Nkhata Bay, Malawi | In this zone in northern Malawi, bordering Lake Nyasa along the southern terminus of the Great African Rift Valley, rates of HIV/Aids infection among pregnant women reach 24 percent. Lack of economic opportunity and education, isolation, alcohol abuse and boredom all contribute to the epidemic s hold in a breathtakingly scenic countryside that lures tourists to well-appointed chalets.
But football for women offers an alternative in which Nkhata Bay Sisters United persist, although they must travel 62 miles round-trip to play many of their opponents in a 16-team league based in Mzuzu.
In a recent report on the FIFA website, captain Marthar Longwe Chinyanja, 29, explains how necessity helped inspire the Sisters formation (“ , 11 Jan 07).
A lot of the girls around here have nothing to do. They don t go to school and they end up going to bars at night and sleeping with men for less than two dollars.
The men promise to help them but the girls end up by getting HIV/Aids. I wanted to make the girls see the light and change. To stop them selling themselves I try to teach them good ways and cure them of these vices.
We need to stand up for each other. We can run and we can play football.
The side early in 2006 gained sponsorship from , a UK aid organization that toils with residents to help start microbusinesses in mushroom growing and organic gardening along with assisting in a local secondary school and building social networks for the elderly and widows.
The group s April 2006 newsletter describes how the team began with seven members, limited to a makeshift dirt field; boys had prevented them training on the area s main pitch.
Fishing, subsistence farming and tourism form the main economic pursuits along the western shores of Lake Malawi, also known as Lake Nyasa. ( | Flickr™) [A]s a group of women, reads the Africa Unplugged report, they can show that they can do more than just feed [their babies], collect firewood and [do the] cooking and cleaning.
They have extended this principle to playing a local men s team. We needed to show we can stand on our own, that we can do what men can do, said Chinyanja of a 2–2 result.
With a link to a county football association in England, Huntingdonshire, Nkhata Bay Sisters gained a set of surplus kit, donned 10 Oct 06 when Africa Unplugged field director Chris Ashton accompanied the side to Mzuzu for a friendly with St Peters.
As the game got under way, the sun was already high in the sky with temperatures reaching close to 90ºF. It started very frantic with both teams coming close; the new girls to the team held their own and were involved in a movement in which they came close to scoring. The scores were still level after 25 mins with the Nkhata Bay goalie making a couple of first-class saves.
Nkhata Bay ended up losing 1–3, but with standout moments such as a St Peters player striking the ball on the half-volley to score from 30 yards.
The women s game appears to be building in Malawi and elsewhere in Africa from the grassroots. University of California–Berkeley scholar Martha Saavedra in a 2004 survey of the continent concludes that women play football in at least 30 African countries and probably more.
African women s football is not invisible, she writes. Furthermore, [media coverage] is not nearly as often marked by surprise or ridicule as in the past, but more often shows respect and furnishes a straightforward account of events. Still, the men s (and boys ) game in all its glory and infamy receives dramatically more attention (“Football Feminine—Development of the African Game: Senegal, Nigeria, and South Africa, in Soccer, Women, Sexual Liberation: Kicking Off a New Era, ed.
Fan Hong and J. A. Mangan [Cass, 2004], 227).
One could say that development of women s football in Malawi, judging by the Nkhata Bay experience, exhibits admirable independence, although facilitated by groups like Africa Unplugged and others. The game s origins in Malawi, known formerly as Nyasaland, date to the influx of football-toting missionaries from Scotland in the 1870s and 1880s. As in South Africa, separate institutions for white and non-white football ensured segregated football as the sport developed before Malawi s independence in 1966.
The women and girls of Nkhata Bay now seek their own independence, via thrice-weekly training sessions and linked classes on child-rearing and fitness. School is free but I don t have money for books so I stopped going, Chikondi Love, 16, tells FIFA.com.
Nobody helped me before but now my sisters in the team have. If I weren t playing I would probably go to the market and fight, argue and drink Kachasu, a potent brew made from maize and sugar. Chikondi, along with Gift Mughogho, is viewed as a possible prospect for one of Malawi s age-group women s teams.
The senior women s side is ranked no. 123 among 140 national teams recognized by FIFA. dc:title="Sisters, united | Like mushrooms, women s soccer sprouts in northern Malawi" The trailer from Matti per il calcio (Mad about Football), released in Italy in Oct 06.
