A leading Australian social commentator and veteran foreign correspondent once observed that, having travelled the world, the only two constants are football and Coca-Cola. How ironic then, that even as Australia gears up for its second consecutive World Cup with a battle-hardened squad of players who earn their living in some of the best leagues in Europe and mounts a serious bid for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups, in the eyes of the rest of the world, Australia is still seen to be as much of a heathen nation as America or New Zealand — an anomalous, Anglo-Celtic nation devoted to an obscure oval ball football code.

Like all myths, this one is based on impressionistic perceptions rather than reality. Several factors have contributed towards the making of this myth.

Firstly, the reputation of Australian association football (“football”) is, to an extent, an unintended victim of the well-deserved and outstanding success enjoyed, both on and off the field, by Australian Rugby Union from 1984 to 2003. Two World Cups, a Grand Slam of the Home Nations, regular Bledisloe Cup and Tri-Nations victories and a last-minute series win over the British and Irish Lions represent an astonishing return for a code which is only played in private schools in two of Australia’s six states, has no functioning national league of any description, zero live free-to-air television coverage (with the exception of international test matches in two out of six states) and three to four figure attendances for club matches.

According to almost every conceivable criterion — national player participation rate, national geographical spread, television coverage and revenue, and domestic club match crowd attendances — rugby union trails not one but three rival football codes: football, Australian Rules football (“AFL”) and rugby league. Indeed, the success enjoyed by Australian Rugby Union from 1984 to 2003 is more a testimony to the excellence of its administrators, than any reflection of the game’s actual popularity across the country. Consider the following statistics from the Australian government’s 2008 Exercise, Recreation and Sport Survey:

• the national participation rate for rugby league is 220,000;
• the national participation rate for rugby union is 149,000;
• the national participation rate for AFL is 488,000;
• the national participation rate for outdoor football is 856,000; and
• the national participation rate for indoor football is 384,000.

This period of sustained success, coupled with the poor performances of the Australian national football team (the “Socceroos“) in World Cup qualification up until 2006, has, understandably, created a lingering impression that Australia is a rugby union nation when, in truth, rugby union is not even the leading oval ball football code in Australia. Hailing from the largest of the four non-rugby states, I’ve always been bemused to be informed, on my travels, by people from all around the world (perhaps with the notable exception of south-east Asia where Australian footballers such as Tim Cahill, Harry Kewell and Lucas Neill have risen to prominence in recent times), that Australia is a “rugby nation”.

Secondly, over approximately the same period, the performance of the Socceroos in World Cup qualification could only be described as dire. After qualifying for the 1974 World Cup as rank outsiders (and not scoring a single goal or winning a single game during the tournament), the Socceroos failed to qualify for a single World Cup until 2006. Although this remarkable string of failures was undoubtedly partly of our own making (see the section below on the dysfunctional national governance structure), it was also caused, in no small part, by the disinterest of FIFA which, perhaps understandably, focused its attention on the raw, untapped talent of Africa, the economic growth markets of East Asia and the last great frontier of North America. Accordingly, Australia, a relative economic backwater with its measly population of 20 million was left isolated in every sense of the word — left to rot in the only FIFA confederation (Oceania) without a full World Cup berth. Instead, the winner of Oceania was put into a sudden death two-leg play-off with a team from another FIFA confederation for a full World Cup berth.

The problems with this system were manifold. Oceania essentially consisted of Australia plus a collection of rugby-mad Pacific micronations (such as Samoa and the Cook Islands) and rugby-mad New Zealand. This led to tragicomical results in Oceania qualification such as the Socceroos’ 31-0 victory over American Samoa on 11 April 2001, which meant that big European clubs were understandably reluctant to allow our best players to fly 24 hours (one-way) for Oceania qualifiers, for example, Messrs Kewell and Viduka, then at the peak of their powers for a Leeds United side rampant both at home and in Europe were notable absentees from the aforementioned fixture. This, in turn, meant that our first choice XI played precisely two live competitive matches once every four years in the form of a two-legged sudden death play-off against an opponent from another confederation whose battle-hardened first-choice XI had just been through a lengthy and competitive qualification process.

