know of about women’s soccer in Africa are both set in Tanzania: in addition to an excellent 2007 documentary on women’s soccer in Zanzibar (which combined with Tanganyika in 1964 to form the United Republic of Tanzania), it now seems another film-maker has been following the Tanzanian women’s national team (if you’re curious, check out the goal around 1:02 of the trailer—it’s a cracker).  As part of their reward for qualifying the team earned a sponsored trip to Seattle to train and play local teams—ending up with a mixed record against amateur women’s teams from Washington state.  Given their record against the locals in Seattle, the Twiga Stars may not yet be world class on the field—but the fact that they were there at all, and that Tanzania seems to be starting to take women’s soccer seriously, seems well worth documenting.

Ultimately I suspect that each of the eight women’s teams at the African Women’s Championship in South Africa represents many more fascinating stories that we’ll never see.    Even South Africa, with its relatively developed infrastructure and a history of some support for women’s soccer, is struggling to get Banyana Banyana to an international level (at last summer’s U-17 Women’s World Cup South Africa finished the group stage with 2 goals for and 17 against, including a 10-1 drubbing by Germany).  So, as Peter Alegi notes, beyond its limited press attention perhaps the most important question of this particular tournament is: “what will be the impact of this tournament on the development and growth of South African (and African) women’s football at junior, amateur, and elite levels?  This is a crucial question given that the number of female players — mostly black — continues to grow alongside their ongoing marginalization and exclusion in a male-dominated football world.”

Because if the legacy of the South African World Cup isn’t to develop the game at all levels, we’ll not only miss some good soccer stories—we’ll miss good soccer.

After an eventful World Cup that likely cost him the first few months of the new club season, how does Holland’s Arjen Robben feel?  I mean that quite literally—I’m not looking for the sideline reporter’s sports clichés, nor the armchair philosopher’s curiosity about what it means to lose a World Cup final.  I want to know about the experience of pain.  Because Robben’s antics during the World Cup were strangely infuriating.  His dramatic facial expressions prompted by any ordinary challenge, his excruciating gesticulation at the mere hint of physical contact, his anguished complaints to anyone that would listen.  It seemed cheap and tawdry—and it reinforced all the superficial critique of soccer-critics who can’t get beyond the perceived dishonor of ‘flopping.’ In a certain odd way, his claims of pain became a litmus test for how we think about the game.

So while my curiosity about pain goes well beyond any one individual case, Robben is particularly interesting because he takes a lot of guff for the way he puts his pain on display.  As Richard Farley noted in a World Cup preview:

“Robben is one of the world’s most dangerous players when he marauds down the right hand flank. However, he comes with some baggage as well – he’s notorious for inviting contact from the opposition and going down too easily, as well as missing far too many games to knocks and niggles. Perhaps he simply has an unusually low pain tolerance?”

While that question was probably sarcastic, it does tap a real issue in the game.  What is pain worth?

Because as it turns out Robben really was playing with a serious injury: his ‘knocks and niggles’ in the World Cup were serious enough to require surgery.   And it turns out that for any player in any sport, because of the nature of pain, we can never exactly know how they feel: the physical pain that is so much a part of competitive sports is less an objective biological reality than a subjective psychological experience.

The psychology of pain

Towards the end of my competitive playing days, pain was a very real part of my own psychological experience in the game.  I was in my twenties, my body was resilient and well-conditioned, and I was fortunate to avoid any ‘serious’ injuries.  But I still woke up nearly every day with gnawing aches shooting through limbs, joints, muscles, and tendons; the hurt was enough to contribute to my decision to give up my soccer-playing dreams (a decision heavily facilitated by the fact that I wasn’t quite good enough).  It also made me wonder about the fact that when top-level players retire we respect them for saying they want to move on to new challenges, to spend more time with their families, that they’ve accomplished all they wanted to accomplish.  But we don’t want to hear that it hurts too much.

Why not?  Isn’t pain a physical experience that we can’t do anything about?  Pain is the body’s way of telling us something is wrong: at a base physiological level there is some kind of damage that triggers neural signals demanding remediation.  It’s not me—it’s my body.  Right?

Yes and no.  Pain, like any human perception, derives from a combination of physical signals and psychological responses.  In fact, in psychological science sensation and perception are meaningfully different phenomena: the physical sensation triggered by a stimulus out there in the world is different from the ultimate psychological perception inside our minds.  Psychologists who study sensation and perception talk about this difference as related to efficiencies of the human brain: to avoid having to match and record every one of the millions of available bits of sensory information the brain combines “bottom-up” processing of basic data out in the world with “top-down” processing based on concepts and expectations already programmed (by genetics and experience) in our minds.  When Arjen Robben walked into the stadium for the World Cup final his brain immediately started processing millions of stimuli—blades of grass, specks of white paint, swarthy millionaire Spaniards—but his brain’s well-honed expectation of what a pitch should look like, along with an innate ability to recognize broad spatial patterns, eliminated the need to process every detail (leaving plenty of time to jealously contemplate Carles Puyol’s flowing locks).

I actually find it easiest to make sense of this concept through examples from visual perception.  Optical illusions are perfect examples because they highlight the way the brain adds to and subtracts from the raw visual information in any one scene.  In the lower left corner illustration on the right (which I found at boredville.com—though I don’t know who to credit for its creation), it is nearly impossible for us to perceive the three elephants trailing away in a single file line as being the same size, even though sensation of the images on our retina are exactly the same size (go ahead, measure): our experiences with depth perception tell us to add size to things that are further away.  The “bottom up” processing of the image on our retina negotiates with the “top down” processing of our memory.

