They call soccer the beautiful game, and often with great reason. The game can be taken in so many different ways that create opportunities for magic to happen at the feet. There are freestylers that work the ball with such speed and skill it seems inhuman. There are the analysts and the game scholars, these are the ones who become the announcers that narrate the wonderful moments on the pitch as well as coordinate the players by the touchline as managers. Finally, there's the magicians that take the pitch all over the world, representing the world’s finest clubs and countries. If you take away the sport specific language, any sport can have things such as these, but fútbol has a magic unlike any other. Fußball is the game of the people all over the world and is by far the most widely beloved on Earth. In the grand scheme of things though, fotboll provides a link for the world and shows itself as an interesting look into the human psyche.
The holy grail of calcio is the World Cup. Every 4 years, after a long and grueling qualification process, the best 31 of 208 men’s national team duke it out for the crown of the best futeboll team in the world. This single event brings people together like few other, as seen by viewership statistics published by FIFA. According to FIFA, approximately 3.2 billion people across the world tuned in to watch the month-long tournament in 2014. To be put in perspective, the Super Bowl, football’s greatest spectacle got 160 million to view in 2014. Yeah, futbola really is that big. Inherent in that, however, is the fact that all eyes are put on that since 115 by 74-yard pitch. Think about it. You’re in the same passionate struggle as half the world! That’s something that I find so alluring about this tournament. Billions of people the I will never know are locked in the same back and forth struggle to get a ball in a net. It sounds so simple but it’ s a link that is palpable in the passion thrown into the game. You see people at stadiums exulting in excitement over goals, or crippled in crying fits over getting scored on. It’s a moving display of emotion that you feel to some degree. That kind of emotional link is an incredible feeling, something that is rarely found in any other aspect of life, even rarer still when it’s something so relatively lighthearted.
Further, the sport has such an interesting allure. It’s a game that is spent in a constant battle back and forth to gain the defining score. The word constant isn’t taken very lightly in this situation either, this is 90 minutes of pure grinding up and down the pitch, struggling for that edge that’ll give you the title or trophy. One small mistake could define the rest of the game, and by consequence, history’s memory. What greater example of this than the famed Maracanazo. The goal in the 79th minute gave Uruguay the edge over Brazil in the 1950 World Cup Final hosted in, you guessed it, Brazil. This was the first time the World Cup was held in the soka loving nation of Brazil, and their dreams of home-field glory were ripped to shreds with one run up the field. Just like that, a dream fell, but all in fair play of an honest game.
It’s this kind of intensity that makes putbol the game of the people. Few other games reach so many people and touch them emotionally as this. Futbol is the universal game, the language of the feet, the game for the masses cross the world. It brings together people in shared emotion, until the blow of the whistle. That kind of worldwide reach is unparalleled and that’s pretty cool, don’t you think?