The criterion used by FIFA to select that opponent seemed to vary between almost every World Cup — FIFA’s sadistic indifference in this regard perhaps reached its zenith in the 80s and 90s when, in successive World Cup qualification play-offs, the Socceroos faced (and narrowly lost to) Souness and Dalglish’s Scotland (1985, the third-placed team from European Qualifying Group 7, managed by some young fellow named Alex Ferguson) and Maradona’s Argentina (1993, the second-placed team from South American Qualifying Group A). Needless to say, such obstacles never seemed to find their way into the qualification path of the United States of America.

Even when the Socceroos were gifted a relatively easy opponent, such as Iran (the second-placed team from Asian Qualifying Group A) in 1997, the Football Gods seemed to conspire against the Socceroos in scarcely believable fashion. After a 17-year old Harry Kewell gave Australia a precious away goal in the first leg 1-1 draw in front of a hostile crowd of 128,000 in Tehran, the Socceroos were cruising in the home leg at 2-0 up after 48 minutes having wasted a hatful of chances. Then, disaster struck as notorious serial pest Peter Hore invaded the pitch and cut down one of the goal nets. The subsequent five minute delay allowed Iran to regroup and changed the entire momentum of the match. The Australian players themselves seemed spooked by the unexpected interruption just as they were approaching their Everest in front of an expectant home crowd of 85,000 in the nation’s greatest sporting cathedral. After the restart, Iran scored in the 71^st minute to make it 2-1; panic set in and, almost inevitably, like a nightmarish quadrennial self-fulfilling prophecy, the Socceroos fell again at the final hurdle as Iran quickly scored once more to make it 2-2 and deservedly went through on the away goals rule.

Nonetheless, it cannot be denied that the institutionalised incompetence of Australia’s football administrators over the same period was as significant a cause as bad luck of Australia’s abysmal World Cup qualification results. Although the full extent of this incompetence cannot be catalogued in a single article, a few of the more notorious examples will suffice to give the reader an appreciation of its breadth and depth:

1. The absence of a cohesive, fully-professional and profitable national league — the self-defeatingly-titled-National Soccer League (“NSL“) featured semi-professionals plying their trade alongside full-time professionals and suffered from small crowds, ethnically-based clubs and, perhaps worst of all in the modern age, the absence of anything resembling a lucrative television contract to both fund the game and keep it at the forefront of the public consciousness.
2. When administrators were given the opportunity to choose a venue for a World Cup qualifier, they could be reliably counted on to pick the most hospitable venue for our visiting opponents. For example, in 1985, when the Socceroos were forced to play-off against Souness and Dalglish’s Scotland for a World Cup place, our learned administrators chose to play the home leg in Melbourne (the southern-most and coldest of all the major mainland cities whose climate most resembles that of Britain), rather than a northern city such as Brisbane where temperatures in excess of 30 degrees Celsius would have been guaranteed to greet the Scotsmen arriving in Australia from a Glasgow December.
3. The absence of experienced, international-class managers for the national team left us tactically exposed at play-off time. For example, the 1985 play-off against Scotland pitted Alex Ferguson against Frank Arok. The latter was a solid manager whose previous management experiences were in the Australian domestic league and at the small Yugoslavian clubs FK Novi Sad and FK Vojvodina. The former had already led Aberdeen to the Scottish league title and the European Cup Winner’s Cup (defeating Bayern Munich en route to the final where they comprehensively outplayed Real Madrid to win 2-1).
4. The absence of a cohesive national coaching structure unified from youth to senior level by a strategic vision, meant that our players were denied the technical skills and tactical awareness which our European and South American opponents took for granted. Young Australian footballers were confronted by independent, competing associations not only between states, but in some instances, within states, each with different football philosophies and political priorities. Little wonder then, that there was no unified national coaching framework teaching touch, movement, passing and vision from a young age. Those outstanding players we did produce succeeded in spite of, not because of, our domestic coaching system, as they headed overseas from their early teenage years in order to develop the aforementioned necessary skills and knowledge. The likes of Bresciano, Grella and Vieri went to Italy, Kewell headed to England, and Viduka went to Croatia. This talent drain often resulted in a promising Australian player choosing to represent the European country which they had departed to in order to further their footballing education. The most well-known example of this is Christian Vieri, who left European journalists at the 1998 World Cup utterly befuddled when he named legendary Australian cricket captain Allan Border as his boyhood sporting hero. Indeed, the young Vieri was so cricket-focused that his Australian football club youth coach had to “devis[e] a [football] version of cricket to animate Christian’s youthful interest in the round-ball game.”[1]
5. The factors set out above in (1) and (4) and below meant that, unsurprisingly, many promising young footballers chose to pursue other sports professionally. For example, whilst in England, the Neville brothers, both talented junior cricketers, opted for football, in Australia, the Waugh twins, who both starred for their state as junior footballers, opted for cricket. No tougher a critic than the late, great former Australian football captain Johnny Warren wrote in The Sydney Morning Herald in 1983: “I have not seen a better goal this year than the one scored by East Hills High School’s Stephen Waugh in the Commonwealth Bank Cup at Mt Druitt Town Soccer centre last Wednesday evening. It was a goal of which the legendary Franz Beckenbauer would have been proud.”

