Everywhere you go, soccer is a universal language
- Bryan Schaaf
- July 1, 2018
- 2739
By the time this goes to print, the World Cup will be just over a month into its summer. And if you haven’t taken time to catch even a minute of the beautiful game’s crowning event, well, I feel sorry for you.
The World Cup, contrary to what analysts on the NFL Network would have you believe, is the largest and most followed spectacle on the planet. That’s a notion of which I’m so confident I won’t even argue.
And not just because it has more followers (it does) or represents a larger pool of athletes who are at the peak of their field (it also does). The World Cup matters because it truly, above all else, is a celebration of sport that engulfs the entire planet. It melds cultures, grays political boundaries and transcends religion. It’s one of the few unifying elements we have as a society. And for almost 60 days this summer, it’s your goldfish bowl to enjoy.
As a child it was the first sport I played, but I didn’t fully understand its place in culture until the 1994 World Cup came to America. I vividly remember watching Bulgaria’s Yordan Letchkov — distinguishable for his male pattern baldness — and Hristo Stoichkov play with such remarkable composure and speed that I was hooked for life.
Four years later I watched as the Americans fell flat against Iran — Iran? — in France ’98. And then another four years I woke up in the middle of the night to watch their escapades in South Korea and Japan.
Over the years I joined the rest of the planet, tuning in to the festivities as they went down in Germany, South Africa, Brazil and currently Russia.
That’s the beauty of the beautiful game. It doesn’t matter where you come from, the type of house in which you reside, the foods you eat or the place you choose to worship. Everywhere you go, soccer is a universal language.
And while it’s played in towns big and small all over the world pretty much year round, once every four years, we have the opportunity to put the pieces together and unify for two months of celebration.
Perhaps you’re in the boat that only embraces soccer during this two-month span. You’re like the casual hockey fan who only starts paying attention once the playoffs begin. And if you are, then good on ya.
Too often we compare the World Cup to other sporting climaxes, like the Super Bowl, the Stanley Cup or the World Series. But doing so is a failure to understand the real significance of what the tournament embodies.
Sports as just sports are pretty insignificant. But one of the things that’s always drawn me to them — like food — is their ability to bring people together in a way that’s atypical of societal norms.
Think about it. Nearly 20 years before the civil rights movement, Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier. Sports have brought entire families out of poverty, connected participants from vastly different backgrounds and given them a commonality in a way you don’t find often.
If you’re reading this, the World Cup has been paired down to the knockout rounds. I implore you to tune in and watch, not for the sport, but for the spectacle that joins the world.