Why the World cup is far better than the olympics
It is not just that running is a boring sport for boring people. There are in fact many reasons why the world cup epically pwns the olympics.
The received wisdom seems to be that while the world cup can lead to dangerous outpourings of national chauvanism, the olympics is a great festival of international friendship. In fact the opposite is true. Football is too much of a game, too prone to upsets, to represent a serious comparator of national prowess. By contrast, sports like running and throwing a javelin are too straightforward, and to devoid of an entertainment factor to be anything other than such a comparator. Thats why you rarely here of dubious regimes drugging their football teams silly to make them win, despite the far greater public interest. Meanwhile, by the end of the olympics the actual sport aspect has been dissolved into dry as dust medal tables. Since demonstrating WHO IS THE BEST really is of prime importance.
Indeed the olympics is far more a festival for national elites and governments than the world cup. Compared with the recent olympics you will see far fewer OTT spectacles unrelated to the actual game. At the world cup presidents, prime ministers and dictators will keep a far lower profile. And this, perhaps, explains why our government went to such enormous effort and expense to get the olympics over here, while any efforts to bring over the world cup have been seriously half hearted – and all this in spite of the fact that the British public care far, far more about football than how far some long legged loonatic can jump.
Unlike many sports, such as cricket, the spread of football does not reflect the spread of institutionalised power during the 20th century. After all it spread most to Latin America, after most countries had become independent of Europe. Rather, its popularity reflects its unique capacity to generate excitement. And that is why we football fans do not need to go through the motions of formal national parades for the world cup to bring the world together: because the sport itself is sufficient to bring about a genuine cmmunity of feeling. Across the world people will share the same enormous excitement of near misses and great goals.
Bring on the world cup! And may we be deaf to the winging of football haters and embittered scots!
Reader Comments
Also, have you ever noticed that professional atheletes don’t shake hands after races, whereas in more game like sports, and in amatuer atheletics, they do. Something that has always pissed me off watching the olympics.
Must protest though that atheletics is not boring and neither are the people who do it, even if a lot of them don’t smoke.
Good points. But isn’t it also true though that the Olympics gets things built? I’m hoping East London will do a lot better out of it than anything the World Cup would bring in (although the closure of football pitches to make way for it all is tragic). As for the “genuine community of feeling”, for some reason this year (in this country) it seems unusually tyrannous. Loud and white and male and full of it (cf James Corden). Football supporters en masse are terrifying and they’re terrifying on purpose.