World Cup Fever (by Thom)

I’m the first to admit it: I don’t get soccer. Or football, füt, or whatever else it’s called here. I see a lot of it in Mali, though. In the US you might see kids playing street hockey, basketball at the park, or a pickup game of baseball. Here there is only one sport competing for kids’ interest: soccer. The more I see of it, the more I think I understand why it’s not as popular in America. Still, you cannot deny it’s impact here. You might have heard the World Cup is now going on in Germany. Mali doesn’t have a team in the competition, but people here are still very excited about the Cup. Cote d’Ivoire is playing; so is Togo (whose coach just quit), Ghana, Angola, and Tunisia. Those first three countries are all from West Africa, so there is a lot of interest here. It’s also kind of funny. Mali has a competitive relationship with Cote d’Ivoire that’s kind of similar to the relationship between Ohio State and Michigan, or Florida and Florida State, or Nebraska and Oklahoma. I think you get the idea. I can’t really tell if Malians want Cote d’Ivoire to win and represent West Africa well or lose because, well, they’re Cote d’Ivoire. I was reading about the World Cup online and came accross this interesting tidbit regarding the Cote d'Ivoire team:

In many parts of the world football evokes great passions and plays an important role in the life of individual fans, local communities, and even nations; it is therefore often claimed to be the most popular sport in the world. ESPN has spread the claim that the Côte d'Ivoire national football team helped secure a truce to the nation's civil war in 2005. By contrast, however, football is widely considered to be the final proximate cause in the Football War in June 1969 between El Salvador and Honduras. The sport also exacerbated tensions at the beginning the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, when a Red Star Belgrade-at-Dinamo Zagreb match devolved into rioting in March 1990.

Anyway, I’m finding this World Cup time to be interesting. People are leaving work early to watch their matches, they’re waving flags from their cars, and, in general, everyone’s got World Cup fever. Last weekend I actually watched part of a soccer game. I’m hoping to figure out what it is about this game that people love so much before it's all over.

By the way, in case you were wondering about other popular sports here, foosball is HUGE!