Teamwork for all

Football works wonders, says a new Discovery series.

Here's something to tell everyone you know: FIFA has more member nations than the United Nations (UN). Now, that's the global popularity "" nay, relevance "" of football. This popularity will reach its pinnacle, even manic proportions, when the FIFA World Cup action heads for a crescendo.

If silly match-scorecard trivia is not all you want to load up on, Discovery channel is airing a series titled More Than a Game which focuses on how football can actually change the fortunes of a country.

"It's just not a football-based show," says a channel spokesperson, "but also talks about how a country's economy can improve "" or problems like racism could be resolved "" through football."

When West Germany won the World Cup against the odds in 1954, for example, it was the first time since World War II that the country had been allowed to compete at all in the tournament.

The victory helped erase the widely-held image of its one-time leader jumping to his boots in consternation at Jesse Owens' Olympics Gold some two decades earlier. This, in 1954, was a new Germany the world saw, and its economy went from bust to boom.

Similarly, when Zinedine Zidane-inspired France went on to lift the Cup in 1998, the victory helped make a compelling case for the magic of diversity in teamwork. Football teamwork is no abstraction: it's there, live, on television screens for everybody to see and understand.

Discovery's series will focus on six footballing powerhouses "" Brazil, Argentina, Italy, England, Germany and France "" and the footage will include interviews with Beckenbaeur, Maradona and Pele.

"The show will actually make one believe that at the end of the day, football is more than a game," says the spokesperson.

"More than a game" it sure will be if Iran manages to shake the world up by making waves on the field rather than under the ground. Naah... that's just too much to ask, isn't it?