It’s also worth noting that while the inclusion in this illustration of Frank Lampard’s infamous “goal” against Germany from the World Cup is clearly intended as a joke, it is not completely irrelevant to the psychological process of sensation and perception.  Presuming the referee and his assistant on the line had a clear view of the goal area for that fateful shot, the image that hit their retinas presented their brain with the raw data of a ball crossing a line.  But that information came so quickly that the brain automatically executed a cross-check using concepts and expectations—based on the way the ball bounced, the reaction of the goalkeeper, the angle of the strike, it seemed an improbable goal.  Unconsciously, automatically, and even (in the grand scheme of things) efficiently, the decision was to play on.  Seconds later, with the benefit of slow-motion replays and still shots that presented irrefutable “bottom-up” data, the soccer world had no more need for “top down” processing and knew the referee had made a dramatic mistake.  But such is the magnificent design of a human brain (and the inevitable limitation of a human referee).

Something similar happens with pain.  When a player such as Arjen Robben is knocked to ground on a tackle, the contact does inflict minute degrees of tissue damage.  That damage, potentially enhanced by increased physiological sensitivity residual from prior injury, results in signaling through the central nervous system that activates the brain: there is a bottom-up sensation.  But the brain simultaneously offers an interpretation of that sensation which depends heavily on context: Robben’s expectations and his schema for how to deal with a sloppy challenge initiate a top-down process.  His eventual perception, deriving from both these processes, is ultimately his own subjective experience—it has surprisingly little to do with the objective severity of the tackle.

But wait, you might ask, don’t many other types of direct stimuli (ie, other sloppy challenges) result in much more reasonable perceptions of pain?  Didn’t Xabi Alonso take the full brunt of the unrepentant leg-breaker Nigel De Jong’s studs to his chest with little noticeable effect?  Yep.  That’s the point: context matters.  It matters so much that it can actually change our experience of pain.

There are, for example, studies that measure brain activity using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) to show that when volunteer subjects expected a moderate level of heat to be applied to their leg, but actually receive an application of extreme heat, their perception of pain is diminished by a degree equivalent to a dose of morphine (compared to when subjects both expected and received extreme heat—in a 2005 study by Koyama et al.).  Expectations also seem to cause the body to release its own natural pain relievers, including the same endorphins you hear about in association with exercise, further modifying subjective experiences of pain.  And then something as simple as distraction can further decrease pain—in one British study at Keele University, subjects who swore repeatedly were able to keep their hands submerged in ice water for longer than subjects who repeated innocuous words.   Various combinations of these factors likely explain how someone like Ike Opara was able to play 90 minutes for the San Jose Earthquakes without realizing that at some point he had broken his foot so badly as to require surgery.  That had to hurt.

The sociology of pain

Photo mosaic by Steffe (through creative commons) at flickr.com

The factors that influence pain perception also allow for the possibility that Xabi Alonso is just a tougher S.O.B. than Arjen Robben—and that is certainly what generations of coaches would like you to believe.  The culture of competitive sports generally is one which tends to assume that coping with pain is essential  to the toughness required for success.  This is often associated with stereotypical notions of masculinity—when male athletes in American and British sports cultures respond flamboyantly to pain it doesn’t take long for them to be told to “man up” or, alternatively and more pathetically, to “take off their dress” (or worse).  It turns out, however, in some situations women have a higher pain tolerance than men—and that men seem more extrinsically motivated in the ways they cope with pain.  Though research does suggest that on average men seem to have a higher tolerance for acute pain than women (with considerable individual variation), much of that tolerance is likely to be a self-fulfilling prophecy: stereotypical masculinity involves not showing pain, a social pressure which triggers the top-down processes that shape our perceptual experiences.

So when soccer-critics react to the “flopping” in soccer as a lack of toughness, they are failing to appreciate how much context matters to the experience of pain.  The fact that sports such as American football, a home base for many soccer-critics, thrive on the idea that pain is noble may actually shape players’ psychological perceptions.  Not coincidentally, it may also contribute to things like playing through concussions and suffering long-term brain damage.  The absurdity of this dynamic is evident in an essay on “Pigskin, patriarchy, and pain” by sociologist Don Sabo:

“My high school coach once evoked the pain principle during a pregame pep talk.  For what seemed an eternity, he paced frenetically and silently before us with fists clenched and head bowed.  He suddenly stopped and faced us with a smile.  It was as though he had approached a podium to begin a long-awaited lecture.  ‘Boys,’ he began, ‘people who say that football is a ‘contact sport’ are dead wrong.  Dancing is a contact sport.  Football is a game of pain and violence!  Now get the hell out of here and kick some ass.’ We practically ran through the wall of the locker room, surging in unison to fight the coach’s war.  I see now that the coach was right but for all the wrong reasons.  I should have taken him at his word and never played the game!”

Ultimately, in comparison to American football, I think the meaning of pain in world football is a bit more complicated.  In fact, I suspect that if you put injured American football players and injured soccer players into studies such as those I’ve described, you’d find that the soccer players do—on average—experience more pain from less physical trauma.  Their top-down expectations, the cultures of each game, are just too different.  But that doesn’t mean the soccer players are ‘soft’—I suspect some of the anguished responses that appear to be ‘flopping’ actually produce pain in the brain (though I’m not so naïve as to think all of them do; sometimes you just need to hold on for a point on the road, or draw that second yellow).

The comparison with American football also highlights a large piece of what fascinates me about the brain using both top-down and bottom-up processing to create our psychological experience: at the opposite pole from pain, our joy is also crafted by negotiations between what is actually out there in the world and what we’ve come to expect.  Though American football fans and world football fans often debate which sport people should enjoy, from the bottom up all sports offer some basic aesthetic pleasure.  There is artistry and drama both in the pinball ferocity of a long touchdown run and in the weaving tightrope flow of a pacey winger.   Both American football and world football offer the possibility of pleasure with their pain.  But which we prefer has much to do with our top-down concepts and expectations—what our brain has come to appreciate.