By the time the Socceroos failed yet again to qualify for the World Cup in 2002, falling in a sudden death play-off to Uruguay, the fifth-placed South American team, Australia’s World Cup qualification drought was approaching its third decade. An entire generation of Australians, myself included, had grown up without having seen an Australian team play at a World Cup.

Australian football fans had become so mired in a deep and everlasting pessimism that, when it was revealed in 2002 in Johnny Warren’s autobiography that the qualification drought may have been caused by the curse of an African witch doctor, nary an eyebrow was raised. The story goes that when the Socceroos travelled to Mozambique in 1970 to play a World Cup qualifier against the nation then known as Rhodesia, they employed the services of a local witch doctor to curse their opponents. The Socceroos duly went on to record a 3-1 win. Unfortunately, the Australian players could not stump up the £1000 which the witch doctor demanded for his rather effective services and he, somewhat understandably, cursed the team from the former convict colony with his powerful magics.

By 2002, the problems with the governance of Australian football had become so severe that the federal government, even one led by a socially conservative, Wallabies-tracksuit-wearing, 1950s romantic of Anglo-Celtic extract, had no choice but to commission a comprehensive report which, unsurprisingly, recommended radical surgery to every level of the game’s administration. On 2 September 2002, the Federal Minister for Sport announced the terms of reference for a review into the governance and management structures of football in Australia to be conducted by an independent Review Committee. The Committee, chaired by David Crawford, delivered its final report, titled Report of the Independent Soccer Review Committee into the Structure, Governance and Management of Soccer in Australia (the “Crawford Report”), on 7 April 2003. The Executive Summary of the Crawford Report explained:

The Committee was made aware that over the past two decades, soccer in Australia has found itself addressing a series of crises evidenced more recently by: a) severe financial problems (members equity of Soccer Australia was a negative $2.6 million at 30 June 2002); b) reduced staffing levels; c) political infighting; d) lack of strategic direction and planning; and e) mixed results on the field in the international arena.

The Crawford Report exposed the byzantine structure of Australian football governance with organisations actively competing against one another in some states in the administration and staging of football. For example, New South Wales, the most populous state in Australia, was home to no less than three competing governing bodies — the Northern New South Wales Soccer Federation, the New South Wales Amateur Soccer Federation and the New South Wales Soccer Federation. The Committee consulted extensively with, and received submissions from, a broad cross-section of the Australian football community and published stakeholder comments in Appendix D of the Crawford Report. Pejorative permutations of the word “political” (examples include “politically driven”, “petty politics”, “political manoeuvrings”, “political agendas” and “Machiavellian politics”) appear no less than 25 times in Appendix D. The lengthy list of reforms recommended by the Committee ranged from the self-evident to the drastic:

• creating a unified and streamlined voting mechanism which gives fair representation to all members of the Australian football community;
• appointing a new, independent board;
• appointing an appropriately qualified CEO;
• separating the national league from the structure of the national administrative body so that the former operates as a separate entity; and
• immediately replacing the incompetent incumbent board with an interim board composed of Frank Lowy, Ron Walker and John Singleton.

