France ’98: the Grand Reunion

Move over, Super Bowl. Take a back seat, Winter Olympics. The greatest sporting event on earth is here. Welcome to France ’98! This month, two years of nail-biting World Cup qualifying matches, which saw their fair share of upsets and controversy, will come to a shattering climax. And a spherical, leather-covered, inflated rubber bladder is set to be the focus of hundreds of millions of pairs of eyes for a whole month.
Indeed, outside North America where it is called soccer, and perhaps Antarctica which is not a suitable place to run about in a pair of shorts and a thin shirt, football is probably the number one sport on every continent of the world. Unpredictable, glamorous and extravagant, no other sporting event whips up as much emotion as football where euphoria, flamboyance, tears, frustration and nerve-rattling suspense are all part of the game.
In economic, political and social terms, too, no other sporting event comes remotely near to the World Cup, staged every four years by the world football governing body, FIFA. So highly regarded is the competition that many countries consider it a national disaster if their teams fail to qualify for the final stages. And those who do, of course, are fêted as national heroes. Last December, for instance, Jamaican Prime Minister P. J. Patterson declared a public holiday when the national team’s 0-0 draw with Mexico permitted Jamaica to become the first English-speaking Caribbean country to qualify for the World Cup finals. Meanwhile, Russian President Boris Yeltsin felt so bad that he threatened to disband the national team when it failed to qualify for the event.
And some event it will be! An estimated 35 billion cumulative television viewers from all over the world are expected to watch the event this summer; three billion pairs of eyes will be glued to their TV sets for the final match alone. Therefore, for many political leaders, missing out on the pomp and pageantry of the World Cup can be as singularly disheartening as losing an election.

Just a game?
Football isn’t a matter of life and death. It’s much more important than that! So said Bill Shankley, the legendary manager of the outstanding Liverpool team that dominated European football of the late 1970s and early 1980s. He was only joking, of course, but at a time when unemployment in Britain’s most important port was rocketing and crime was reaching new heights, the local team was one of few things Liverpudlians could take pride in.
Indeed, in Liverpool itself during that period, things were going from bad to worse. The economic policies of the early Thatcher years saw unemployment reach 80% in some parts of the city, an appalling level of health-care, increasing illiteracy as schooling standards slumped, and a frightening decay of inner city areas. Crime was so rife that some districts were classed as no go areas for the police. However, apart from some sporadic rioting in 1981 by crowds of the disaffected local youth - many of whom were more intent on looting shops and throwing Molotov cocktails and other unpleasant objects at the police than on making known their grievances - the voice of protest, although loud, never really threatened the government.
Indeed, some people have taken Shankley’s wisecrack somewhat too seriously. Witness the regular violence, hatred, controversy and corruption which have come to be associated with the sport. Who, having witnessed it, can ever forget the senseless Heysel stadium tragedy of 1985, before the European Club Championship final between Juventus of Italy and Liverpool of England had even kicked off? On one of the blackest days in football history, thirty-nine spectators, mostly Italian, died and 400 were injured when a wall collapsed under pressure from rioting English fans. The irony was that most of those who caused the mayhem in the first place were not Liverpool supporters at all, but assorted hooligans who had made their way to Brussels attracted by the prospect of the violence often associated with big footballing occasions. These so-called ‘supporters’ were people who often left the football stadium without even knowing the result, being more intent on finding opposing ‘supporters’ to fight. This particular final, between Europe’s two top clubs at the time, was supposed to be a showpiece for football, but after the tragedy, few true supporters had the stomach to watch the match.
Even the players are not immune from football violence. When the Uruguay national team was knocked out of the 1990 World Cup, the result was rioting and deaths in Montevideo and many other cities in Uruguay. After the 1994 competition, held in the United States, a Colombian player ‘guilty’ of inadvertently scoring against his own side in a contest with the host country, was shot dead by an irate Colombian ‘fan’. Indeed, in South America where football is seen almost as a religion, guerrilla-type warfare between opposing sets of supporters, stabbings, shootings and deaths are almost part and parcel of the footballing landscape.

Trouble ahead?
In 1990, the Italian organisers awaited the arrival of English football supporters with justifiable trepidation. Whether by fluke or by design, all the England team’s group matches were located on the island of Sardinia, where it was figured that the marauding English hordes could do least damage. This happily turned out to be true. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for last October’s world cup qualifier between Italy and England at Rome’s Olympic Stadium, a match the Italians had to win to ensure a place in France ‘98, and one the English couldn’t lose if they wanted to be sure of their own place. The minority hooligan element of the British contingent succeeded in destroying part of Rome, before themselves being destroyed by baton-wielding Italian police on the stadium terraces. It was a particularly ugly spectacle, witnessed on television screens across the world.
Last December’s World Cup draw in Marseilles produced the strangest bedfellows in football history when the teams from the United States and Iran were pitted against each other in group F. Few nations in the world share such an undisguised enmity as these two. This animosity was born in 1979 when a fundamentalist revolution overthrew the Shah and, with the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini coming to power, 52 American hostages were held for over a year in the US embassy in Teheran, Iran’s capital. A large part of the Iranian public still refers to America as ‘the Great Satan’, and the clash between the two national teams, scheduled for June 21 in Lyon, is awaited with bated breath.

Many of these problems can be blamed on the vast amounts of money that now gravitate around sporting circles, particularly in the case of football. Top players and managers can now command several million dollars each season, but even this is small potatoes compared with the sponsorship money involved, or the sums spent on football betting each week. Small wonder, then, that match-fixing has become one of the sorry by-products of competitive football.
And yet, what other single event on Earth can produce such a string of interesting contests between 32 various cultures and peoples from five different continents (six, if the Australian side had not been eliminated by Iran)? What other contest can bring so many supporters together? Even in this tense atmosphere of competition and rivalry on the football field, each team playing with the sole aim of raising aloft the golden trophy at the end of the competition, a great deal of unity, social intercourse, friendship and, yes, love, can ensue.
And so the countdown begins. The inauguration match between defending champions, Brazil, and the Scottish team, with its thousands of loyal fans and their bagpipes, regarded with some degree of trepidation by those unfortunate enough not to have a set of earplugs handy, will kick off at 5.30 p.m. Central European Time on 10 June, and will be watched by some 2.5 billion viewers across the globe. And from then on a whole array of emotions will be let loose. And so, Welcome to France ’98. Good luck to all participating teams, and the best of enjoyment to all travelling supporters. But please remember, it’s only a game.