And the same probably applies to that conniving thespian Arjen Robben.    Whether or not his dramatics are born of ‘real’ pain, as fans our sympathy depends less on his physical experience than on our own psychology.  We can never know the exact reality of how Robben himself feels; all we can really know is how we as fans feel about him.

Settling into tepid beers and a winter’s warm dusk, it only took twenty minutes for South Africa to score.  The fan park erupted.  It was mass paroxysms of joy: leaping, dancing, hugging, and vuvuzelas of all shapes and sizes.  Then, with the game beginning again, our new friends turned to us and screamed in exclamation: “CAN YOU FEEL IT!  IT IS HERE!”

“Feel it!  It is here!”  With each word carefully enunciated, that catch-phrase was everywhere around South Africa 2010.  It was on TV, on the radio, in advertisements, on street banners, incorporated with concerts and stage shows.  It was, as far as I know, a marketing slogan promoted by either the South African Broadcasting Corporation or Brand South Africa to generate enthusiasm for the tournament—so my initial response was to think there was something inauthentic to its parroting.  At least that’s what I thought rationally, intellectually.  Then South Africa scored a second goal on an inchoate France team, and that Hammanskraal fan park erupted anew.  I suddenly realized that despite my intellectual resistance to uncritical branding—yes: I could feel it.

The beauty and the torture of soccer fandom, I came to appreciate during South Africa 2010, is the way the game simultaneously titillates very different parts of the mind.  The rational and the irrational.  The cognitive and the affective.  The intellectual and the emotional.  I loved this World Cup because it allowed me to try and think hard about globalization, culture, urbanity, inequality, nationalism, identity, sports in society, and many other incarnate ideas that have fascinated me at least since I first travelled through South Africa nearly 15 years ago on my way to two years in Peace Corps Malawi.  But I also loved this World Cup because it allowed me to scream from the bellows of my soul when a ball crossed a line in the grass.

This not-particularly-profound realization has been banging at me in this post-World Cup lull as I reflect back on my all too brief trip to South Africa for the group stage.  Two memories stand out.

One was a day touring Johannesburg with a kind stranger who had stumbled upon one of my pre-World Cup posts and was provoked by my surprise “at how little interest there seems to be in the real soccer experiences, and ‘normal’ daily experiences, of 47 million South Africans who somehow manage—as most of us do—to muddle through.”  The idea of us all ‘muddling through’ struck him as funny, and he offered to show me what he could: I rode three mini-bus taxis to make my way from Pretoria to Sandton, where he picked me up at the mall in his Land Rover (he’d never tried the mini-bus taxis himself, and found it quite amusing that I’d figured the route out).

A many generation South African of Indian descent, an engineer / IT professional who used his vacation time to go off-roading, he was about my age—apartheid ended when he was in secondary school, and he became one of the first students to integrate a prestigious (white) public school in Durban.  But he was more interested in talking about soccer, music, economics, cars, his skateboarding phase complete with dyed blue hair, and his daughter.

At the risk of sounding like a stereotype, she was a vivid emblem of the “new South Africa”—her mother of Afrikaner descent, her father a Muslim, herself an angelic four year old with impeccable manners and grace.  As the father, the daughter, and I toured around downtown Johannesburg—partially just to prove that we could—he talked about the pleasure and pride of having attended South Africa’s opening World Cup game (his wife had never before been to a soccer game, and was a bit surprised to learn that unlike rugby it was legal to make a forward pass), about having experienced more racism on trips to the US than when living in South Africa, and about the ubiquitous question for professional-class South Africans: should he consider looking for greener pastures abroad?  For me the very idea of the day, the confluence of stories, questions, meanings, histories, and identities within a coincidental meeting spurred by a soccer tournament, engaged all the intellectual faculties I ever try to exercise.

Several days later it was my emotion’s turn, sitting in the stands at Loftus Versfeld waiting out an increasingly tense 90 minutes between the US and Algeria.  I had bought the tickets through the US Supporters Club, and found myself amidst the American hard-cores: fans in red, white, and blue body suits and Uncle Sam tuxedos.  I’ve never been a particular fan of Landon Donovan, thinking he got too much too easily in his career, but when he stroked that ball into that net 50 yards from my seat I felt a moment of sheer, irrational ecstasy.  Shrieking.  Fist-pumping.  Shaking.  There would be time later to reflect on whether I was swept up in jingoism, whether my subjectivity had fallen victim to corporate sponsored bread and circus, whether I was experiencing reaction-formation to the anomie I feel in most of my life.  At that moment I found myself trembling with unknown joy under a giant American flag unfurling over my head, watching through blurry eyes while strangers hugged as if meeting family members they thought they’d never see again.  It was, as the kids say, raw.

I’m not sure whether I should be proud of these reactions.  My fascination with the lives of others sometimes feels voyeuristic, my joy at watching a ball cross a line often feels misplaced.  But I do know these things are why I am a soccer fan—for me the game is a perfect place for my intellect and my emotions to reach a symbiosis.

It all reminds me that while Freud was not right about many things, he was right that the human mind is fundamentally conflicted.  We are conflicted between intellect and emotion, between prudence and pleasure, between id impulses and superego strictures.  The challenge is not to eliminate those conflicts, but to find ways of negotiating between them in reasonably healthy ways.  Following soccer mostly works for me.