In Italian. (Copyright © 2006 “ ”) Rome | Within the sometimes cynical culture of calcio in Italy, the 99-minute documentary (Mad about Football) offers respite from the latest calciopoli scandal: the dark dealings linking several of Italy s major clubs to a pattern of match-fixing and referee seduction. says the headline above the film review in La Rinascita della Sinistra.
The article suggests the benefits of football in treating the mentally ill and clinically depressed, but also wonders whether the members of Gabbiano FC, the subjects of the movie, recapture some of the joy and life-renewing power that football was meant to provide.
Gabbiano FC shows the professionals how the game should be played and in what spirit, rather than the other way around.
[T]he only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars .
Such are the players in the side created by Mauro Raffaeli, the clinical psychiatrist who in 1993 began working with patients, twice per week, on a football pitch in Bufalotta, on the outskirts of Rome. Co-author of studies seeking psychoeducational interventions on behalf of schizophrenic patients, Raffaeli emphasizes getting those suffering from severe mental illness out of institutions and providing an alternative approach to overreliance on psychiatric drugs.
The delay between production of Matti per il calcio in 2004 to widespread release on DVD late in 2006 was due to familiar problems facing documentary filmmakers worldwide: indebtedness and lack of access to distribution networks.
Thus, Raffaeli hit upon what is called calcioterapia, calcio therapy. Since forming Il Gabbiano as a competitive team within the Dipartimento di Sanità Mentale di Roma, he has worked with some 80 players, more than half of whom have returned to work and cut down on meds (Tom Kington, , The Guardian, Jan 8). Raffaeli emphasizes that football represents an external activity to individuals for whom unseen irregularities in the mind keep them sealed off from normal life, stigmatized and overmedicated within an institutional ghetto.
We were looking to organize something that strikes of normality, and we found in calcio an exceptional instrument for this idea. When I play with the men of Gabbiano I am not in their service, but I feel at the service of men who have found in calcio a space to be well. (quoted in Carlo Gubitosa, , Carta, 16 Nov 06)
No one expresses the feelings of liberation from confinement and low expectation better than the players.
The biographies are extraordinary. Benedetto Quirino, 41, of whom the film s website says that he hears voices and speaks with them, voices that anger or alarm him depending on his state of mind, received a university degree in psychology and hails from a wealthy family. But on the right wing for Il Gabbiano he has found some relief from the inside forces.
When you run out on the pitch, the voices stop, Quirino says. Your opponent is no longer inside you, he has come out and you can dribble around him and beat him.
Sandro Faraoni plays in defense.
Rotund and musclebound, he exhibits the physique of a former presidential bodyguard. He is also schizophrenic, but has taken up painting and poetry during his treatment and also studies the Tao. Marione Palomba, 43, a gifted center forward with a phenomenal right foot, but also a history of drug experimentation and severe schizophrenia, clearly runs the side in the footage available on a recent (6 Dec 06).
When he plays with Il Gabbiano, the film website says, he is no longer in recovery.
Captain Carlo Strappaghetti emerges as one of the philosophers of the players situation, skewering the often false distinctions society enforces between the sane and the mad. For me, he says at one point, the real madness is a completely normal life.
Of the team s passion for its existence on the fenced-in, dirt pitch at , he is quoted as saying in Il Romanista, the daily newspaper covering AS Roma, that ours is the true calcio: the dust, the mud, the goals with the ripped nets. It is above all the desire to be together. It is a healthy calcio—extremely healthy, yes, therapeutic.
Because this calcio has saved my life, in the truest sense of the word (quoted in Mauro Macedonio, , 17 Nov 06).
The lads of Gabbiano FC. (Copyright © 2006 “ ”) As a film project, director Volfgango De Biasi and collaborator Francesco Trento says that Matti constitutes an act of love for calcio.
During production, two video cameras recorded 12 matches that formed the regular season in the seven-team mental-health league. The film provides play-by-play for each match and, for the season-ending playoff, narration from Sky TV commentators for the 2006 World Cup finals, Fabio Caressa and José Altafini.
In 2006, Il Gabbiano went on to win a nationwide competition, with some 50 other teams of mentally ill patients having been created on Raffaeli s model.