Frank Lowy, apart from being a passionate Australian football fan of Jewish-Czechoslovakian-Hungarian descent, is the executive chairman and co-founder of the world-famous Westfield Group — the Australian corporate behemoth whose ubiquitous shopping centres dot the landscape in Australia, New Zealand, the UK and the US.

In short, the changes worked. After little more than two years on the job, the new board, chaired by Mr Lowy himself had:

• secured the on-field management services of Guus Hiddink to successfully pilot Australia to World Cup qualification for the first time in 32 years (cue the streamers — literally);[2]
• secured the off-field management services of John O’Neill (the merchant banker responsible for Australian rugby’s astonishing off-field success) to turn around Australian football commercially and financially;
• successfully launched a brand-new, fully-televised, professional national league; and
• perhaps most crucially of all, secured Australia’s entry into the Asian Football Confederation with its precious 4.5 World Cup places and highly competitive two-stage qualification process.

At a broader social level, the Lowy-led board has been able to finally demolish the largest hurdle to the game’s ascendance to its rightful place as Australia’s undisputed number one football code — the perception that the game was riven by ethnic fighting, which led to its marginalisation in the eyes of many in the broader Australian community. For example, in his autobiography, the legendary Australian cricket captain Steve Waugh, a superbly-talented junior footballer before choosing cricket as his professional career, recalled:[3]

Talent-wise, soccer was probably the sport where I was most gifted, but in the end it gave way to my real passion [of cricket]. …

In many parts of Australia in the 1970s and ‘80s soccer was known as “wog ball” or a game for “pansies”, but I only ever saw it as a fantastic team sport, even if many clubs and organisations were ethnic-based and -influenced. Travelling interstate with the NSW Under 15 side was a huge honour and a pretty fair achievement considering I was only 13, but with my youth came unfamiliar territory. I wasn’t used to not being the star, or to not knowing anyone else in the squad. Whether it was intentional or not, I was left alone, without any friends and feeling totally isolated from the other guys, who all seemed to know each other well. Being Anglo-Saxon was a major hindrance, because I couldn’t speak Greek or Italian or whatever language was the basis for their conversations. I kept to myself and played as well as I could, but there was something missing — my heart wasn’t totally in it. I didn’t feel an attachment to the team and no one made an effort to ease the apprehension and uneasiness I felt as an unfamiliar face. It wounded me. I didn’t want to ever again feel so isolated and unwanted in a team environment and I didn’t want to see it happen to anyone else, either.

In Australian English, the colloquial term “wog” refers to a person of southern European extraction, typically Italian or Greek, and “pansy” refers an unmanly, physically weak and sportingly inept male. Following the Second World War, the Australian government relaxed its White Australia policy which had, up to that point, largely prevented non-Anglo-Celtic immigration through the disingenuous use of restrictions such as a dictation test, which allowed for the exclusion of non-Anglo-Celtic applicants by requiring them to pass a written test in any language (not necessarily English) nominated by an immigration officer. Consequently, Australia received a flood of immigrants from Italy and Greece and other parts of continental Europe who brought with them a love of football.

Similarly, the late, great former Australian football captain Johnny Warren titled his autobiography Sheilas, Wogs and Pooftas in reference to the widely-held perception of those who chose football over the full contact football codes of rugby union, rugby league or AFL. “Sheila” is Australian slang for woman and “poofta” is an Australian profanity for a homosexual.

The Lowy-led board has been able to substantially demolish this perception by sweeping away the old byzantine governance structure (which gave scope for ethnic rivalries), creating a new national league with no ethnically-based clubs, improving policing and crowd management at matches, providing the unifying effect of World Cup qualification and, above all, supplying professional and competent off-field governance and management — as one would expect from men such as Lowy and O’Neill.

