It is a beautiful game

In June 1969 a second hotly contested World Cup qualifying match between Honduras and El Salvador was played in near riot conditions, with violence between fans and players spilling on to the pitch. Shortly afterwards the Salvadorian armed forces started to strike targets within Honduras, and what’s often described as “The Football War” broke out.

This incident, which took place over 40 years ago, is often quoted as a counter-example when anyone argues that international football promotes peace and harmony among the nations – yet what’s striking about it is that it’s pretty much a one-off. While there have been innumerable near-riots and many ugly incidents of racial intolerance in club-level football, international games – especially those played between national teams – have been amazingly free of such incidents.

This fact is especially surprising when you consider that the purpose of these matches is to establish rankings among countries – and what is potentially more inflammatory for a thin-skinned patriot than to discover that his father/motherland has been eliminated by a traditional rival or hated neighbour? But that isn’t generally what happens, and the current World Cup provides many examples.

Walking past a bar in Paris yesterday during the France-South Africa match (in which les Bleus were playing for a last slim chance to stay in the competition) I heard a great cheer of triumph from the assembled TV-watchers. Assuming that France had at last taken the lead, I looked in at the screen to check my supposition, and was amazed to see that the goal they had been cheering was actually South Africa’s – the first of the match. This morning’s newspapers offered the explanation that the France team had been behaving so disgracefully and playing so poorly that the fans were hoping rather for a South African triumph which at least would have enabled the host nation to qualify for the next round.

In fact, the World Cup offers a chance for nations to experience themselves, and each other, in quite a different way from the usual economic and productivist perspective of the media. Tiny Slovenia suddenly becomes the equal of the United States, while South Africa sends France back home to lick their wounds. Even semi-pariah nations enjoy their moments of respect and glory: Serbia, the scars of the ruinous conflicts of the 1990s still far from healed, overcomes Germany, and North Korea is able for a moment at least to challenge mighty Brazil.

And for the first time in many years the rest of the world sees North Koreans as footballers like any others, with their families at home cheering them on and their hopes and fears, their challenges and disappointments – rather than as the figures of fun or horror which are usually presented.

The Ivory Coast, normally associated with an ongoing civil war and massive official corruption, meets Portugal, ten times more affluent even in the midst of its debt crisis, and they play a good-humored game which leaves them equal (0-0) in a way which in the “real world” they perhaps never will be.

Isn’t there a glimpse here of a world which might be but which we rarely experience, where people are valued for themselves, not for their material assets or their economic potential, and where passion, skill, teamwork and creativity are enough to extricate oneself from the most hopeless situation? If football is a metaphor for life it’s a very optimistic one, and everyone, winners and losers alike, will go home from South Africa with a little more faith in humanity.