South Africa 2010

On June 18th Franklin Foer, editor of the New Republic and author of How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization, Charles Kenny, a development economist at the World Bank and a contributing Editor to Foreign Affairs Magazine and Dayo Olopade and Nicholas Schmidle, both Schwartz Fellows, met to discuss the international geopolitics of the World Cup. The panel discussion was hosted by Andrés Martinez, the director of the Bernard L. Schwartz Fellows Program.

Soccer is the world’s most popular sport, with over a billion people expected to watch the World Cup final. Yet the United States – a giant in every other field of global pop culture – is a soccer dwarf, drawing with the tiny nation of Slovenia. Mr. Martinez found this disconnect remarkable. In a bid for answers Mr. Martinez suggested that American ‘sporting exceptionalism’ was due to soccer being badly suited to television commercial breaks which exist on American television stations but not on state-funded European channels. Mr. Schmidle disagreed, arguing instead that soccer’s lack of popularity in the US was instead due to the best athletes entering other sports.

Mr. Kenny, a native of England, instead blamed American independence; had Americans waited as long as Australians for independence they would have learned how to beat their former colonial masters. Regarding Africa’s role in football, Mr. Martinez pointed out that prior to 2002 every World Cup had been held in Europe or the Americas and that 2010 marks the full internationalisation of the World Cup. Ms. Olopade was concerned that the internationalisation of Soccer had harmed African teams; African players’ propensity to play in European clubs left them less time to practice together, making their teams less cohesive. She also feared that African teams consisting of footballers who play in European leagues, with coaches flown in from Sweden were inauthentic. Mr. Foer also raised the issue of African children being smuggled into Eastern Europe to audition for soccer clubs but being abandoned, and sometimes even forced into child prostitution. He was also fascinated by the nationalistic aspects of soccer, pointing out that the regionally and ethnically divided Spanish and Yugoslavian teams failed to perform well whilst their subdivisions – Catalonia and the post-Yugoslav states – performed remarkably well.

Participants

Featured Speakers
Franklin Foer
Editor, The New Republic
Author, How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization

Charles Kenny
Development Economist, World Bank
Contributing Editor, Foreign Policy Magazine

Dayo Olopade
Schwartz Fellow, New America Foundation

Nicholas Schmidle
Schwartz Fellow, New America Foundation
Author, To Live or to Perish Forever

Moderator
Andres Martinez
Director, Bernard L. Schwartz Fellows Program