In that sense South Africa 2010 was a personal fandom apotheosis.  It may not have produced the most entertaining soccer, it may not have been the most prudent use of funds for a country facing daunting inequalities, African teams may not have availed themselves of anything like a home continent advantage, South Africa may still be balancing deep internal divisions, but such limitations are only ledger marks in the fascinating and ongoing negotiations of sports and society.  They are counterbalanced by other marks such as the elegance and symbolism in the performances of teams such as Ghana and Germany, the architectural inspirations of stadiums including Soccer City and Moses Mabhida, the clarity with which this World Cup sent the message that Africa can manage the most lofty of challenges, and the fact that South Africa is a country of nearly infinite vibrancy, talent, and potential.

Feeling comfortable with such potentially conflicting marks was subtly endorsed and illuminated for me by a variety of local commentators I read while in South Africa.  Several journalists noted that the nature of life in South Africa, the legacies of apartheid and the reality of inequality, promotes a degree of comfort with paradox and contradiction (explaining, for example, why many South Africans felt no hypocrisy in supporting both Bafana Bafana and Ghana, or Germany, or Brazil, or whoever).  South African author Mark Gevisser went one step further in a recent Guardian essay: “Indeed, there is a manic-depressive streak to the South African psyche; an after-effect, perhaps, of having once been so favoured after the “Mandela Miracle” transition to democracy. If we are not “the Rainbow Nation” – or the successful hosts of the first African mega-event – then we are another African failed state; Zimbabwe-in-waiting.”  But Gevisser himself is cautiously optimistic: “the power of a grand national pageant [such as the World Cup] is its myth-making potential: whether we were in cars on the way down to Bloemfontein or dancing on the side of the highway, we will tell our children and grandchildren about it and it will become the measure, for years to come, of the Rainbow Nation we imagined we were bringing into being in 1994.”

In fact, in defining fandom as born of psychological contradiction and conflict I find it interesting to look back at my own patterns of writing here on Pitch Invasion around South Africa 2010.  After offering tongue-in-cheek predictions about who would advance from each group ‘if there were any justice in the world’ (a method that resulted in me correctly picking 8 of the 16 teams that would advance—exactly what you’d predict on random chance, furthering my suggestion that there is rarely any justice in the world.), the last post I wrote before I left was full of sentimental defensiveness.  I was bothered by the fear and pessimism surrounding much pre-World Cup media, and offered alternative media sources that I hoped might be more sophisticated and real.  Then while in South Africa, in an effort to find a niche, I wrote about topics such as my unease with the security apparatus around the stadiums, about xenophobia, about the under-development of grass-roots soccer, about what Franz Fanon might think of Soccer City.  In other words, I mostly wrote things that were intellectually critical.

I tried to focus any criticisms on global forces victimizing South Africa, but it just became much easier to offer pseudo-intellectual deconstructions rather than emotional effusions.  The irony is that while it may not have come across in my posts, I loved every single day of my trip to South Africa.  Loved it.

So while some of what I wrote was about xenophobia and inequality and misunderstandings, I want to go on record stating that in my mind South Africa 2010 was a grand success.  It was a tournament that allowed us to intellectually engage with South Africa as a place that matters in global society, and it was a tournament that allowed us to emotionally immerse ourselves in a beautiful game.  It was a tournament that allowed me, ever so briefly, to love Landon Donovan with all my heart.  It was a tournament that made me happy to parrot a marketing slogan for the sake of a brand: FEEL IT!

The other side of globalization, however, is the possibility that hyper-connectivity and piqued curiosity can create opportunities for diverse voices to propagate.  The possibility of stumbling on African perspectives that enlarge and enrich the conversation about soccer and society should be one of the great opportunities of this World Cup.

And while the sanitized big media version of the World Cup (and of globalization) seems to have maintained its hegemony in recent weeks, there are hints of the alternative possibility.  I’ve been interested, for example, to follow dispatches from well-known African writers and intellectuals dispersed across the continent during the World Cup for a project called Pilgrimages, or to read stories from aspiring writers in South Africa exploring the realities of their daily lives through Global Girl Media (as discussed by The People’s Game).  In addition, during my final few days in South Africa last week I was lucky enough to stumble upon “Twenty Ten: African Media on the Road to 2010 (and beyond).”

Described as a joint initiative by World Press Photo, Free Voice, Africa Media Online and lokaalmondiaal, with funding from the Nationale Postcode Loterij in the Netherlands,

“The Twenty Ten project focuses on strengthening the journalistic skills of African reporters in the fields of the printed word, photography, radio, internet and television.  The intentions are to encourage these media professionals to creatively produce reports about football in Africa and to help sell their products throughout the world.  Twenty Ten also aims to create an opportunity for the results of the project to have lasting effects on African journalism far beyond the World Cup.”

I was tipped off to the project by a fellow Oregonian now living in Amsterdam and working as the web editor for Twenty Ten.  She introduced me to some of the young African journalists and senior media professionals being sponsored to work in South Africa during the World Cup, and offered me a copy of the book that makes up one part of their work (a book with selections from pre-World Cup journalism workshops around the continent, available from KIT Publishers in Amsterdam).  They explained that in addition to the book they’ve been working collaboratively to produce journalism available on the web for reading or for purchase by larger media outlets.  While the original intention was to focus on presenting positive visions of Africa, something they do well in many pieces, the reality of South Africa 2010 has also led them to offer local perspectives on critical issues such as FIFA’s treatment of low-level workers and unemployment in South Africa.

The value of having young and promising African journalists engage with this World Cup is evident in the alternative lenses work from the Twenty Ten project offers on familiar issues.  On the diversity of Bafana Bafana, for example, Ugandan journalist Joseph Opio moves beyond the familiar and artificial black/white dichotomy to consider the integration of South Africa’s large population of Indian descent.  Or on prostitution, for another example, Nikki Rixon offers “A day in the life of a sex worker” as a powerful and humanizing photo-essay.

