Everything is connected

Michel Di Capua on the mesmerisingly interconnected nature of global football.

In the 53rd minute of a group stage match last weekend, the Netherlands’ Wesley Sneijder blasted a twenty-yard shot aimed at Japan’s net.

Sneijder was a star of the Dutch national team in Euro 2008 and at the club level has most recently been with Inter Milan of the Italian league. The coach of Inter when Sneijder landed there was Jose Mourinho. Mourinho’s resume reads like a roll call of some of Europe’s finest football teams: Barcelona, Benfica, Porto, Chelsea, Inter, Real Madrid. He is one of one of only three managers in history to win UEFA Champions League titles with two different squads. The other two managers are Ottmar Hitzfeld and Ernst Happel.

In the 1978 World Cup, Happel guided the Dutch team to the finals against host Argentina. In the pre-game remarks to his squad, the laconic Happel said merely three words: “Gentlemen, two points.” (This was an allusion to the number of points teams used to received for victories in the group stage; Happel was trying to suggest that this match was just a simple occasion.) The Dutch lost.

That 1978 tournament was a controversial one. The Brazilians missed out on a win when the referee whistled the end of a match just as Zico was heading the ball into the net, and there were accusations of a fixed match after Peru’s surrendering four second-half goals allowed Argentina to advance on goal differential. Yet Argentina began that tournament against stiff competition, grouped in the first round with Italy, France, and Hungary. That France-Hungary match-up had an interesting side story. Since Argentina was without color television at the time, and since the French and Hungarian jerseys were impossible to tell apart on the black-and-white broadcast, the French played the game sporting the borrowed uniforms of a local Argentinian club.

The notable television issue of this year’s World Cup has been of a different nature. Until about a month before the start of the event, due to unresolved negotiations between FIFA and the country's TV operators, it appeared that Singapore would be without television broadcasts of the event. FIFA finally lowered the fee for broadcasting rights, but it remains a steep cost which the operators have passed through to their subscribers in the form of a USD$70 surcharge. In protest, groups of Singapore fans have been boycotting the broadcast service offered by the two operators, Starhub and Singtel.

Singtel makes for an emblematic case study for the growth of Asian business. Its parent company, Temasek, is the investment arm of the Singapore government. In the past decade, Singtel has transformed itself into a global corporation, acquiring or taking stakes in telecom companies in Australia, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Philippines, and India, where it owns 30 per cent of Bharti Airtel.

The chairman of Bharti, Sunil Mittal, is the most generous benefactor of the Indian football delegation and has funded a football academy to prepare a team with the goal of qualifying for the 2018 World Cup. In the meantime, the thin glory of Indian football rests on Baichung Bhutia, who, when he joined Bury FC of League Two in the UK, became the first footballer from the country to play at professional levels in Europe.

Bury is managed by Alan Knill, who commented earlier this year that seeing Real Madrid play Barcelona was like “watching football porn.” Knill’s previous stint was with the lesser renowned Rotherham United. When Knill was fired from Rotherham, it was Mark Robins who took over.

Robins’ chief claim to fame is having scored “the goal that saved Alex Ferguson’s job.” Had Ferguson’s Manchester United team lost against Nottingham Forest in the 1990 FA Cup, Ferguson would have almost certainly been sacked after four years on the job. Instead, Robins produced the single goal in that match, and the rest is Man U history; Ferguson, knighted by the Queen of England, has now been managing the world’s most popular football club for 24 years.

The acquisition of young, expensive, international talent has become second nature for Manchester United. In 2009, it sets its sights on the “new Ronaldinho,” the 18-year-old Douglas Costa of the Brazilian club, Gremio. Gremio has a “sister" club in the Japanese League — Kawasaki Frontale, a club with which Gremio cooperates and with whom it shares a team crest and jersey colors.

Kawasaki Frontale’s goalkeeper? Eiji Kawashima, who in this 2010 World Cup has been the goalkeeper for Japan, and off whose hands rocked Wesley Sneijder’s blast before landing in the net, giving the Netherlands the mark it needed to top Japan and resulting in the World Cup’s most sensational goal to date.

Michel Di Capua is a New York-based writer. He will write every week for the duration of FIFA 2010