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The World's Game
JUNE 2006
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The World's Game
This month 32 nations will compete for the World Cup of soccer, the "beautiful game" that unites and divides countries around the globe. To celebrate that we bring you excerpts from The Thinking Fan's Guide to the World Cup.
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By Sean Wilsey
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Photographs by Marco Anelli, Grazia Neri
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"Introduction" by Sean Wilsey
"IVORY COAST—The Way to Win Juju on the Field," by Paul Laity
"ENGLAND—Faded Glory: Taming the Hooligans," by Nick Hornby
"BRAZIL—Ballet with Ball: A Love Story," by John Lanchester
"COSTA RICA—Soccer Inc: Marketing Fanaticism," by Matthew Yeomans
"SPAIN—Morality Play: Soccer as Theater," by Robert Coover
"ANGOLA—A Greater Goal: Healing a War-Torn Land," by Henning Mankell
"ARGENTINA—Ode to Maradona: Falklands' Revenge," by Thomas Jones
"CROATIA—Group Therapy: A Nation is Born," by Courtney Angela Brkic
BRAZIL
Ballet With the Ball: A Love Story
By John Lanchester
Why do we fall in love with soccer? What happens? At some deep level the reason soccer snags us is that good soccer is beautiful, and it's difficult, and the two are related. A team kicking the ball to each other, passing into empty space that is suddenly filled by a player who wasn't there two seconds ago and who is running at full pelt and who without looking or breaking stride knocks the ball back to a third player who he surely can't have seen, who, also at full pelt and without breaking stride, then passes the ball, at say 60 miles an hour, to land on the head of a fourth player who has run 75 yards to get there and who, again all in stride, jumps and heads the ball with, once you realize how hard this is, unbelievable power and accuracy toward a corner of the goal just exactly where the goalkeeper, executing some complex physics entirely without conscious thought and through muscle-memory, has expected it to be, so that all this grace and speed and muscle and athleticism and attention to detail and power and precision will never appear on a score sheet and will be forgotten by everybody a day later—this is the strange fragility, the evanescence of soccer. It's hard to describe and it is even harder to do, but it does have a deep beauty, a beauty hard to talk about and that everyone watching a game discovers for themselves, a secret thing, and this is the reason why soccer, which has so much ugliness around it and attached to it, still sinks so deeply into us: Because it is, it can be, so beautiful.
No country tries as hard or as consistently to play beautiful soccer as Brazil. It's an ideological thing. That is why Brazilian players are so loved. Not in South America, of course, where they have the status of a regional sporting superpower, but by pretty much everyone else in the world. In fact, the Brazil soccer team is unique in sports in being an example of a beloved overdog. In general, sports fans, and especially soccer fans, hate the overdogs (Real Madrid in Spain, Juventus in Italy, Manchester United/Chelsea in England). But Brazil, the only team to have won five World Cups, the only team to have won it playing away from its own continent, is loved. So a great many soccer fans have, at the national level, two teams: their own, and Brazil. It is the only favorite that's a favorite.
(John Lanchester is a novelist who began his career reporting on soccer matches. His memoir, Family Romance, will be published next year.)
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