Likewise, the book (fully titled Africa United: The Road to Twenty Ten) offers intriguing local perspectives on stories that would likely be somewhat familiar to followers of African soccer: the role of Didier Drogba and the Cote D’Ivoire national team in national reconciliation (by Selay Marius Kouassi), the tragic plane crash that killed most of the Zambian national team on its way to a World Cup qualifier in 1993 (by Kennedy Gondwe), the inspiration provided by George Weah to war-torn Liberia (by Emmanuel Geeza Williams).  But particularly when the stories are told by journalists from the country at hand (which is not always the case in the book), the pieces offer rich local insights: on Cote D’Ivoire we hear from observers as diverse as Drogba’s mother and government ministers, on Zambia we get the contemporary story of widows struggling to support their families since promises of endowments in tribute to the crash victims have been unfulfilled, from Liberia we learn what it was like to listen to Cameroon’s legendary 1990 World Cup victories on the radio while living in a refugee camp.

There are also stories of African soccer I hadn’t heard before; I particularly enjoyed reading Joe Opio on how Idi Amin, for all the problems he caused in Uganda, managed to convince Pelé to make a three day visit in 1976 that enthralled the nation:

“The Pelé visit is remembered as a landmark event by every Ugandan with a passing interest in football.   But it isn’t the sole reason Amin, despite such an infamous contribution to humanity, holds a treasured place in the hearts of football lovers in Uganda.  Come to think of it, it isn’t even the crowning legacy of Amin’s patronage of local football.  In a success-starved nation, Amin’s reign, for all its faults, is remembered among fans as a golden era of sorts.”

Who knew?

The book is also particularly strong in its photojournalism.  The series by Joseph Moura, for example, on ‘Mother Malou,’ identified as “the first woman referee from Congo to make it to the international level,” makes for a fascinating picture of a parallel Congo where strong women dictate male worlds.  Similarly,  the series by Simone Scholtz titled “Transformations,” showing Ghanaian fans before and after painting themselves with national colors and a black star, offers evocative images of fandom as simultaneously exotic and familiar.

The work does have its limitations—the journalists are often young professionals and they start with many different languages—but the project as a whole strikes me as the type of thing we should hope for more of from this first World Cup on African soil.  “Just imagine,” suggest the book’s editors Stefan Verwer, Marc Broere and Chris de Bode, “what it would mean to the people in Africa if an African team won the World Cup.”  On the field, unfortunately, all we can do for now is to just imagine.  Off the field, hopefully, amidst the limitations and possibilities of globalization we can learn to expect more.

More importantly, however, the vague idea of celebrating ‘Africa’s Humanity’ seems to create a depersonalized other that is simply not there.  What is the difference between ‘Africa’s Humanity’ and humanity?  And is this World Cup really celebrating Africa as a whole?  The many African immigrants I’ve talked to in South Africa—Malawians, Zibabweans, Nigerians, Mozabicans, etc.—seem to feel otherwise.

In the conversations I’ve had during my two weeks in South Africa it has been more common to hear about Africa’s differences than its similarities.  There are the shocking differences between glitzy suburbs such as Sandton, full of gleaming shopping malls and Lamborghini dealerships, and sections of tin shantys in townships such as Alexandra—a mere few blocks down the street.  But there are also the perceived differences between Africans of different nationalities.

These perceptions are often negative.  As the Malawian fellow who works at the bed and breakfast where I’m staying told me, “Have you heard about this thing the xenophobia.  Here there is this big problem.”  He went on to explain that Malawians generally have a good reputation in South Africa for being honest and hard working, “But the Zimbabweans—ah, those ones can’t be trusted.”

Then there was the (white) South African who warned me sternly to be careful walking by a nearby apartment block: “Nigerians live there.”  Or the (black) South African who told me that in his village “there are too many problems with the Mozambicans; they are always just stealing.”

Whatever the stereotypes or national origins, many of the African immigrants I’ve talked to are nervous for the World Cup to end.  My Malawian friend claimed that in his Johannesburg township the threats are explicit: “They tell us, wait till the World Cup ends.  We’re going to kick your ass.”  Whether or not that is meant literally, there is a perception that right now many poor, urban South Africans are on their best behavior—but that may mean they are bottling up ‘the xenophobia.’

Why so much fear of African immigrants in the face of so much social marketing promoting African unity?  The core dynamic seems remarkably familiar to the contemporary relationship between the United States and Central America.  There is massive income inequality; poorly educated migrants are willing to work long, hard hours for low pay; unemployed and poorly educated locals find a scapegoat.

The World Cup, of course, offers a great backdrop for scapegoating.  In fact, the one thing locals, immigrants, and tourists seem to regularly agree upon is that the most dangerous group here is the dark overlord known as FIFA.  South Africa’s Mail & Guardian last week told of a Cape Town man who had stumbled into a brisk trade selling “FICK FUFA” t-shirts.

Even the US fans got in on the action the other night against Algeria: when Clint Dempsey’s goal was called back for being offside, the US fan section erupted into a three beat chant “F**k you FIFA…F**k you FIFA.”  It was fascinating to me that rather than blame the referee or the linesman as individuals, the fans choose to blame an entire abstract entity (though I do get that much of it has to do with FIFA’s handling of the mystery no-goal in the Slovenia game during which an individual was scapegoated).

Ultimately, then, the question on the streets in South Africa seems to be less who will win the World Cup and more who to blame.  Who to blame for losses, who to blame for inequality, who to blame for crime.  I’d emphasize, however, that the blame is often focused entirely on abstractions: FIFA rather than Sepp Blatter, Zimbabweans rather than the kind women selling her handcrafts in the public market.

