Kanika Datta: G32 - The great equaliser

Set aside the pure sporting pleasure, World Cup football is a great equaliser

As with every edition of the World Cup football, pundits, fans and commentators will theorise endlessly on why the tournament is one of the most-watched TV events on the planet. Set aside the pure sporting pleasure (which is considerable), here’s another reason to celebrate the tournament: it’s a great equaliser.

The 32 teams participating in the World Cup finals range from some of the biggest and richest nations to the smallest and poorest. But footballing prowess is not proportionate to economic power. Here, it’s talent that does the talking.

In every tournament, teams from, say, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Paraguay and Nigeria, with scanty budgets for training and facilities, increasingly stand a decent chance of beating teams from richer nations (as Senegal did to France in 2002, to quote a prominent recent example).

The World Cup has, in fact, been shared almost equally between Europe and South America, two continents with vastly different trajectories of economic development. Argentina and Germany, old rivals, are in Fifa’s top-ten ranking at number seven and six, respectively. With an embarrassment of talent, both teams are credible contenders to lift this year’s trophy — as they are each time. Yet the German economy, the world’s fourth largest, is ten times the size of Argentina’s and one is a developed country, the other in the ranks of the developing.

Eight of the world’s ten largest economies are participating in this edition of the World Cup. In footballing terms, however, they are by no means top dogs. True, five teams from the world’s ten largest economies figure in Fifa’s top-ten rankings (including Brazil). But troubled Portugal is a Fifa star at number three and has the world’s highest-paid footballer (Christiano Ronaldo) in its ranks. It, however, figures in the late thirties in terms of the size of its economy and now forms part of the infamous PIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain) grouping of indebted EU nations.

Or consider poor, old, bankrupt Greece. It is ranked 13 by Fifa — just one place ahead of the US, the world’s largest economy. When Greece, the world’s 28th largest economy, takes to the field on June 12, it is expected to beat South Korea, which represents an economy more than twice its size (it’s the 15th largest), but 34 places below it in the Fifa rankings.

Most fans will salivate at a Group G match on June 15 between the Ivory Coast, a least developed economy, and Portugal, which, despite its diminutive size, is ten times larger than its African opponent and 129 places above it in the UN’s human development index. But who cares about rich or poor when the sumptuous skills of Salomon Kalou, the Toure brothers and Emmanuel Eboue are tested against Ronaldo, Simao, Deco and Ricardo Cavalho.

Run an eye over the players listed in the paragraph above and you’ll notice that no matter what their nationalities and skin colour, all of them play for the most glamorous, top-dollar clubs in Europe (which remains the epicentre of the industry).

That’s the wonder of the world of football — it grows from strength to strength and has created an equality of opportunity and level of labour mobility that would be the envy of any global conglomerate. It could be argued that talent gets a premium over provenance in any sport — golf, hockey, Formula 1 racing, rugby, cricket. True, but none of them operate on quite the same scale as football and none of them have such low entry barriers.

Indeed, football represents the dictatorship of the proletariat, to use a dated term, in extremis. There are no Oxbridge or Ivy League or, for that matter, any graduates to be found in football teams. Its ranks are filled by factory workers, coal-miners, odd-job men, night-watchmen and so on, who can credibly dream of earning, by their mid-twenties, what investment bankers take years to accumulate (and evidence suggests football is the more stable business). The defiant, bling culture that footballers have created — as hyperbolically portrayed in such serials as Footballers’ Wives — is a reflection of this class triumphalism.

Yet the dynamics of this business are unabashedly capitalist. There is nothing remotely socialist about the way football clubs operate — no affirmative action, subsidies or state intervention — though they are subject to regulation. Many of the African players in Europe perform in an environment of rank racism (spectators make monkey noises and so on), a world away from the politically correct neutrality of the average multinational.

The simple performance-driven profitability of the industry demands that no successful football manager can afford to discriminate on grounds of race or colour. It’s a reality that can turn an Ivorian playing for a club owned by a Russian oligarch into an adored English icon.

Surely, that’s something to cheer about.

PS: Here’s some more World Cup trivia: The 32 countries that will gather at Johannesburg on June 11 for the World Cup’s inaugural ceremony account for almost 67 per cent of the world’s GDP.