Politics and Press

World Cup – Giving credit where it is due

The World Cup deserves its title – unlike the World Series – because every four years populations everywhere in the world watch it carefully and draw perhps dubious conclusions about the state of nations everywhere in the world. This is no doubt a bizarre way of drawing conclusions about international developments, and yet… This World Cup has been even more interesting than usual in this regard. First of all, the beautiful country of South Africa, despite the economic and social problems it still must negotiate, has defied many sceptics, and pulled off this great organizational accomplishment, with virtually none of the feared problems arising. With only the semi-finals and final to go, it is easy to predict that South Africa will have shown that it can produce a world event with quality. Even its soccer team did better than expected.
Europe, on the other hand, presented teams that in a remarkable way tended to reflect the names the teams wore on their shirts. England, Italy and particularly France, looked old and tired and were quickly dispatched. The Netherlands remains well in the mix with a skilled veteran team that is steady as a rock. But it is Germany, of all places, that has come up with a group that almost too easily reflects a young, aggressive, skilled, hard-working multicultural, multiethnic and multilingual society. When you look at the German teams of the past and compare it with this one, you see the difference between a country completely dominated by veteran German-born, German-named Caucasian players, often of the highest level, and a very young team, with a talented group of somewhat older players with names like Lahm, Mertesacker, Schweinsteiger, Friedrichs as well as Klose and Pudolski (both from the old German parts of Poland) and the very youngest named Müller, and a crop of young players in the starting lineup named Ozeil, Khedira, Boetang, Gomez and Cacao (who could have played for Turkey, Tunesia Ghana, Spain and Brazil). It would be too naive to draw too many social and political implications from this. Nevertheless my brother will do that. He thinks that it is a sign of the European times that Germany, 65 years after the end of a war that they started to show their racial superiority should field a team that has the feel of a skilled, hard-working and multicultural unit that reflects the qualities of the new Germany that the rest of Europe has to look to for in leadership if it is going to pull out of its increasingly senile-feeling doldrums.