Planet Football

July 15th, 2010 | Author: Early Bath Football Gifts

In a break from staring out of the window, Ian at Early Bath (www.earlybath.co.uk), has been pondering what it is that makes the beautiful game quite so beautiful.

First some statistics:

According to FIFA’s 2006 “Big Count” survey, there are 265 million male and female football players in the world. Add on the five million referees and officials and you get a staggering 270 million people directly involved with the game. That’s one out of every twenty-five people on the planet!

And that’s not all! What about those who can’t be bothered to get off the sofa?

In Britain, big games featuring English teams – Champions League Finals and World Cup games – routinely chalk up over 15 million viewers. One in four of every man, woman and child in the country.

Globally, the viewing figures for South Africa 2010 were spectacular. FIFA’s soon-to-be-announced results are expected to show an average of 125 million viewers per game. The final itself is anticipated to have become the second-highest watched sporting event in history, with over 700 million viewers (the highest being the opening ceremony to the Beijing Olympics). That’s over 10% of the world’s population.

Football is the Planet Earth’s “national sport.”

But what is it, precisely, about football that makes it so special?

A few possibilities spring to mind….

For instance, it doesn’t take much to set up a game. A spare pig’s bladder, four jumpers and you’re good to go.

Hand-in-hand with this, the rules couldn’t be much simpler. Even the offside rule. Let’s be honest, considering all those “offside for girls”* diagrams that the newspapers print every four years, have you ever met anyone who after, a two-minute explanation, still doesn’t get it?

And that’s about as complicated as it gets.

*note to lazy journalists: 42% of the TV viewers for South Africa 2010 were female

[rant alert] Going off on a tangent, what about those commentators who think that the away-goals rule is too complicated for us mere viewers to understand? I can close my eyes and hear Clive Tyldesley sparing us the trauma of a proper grown-up explanation with a soothing “The permutations are complex but don’t worry, we’ll do our best to simplify things for you as the evening unfolds”.

What’s wrong with “If it’s a draw the side with the most away goals wins. If that’s the same then it’s extra-time”?

Works for me and, I suspect, the other 15 million football fans in the country [/rant over]

Anyway, I digress…where was I? Ah yes, I was pondering whether football’s simplicity forms part of its huge appeal.

Without the benefit of a three year thesis on the subject, I’m going to say yes. But it’s not the whole story. If it were just about simplicity, we’d all spend our Saturday afternoons watching our heroes doing the 100m sprint. Then grumble/gloat about it in the pub afterwards.

So what else?

Maybe it’s the game’s intoxicating blend of skill and technique juxtaposed with (mostly) controlled aggression? Art plus power.

Yes yes…but couldn’t you argue the same for cricket, golf, tennis, ping-pong? Fine sports all, but not watched by one in ten people on the planet.

Hmmm…how about the intriguing dovetailing of teamwork with individual finesse?

Good point, but what about rugby, American football, hockey, cricket, polo…? Same argument applies to these, doesn’t it?

Could it be down to football’s self-replicating publicity loop? The more popular a sport, the more publicity it generates. The more publicity it generates, the more popular it becomes. Repeat cycle until the back eight pages of the newspapers are devoted to football, even during the close season.

A persuasive argument but one that overlooks the gag reflex, i.e. when something is rammed down your throat, your instinct is to gag. Yet football’s media saturation shows no sign of abating just yet. Check out the back eight pages of the newspaper, even during the close season.

So what do we have? Lots of contributory factors but nothing that sets our game apart from other sports.

So is there anything? Is there one property of football that’s unique, that distinguishes it from all the other noble and worthy sports on which the human race fritters away its spare time?

I reckon there is. And I reckon I know what it is.

It’s the goals. Or rather, the lack of.

Footy’s unlikely USP is the fact that it’s entirely conceivable to stand through four or five hours of the game without seeing your team score. In the rain.

Compare that with other major sports…

• Tennis: A point every 40 seconds or so
• Cricket: Hundreds of runs in a game. To be fair, taking a wicket is cricket’s equivalent to a goal. But, even then, you’re guaranteed to see a fair number of these. Unless you’re snoozing with a newspaper over your head.
• Rugby Union: The last time an international rugby match finished scoreless was in 1964 when Scotland drew with the All Blacks at Murrayfield
• Basketball: A shot on goal just about every time your team gets the ball. And who are the current basketball world champions? Who cares?

By contrast, football’s moments of blissful joy arrive after relatively lengthy barren periods of frustration, disappointment and, quite frankly, boredom.

But why does this matter? Because it’s in our hardware. Watching your side scoring has a profound effect on your brain.

When you see that delicious ripple of the net as your boys take the lead in the dying moments of the game, your brain receives a flood of a cheeky little chemical called dopamine. Dopamine is what’s known as a neurotransmitter and it’s a potent little beggar, producing feelings of happiness that range from chilled contentment to air-punching euphoria.

Of course there are other ways of getting your dopamine hit; ways that don’t involve several hours on a wet windy terrace. You could smoke crack-cocaine for instance. Or you could have great sex. Interestingly, you could eat some chocolate, which has a high concentration of the stuff.

You see the territory we’re in here? When your team comes back from a goal down to sneak an injury-time victory, the joy you experience isn’t similar to a narcotic rush; it’s identical. Just as addictive too.

“So what?”  I hear you cry. “Isn’t it the same for all sports?”.

And the answer is yes. Well…yes and no. My argument – based on nothing more than my own unresearched opinion – is that football’s highs are higher because of their relative scarcity.

To stick with the narcotics theme, it’s the headiness of the first fag of the day versus the grim satisfaction of the chain-smoker.

And that – in my unresearched and uninformed opinion – is why one in every ten of the planet’s inhabitants spent two hours watching eleven Spaniards and eleven Dutchmen kicking and tripping each other.

Finally I’ll admit that, in making my point, I’m being outrageously unfair to many fine and noble sports that – of course – contain moments of intrigue, fascination and unbridled euphoria. Apart from basketball, which is just rubbish.

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