The World's Most Beautiful Game

IF YOU ARE FEMALE OR AMERICAN OR YOU JUST HATE SPORT, this might have made little if any impact on your consciousness but ...

FOOTBALL'S WORLD CUP... (that is soccer-football to you Americans ~ but of course) kicked off about ten minutes ago with South Africa v Mexico.

Crowds of 94,000 are packed into Johannesburg's Soccer City stadium blaring away on plastic horns named vuvuzelas. Detractors claim the cheap "musical" instruments (a post-apartheid South African tradition) sound "like swarms of angry bees" or like "a herd of elephants breaking wind". European TV companies apparently went nuts when they realized the soundtrack to all games would be blighted by this noise and attempted to have the windy trumpets banned. They were not successful and instead label the strange sound the "authentic voice of Africa" ~ haha!

Traditionally soccer is a Big Deal on three out of six continents: Europe, South America and Africa. In recent years the sport has taken off bigtime across Southern and Eastern Asia ~ where the British team Manchester United is said to have fans numbering tens of millions.

More recently David Beckham has done a great deal to raise soccer's status as a professional sport in America.

If you do live in middle-America you might be surprised at the level of passion this Beautiful Game evokes. Imagine the Super Bowl crossed with the Olympic Games and you're starting to get some idea of the sport's ubiquity across most of the planet.

World audiences may exceed TWO BILLION.

According to Reuters, the 2006 World Cup in Germany pulled in 26.3 billion (were 20,000,000,000 of these on another planet? Because there's fewer than 7,000,000,000 people on earth).

Whatever. It's a lot of people.

So crack open a cold beer. Have a blast on a plastic pipe. Click on the telly and enjoy ...

(I'd love to join you, but I will be watching Lindenstraße and Marienhof instead ...)





(ANM. DEUTSCHER INHALT KOMMT NOCH SPÄTER)