Opinion: Sunday Current: Goooal-obalization!
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| Ready for some futbol? Brazil’s Ronaldo last week (Getty Images) |
With soccer’s World Cup just days away, Times staffers looked at the sport’s global reach in Sunday’s Current. Editorial pages editor Andres Martinez checked out the heavyweight fight in China between basketball and soccer and what it means for the fortunes of U.S. professional sports elsewhere:
According to independent marketing surveys cited by Fischer, 33% of the Chinese population are ‘avid’ World Cup fans and 30% are ‘avid’ NBA fans. But among those ages 15 to 24, the NBA counts more avid fans by a similarly narrow margin. As Fischer points out, it isn’t even a fair contest because the NBA is a regular sports league and the World Cup brings together national all-star teams only once every four years.
China is a bright spot in a largely anemic colonialist record for American sports. U.S. pop culture may reign supreme around the world, but the troika of our games — basketball, baseball and ‘American’ football — hardly reigns supreme anywhere else, which is why we console ourselves by calling the Pittsburgh Steelers and Chicago White Sox ‘world champions.’
Mexico City correspondent Reed Johnson explores the political futbol of how Mexico’s World Cup soccer fortunes will affect the upcoming presidential election:
In World Cups past, the Mexican team, cursed with repeated bad luck, has performed in valiant but underachieving fashion. But this year’s team has aroused high hopes. Its controversial Argentine coach, Ricardo La Volpe, has practically guaranteed that his squad will advance at least to the tournament’s quarterfinal round, just a couple of days before the presidential election. This is where the theorizing gets fun.
Paris staffer Sebastian Rotella profiles Zinedine Zidane, the hard-working, soccer-playing son of an Algerian immigrant who could ‘help decide the survival of a French government endangered by unrest, scandal and political and economic crises’:
Like a reluctant gunslinger accepting a last showdown, a beloved statesman returning from exile, he will play in this World Cup before he retires for good.
Once again, the story will be bigger than sports. Until 1998, the French middle class tended to snub soccer in favor of such genteel pastimes as tennis. The immigrant working class often rooted for teams from family homelands.
But Les Bleus, as the blue-shirted national squad is known, have united both worlds with the kind of passion that can topple rulers and start wars in wilder, less Cartesian countries.
Tokyo bureau chief Bruce Wallace tracks the cleat-marks the Croatian team planted in a small Japanese town at the last World Cup.
Sports-page provocateur T.J. Simers scoffs at soccer’s claim to world domination:
Unless it’s the Yankees against Boston in June, there’s not much to get excited about. And as I understand it, only seven countries have won the World Cup Championship since 1930, so unless it’s Brazil versus Germany, what’s the point?
Editor’s note: Boston will play four games against the Yankees in New York starting Monday. The World Cup starts Friday. Fans of both sports will be spared a Solomonic choice.