On Jan 16, the film and associated book, along with Raffaeli and members of Il Gabbiano, will receive the 10th Altropallone award from , an umbrella group of peace-directed sporting initiatives, including the , or anti-racist World Cup. The award honors actions for solidarity, for clean calcio, against consumerism in calcio and sport, against racism, for peace.
While celebrating these successes and a reuniting of calcio with clean motives, Raffaeli and assistants likely will acknowledge the importance of staying power.
Players and caretakers have worked more than 10 years for the recognition and must continue into the future. The filmmakers quote from Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano s own citation, in Las palabras andantes (1993), of Argentine director and poet Fernando Birri:
Utopia is on the horizon. I take two steps toward it, and it retreats two steps.
I walk ten steps and the horizon moves ten steps further. However much I walk, I will never reach it. What then is utopia for?
It is for this: for walking.
dc:title=" Mad about football | Tackling the stigma of mental illness through calcio, cinema" Rawat Parbchompoo of Thailand contends with Aung Cho Myint of Myanmar, in foreground, at the Asian Games in Doha. Thailand defeated Myanmar in this men s doubles final of sepak takraw, two sets to nil (21–17, 21–15), on 13 Dec 06.
(© 2006 DAGOC) Doha, Qatar | In the family tree of football variants, cuju begat chinlone begat sepak raga begat sepak takraw. While this genealogy may be speculative—less formalized and less freighted than that in the first chapter of Matthew—the importance is that the stylized kickball game of imperial China has found expression in the modern era.
Previously we have discussed chinlone (see ), or cane ball, the noncompetitive, hacky-sack-like juggling of a rattan ball in a circle of peers.
Practitioner Greg Hamilton, director of the critically lauded documentary , describes the Burmese game in an interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. as a fusion of sport, dance and meditation.
The Irrawaddy magazine, produced in Thailand by expatriate Burmese, features chinlone in its January issue (Geoffrey Walton, ), reflecting on the success of Burmese athletes at the recent Asian Games in Qatar.
Athletes from Myanmar won two silver and three bronze medals in the sepak takraw competition in Doha. A blend of the Malay and Thai words for kick and ball, sepak takraw is the competitive, footvolley permutation of chinlone, although an earlier version, called sepak raga, was played in the Malay Peninsula, also with a ball of rattan.
Solo and team chinlone master Su Su Hlaing supports her family through her performances which has enabled her to send her younger sisters and brother to school and university, says the Mystic Ball website.
Sir James George Scott, credited with bringing association football to Burma (see our of Andrew Marshall s book The Trouser People), comments in a chapter of his book The Burman: His Life and Notions (1910) on native games such as chinlone and gonnyinto, a sort of full-contact jumping contest.
Curiously enough, taking gônnyinto for mere childishness, most foreigners look upon Burmese football as a game. This is certainly not the case in so far as a game is a striving between one or more competitors for supremacy.
There are of course different degrees of proficiency, but one man cannot be pitted directly against another to see who is the better player, as you do with two lawn tennis or racket players. Primarily chinlôn, as it is called, is simply designed to exercise the body, to restore elasticity to the back and limbs cramped by sitting, reading, or writing, or even by playing chess or gônnyinto. The ball is composed of wicker-work, strips of rattan interwoven in bands so as to leave a number of pentagonal holes, and is about four inches, or a little less, in diameter.
It is extremely light, and the object is to keep the ball as long as possible in the air without touching it with the hands. Thus a single individual may play it all by himself, or there may be a circle of players who catch the ball as it comes round their way, keep it up as long as they can, until an ill-judged stroke sends it away from them to somebody else, who proceeds in a similar manner.
The Irrawaddy quotes the Scott selection, adding that nothing much has changed in Burma related to choices in recreation.
[G]roups of players can be seen in the back streets of Rangoon and dusty rural villages punting the wickerwork ball about for the fun of it.
Hamilton pursues chinlone, seeking the spiritual benefit, rather than the volleyball-type scoring of sepak takraw. The latter has been a competitive sport at least since the 1965 Southeast Asian Games.
Its promoters envision a promising future. At the website of the 15th Asian Games word comes of an to petition for inclusion in the Olympics. Its lure comes from the mesmerizing acrobatics—players executing bicycle kicks and landing back on their feet—and, organizers say, from the multiracial appeal across Asia.