So there you have it. Perhaps the one unequivocally good deed done by a neo-conservative government responsible for systematically distorting public funding of secondary and tertiary education, politicising the public service, falsely accusing boat people of throwing their children overboard, cosying up to President George W Bush, signing Australia up to the Coalition of the Willing, refusing to sign the Kyoto Protocol and frittering away budget surpluses (remember those?) on pork barrelling and electioneering — they single-handedly saved Australian football.

Looking ahead, this article concludes on an optimistic note. On 6 June 2009, Australia (along with Japan, South Korea and the Netherlands) became one of the first teams to qualify for the 2010 World Cup, drawing 0-0 with Qatar in Doha to wrap up qualification without conceding a single goal and with two matches left to play. Australia eventually finished top of Asian Qualifying Group A, with 6 wins and 2 draws from our 8 matches and a full 5 points clear of second-placed Asian powerhouse Japan. The Socceroos’ manager Pim Verbeek demonstrated tremendous strategic and tactical nous and instilled the side with the kind of match-hardness and professionalism needed to successfully navigate a multi-year two-stage qualification process played out in conditions as varied as the desert heat of Tashkent to the February chill of Saitama City. Verbeek, quite rightly, adopted a pragmatic attitude to qualification, prioritising results over aesthetics. Accordingly, he primarily used a defensive 4-2-3-1 formation both home and away, deploying two defensive central midfielders in front of the back four and just the beanpole striker Josh Kennedy up front. This formation was not only well-suited to the nature of the qualification process but the resources Verbeek had at his disposal — whilst he was blessed with an abundance of wealth in midfield, the cupboard up front has been a bit bare since Viduka retired; and, unlike most of the teams they were facing, the Socceroos possessed the tactical discipline (acquired by playing at the highest level in Europe) necessary to effectively utilise the formation.

Nonetheless, it is hoped that Verbeek, being the rational Dutchman that he is, will modify his tactics to the different demands of tournament play. Put simply, wins are required to progress in tournaments whereas away draws are more than adequate in qualification. The main victim of the defensive 4-2-3-1 formation used during qualification is the very man who could hold the key to our success in South Africa — former Celtic striker Scott McDonald. A classic fox-in-the-box goal poacher, McDonald thrives playing alongside a big target man such as Jan Vennegoor of Hesselink at Celtic. However, during qualification, when selected, he was nearly always required to play alone up front which meant that, despite scoring 65 goals in 126 appearances for Celtic (including crucial strikes against the likes of Manchester United and AC Milan in the Champions League), he has yet to score for the Socceroos. Hopefully, Verbeek will switch to a more offensive 4-4-2 formation in South Africa, with McDonald playing alongside Kennedy up front and a rejuvenated Harry Kewell and Brett Emerton on the wings.

Fortunately, unlike 2006, our ever-faithful friend the FIFA lottery was kind enough not to place us in the Group of Death; rather, it merely placed us in the Group of Enhanced Interrogation Techniques containing Germany, Ghana and Serbia.

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[1] http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/06/07/1022982768397.html

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZdbW7PSPGk&feature=related

[3] Steve Waugh, Out of My Comfort Zone: The Autobiography (2005) 24–5.

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As the big countdown ticks away, less than 100 days before the World Cup, perhaps Africa’s strongest team, Ivory Coast, is still without a coach. An article in the Zimbabwean brings up the state of African football and its reliance on foreign coaches.

In Cote D’Ivoire, the disgruntled Vahid Halilhodžić was unceremoniously dispensed with following an unsuccessful run at the African Cup of Nations (despite having lost only one match during his two-year tenure). Similarly, Nigeria rid themselves of Shaibu Amodu after only getting 3rd place in the same tournament. He was axed in late February and replaced with Lars Lagerbeck, a Swedish coach whose most recent claim to fame is failure to qualify for the 2010 World Cup with Sweden.