Civility before US v Algeria

In fact, one of the great things about the atmosphere around this World Cup is how positively disposed everyone is to basic, friendly human interaction.  Before the US game the Algerians were beating their drums and waving Palestinian flags, but afterwards the Algerian men I talked to were pure diplomacy: “Ah, it was a good game.  Both teams had chances—the US just wanted it a bit more at the end.”

So on an individual level everyone I’ve talked to here—Algerian, South African, Zimbabwean, Kenyan, Mozambican, Slovenian, Australian, Mexican, Dutch, Nigerian, and even English (!)—has been decent, engaging, human.  But still, my Malawian friend assures me, “What you don’t see is  that here in the locations [townships] things are getting tense.  I’m telling you, after 11^th July when you are up there [back in the US]—well, just watch the news.”

One reason I’ve felt reasonably safe almost everywhere I’ve been around this World Cup is the sheer numbers of South African staff in and around all the venues.  There are highly visible hives of blue uniformed police, yellow jacketed ‘volunteers’, orange vested ushers, purple shirted information booth attendants, and seemingly every other color possible in this rainbow nation.  Most often these folks are quite pleasant while milling about the stadiums or the fan parks in small groups, chatting and enjoying their own people watching while maintaining different types of buffer zones.  I don’t know the actual count, though at any one venue they must number in the thousands.

But the more I think and read about that presence, my feeling of safety morphs into thoughts of discomfort.  All the World Cup stadiums I’ve been to here have a first set of people minding cold chain and wire security fences that start several football fields away from the actual stadium gates.  Those fences feed into initial checkpoints where tightly packed lines are funneled through metal detectors and guards proffering pat downs.  After discarding any food or drink and escaping questioning from blue-blazered FIFA hosts, there is a zone of well-spaced sponsor booths blaring sanitized music while staff peddle wares.  From there you find the correct gate and allow another staff member to insert the bar-code side of your ticket into a scanner that, if successful, unlocks a person-sized turnstile that looks like a cattle shoot.  Now you are free to fill up on plastic bottles of Budweiser or Coke (and Budweiser or Coke only), before making final negotiations with ushers at the gate nearest your seat.

Aside from the generally jovial mood of the masses and the glorious relief in finally seeing the emerald green of the pitch, the whole process reminds me of movie scenes portraying captives shuttling into a prison camp.  It reminds me that the trade for my feeling of safety is a willingness to accept that I am entering a modern version of Foucault’s panopticon.

In that vein, it has been interesting to read some of the local commentary on how the police have been employed to address concerns about security in South Africa.  In one analysis, Gwinyayi Dzinesa in South Africa’s Mail & Guardian used the World Cup to discuss broader issues of security in South Africa:

“The exclusive, leafy suburb of Sandton in Johannesburg recently witnessed an extraordinary show of police might as specially trained officers parachuted from the sky and others abseiled down the side of tall buildings.

The display was meant to reassure everyone about the South African Police Service’s [SAPS] ability to tackle any trouble at the World Cup.

But the exhibition also confirmed a widely held view that the police, whose job should be primarily to preserve the conditions necessary for the safe exercise of public rights and freedoms, are being turned into warriors.”

Another angle of critique focuses on the unofficial forces—the temporary staff working as ushers, information attendants, and the like.  These folks, you may have read, are putting in long days during this World Cup at astonishingly low wages for a multi-billion dollar mega-event.  According to the Mail & Guardian, for example, World Cup security crews are getting less than the equivalent of two dollars an hour for 10 or 12 hour shifts.  In contrast, security guards at South African rugby matches earn around 15 dollars an hour for three hour shifts.

Yet the few poorly paid workers with the courage to complain have been the exception rather than the rule—around the five stadiums and four official ‘fan parks’ I’ve visited all the different types of staff have been unfailingly polite and willing to help.  They have not always been particularly informative—questions such as where can I find an ATM or a taxi have proven surprisingly challenging—but they are always trying.

When I took a quick and unplanned side-trip to Durban the other day, for example, the people at an information booth near the beach-side ‘fan park’ were most kind in looking up possible accommodations for the night.  One young woman in particular, adorned with a silver tooth, riotous braids, and a charming version of the Queen’s English, offered to call most of the hotels in the area to find one with both a reasonable price and internet access.  Though she seemed to have no idea what a fair price should be, she was perfectly happy to walk along on a mission to actually look at the several of the rooms.

During the walk we chatted about her work; she liked being around the energy of the games, was sorry no one will be able to go up to the top of the arch over Moses Mabhida Stadium until after the World Cup is over (for ‘security reasons’), and tended to avoid the rabble-rousing over either wages or game results.  She also happened to agree that the US was robbed of its third goal in the Slovenia game.  Surprisingly, however, her strongest opinion was about the female Holland fans who had been arrested outside Soccer City in Johannesburg for wearing orange dresses sponsored by a beer company: “No, come on—you can’t just have that guerilla marketing…and with those short mini-skirts!  No.”

So maybe I’m taking this all too seriously. Maybe I should just agree with the kind host in Durban and assume FIFA is simply doing what it has to do.  Maybe I should just accept that safely enjoying a modern World Cup requires the uncomfortable realization that prison camp-like buffer zones are a symptom of a dangerous and unequal world. Maybe I should just enjoy being around all the pleasant and colorful people—no matter what they are being paid or what they represent?

