An Almost Beautiful Week for the Beautiful Game

PARIS — And so the World Cup madness begins, still the better part of a year before an opening whistle blows in Johannesburg. Perhaps the happiest football fan in the world was here last week, in Paris: President Nicolas Sarkozy, one would imagine, was kneeling in front of his TV, praying France's way to a World Cup birth with a 1-0 victory over Ireland.

To not have les blues in the tournament would be monumental defeat; the last time the frogs missed the tournament was in 2002, four years after they won the Cup, and four years before they made it to the finals once again. It's hard to fathom the horror Sarkozy would face if such a schizophrenic cycle continued.

I was in Madrid last week and met with Fernando Henrique Cardoso, the president of Brazil from 1995-2002. He had watched the night before Brazil played England in Qatar. It was the morning after a game between Argentina and Spain, as well, which took place in Madrid, and was billed as a "friendly" match — without bearing on entry to the World Cup — though few would attest to any level of civility. Cardoso, perhaps the only Brazilian to ever confess a lack of affection for football, recalled the 1994 Cup as he sought election to the presidency. Then finance minister, his wildly successful Plano Real, with a new currency and critical measures to curb the nation's perpetual hyperinflation, was proving insufficient to pull ahead in the race.

His advisers urged him to be funnier, to appear more in shirtsleeves. Despite his efforts, what managed to push him ahead of his opponent was allowing reporters to photograph him watching Brazil on its way to a decisive victory. Wasn't he terrified, I asked, that a reporter would ask him a question he couldn't answer?

"Yes," he confessed with a nod. "But I knew enough, I knew the names of the players and the positions," he said. He brightened, "Ronaldo called me the other day — we're neighbors now and he invited me over for pizza."

Perhaps not a fan, but certainly a man that respects the power of the game.

That his nation's game was played in Qatar attracts attention to another fascinating dimension of the Cup — smaller nations' unquenchable thirst for the international football stage. In Nigeria last week, a sports reporter ardently advocated the president offer a million-dollar incentive to the Mozambique squad against continental rival Tunisia.

Qatar is locked in a competition with fellow oil oases to secure a place in soccer hierarchy. Emirates Airline, based in Dubai, is British football powerhouse Arsenal's chief sponsor; the deal for naming rights to the club's stadium is worth 200 pounds alone, and the airline has increased its sports advertising budget tenfold in the last decade. Qatar is in the running to host the 2022 World Cup, and the kingdom's Aspire sports academy has the built world's biggest indoor venue and perhaps most sophisticated training center in hopes of turning out a World Cup qualifying team in the coming decades.

The week also saw the famed Argentine coach Diego Maradona — known around the world for his days as a player and battle with the pitfalls of the superstar life — banned from contact with the team for two months. After Argentina's qualification for the Cup in October, he told the media to "suck it and keep sucking," among other things; that was rightly sufficient for FIFA to bring down the hammer, apparently.

Yes, such a decisive week — in which teams brawled for the final nine slots in the 32-team tournament — could not pass without at least one more ugly note. In Cairo, the visiting Algerian national team was showered with glass, several players gashed as a result, by Egyptian youths hurling bricks at their bus. In Algeria, Egyptian businesses were victims of reprisals. Though the Egyptian government tried to deny the incident, holding that the Algerian players had broken the glass with a fire extinguisher to attract international condemnation, video emerged from a player's camera that proved condemnatory of the failed Egyptian security.

Such is the intensity, seven months from the first strike, in all corners of the world.

Brian Till, one of the nation's youngest syndicated columnists, is a research fellow for the New America Foundation, a think tank in Washington. He can be contacted at till@newamerica.net. To find out more about the author and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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