The appointment of Lagerbeck was quite a prize for not being able to qualify with his original team, and he now has the task of ingratiating himself to the players and learning up on Nigerian football in the 90-odd days that he has before the tournament starts. Lagerbeck replaced a Nigerian coach who would have been the only other African coach in South Africa (besides Algeria’s Rabah Saadane).

Whoever inherits the Ivory Coast (latest word is that Dutch “miracle-worker” Guus Hiddink is poised to get the job) gets the privilege of coaching one of the world’s most talented squads, bursting with ability, speed, power, and efficiency at every corner: Didier Drogba, Yaya Touré, Kolo Touré, Didier Zokora, Emanuel Eboué, Salomon Kalou, and so on, without having to actually do any work in qualifying. Common sense tells me that an Ivorian coach is not in the running.

South Africa has chosen a similar path, re-hiring Carlos Alberto Pareira (Brazilian; you might remember him from the World’s Most Boring World Cup Final [TM] [1994] or as the Man Who Could Make A Team with Romario, Ronaldo, and Bebeto into a Side-Passing Snore-Fest [R]. Also known as Coach of Oil-Rich World Cup Whipping Boys [Kuwait 82, United Arab Emirates 90, Saudi Arabia '98 aka "Fired During the World Cup"]. And most recently known as Man Who Can Make Even Brazil Look Bad [Brazil, 2006]). Interestingly, he was coach of South Africa previously, and quit, citing family reasons (though it is hard to ignore the fact that he did not do anything worth noting in his brief stint with them). Perhaps he needs to fund that vacation home (I’m guessing it won’t be in Ivory Coast).

In July of 2009, Cameroon appointed perhaps the most interesting of the [actual] coaches so far mentioned, Frenchman Paul Le Guen, who played a major role in turning Olympique Lyon into a dynasty in French football. He established a reputation at Lyon for good football with resources far smaller than those at other European top clubs. Furthermore, he coached a number of immensely talented players (many of them African) and helped springboard their careers at bigger clubs.

In comparison, Ghana go WAAAAAY back with coach Milovan Rajevac, who has been with them since all the way back in 2008. Amazingly, he did not get the axe despite coming in 2nd place at the African Cup of Nations.

We shall see in the coming days how the Hiddink acquisition pans out (no doubt some interesting transactions will be taking place, considering he is still under contract with the Russian Federation). In all of this, it is a tad disheartening to see the reliance on coaches that apparently have had little or nothing to do with a nation’s football. In some cases, a coach might have a past triumph under his belt (as in Pareira), but in others (especially Lagerbeck) one wonders whether getting a mere European name is better than finding a true match for a national team’s football.

The idea of the foreign coach has been slowly adopted even outside of Africa; even England have turned to the [zzzzzz] Swede Sven Goran Eriksson and in 2010 will be lead by Italian Fabio Capello (Italian for “Fabulous Hair”). In 2004, Greece won the European Championship with a German coach, Otto Rehhagel . Though now that you think about it, there haven’t been all that many foreign coaches at the world stage with such success.

originally posted at the Soccer Politics blog

An article by Jonathan Wilson in the Guardian today asks an interesting question for those of us who grew up in an era in which West African football was the realm of skilled artists such as Abedi Pele, George Weah, Roger Milla, and exciting teams like the “original” Nigerian Super Eagles who played swashbuckling, imaginative football. In a piece that starts out by discussing Egypt’s tactical formation (very interesting as well), he goes on to ask:

So where have Africa’s creators gone?

That then raises the issue of where the creators have gone; why west Africa has, in a generation, not produced a player like Jay-Jay Okocha or Abedi Pele. Okocha blames the attempt to impose discipline and adopt a “European model”, but that has not prevented European nations from producing gifted creators. Manchester United’s scout in Africa, Tom Vernon, who runs an academy in the hills above Accra, suggests that the fault lies partly with European clubs, who tend to have what he terms “the Papa Bouba Diop template” in mind. The African players who have succeeded in Europe in the past have usually been big and robust, and so clubs look only for something similar. Players called up by European clubs at a young age develop faster and have a higher profile, and so it is they who make it into the national team.