Abdul Halim Bin Kader, secretary-general of the International Sepaktakraw Federation, sounds like the minds at FIFA. We are also going to introduce a new ball, a new-generation ball, that will be an improvement on the 100 percent synthetic product currently in use, and this will be used for the first time in the first Asian Beach Games in 2008. dc:title="Mind over rattan | In a meld of meditation and footvolley, the Burmese excel" The reply from the Iranian Sport and Recreation Organization, written in Farsi and received Nov 18.
Queries were submitted to Ahmadinejad s website on Apr 26. Tehran, Iran | With translation help from Portland, Oreg.-based writer and radio host Goudarz Eghtedari, we learn from Iran s sporting authority that preparations are being made to facilitate coed attendance at football matches despite an ongoing ban by clerics.
Acknowledging that the presence of women and all sections of the society at sport events will have some positive psychological impact on athletes, the Iranian Sport and Recreation Organization writes in reply to questions submitted by the Global Game in April that measures are in process to make sport complexes physically ready for this coed attendance.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad instructed the sporting authority on Apr 24 to lift a ban on women s attendance at men s football, part of a broader gender segregation in place since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Certain prejudices against women have nothing to do with Islam, Ahmadinejad said at the time.
Unfortunately, whenever there is talk of social corruption, fingers are pointed at women. Shouldn t men be blamed for the problems, too? Clerics, however, who are the ultimate authority in Iranian political life, within two weeks had reversed Ahmadinejad s action.
In the reply to the Global Game s queries, the sporting authority did not specify how stadia would be modified to accommodate women. The plan in April, according to media reports, was to offer separate seating areas by gender.
Women s participation in sport, including football, has not been in question.
There is no prohibition for women s participation in any lawful sport in Iran, writes the sport organization. A national women s team competes in regional tournaments, including the West Asian Football Federation Women s Championship in the fall of 2005. The team, however, is not recognized by FIFA.
The preferred form of the sport, since women s soccer was introduced in Iran in 1998, is futsal (see ).
Eghtedari, host of on in Portland, writes that segregation is the problem for female athletes, and that they are not allowed to take part in international matches with males in the audience limits their potential for advancement.
A still from Panahi s feature Offside shows one of the girls detained after trying to sneak into Azadi Stadium.
Jasper Rees of the Daily Telegraph calls Offside one of the most compelling films about ordinary football fans every made (“ , 2 Jun 06). Women s rights activist Mahboubeh Abbass-Gholizadeh, whose leg was broken in Jun 05 as part of a demonstration among women seeking entry to a World Cup qualifier, concurs in an April with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
Under the current conditions—in which a woman who wants to travel needs her husband s permission, in which academic places, universities, scientific locations, and recreational places like coffee shops are segregated—women or young girls cannot easily gain access to public places.
And this segregation shows that we cannot say that women and men use public places equally.
Abbass-Gholizadeh sees the admission of women to football matches as a stepping-stone to other reforms. Sport seems a potent area for challenge of cultural and political norms.
Women have participated in large public celebrations after Iran s World Cup successes in 1998 and 2006. Rally car driver Laleh Seddigh—called the little Schumacher —has implicitly challenged the male ruling establishment through her victories. In October, the 2004 national champion was barred from participating in a race.
Organizers cited security problems.
Iranian director Jafar Panahi s film Offside has been touring the festival circuit to acclaim. The quasi-documentary about women trying to sneak inside Azadi Stadium to see Iran s World Cup qualifier—art imitating life—has been banned from public theaters in Iran (see a concerning one of the women, who are detained, trying to take a halftime toilet break).
To Panahi, in an interview with website Open Democracy (“ , 6 Jul 06), restrictions on women s attendance are an unwritten law ; there is no written ban. As women have done in Iran in order to experience aspects of life denied to them, Panahi s protagonists must disguise themselves as boys in order to sneak past a security detail.
I believe that it is the greatest insult to women that they have to deny their identity as women and have to dress as men to take part in society.
