World Cup captures audiences everywhere

By Andrew Mell
Western Herald

Unarguably the most important, most-watched and most anticipated sporting event in the world is underway and it seems like we’re finally starting to care.

The World Cup is a highly anticipated soccer contest featuring the 32 best national teams from around the globe competing in a month-long tournament to determine a true world champion.

Hopefully, you already knew that. Despite Americans’ general dislike of soccer, it’s hard to ignore something that is so globally popular, hard to ignore a tournament whose championship game garners some 715 million viewers, or seven times that of the Super Bowl.

In baseball, we have the World Series and other sports, champions are often proclaimed “world champions”, but that is nothing more than a title of egotism because the championship isn’t competed for on a global level.

The World Cup truly does determine the champion of the world.
Non-fans of sports often scoff at the passion and desire that sports fans have, saying that sports are nothing more than guys pushing around a ball, or swinging a stick.

They don’t get it. You could oversimplify anything and make it sound stupid, and sports are far from meaningless.

The passion that the global community has for the World Cup has been a peace engine like no diplomat, regime or administration is able to match. In one previous World Cup, two African nations called a temporary cease fire in a raging battle so that they could watch their favorite sport.

It is entirely possible that sometime later this month North Koreans and Americans will occupy the same place at the same time and do so with a mutual respect, sportsmanship and possibly even a developed friendship.

If the U.S. Soccer team were to play the team from North Korea, they would walk onto the pitch side-by-side, the captains would shake hands and exchange gifts and the teams would play a match that most likely would be clean and courteous.

All our politicians can do is talk about peace and seemingly do almost everything except accomplishing anything.Politically we’re too caught up on certain ideals, our own agendas, and simply refuse to see the other point of view, or meet in the middle.

That’s not to suggest that we appease the North Koreans, or Iranians, or anything like that; obviously they’re dangerous countries who mean the world harm, but there has to be something that would be a little more productive than shouting across the oceans at each other.

Perhaps we could let our soccer players do the talking for us.

The World Cup can be summed up as an athletic, social, global, peace rally. People watch it from small broken down televisions in shantytowns; people watch it from seventy-inch flat screens in posh mansions with private wait staffs.

But at that moment, that moment when their country plays in the World Cup, those people are equals; they have no other care in the world. Those two people, separated by so much politically, socially, and economically would be best friends united in a passion that runs through billions of people on this globe.

So yes, soccer might just be a bunch of guys kicking around a ball, but it is so much more than that. It is a unifier, something that brings people together in a way that no other person or event has been able to accomplish (except perhaps the Olympics).

After playing to a draw with England and Slovenia, the US team is poised to advance out of group play to the elimination rounds if they can win their last match on Wednesday. We have a team that is capable of making some noise at the World Cup, and it should be a blast to watch.

If for no other reason, tune in to the World Cup to see the power and the emotion that swirls around it. And then realize, that somewhere, half a world away, so many other people are doing the exact same thing.

The World Cup has the capability of unifying the world. For the next month at least, that unity will be realized. Hopefully one day, it can be realized permanently. Until then, at least we have sports.

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Posted by kleonard on Jun 20 2010. Filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry

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