Indeed, a superficial survey of some of the West African players in leagues like the Premier or the Primera División of Spain will confirm this tendency; robust, very physical, big players often placed into combative roles. Think Essien and Mikel at Chelsea, Toure Yaya and Keita at Barcelona, Abou Diaby and Song at Arsenal, M. Diarra at Real Madrid, and so on. Even African players, like Drogba at Chelsea, who play in other positions seem destined to rely on their athleticism and power; in very few instances do you see a “creator” or creative midfielder from Africa.

Of course, fans of football are no strangers to stereotyping, often of racial nature, when it comes to players at the international and club level. In England, there are stereotypes of what nationalities will succeed and which ones won’t. In England and Spain, there is an obsession with West African hard-working midfielders, yet there are few Italians (though you will find West Africans in Italy). You see a crop of Brazilians in Spain yet they are seen as difficult to adapt to England. And so on and so on.

The idea, though, becomes interesting when one starts to wonder to what extent such ideas influence the way a team thinks of itself. There is no doubt that racism towards West Africa (and elsewhere) exists, that European clubs are looking for their “Makelele” or other player willing to do the unglamorous, slavish dirty work so that their starlets may thrive. But how does this affect the way a national team, for example, envisions its own football?

Manchester United’s scout, quoted in the article, readily admits that players in these African national teams are often in a hierarchy related to who plays abroad and where. When you have such an economic force as European club football drawing up players from Africa to play in roles determined by the European footballing imagination, what impact is that going to have on the national teams?

The scout, Tom Vernon, goes on to speculate that the way kids play on the street in Ghana might have something to do with it, as in his opinion playing on tiny pitches forces them to “play through the middle” and sacrifice creative wing play. Of course, anyone familiar with Brazilian football, to cite just one example, can write that off as nonsense. In Brazil, one can witness football being played just about anywhere there is flat ground, regardless of space. The greatest players from there have hailed from inner-city squatter ghettos where space is at a premium; it is precisely that lack of space that is a driving impetus for imagination and creativity.

In the case of Brazil, these players seem to transform when they put on their yellow jersey to be a part of the seleção; while the commentators during this upcoming World Cup might talk about the Brazilian footballing blood in their veins, I would say to think about the culture built into the minds of these players. Players of diverse racial backgrounds who are playing under the idea of being Brazilian, in a culture that deifies anything related to the supposed jogo bonito, the Brazilian “beautiful game.”

Naturally, anyone who has witnessed football under Dunga, especially in ‘94, knows that the Brazilian national game can be anything but beautiful, and that their best results are the fruit of grim determination, discipline, physicality, and efficiency even more than artistry. The Brazilian team of today emphasizes this even more clearly, as Dunga coaches them into South Africa.

For the African teams in South Africa in 99 days, success will be a measure of how well they can overcome the typecast images of themselves that dominate their football history. It will be a test of how this idea of hard-working journeymen playing on chaotic, disorganized African teams can be overturned and how new ideas can be formed. To the extent that these are external, cultural ideas, accumulated and enforced through the brutal economics of football, one can say that it will take something truly special to pull it off.

And yet, from time to time we see teams overcome the burden of history to change the course of their destiny. Most recently Spain, in 2008, overcame the “perennial overachievers” tag to capture their first senior international triumph in 44 years. Last summer, the USA very nearly pulled off a worldwide shockwave by going up 2-0 against feared and revered Brazil in the Confederations’ Cup final, before falling victim to their own tactical naïveté (though the second American goal will live long in my memory as perhaps the finest counterattacking goal I’ve ever seen).

For many (myself included), the first African World Cup will be a fascinating stage on which some of the dominant myths of international football could well be overturned. I, for one, wonder if it will be a time for players like Essien and Toure Yaya to break their shackles as huffing-and-puffing defensive midfielders and play to their true potential as creative, imaginative geniuses that I know they can be.

originally published at the Soccer Politics blog