So yes, there is humour, but it is bitter humour. You may laugh at it, but nevertheless you feel very sad that women have to deny their femininity to take part in a function where men can take part.
dc:title="Clerical error?
| Iranian officials say coed attendance remains possible, despite sharia ban" Marta flashes the FIFA Women s Player of the Year trophy on arrival in Rio de Janeiro on Dec 20. (Wilton Júnior | AP, via Agência Estado) Dois Riachos, Brazil | Marta Vieira da Silva, proclaimed by FIFA on Dec 18 as the best player in women s soccer, has been on the road for much of the past six years. Beginning at 14, when she followed a path from the nordeste to Rio de Janeiro, seeking opportunity with Vasco da Gama, she has played around the world for age-group and the full Brazilian national team and now, professionally, for Umeå IK in Sweden.
The journey took her to the Zurich Opera House last Monday night, welcomed by women in heavy mascara and period dress as part of a tribute to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, back to Rio on Wednesday, to a firetruck-led cavalcade in Alagoas capital Maceió on Thursday, then home to the Sertão scrubland for a holiday respite.
Yesterday, Dec 27, she had foot imprints taken for the hall of fame at the at the Estádio Rei Pelé in Maceió (see from Globo.com).
Such jarring intersections must be common for the 5-foot-3 (1.6m), left-footed playmaker. Already, at 20, she has a worldly bearing and pulls the prodigy s trick of seeming older.
Her story has been pieced together in English-language sources, from which one can skim that, in a provincial town in Brazil s Northeast, Dois Riachos (meaning two streams ), she battled from as young as 7 for her right to play her tricks in the street games with the boys (Rob Hughes, , International Herald Tribune, Dec 19).
dc:title="’Tis the season for tears | The extraordinary, untold story of Marta Vieira da Silva" Eventually, this presepe (crèche) will include the infant Jesus, who will have plenty of company. The roster of those bearing good tidings includes former FC Napoli star Diego Maradona (lower left), FIFA World Player of the Year Fabio Cannavaro, Ronaldinho, and other figures, not necessarily to scale.
(“ ”) Naples, Italy | Including figures from the world of football in the holiday-time presepe could not be sacrilegious, as football in Italy certainly takes on the characteristics of faith. After all, Tarcisio Cardinal Bertone, secretary of state for the Holy See, caused a fuss earlier in the month by announcing creation of a new football tournament for candidates for the priesthood, , and extemporizing that the Vatican had ambitions to challenge in Serie A (see ). He has since retracted the statements about a possible move to professionalism.
I was only joking, the cardinal said.
As further evidence of the interpenetration of football and faith, author of weblog finds the above tableau on what is known colloquially as Crib Street, Via San Gregorio Armeno in Naples, the main avenue of the Neapolitan crib industry. [T]he presepe doesn t necessarily have to have a religious theme, she writes.
Some presepi can simply represent country scenes or village scenes, or, as shown, the coiled tension in the head of France midfielder Zinédine Zidane as he bears down on the chest of Marco Materazzi.
The field already is crowded in this scene, awaiting placement of the Christ figure—perhaps as intermediary between the two World Cup antagonists? Jane Ure Smith writes in the Financial Times that presepi at their 18th-century zenith occupied entire rooms (“ , Dec 23).
Secular motifs also began to intrude.
The baby Jesus was sometimes hard to spot since the story of his birth is just one of many played out in a complex landscape in which certain elements were de rigueur. In addition to the holy family, the angels, shepherds and animals, a classical ruin was a standard ingredient, along with a band of musicians and an inn.
The scenes were filled with recognisable contemporary social types—men and women from all walks of life; beggars and dwarves had a special status. The three wise men were typically joined by Turks in Ottoman Empire dress and other richly clad Asians and north Africans, reflecting a fascination with the Orient.
Adding Zidane and Materazzi or other footballers to the pastoral scene would illustrate the tradition s tacky, modern-day incarnation, in Smith s words.
However football intrudes on your holiday, please accept our thanks for reading on for another year. dc:title="Butting in on Christmas | Zidane, Materazzi herald His coming" With the Turkish foreign minister and Istanbul governor paying homage, the body of Ertegün is laid to rest on Dec 18. (Osman Orsal | AP) Istanbul | New York Times popular-music critic Jon Pareles refers in the opening paragraph of his appreciation to the sheer improbability of Ahmet Ertegün s career ( , Dec 16).
A reading of Ertegün s life, even a superficial reading, demonstrates the often covert international influences on seemingly indigenous American art forms—on soul music and rhythm and blues, in Ertegün s case—and on American soccer.
