Imagine for a moment you don’t care about sports. Perhaps you’ve referred to games as “sportsball” with a derisive tone. Maybe you mutter “panem et circenses” when you see grown adults swept up in the urgency of chasing a leather sphere around a square patch of grass.
The coming weeks could be tough for you, because the 2022 FIFA World Cup starts on Monday and will dominate the airwaves.
SBS has paid a rumoured $20 million for the rights to host. Football Australia will be spending millions of dollars to pay the players and staff this year. It doesn’t say exactly how much, but in 2018, the last World Cup year, it spent $24 million paying employees, or $20 million if you exclude salaries for senior managers. The World Cup will occupy the minds of the nation and push otherwise important topics to the side.
Should we care because Australia might win? Oh boy, no. Australia only barely qualified (defeating Peru narrowly in a shoot-out) and is given a 0.1% chance of hoisting the trophy. The good Australian coach — Ange Postecoglou — has left. He now manages a European team, while our top-scoring player ever — Tim Cahill — has retired. Even the official FIFA website is dissing us, with the page introducing the team with: “This is not, by any measure, a vintage Socceroos squad”. The best-regarded player is goalkeeper Maty Ryan, which is good because he will be busy.
Our first match (Wednesday morning, 6am) is against reigning champions France, and the net behind the Australian goalkeeper is likely to touch the ball more often than our strikers. If we can prevent the match from finishing with a rugby score line it will be good news.
No, the reason to love the World Cup is not parochialism. It’s the opposite: inclusion. This is a time when the mighty take on the weak as equals. Iran v the United States is a tantalising match. Spain v its former colony Costa Rica is another. France v Tunisia is another example of the same dynamic.
As the next chart shows, the World Cup brings in countries from across the map and across the income spectrum.
When do we ever get to hear about Cameroon or Senegal, for example? They are never in the news most Australians read. Not even in an Olympic year. But in a World Cup year, these countries of 27 million and 17 million people, respectively, can find the eyes of the world upon them. The odds of Senegal winning the World Cup may be small, but they are greater than those of the world’s richest and most powerful country, the USA.
Yes, the World Cup is being hosted in Qatar, a dictatorship. And many of the teams participating are not free — Cameroon has had the same president since 1982, for example. The World Cup brings legitimacy to these leaders, but also inclusion, hope and attention to people the rich world ignores the rest of the time.
Almost half the countries present aren’t in the G20. They are minnows, economically and geopolitically, but with the ball at their feet and their formations in motion, anything is possible.
The favourite to win the World Cup is Brazil, a middle-income country far from global centres of power. Fresh from voting out radical rightist Jair Bolsonaro at its recent election, can the second-largest democracy in the southern hemisphere (214 million people) notch another triumph? The biggest challenge to its chances comes from the fifth-largest democracy in the southern hemisphere, Argentina (46 million).
They may lack economic clout these days, but the South American nations still have something the Europeans would love dearly — trophies on the shelf.
Is the World Cup an important global institution? A waste of time for non-fans? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
