12 June

The Roanoke Times, published in Roanoke, Virginia

New York Post, published in New York, New York

16 June

The Press, published in Christchurch, New Zealand

June 17

JoongAng Ilbo, published in Seoul, South Korea

19 June

Politiken, published in Copenhagen, Denmark

20 June

Lance! – Rio de Janeiro, published in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

21 June

Aujourd’hui, published in Paris, France

22 June

The New Zealand Herald, published in Auckland, New Zealand

23 June

Irish Examiner, published in Cork, Ireland

24 June

Correio*, published in Salvador, Brazil

25 June

The New Zealand Herald, published in Auckland, New Zealand

26 June

Neue Westfälische, published in Bielefeld, Germany

28 June

The Times, published in London, UK

29 June

Diario do Comercio, published in Sao Paulo, Brazil

30 June

Asahi Shimbun, published in Tokyo, Japan

1 July

NEXT, published in Lagos, Nigeria

2 July

AD, published in Rotterdam, Netherlands

4 July

La Nacion, published in Buenos Aires, Argentina

5 July

El Territorio, published in Posadas, Argentina

6 July

El Pais, published in Montevideo, Uruguay

7 July

Der Tagesspiegel, published in Berlin, Germany

8 July

La Vanguardia, published in Barcelona, Spain

10 July

Potsdamer Neueste Nachrichten, published in Potsdam, Germany

12 July

El Punt – Barcelona Edition, published in Barcelona, Spain

El Pais, published in Madrid, Spain. 12 July 2010.

And fairly enough, with much of the team also coming from Barcelona and the Spanish team playing a similar style, the Catalan-language daily El Punt proclaims that Barcelona’s style won the world, and notes that six Catalans played in the final.

El Punt – Barcelona Edition, published in Barcelona, Spain. 12 July 2010.

El Pais, published in Madrid, Spain. 12 July 2010.

Courtesy newseum.org

Example: It took the bizarre appearance of Viola — who I still believe never actually existed, and was holographically beamed in by João Havelange onto our television screens to dance in pointless circles around exhausted Italians for the amusement of 94,000 Americans present — to liven up the execrable 1994 World Cup final for 14 minutes, but it wasn’t as if you could ever take your eyes off it anyway. It was still the World Cup final, and it ended with a Divine Ponytail in tears.

And after tomorrow, there won’t be another one for four years. In baseball, Chicago Cubs fans appear to keep filling Wrigley Field and cheerily chugging on based on the vague belief that There’s Always Next Year, even though their team hasn’t won the World Series since 1908 — there’s even a book about this peculiar concept of fan happiness.  But really, it’s not all that peculiar; it’s the mundane existence of following a club team, with next season always around the corner promising to cheer us up a bit. The World Series happens every year and so does the Champions League, etc.

The World Cup doesn’t happen every year, of course. We see the tears of players who know they will never return to this stage again, even at the youthful age of 30, and we weep for them. We weep for our country, knowing another of the relatively few World Cups we might ever witness has passed by again without glory being brought upon us. I was born 13 years after England won the World Cup; statistically, I probably missed my chance to ever see that happen. England is but one of perhaps 30 countries that have a somewhat realistic chance of winning a World Cup in the next 50 years, if I live that long, and there will only be 12 World Cups for them to share. And of course, only seven countries (eight after tomorrow!) have won any of the 18 World Cups played so far: in reality, I’m lucky to come from one of those in World Cup national glory terms. 203 nations entered this World Cup.

But it’s not merely a matter of time and of waiting; the European Championship only happens every four years, too. The latter is fun, sometimes even fantastic, but it’s not the World Cup.

The World Cup is the World Cup because we have made it so (not FIFA, not Nike, not Ronaldo). Because we feverishly anticipate it, dwell on it, and then devour it in one monstrous, global orgy every four years: Twitter has fairly well illustrated the epic scale of this in the past four weeks, the servers themselves succumbing to our obsession, the greatest reality TV show in the history of mankind.

I say all this as a preamble to someone who says it all much better:

If a football match is, in part, a metaphor for a battle, then defeat is a metaphor for dying, and victory is a metaphor for … not dying. I trust that at some stage of your existence hitherto, you have discovered that you are one day going to join the majority. (If not, it’s time to have a word with your folks as to the precise nature of this “puppy circus” they told you Snuggles had run off to join.) We are the only animal equipped with this awareness, and it bothers us. We are programmed to fight our own mortality — by, say, making babies, or taking pictures of each other. It’s a form of madness: a madness that makes us human. But we cheat death in an altogether more basic way: we stay alive. The universe will kill us if we stand still. It wants us to sate its entropic appetite; it wants us to fulfill our fate and return to the chaos whence we came. We inevitably will, of course — that’s what fate means. All organisms may possess a mechanism for self-preservation, but our foreknowledge gives our fear of death a unique profundity. Merely to hold our destiny off for another day, to postpone it until some indefinite point after now, is a triumph and a matter for celebration. If this appears meagre to you; if it appears doleful; defeatist, even … well, you lead an existence either most lucky or most unlucky.