Outside Moses Mabhida Stadium in Durban

'Shanty Ground' across from Orlando Stadium

This struck me most forcefully the other day on a trip through a small part of Soweto—where I finally saw a few casual games being played, but only in the poorer sections.  One of the surprising things about the famous ‘township’ is just how much it varies neighborhood by neighborhood.  Just across the Soweto Highway from a stereotypical shanty town are neighborhoods of solid working class homes with cars in the garage.  Further along, in the sections near the former homes of Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, there are million dollar mansions.  In that section I noted to one of the locals that there only seemed to be kids out playing in a few small parts; he explained “Right, in this part they are too busy inside with the Play Station.”

This always seems to happen: the kids that are the most engaged, the most creative, and the most truly child-like in their play are often the ones that have the least.  In the poorer parts of Soweto there seemed to be children on every street playing football, on every hill making improvised slides, in every corner crafting paper airplanes from scraps.  Will this World Cup help those children?  Probably not.  But the more interesting question may be, what kind of help do they really need?

I asked some of the locals in Soweto about the situation with community pitches—having heard that part of the World Cup plan involved improving local playing areas—and there have, apparently, been some improvements.  But there have also been many empty and distorted promises.  In this particular section, for example, the local affiliate of the South African Football Federation had supposedly promised ‘new turf’ for the local dirt pitch (called ‘Shanty Ground’ by locals in tribute to the shanty houses that had previously occupied the neighborhood).

When they started to do the work, however, they began by putting up a large spiked fence with a locked gate that served to keep any and all games off the field.  Then they placed a small set of brick changing rooms, also locked, directly in play on the field’s west flank.  They did plant new grass, but never sent anyone to mow—not that anyone could get inside anyway—and the grass grew to knee height.  As a final insult, they only planted a standard goal on one end.

After months of frustration the locals finally broke the padlocks and cut the grass themselves.  But they also found that the changing rooms, which had already been ruined by vandals, blocked enough of the playing area to make it only good for 7 v7.  Why bother?  Kids can now sneak through the broken gate for a kick-about, but it is useless for games.

Back in the day, however, the locals told me that there used to be crackers.  When local rivals Phefeni High School took on Orlando West the whole community would line the pre-fence pitch to sing and dance:

“We used to call it our ‘FNB Stadium’ [the old name for the stadium that was Soccer City].  There would be singing for their team on this side, then singing on that side.  We would have our best dancers go out at the interval; they would send their best dancers out.  It was just sand where we were playing, but for us it was a great occasion…Now, they just spoiled our field.”

The vandalized locker rooms on the pitch

This is just one small example of how, despite many claims about how this World Cup will help develop the game in Africa, there is reason to be concerned about the possibility of real trickle down effects.  There is certainly some awareness that has been raised, and some projects that have been useful, but there is also much that seems hollow.

I’ve been particularly irritated by FIFA plastering a ‘20 Centres for 2010’ slogan all over official billboards and advertising related to their ‘Football for Hope’ initiative—as far as I can tell (and as far as anyone has been able to tell me), only one center has been opened and only five others are identified in any plans.  So what about the other 14 promised to the continent?  Since the slogan specifically says ‘for 2010’ I hope they show up in the next 6 months—but I fear yet another case of grass roots development looking better in promotions than in practice.

Similarly, while much concern has been expressed over ways that the massive cost of the World Cup stadiums to the South African government could hypothetically have gone to other good causes (housing, education, health care, etc.), that is a false choice.  The real choice seems to have involved shifting spending to the stadiums from spending on promised local initiatives (such as arts programs and community football).  As a Pretoria News article by Janet Smith from Saturday, 12 June 12 explained in addressing the secretive South Africa 2010 budget:

“…Probably the more glaring anomaly has been around arts and culture, where a 2010 task team was axed without an explanation and some for the R150 million allocated for the World Cup seemed to vanish…

We put questions to the LOC [Local Organizing Committee] about each of the many projects upon which Fifa and itself had embarked or promised to begin, but it was not able to answer questions on most legacy commitments.  It instead referred us to Fifa, but it was too late to get replies from them.

All we know for sure is that the National Lottery Distribution Trust Fund committed R170.1m to build 27 football turfs in communities, and has initiated the process of establishing the first nine sties.  But a further 43 still have to be built.

Now though the time for questions has passed.

The juggernaut that is the World Cup is upon us for better or worse…”

At halftime of the Spain v Switzerland game I found myself watching just such a dance from a picnic table in the large courtyard of an ‘entertainment lounge’ across the street from Loftus Versfeld stadium (where South Africa was to play Uruguay later in the evening).  I had made my way to the stadium neighborhood to check out the scene and see if there was any chance the touts had tickets for the South Africa game.  They did—but the price was exorbitant, and it just made more sense to find a pub and settle in.

The place I found would not have been out of place in an up-scale suburban American mall on Super Bowl Sunday.  There was an affluent crowd in uniforms and face paint, happy to pay a relatively high cover charge and drink prices to be amongst others who felt the same.  Local college students, almost all attractive white females, had been trucked in to sell drinks from specific sponsors.  I’ve never been asked so many times ‘would you like a Jaeger bomb?”  The number of servers was only matched by the number of foreign media conspicuous with their credentials and their determination to find ‘true’ images and sounds of South Africa.

Enter the dancers.  It was a cold night, most of us were bundled in ski parkas and woolen caps huddling around barrel fires in the courtyard, but three men dressed only in skirt-style loincloths and feathers appeared suddenly amidst the crowd.  As the halftime entertainment, they jumped on the stage with only their drums and staffs by way of introduction.  To the crowd’s great pleasure, indicated by flag waving and vuvuzela blowing, they danced and gyrated for several minutes before being ferreted away by one of the eager foreign camera crews for an interview.

