SPORTS: Football Consolidates its Expansion into Asia

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Jun 29 2002 (IPS) - The Federation of International Football Association (FIFA) will also celebrate a triumph of its own when the World Cup comes to a close in Japan Sunday: the consolidation of the expansion into Asia of this traditionally western-dominated sport.

Making new inroads into Asia was the main reason underlying FIFA’s decision to hold this year’s world championship outside of football’s traditional stronghold of Europe and South America.

The United States, which hosted the World Cup in 1994, and South Korea and Japan, which organised it this year, are the big new markets conquered so far.

South Korea’s fourth-place ranking – albeit boosted by several dubious decisions by referees in two key matches – contributed to the success of the initiative to hold the world’s greatest sports event in Asia.

Over the past two decades, FIFA has invested more and more money in its effort to make football the “universal” sport, Gilmar Mascarenhas, a geography professor at the State University of Rio de Janeiro, told IPS.

One example of that are the subsidies granted to Venezuela, in an attempt to gain ground in a country where baseball is the local passion. However, that effort has failed until now, said Mascarenhas, who specialises in research on sports and culture.

Low ticket prices have failed to draw large crowds to Venezuela’s stadiums, and football has not yet caught the attention of local TV stations, he observed.

Nevertheless, the popularity of football has grown around the world like that of no other sport, making it a mega-business that moves flows of money that were inconceivable two or three decades ago, after winning over hundreds of millions of new fans in a number of regions where it was not traditionally strong.

However, the growth of this “sport of the masses” is not only due to the efforts of FIFA, but to national initiatives aimed at bolstering its popularity as well.

The United States, for instance, “imported” famous footballers in the 1970s like Brazil’s Pelé and Germany’s Franz Beckenbauer, while Japan brought in Brazil’s Zico (Arthur Coimbra), who played a similar role in the 1990s, becoming a local idol.

The initial spread of football in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was a byproduct of British imperialism, which was keen on conquering markets for its commerce and disciplining factory workers for its industries, said Mascarenhas.

The process began with the codification of the rules of what was then a new sport, in 1863, after which football spread throughout Europe and the Southern Cone of the Americas.

But it failed to catch on in the United States, which had already invented and enshrined baseball as its national symbol, while expanding it to the Caribbean, Central America and even Venezuela, thus making it an effective barrier against football, explained Mascarenhas.

And in its early years, the expansion of football also ran up against hurdles in India and Pakistan, where the strong British presence had already made cricket the most popular sport, with deep roots, he added.

Mascarenhas said that now, at the dawn of the 21st century, China could become a promising frontier, since there is no sport in the Asian giant that enjoys a monopoly position in terms of popularity. In addition, football has already caught on among women in China, as it has in the United States.

Those two countries and Scandinavia dispute the top spots in the world championships for women’s football.

FIFA’s desire to carry football to every corner of the planet also lies at the origin of the low quality of the refereeing in the world tourneys, which hit a new low in the 17th edition in South Korea and Japan this year, said Mascarenhas.

Selecting referees from countries without a strong football tradition, who are thus not qualified to arbitrate in such crucial matches, is one of the routes FIFA has chosen to get nations to participate in the world competitions, because their national teams are not likely to ever be skilled enough to classify for the World Cup, he explained.

But there is still much to understand about the phenomenon of football and other sports, because research in that area is scarce, due to still widespread academic prejudices, Simoni Lahuda Guedes, a professor of anthropology at the Fluminense Federal University in Niterói, a Rio de Janeiro suburb, told IPS.

The 2002 FIFA World Cup revealed an unexpected level of enthusiasm among South Koreans, as occurred in France, when its national team won the world championship there in 1998, said the anthropologist.

The scarcity of university research makes it impossible to compare the significance of football in different parts of the world, she noted.

At the same time, each World Cup gives rise to heated debates and analyses in the countries where football is a national passion, especially when the national teams lose or fail to classify – a development that “is more interesting from an anthropological point of view,” Lahuda Guedes pointed out.