On a long July afternoon in 1966, in north-west London, England’s footballers won the World Cup. By the time they beat West Germany, after extra time, with the help of a dubious goal, it was too late for the early editions of the Sunday papers. Only on the Monday was Fleet Street able to register the moment in its full glory. The Mirror, then the most popular daily ever published in Britain, with sales of 5m, knew a piece of history when it saw one. Its front-page splash proudly announced: A BOUNCING BABY GIRL FOR PRINCESS ALEX. Winning the World Cup was not as big as the birth of Marina Ogilvy, the Queen’s first cousin once removed.
The Sun didn’t lead with the football either, preferring a story about a pay squeeze; for weeks there had been a sterling crisis, and the prime minister, Harold Wilson, had loomed far larger than any footballer. Even the two papers’ sports pages, which in those days were tucked inside, went less than crazy. The Mirror had two pages reflecting on the final, the Sun a little less. In the broadsheets, two-thirds of a page did the job, as it had done throughout the tournament. Three months earlier Time magazine had run its famous cover on Swinging London. And yet, even as London swung, and Britain’s bright young things, led by the Beatles, conquered the Western world, it was as if the national mood was still being dictated by Rudyard Kipling: if you can meet with triumph and disaster, and treat those twin impostors just the same…
The vuvuzela is the symbol of the 2010 World Cup. It’s a one metre plastic trumpet, something like the Brazilian corneta, really loud and raucous. At its best a vuvuzela sounds like a fog horn.
Everyone has a vuvuzela. In their tens of thousands, in the beautiful new soccer stadiums, they have the sonic effect of massed rocket launchers, deafening foreign players and commentators. The locals are already deaf. You also hear vuvuzelas blown on the streets everywhere in Cape Town, and in houses, in hotel rooms, on the upper floor balconies of the bars on Long Street as the procession of fans goes by every evening.
Look, can we get this straight, right from the get-go, from the first whistle: It’s football, O.K.? Football. Not soccer. It’s never been soccer. Nobody but midwestern cougars calls it soccer. Soccer is a late-19th-century English-university slang word that’s an abbreviation of “association,” as in “association football,” to distinguish it from “Rugby football,” which, incidentally, is the origin of the game Americans call football, first played by Ivy League toff boys in 1867. In French, it’s le football. In German, it’s Fuβball. In Spanish, it’s fútbol. In Russian, it’s фymбoл. Though, weirdly, in Italian it’s calcio, from the Latin for “heel.” You may, if you really insist, call it “footie.” It also universally, and without contradiction or cultural snobbery, answers to the appellation “the Beautiful Game.”
The football World Cup is, by a country mile, a long hop, an eagle, a furlong, and the whole nine yards, the greatest sporting event in the world, ever. It’s been estimated that more than 715 million people watched the cup final in 2006. By the way, that’s almost 10 times the number that watched the Super Bowl that year. Two hundred and four nations tried to qualify for this year’s World Cup (for 32 spots). To put that in perspective, there are only 192 in the United Nations.
The 2010 FIFA world cup inspired one of the largest consolidated research exercises in South Africa in years. Culminating in a 2009 book, Development and Dreams, the research found the economic benefits of the global tournament had been wildly over-stated but its infrastructure and social legacies would be considerable, said co-editor Dr Udesh Pillay.
Development and Dreams: The urban legacy of the 2010 World Cup pulled together four years of research co-funded by the Development Bank of Southern Africa and led by the Centre for Service Delivery of the Human Sciences Research Council, or HSRC, which published the book. Pillay is the centre’s director.
Today, infographic powerhouse The New York Times has entered this emerging arena as well: their blog “Goal” [goal.blogs.nytimes.com] now features a new data analysis module that delivers detailed football match information in real-time, after which it acts as a detailed interactive archive once the game has finished. A live module also appears on the homepage of The New York Times - Global Edition.
Embodying Dixie offers a critical exploration into how race-based identities are formed in and around the educative bodies of the US South. Using historiographic and ethnographic methods to analyze the pedagogies and practices at the University of Mississippi (more reverently known as ‘Ole Miss’), the interrelated studies within this book bring into focus how transformational episodes such as the US Civil War, the Great Depression, World War II, Brown v. Board, and the Civil Rights Movement—as well as more recent events such as September 11, 2001 and Hurricane Katrina—have influenced the physical and social relations on the campus and beyond.
This book canvases a university defined by a history of slavery, segregation, and exclusion; a university that has in recent years brought international notoriety for preserving symbols (i.e. the Confederate flag or the school sporting mascot, ‘Colonel Reb’), practices (i.e. the ‘Confederate Lawn Party’ or songs of the Old South), and spaces (i.e. campus monuments) of the Confederate South. Through this detour deep into the heart of Dixie, we learn important lessons about citizenship, power, and politics in US cultural life. In sum, Embodying Dixie tells the story of an institution still wrestling with an exclusionary past on its way toward a more inclusive future.
In what seems to be a simple re-skin of the Sprint Widget Mosaic Dashboard, the Castrol 2010 Football World Cup Cup Live Tracker [castrolfootball.com] displays all sorts of real-time soccer trivia and sports statistics about the current tournament. From the “total amount of goals” so far, over the “amount of energy burnt by all players”, to the “number of cards issued”, Castrol claims there a lot of “live insights” to be made through exploring this uber-widget dashboard.
Only days before the start of the World Cup, South Africans seem as anxious about the planet’s biggest soccer festival as they are excited. In a torn country, threats of strikes and uprisings by the poor have put a damper on euphoria. Some groups may use the spectacle to further their own interests.
Peter is a gas station attendant in Springbok, the capital of South Africa’s Namaqualandes region, which is famous for its wildflowers. It’s only a short distance from the border with Namibia, but you get the first sense here of the football fever that’s about to explode across the nation. Hardly any flags can be seen, only a few fans have decorated the mirrors of their cars in the country’s colors, and there aren’t many people passing through with Bafana-Bafana shirts — Springbok is not like the big cities.
From Intelligent Life Magazine
By Imraan Coovadia, in n + 1
From Information Aesthetics
The latest issue of 
From Information Aesthetics
By Karl-Ludwig Günsche, in Cape Town