The Universality of Football (see: Soccer)

I have mentioned to people before in my travels how popular the game of football is around the world (and I call it football because that’s what it’s called by 5.5 billion people on this Earth – power in numbers, people). I’ve played football with locals on an island on Lake Titicaca in Bolivia at 3000m+ above sea level (none of whom spoke English). I’ve kicked the ball around in West Africa, and watched towns and villages shutdown in countries as remote as Burkina Faso when important football games come on TV - and I’m not talking fancy TVs here. I mean a 15 inch black and white TV pulled out onto the street and surrounded by plastic chairs for all the neighbourhood to watch. The conversation went something like this… “What’s that Chubabu (“white man” in West Africa)?”…. You want dinner? … Okay… After the game”. There is no other sport in the world that can do this on so many continents in so many languages.



Most recently the guy I met at the airport in Yangon (hence forth called Ilan) and I met a Buddhist scholar when visiting the Shwedagon Pagoda (google that). He invited us to the monastery he was studying at and when we went to visit him we noticed newspaper cut-outs on the walls of famous football players from the Premiership in England. This was obviously not something I expected to see in the dorm room of monks, but there were several pictures on the wall of Chelsea, Manchester United and Liverpool players. As we walked out of the monastery we ran into novice monks (8-12 years of age) playing football with a small plastic ball in their robes and bare feet in the 40 degree weather. Since Ilan is an avid football fan (he is from Israel but also loves the Premiership) we played for about an hour with the children. Ilan, myself and our Bamar friend (Bamar is the actual term for the majority of people from Myanmar – the British fucked it up, like everything else except football, and called it Burma) played against four gritty and determined 8-12 year olds who eventually beat us 13-11. The amazing thing? the kids come from hill tribes and can’t speak the Bamar language, so not even our Bamar friend could communicate with them. We just played the game as it is supposed to be played and shook hands/high-fived at the end. There is no need to talk when everyone knows exactly what is supposed to be done, and how it is supposed to be played. This is why football is the world’s sport.

To top it all off, tonight half of the men in the city I am in (Bago) are watching the Liverpool/Chelsea game live on TV. Every generator in town (power in Burma goes off as easily as a child flicks a light switch) must be on standby for this game tonight because the restaurants are packed with men hungry for their fill of European football. As I sat eating dinner and watching the locals watch the game (I personally don’t care for football), I started to think about how many people in how many countries on how many continents might people be watching the game? I mean, if most of Myanmar is watching it, are the astronauts in the ISS watching it? And would that make it truly Universal?