Ertegün s death on Dec 14 at 83 as well as the death a day earlier of Lamar Hunt, 74, meant the loss of two men whose interests and largely beneficent wielding of money and influence beginning in the mid-1960s provided momentum for a moribund sport.
Hunt, the son of billionaire oilman Haroldson Lafayette (H.
L.) Hunt, has been American soccer s ubiquitous presence since a terrace-based encounter with Shamrock Rovers in Dublin in 1962 and his viewing, with other Americans, of the BBC broadcast of the 1966 World Cup final from Wembley Stadium (Frank Dell Apa, , ESPNsoccernet, Dec 13). Andrei Markovits and Steven Hellerman in Offside: Soccer and American Exceptionalism (Princeton, 2001) deliberately choose ubiquitous to characterize Hunt s involvement.
For one, Hunt seemed attracted to upstart projects and mixing in the alphabet soup of nascent sport leagues. In 1959, he joined several prospective team owners to create the American Football League, a rival to the burgeoning popularity of the NFL whose 12 franchises had proven a closed shop. The AFL would launch with eight teams the following year, before merging with the NFL in 1970.
Four Super Bowls —a name suggested by Hunt—were contested between the two leagues, with Hunt s Kansas City Chiefs winning the last between the AFL and NFL on 11 Jan 1970.
Chiefs quarterback Len Dawson, whose name was linked to a federal gambling investigation five days before the game, helped guide the side to the upstart AFL s second straight victory over NFL opposition in Super Bowl IV. His name was later cleared.
Almost simultaneously to the heated AFL-NFL wars, Hunt, as owner of the Dallas Tornado, joined the leadership of the North American Soccer League, a quickfire merger of two leagues—the National Professional Soccer League and the United Soccer Association—that launched in the spring of 1967 to fill a soccer void. In just two years, however, club soccer s presence in America had dwindled to five professional teams. The league s survival, according to Markovits and Hellerman, until the Cosmos founding and the infusion of overseas talent was due to league commissioner Phil Woosnam and Hunt, who brought the credibility of the Chiefs 1970 championship.
The presence of Hunt, a highly respected businessman from an extremely wealthy family, gave the shaky league its sole anchor of legitimacy and hope. Yet, highlighting the ephemeral nature of professional soccer in America and the completely unconventional—even weird—manner of building its teams, Hunt s Tornado embarked on a global odyssey that carried the team to twenty countries, playing forty-five games of which it won ten, lost twenty-seven, and drew eight before the team had played its very first game in Dallas. (165–66)
The Dallas side folded in 1982.
No NASL team ever made a profit. Yet more important than the unworkable business model was the investment that Hunt and others had made in developing a nationwide awareness of the world s most popular entertainment. [G]reater numbers of American youth and, notably, American women, write Markovits and Hellerman, began to take up the sport as the saga of the NASL wound down.
While the recently released film Once in a Lifetime emphasizes the Cosmos excesses and glamour, soccer found its form in America in open fields, as a game for girls and boys who might not have found comfort in the more indigenous sports.
Columbus general manager Mark McCullers says the embodiment of [Hunt s] legacy is Crew Stadium, pictured on 29 Apr 06. ( | Flickr™) Hunt s place as soccer s guardian angel —the words of former FC Dallas (née Burn) general manager Andy Swift—became assured with his sustained interest in the sport through the 1994 World Cup finals and with the Hunt family s ownership of three Major League Soccer teams in Columbus, Dallas and Kansas City.
(The Kansas City Wizards were sold in August to local owners.) Perhaps Hunt s most vital contribution to the American club game was seeing, from his study of stadia abroad during quadrennial trips to the World Cup finals, the ingredient offered by the game s surround. The first American arena constructed for outdoor soccer, Columbus Crew Stadium, rose after Hunt persisted through two earlier denials in 1997 and 1998 (Shawn Mitchell, Hunt Saw His Vision of Soccer Come True, Columbus Dispatch, Dec 15; not available online).
These investments in concrete, made also in stadia in the Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas and Denver areas (Toronto, New York and Washington, D.C., to come), show that soccer has established a physical as well as a cultural presence in its last frontier.
I have no doubts that [soccer] will be a major sport in the United States, said Hunt in 2002, although he might have had reason to employ the present tense.