Any sporting contest, especially a competition which gradually pares down its number of participants, simulates this spirit; it ritualises it. The end of the journey is always a step away; annihilation is forever on call. To see each successive phase of a tournament as a step towards its ultimate resolution would not be to miss the point, exactly, but it would be to give it a glancing blow at best. Each stage is more than just an increment. Such is the sense of foreboding in the face of elimination, and such is the prospect of the deep joy of avoiding it, that a match becomes a universe within a universe. It takes on a meaning that, without detaching itself from the “championship” element of the tournament, is self-contained and keener than keen. Thoughts of the sweet hereafter are of limited use. There may be no future after the final whistle. For all you know, this is all you’ve got. A competition is a series of survivals and demises.

I say “a competition”, but the World Cup embodies this most of all. A unique admixture of circumstances makes it uniquely grand, uniquely mad: its globalness; its co-option of the peculiar neurosis of the national football team; its three-year duration and quadrennial period, epic spans in sporting terms (the Henry-triggered meltdown in Ireland was ludicrous in its extent, but it can be partly explained by the fact that 2014 may as well have been 3014 at that point); and so forth. Above all, it is so through the force of an extraordinary consensus; it is so because we (or as great a “we” as can be reasonably imagined) have willed it to be so. The desperate, magnificent vitality intrinsic to sport is lit up by this extrinsic investment. It is heightened beyond a point where it is simply “sport, only more so”; it is alchemically converted into something other.

The World Cup is madness, and so are we.

Photo credit: mfcorwin on Flickr, via a Creative Commons License.

Wouldn’t it, in fact, be awesome to see Sepp Blatter actually hand over a golden pineapple at the end of today’s game?

Potsdamer Neueste Nachrichten, published in Potsdam, Germany. 10 July 2010.

Courtesy newseum.org

Royal Bafokeng Stadium, Rustenburg. United States vs. Ghana, 26 June 2010.

Photo credit: manfrotto tripods on Flickr, via the Pitch Invasion Photo Pool.

BBC Newsnight understands a member of Uefa’s Disciplinary Services Unit – which is responsible for investigating match-fixing – first became suspicious during qualifying rounds of the World Cup.

It is alleged that certain Nigerian players came forward and said their team was vulnerable to manipulation.

On the morning of Nigeria’s first match, he alerted Fifa’s new Early Warning System, set up to look for signs of match-rigging, of his concerns.
German journalist Christian Bergmann also had a call just before the first Nigerian game of the tournament from a Uefa contact who said there were suggestions that “some players from the Nigerian team are actually involved in some form of manipulation”.

In their second game of the tournament, Nigeria were strong favourites to beat Greece and took an early 1-0 lead.

But after just 33 minutes Nigeria had a man sent off and Greece subsequently scored their first ever World Cup goals to win 2-1.

As ever, we turn to Declan Hill for the informed commentary, and he follows up on his earlier concern about the laxness of FIFA’s “early warning system” to look out for match-fixing by commenting that it does little to protect players who come forward:

FIFA’ early warning system is practically useless. They don’t investigate. They don’t protect the players. If you are a whistle-blower and you come forward to expose your fears, don’t expect protection and don’t expect the situation to improve.

And again, as he did earlier in the tournament, Hill makes clear that the root of the problem remains the fact that players performing at a multi-billion dollar sporting event, elite professionals in the world’s richest sport at its apex, aren’t guaranteed to be paid the money due to them because FIFA refuses to pay players directly:

The Nigerian Football Association has been so utterly incompetent for so long that many Nigerians have been desperate to close it down and start again. The Nigerian government got involved. Perhaps more tellingly, the great star Jay-Jay Ochoa pleaded with FIFA not to pay the World Cup bonus to the Nigerian FA. His fear was that the money would disappear before it could reach the players.

The basic scenario that leads to corruption at World Cup tournaments is that many of the national football association are so incompetent they cannot guarantee their players will receive any salary or bonuses for playing in the world’s biggest tournament. Until FIFA stops this exploitation, pays the players directly and establishes a proper investigative unit (as UEFA has) they expect lots of these types of stories.

FIFA’s glitz and riches will be on display this weekend in its showcase pair of final World Cup games. But we should not forget its hesitation in tackling this issue. If we think the failure to deal with the need for technological aid for referees in key decisions until it’s too late is bad, it pales in comparison to the unwillingness to deal with a threat that may well eventually allow a major scandal at a World Cup to unfold due to the failure to take enough preventative action on the threat of match-fixing.

The World Cup, because of the scale of the gambling on it, is the easiest event to hide unusual betting patterns on. And evidence continues to grow that until FIFA takes the action urged by Hill — “pays the players directly and establishes a proper investigative unit” — the World Cup will remain vulnerable to being undermined in a far darker way than just by innocent officiating errors.

Moses Mabhida Stadium, Durban, ahead of the Spain vs. Germany 2010 World Cup semi-final.

Photo credit: hartleyr on Flickr, via the Pitch Invasion Photo Pool.

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.