In their stead several white South Africans from the crowd, bundled in green and yellow Adidas parkas,  jumped onto the stage and improvised their own version of a war dance—pretending the microphone stand was a spear, and the beer company poster a shield.  They too received an enthusiastic response, though I couldn’t be sure if it was for their enthusiasm or their satire.  The South African couple next to me at the table smiled: “White South Africans just love these dances.”

Why?  The dances do, of course, have some distant origins in the ‘traditions’ of South Africa—but they are hardly a part of contemporary daily life.  Amongst the masses of people I’ve seen here no one other than those halftime dancers has worn just a loincloth.  The popularity of these dances, and perhaps also the vuvuzelas, instead seems to me more reflective of the complicated process anthropologists call the ‘invention of tradition:’

“In a famous essay on the invention of tradition in colonial Africa, Terence Ranger insisted that social and cultural traditions were invented and manipulated by both Europeans and Africans to serve their own interests. Specifically, elders, men, ruling aristocracies, and indigenous people appealed to “tradition.” The elders did so in order to defend their dominance over the rural means of production against challenges from the youth; men wanted to retain control against women, who were playing an increasingly important role in the rural areas, especially in regions dominated by male migrant labor; ruling aristocracies sought to maintain or extend their control over their subjects; and indigenous people were anxious to ensure that migrants who settled among them did not achieve political or economic rights. This model became popular for analyzing the contexts in which various cultural and social practices in colonial Africa developed—from music and dance to law and marriage.”

In the context of this World Cup, the notion of traditions being employed by ruling aristocrats brings to mind Sepp Blatter and his perspective on the vuvuzela (as was quoted in the June 15^th Johannesburg Star): “I have always said that Africa has a different rhythm, a different sound… I don’t see banning the music traditions of fans in their own country.  Would you want to see a ban on the fan traditions in your country?”  As many have pointed out, however, just how ‘traditional’ are one-note plastic trumpets manufactured in China?

As with the dances, the vuvuzelas do have some basis in the history of the region; it is true that some tribal groups used kudu horns as part of ceremony and ritual.  But as the ‘invention of tradition’ concept suggests, ‘culture’ is always dynamic and often used as a chit in broader power relationships.  In that vein, part of what is interesting about seeing the vuvuzelas in South Africa is how many of the people blowing it are tourists and white South Africans jumping on the soccer bandwagon.

They are, I believe, genuinely enthusiastic and well-meaning.  But as we all now know, that enthusiasm has side-effects: the vuvuzelas drown out any possibility of other types of fan culture, while the dancers at halftime of Spain v Switzerland invent an illusion of what it means to be African.  These patterns are not, of course, specific to Africa.  At the last World Cup I’m sure there were many German half-time shows involving lederhosen, while sports ‘traditions’ such as New Zealand’s Haka dance could qualify as a meaningful ‘invention.’  But in South Africa the inventions seem more loaded: if nothing else, it is just too cold here to be out and about in just a skirt-style loincloth.

When the train stopped at a few smaller stations along the way, neon-vested guards jumped up to watch the doors and make sure no one without game tickets came aboard.  So inside was a comfortable group of relatively affluent fans, a mix of visitors and locals chatting in packs of two or four.  Outside was what I can only assume to be the usual daily crush of poor commuters—the unlucky portion of South Africans who can’t afford either the luxurious mobility of a personal car, nor tickets for a World Cup game.

After several hours Soccer City appeared suddenly, a distant calabash in an artificial looking valley between grubby hills, trees, and factories.  It was visually stunning.  The burnt shades of orange and the geometry of the thing, well-known to any World Cup TV viewer, glistened in mid-day sun.  Everyone on the train rushed to the windows with cameras in hand and a palpable sense of awe.

But the odd isolation, near desolation, of the surrounds made me feel a bit uncertain.  Later, as I paged through the week’s Mail & Guardian newspaper, an essay by Mark Gevisser (identified as “writer-in-residence” at the University of Pretoria) made more sense:

“There is terrible poignancy in the fact that the state could never earn as much good feeling per rand spent, say, on housing, as it will out of the money spent on the World Cup stadiums.

Franz Fanon wrote brilliantly about this impulse in independent Africa, warning that one of the ‘pitfalls of national consciousness’ is that, ‘instead of being the all-embracing crystallisation of the innermost hopes of the whole people, instead of being the immediate and most obvious result of the mobilisation of the people, it will be…only an empty shell, a crude and fragile travesty of might have been.’

Fanon saw the neocolonial phenomenon of the national stadium as one of the primary examples of this and, visiting Soccer City a few weeks before the World Cup was to open, I could not help but hear his words reverberate around the magnificent place, even as I was awestruck – and even ‘proud’ of it – myself.

What is so striking about Soccer City is that – unlike Ellis Park of the FNB Stadium which it replaces – you are entirely enclosed within the perfectly cambered calabash once you are inside; there are no vistas of the city or the world outside.  This may well be a function of international design trends – the bird’s nest factor – rather than ideology, but the effect is intense all the same; at a time when it seems increasingly difficult to hold the Rainbow Nation together, the ‘African calabash’ seems to provide South Africans with the fantasy of containment within a single shared national identity.”

However artificial, watching a game at Soccer City is – perhaps like all great sports events – a wonderful fantasy.  I was there to watch Holland v Denmark, and the waving orange contours of the seats complimented the bright attire of the Dutch fans beautifully.  The green of the grass, the blue of the sky, the buzz of the stadium was enthralling.  Out in the sheltered concourses, beneath the ‘perfectly cambered calabash,’ there was a light and spacious feeling that fit the energy of the game.  The Dutch, the Danes, the South Africans, and the rest of us mingled courteously but at a distance from each other—just happy to be there in our own slow spun cocoon.