I m probably not going to live to see that day because Americans are a little afraid of getting interested in something at which they re not very good. [W]e ve made huge strides since the 1990 World Cup, USA ’94, and obviously since ’98.
Unfortunately, those strides only register with the public once every four years. But I have no question that we re going to see the sport become a major success in the United States, with high attendance at club games.
Markovits and Hellerman emphasize Hunt s contribution toward a global perspective among the next generation of soccer investors, a cogent sense that soccer is the world s only truly global team sport and the world s most popular form of entertainment (185).
Born in Istanbul, the son of the one-time Turkish ambassador to the United States, Ertegün s international credentials are more immediately apparent. Due to his father s posting, Ertegün found himself in Washington, D.C.
, by the mid-1930s, and one imagines him plying the city s U Street corridor, the home ground of Duke Ellington, as well as listening to jazz music at desegregated soirées in the Turkish Embassy. Social gatherings in the capital still were segregated, as well as housing, schools and shops (see ”).
Ahmet (left) and Nesuhi in the Turkish Embassy record room, sometime in the 1930s.
(William P. Gottlieb Collection, Library of Congress Prints Photographs Division) Ertegün earned his undergraduate degree at in Annapolis, Maryland, a unique American college based on a great-books curriculum in literature, philosophy, theology, political science and history. Three years later, in 1947, with $10,000 in start-up capital Ertegün created Atlantic Records and would cultivate his early exposure to jazz and gospel music through the business, signing artists such as Ruth Brown, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett and, later, Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones.
His founding of the Cosmos, partnering with brother Nesuhi, had origins in the label s acquisition by Warner Communications. According to the account in Once in a Lifetime, Nesuhi remained in the fold only after convincing Warner CEO Steve Ross to invest in a New York NASL franchise that would become Cosmos.
Pareles in his New York Times appreciation emphasizes that an interfaith coalition of the Muslim Ertegün, African American musicians rooted in the church and Jewish producers helped forge a new direction in American popular music.
A similarly offbeat blending of these members of the Turkish diaspora, glad-handing American moguls, an iconic Brazilian (Pelé) and elite European footballing talent created a media burst that for a period made North American soccer palatable for mass consumption.
But beyond such flash, Hunt s and Ertegün s connections to a wider world facilitated the humble gift of a kicking game. dc:title="Ahmet Ertegun and Lamar Hunt | Adding spice, foreign and domestic, to American soccer" Important resource covering an underreported region.
Gary Pritchard, of the northwestern Welsh island of Ynys Môn, travels with the Welsh national team. In Welsh. Two dudes discover the passion of Brazilian futebol.
Dedicated to the world of football seen from the perspective of its fanatics. Occasionally includes items on women s football. In Spanish.
Harvard s Berkman Center for Internet Society spotlights bridge blogs, sites that help explain unfamiliar cultures. Frequent posts on football. Entertaining Web log that surveys music and the place of Zlatan Ibrahimovic in Swedish culture.
In Swedish. An attempt to kindle interest in Kenyan soccer starts small, aims big. An assortment of provocative material, some on football.
Some posts in Finnish. Web log of Atlanta Journal-Constitution soccer writer Wendy Parker. Occasional posts on soccer, tracking the sport s place among the rival football codes.
Now the ref dishes it out. Interesting chronicle of game situations offering rich insights into human behavior. All aspects of Ankara football culture by an expat Australian, including accounts of goalposts in urinals.
Devoted to the so-called losers in sport, with a section on football. Houston Chronicle staffers Joe Conway and Bernardo Fallas write, in English and Spanish, about the sport on both sides of the border. Occasional entries on football in Lesotho.
Free spirits who chronicle their journey—and that of a ball—from Battersea Park in London to the World Cup finals. Visually stimulating, humorous, Switzerland-based browse through football s eccentricities and ephemera. In German.
Sheffield, England, group provides a resource library and encourages participation in football from minorities and women. Home for the homeless questions in sport. From Copenhagen, advocates for sports journalists and improvements in sports coverage.
Atlanta-based group emphasizes positive choices in bringing soccer to urban areas across the USA. Organizers of the Homeless World Cup. Based in Berlin, the organization acts as a clearinghouse for information on grassroots football worldwide.
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