The upsets in the World Cup reflect the world as a whole

Here’s a list of every country that has ever won the World Cup: Uruguay, Brazil, Argentina, England, Germany, France, and Italy.  Other than maybe Uruguay (who last won in 1950), the list reads exactly like how you’d expect; football mad nations with a gargantuan amount of resources to nurture and develop soccer talent, dominating. And yet, when you look at this past week’s results something odd is going on, power houses like Spain and Germany are losing to teams like Switzerland and Serbia, Italy and England have only been able to  manage draws against minnows like Slovenia and New Zealand, while the mighty French are still looking for their first victory.

Has it just been an outlier of a tournament so far? Possibly, the ball is round after all and anything can happen. But I don’t think that’s it. I think what we’re witnessing is a reflection of what’s happening with the world at large, in which globalization doesn’t just create greater parity on the global economic stage, but on the soccer pitch as well.

This becomes especially evident when you travel overseas, and see for yourself what tools like the internet are doing for people’s lives; whether they are the local merchant or football coach. Like in the small Tanzanian village where internet access allowed a collective of local craftswomen to sell their goods around the world, and later that night, the local bar broadcast an English Premier game live via satellite to a packed crowd, maybe inspiring one of the kids in the crowd to become the next Didier Drogba. Would either of these things have been possible even thirty years ago? No, and neither would the string of upsets we saw last week.

Imagine what life would have been like for a young Tanzanian football coach in the 1980s for example, when he wouldn’t have had anywhere near the technology he currently has at his disposal. There may be a few books available that teach basic football techniques and training regimens, but you’d hardly expect any of that to be cutting edge stuff by the time it found its way into your hands. The rare top flight football match might be broadcast live but you’d be lucky if there was one a week, and there be no way to record the match and review it for further study. And even then, if you managed to buck the odds and create a home grown star, the odds of him ever getting the attention of a top-flight football club would be next to impossible.

Compare that to now, when YouTube clips provide ample footage for both study, and promotion. The training and nutrition secrets of the world’s top athletes are available to anyone with a quarter and access to an internet cafe, and discount airlines provide the means for even the poorest professional clubs to their send scouts to every corner of the world. Just look at the roster of a team like the Ivory Coast: Didier Drogba plays at Chelsea, the Toure brothers play at Manchester City and Barcelona respectively, while Emanuel Eboue plies his trade for Arsenal. Would it have been possible for the Ivorian team to have looked anything like that then? Of course not. 

During my time in Vietnam last year, I was amazed at the number of foreigners playing for Vietnamese domestic clubs. On one particular team, nearly half the squad was made up of Nigerians, Brazilians, and Argentinians (needless to say, this team won the game I was watching by a healthy margin) but more importantly, football in Vietnam as a whole has benefitted immensely. Vietnam, traditionally one of the weaker footballing nations in Asia, recently won the Asian Federation Cup. You can’t tell me the country’s rapid improvement wasn’t at least partially due to the team’s exposure to foreign talent and know-how. 

This phenomenon of course hasn’t been limited to soccer. When the first basketball ‘Dream Team’ stepped on the court during the 1994 Barcelona Olympics, it was considered a privilege just to play against them and lose. Now? Teams like Argentina, Lithuania, and Spain are not only competitive every time they play the Americans, but regularly emerge on top. The NBA has also seen a huge influx of international talent; the best team of the past decade, the San Antonio Spurs, features international players like Manu Ginobli from Argentina, Tony Parker from France, and Tim Duncan born on the Virgin Islands. It stands to reason that non-American teams would no longer be intimidated when playing their American counterparts; they play against them all the time.

As it is right now, in a country like Canada, the country’s top athletes almost exclusively end up on the hockey rink. The 2010 Canadian Olympic hockey team was so stacked that it was entirely plausible that Canada could have fielded two, equally competitive teams. With every David Beckham highlight on YouTube, or Lionel Messi commercial they see on TV, it may become inevitable that a few of those kids strap on soccer cleats instead.