Globe and Mail: PRINT EDITION

One game: A billion fans

By MARK PALMER Monday, May 27, 2002 – Page W1

TOKYO -- What I know most surely about morality and the duty of man, I owe to soccer," said Albert Camus, the French existentialist who died in 1960. He never expanded on this sweeping pronouncement, but plenty of others have come up with equally grand observations about the world's most popular sport.

Last month, it was the turn of Chung Moon Joon, president of the Korea Football Association, who described the co-hosting of this year's World Cup soccer finals by South Korea and Japan as an "opportunity to mend damaged bilateral ties and enhance exchanges between young people."

It makes you wonder why there isn't a World Cup every summer. After all, hostilities on the front line during the First World War ceased, briefly, for a soccer match in 1914 and the England Football Association recently organized an international game of soccer in Kabul as a means of raising morale in the beleaguered city. But it's still indulgent to claim that soccer has the power of political healing.

What is certainly true is that from May 31 to June 30, vast swaths of the world will be engrossed in a tournament comprising 32 national teams, each competing for the most coveted prize in sport -- the Stanley Cup playoffs multiplied 100 times. During the 64 games, a cumulative television audience for the World Cup is expected to be at least 34 billion. That's more than double the number for an Olympic Games.

In 1998, a billion viewers tuned in to the final match between Brazil and France, far exceeding the nearly 140 million viewers of the Super Bowl each year and more than 20 times that of a Wimbledon tennis final.

"The World Cup is probably our greatest international marketing opportunity," says Kelly Brooks, worldwide sports public relations manager for Atlanta-based Coca-Cola Co., an official World Cup sponsor since 1974. "For most people outside the United States, soccer is part of the fabric of daily life."

Soccer is what almost every small boy outside North America does. For hours and hours. And most of those small boys dream of pulling on the shirt of their national side and scoring a sensational winning goal in front of a billion people. When those small boys become bigger boys, they still dream the same dream. It never dies. And when a World Cup comes round, the passion is given an almighty stir.

Add a few thousand dollops of national pride and you end up with a heady concoction. Here in England, members of the World Cup squad were invited to meet Prime Minister Tony Blair and the Queen.

England will grind to a halt on June 7 when the team plays Argentina in what will be one of the more highly charged games of the tournament. The two countries are bitter rivals.

Qualifying for the World Cup -- unless you are the hosts or won it four years earlier and thus qualify automatically -- is no easy task. The process begins 18-24 months before the finals. Which is why life in Senegal, Slovenia, Ecuador and China will take on a whole new dimension in June. This is the first World Cup for these four countries, a first chance to grace a tournament that has thrown up immortal names such as Pele, Maradona and Johann Cruyff.

No one knows how the drama will unfold. It's a simple game but the intensity will be such that when a team does well, its supporters will feel that everything in the world is different -- and yet nothing will have changed. And when that team loses, it is a wonderful short, sharp lesson in despair.

The stage is set. The gods -- France's Zidane, Brazil's Ronaldo, Spain's Raul, Portugal's Luis Figo and England's David Beckham -- are waiting to make their appearance. Albert Camus is perched in the great stadium in the sky. Perhaps Bill Shankly, a former Liverpool coach, is sitting with him. "Some people think soccer is a matter of life and death," Shankly once said.

"I can assure them it is much more serious than that."
mark.palmer@dial.pipex.com