By Andy Goldberg Jul 8, 2006, 13:29 GMT
Berlin - An estimated 1.5 billion people will tune in to watch the World Cup final on Sunday. That is, about a quarter of the world's population - young, old, rich, poor, black, white, brown, pink, yellow, sick, healthy, man, woman and any combination thereof - will stop what they would normally be doing - sleeping, studying, working, walking, playing, loving, and any combination thereof - and devote their attention to an electronic screen on which images of 22 men will chase the image of a little ball around for 90 minutes or more.
Many will more or less arbitrarily chose a team to support. They will murmur words of encouragement to their designated side, cheer their good fortune and complain to the referee even though they are thousands of miles away and can have absolutely no influence on the actual outcome - though many of course believe that their exhortations are going directly to the big coach in the sky who is also shirking his normal duties and taking a personal interest in the outcome of the game.
And if a bloke in the right colour jersey happens to propel the ball into the well-guarded net of his opponent, pandemonium will break loose across the planet as supporters jump with joy, hugging the strangers who might be sitting next to them in an explosion of pure and unadulterated ecstasy.
But why do we react like this? What is this strange magic called football and how can we explain its bizarre grip on the population of the planet?
Mass hysteria
You can dismiss the entire shebang as just an extreme case of media-hyped mass hysteria - a perfect storm of frivolous escapism for a global village besotted with celebrity shenanigans.
While we usually think of Hollywood stars like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie as being the personalities that this village likes to gossip about, it seems clear at least for now that our football heroes and villains are filling these essential anthropological functions of celebrities.
After all for months the papers, TVs, radios and Internet sites of the world have been filled with stories that are building up to the great day in Berlin.
World religion
The entire time-line of the World Cup is actually reminiscent of a religious cycle that culminates in the high holy-day only once every four years with the sacred ritual taking place in a temple dedicated for the holiest ceremony in the calendar.
So football is the world religion - may the priests and rabbis and imams forgive me for saying so. It has its priests and holy-men, a rigid caste system, a simple set of rules that clearly differentiate between good and evil, and it allows people to periodically escape responsibility for their actions. And if you have been good, followed the rules, trained conscientiously and picked the right team, you, through your designated spiritual representative, will enter the heaven of winning the coveted trophy.
Tribal warfare
A more sociologically correct explanation for our planetary obsession comes from the likes of Desmond Morris, the author of The Naked Ape who in his less famous book The Soccer Tribe, described how games were as essential to the human mechanism as sex, eating and drinking.
Our propensity for team games in particular stems from our evolutionary need to work in tribes and clans to ensure our survival, and in Morris' view football takes the place of tribal wars in the modern world.
Football mysticism
More esoteric footie-nuts might also like to consider the nature of the ball itself.
This is best explained at an exhibition currently at Berlin's Pergamon museum called 'Der Ball is Rund: Kreis, Krugel, Kosmos', ('The Ball is Round: Circle, Sphere and Cosmos').
This brilliant show posits that our obsession stems from the fact that the round form has been the essential shape of human experience since we split from our genealogical cousins.
It is the shape of the sun, the earth, and all the other planets, the dominant image of most religions, the halo of saints, the Buddha's wheel of doctrine, the circle of life, time and reincarnation and the symbol of the immutable forces of chance and fortune. Its shape is the symbol of perfection and harmony. It has no beginning and no end.
The ball also represents the ultimate mystery: Pi - the shape of a circle - is impossible to calculate. You can go on trying till you hit infinity. Therefore a sphere, which is Pi multiplied by Pi - is infinity multiplied by infinity, which is yet another reason to watch the final - the outcome is impossible to predict.
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