Playing for the Cup

By A.A. Gill, from Vanity Fair

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.

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