This Ball is Always Round

Sometime back I mentioned in a post that one of my all-time favorite books about soccer is The Ball is Round. Unfortunately though, for many who play the game, the ball isn't always round. Or even much of a ball.

An article in The New York Times (which I first saw linked on Rachel Maddow's Facebook page) last week highlights an obvious fact: kids in the poorest countries not only do not play with balls that are round, they often play with balls that are not even balls but rather rough spheres fashioned from trash or debris. Efforts by relief organizations to provide them with "real" soccer balls often fail because the balls are quickly torn or otherwise deflated by the rocky conditions on which the children play their games.

Cue Tim Jahnigen and his quest to bring durable soccer balls to kids in the poorest countries in the world. The article recounts Jahnigen seeing a documentary about children in Darfur who found joy in playing soccer, even though the balls were made out of garbage and string.

Something of a renaissance man, Jahnigen has held a variety of jobs and engaged in a number of pursuits before turning his efforts to inventing an indestructible ball. You don't need me to recount the entire Times article (linked in the second paragraph) but it's an interesting story that involves, among other things, Crocs and Sting.

The balls are expensive, at least in part because it costs so much to ship them where they are needed (they are not only indestructible, they're also not deflatable). Still, if you're looking to make a charitable donation this holiday season, why not give a kid somewhere a ball that will always be there for him or her? You can buy a ball, or make a donation, here.

Lest it be completely lost on us, there is also a certain beauty to make-shift balls.  As I was writing this post, my friend Michael sent me a link to this series of pictures by Jessica Hilltout that she has taken of cobbled together balls. 

"Domingo's Ball, Mozambique."

These balls, or at least their photographs, certainly are artful. But those who play with them I'm sure would rather play with one that rolls true and stays round.

Your Game Wasn't Stolen, It Was GIven Away

The World has their game and the British want it back. Or so says Dave Richards, Chairman of the English Premier League.

Speaking at a conference on sports and security this week, Richards went on what can only be described as an ill-advised and misinformed rant about soccer and its governance, saying:

England gave the world football. It gave the best legacy anyone could give. We gave them the game. For 50 years, we owned the game . . . We were the governance of the game. We wrote the rules, designed the pitches and everything else. Then, 50 years later, some guy came along and said you're liars and they actually stole it. It was called FIFA. Fifty years later, another gang came along called UEFA and stole a bit more.

One can easily perceive Richards' diatribe as a misguided call for some order in soccer's governing bodies, where decisions regarding the location of the next multi-billion dollar extravaganza are seemingly based on which suitor has the willingness or ability to line the decision-makers' pockets. It's a point that has merit, and when made usually falls on deaf (or lucre-stuffed) ears. But he didn't specifically identify the problem and didn't really address the solution, other than presumably a return to the "good old days" when the English controlled all aspects of the sport.

But setting aside for a minute the absurdity of the notion that in this day any nation has exclusive rights to a sport, his history is completely wrong. I don't mean about soccer being an English game (Chinese claims to the contrary, Richards is correct that the English invented the game in close to its current form), but about others stealing it from them. In fact, in their arrogance, the English gave it away.

Soccer is the World's game because the English exported it to their vast imperial outposts in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Europe, Africa, the Middle East, South America -- almost anywhere that soccer became the sport was because the locals learned it from British teachers, engineers, entrepreneurs, and, more often than not, soldiers and sailors.

But the English refused to allow the World to share in the governance of the sport. As David Goldblatt explains in his seminal history of soccer "The Ball is Round" the British founded the International Association Football Board (IAFB) to serve as soccer's law-making body. The IAFB was solely comprised of representatives of the four "Home Nations" (England, Scotland, Wales, and, at the time, Ireland). Twenty-two years later, the rest of the world created the Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) without any British involvement.

England's initial refusal to recognize FIFA, and its reluctance to even allow the rest of the world a role in the IAFB, ultimately led to the irrelevance of the IAFB and the dominance of FIFA as the governing body of the sport. I'm sure that the irony isn't lost on Richards, or the English, that the ruling body in soccer has a French, not an English, name.

Now we are stuck with FIFA and its Gallic soul, to paraphrase Goldblatt. But make no mistake, we are stuck with it not because it stole soccer from Great Britain, but because the English gave it away.