International Press Clippings

May 30th 2002 
From The Economist print edition

International football is a multi-billion-dollar industry. Yet, argues Gideon Rachman, the game is less about money than about passion and national pride

ON THE night of July 12th 1998, a million people spilled on to the streets of Paris and converged (聚合，会聚）on the Champs-Elysées. France's victory over Brazil in the World Cup final that night sparked the biggest popular celebrations in the French capital since the liberation of Paris from the Nazis in 1944. It is safe to predict that on June 30th this year, as another World Cup is won, there will again be wild rejoicing somewhere in the world. According to the bookmakers（赌马者）, it may be in France again; or in Argentina, a football-mad country in desperate need of a boost to its morale(士气）.

But there is no need actually to win the championship to experience World Cup euphoria（欢欣鼓舞）. In some countries it is enough simply to qualify for the final stages of the tournament. In China, a quarter of the population—around 300m people— watched their country clinch （钉牢，确定；决定）its first ever place in the finals with a 1-0 victory over Oman （阿曼）late last year, and 500,000 people poured into Beijing's Tiananmen Square to celebrate. Senegal （塞内加尔（西非国家））is also a first-time qualifier. When its players flew home after securing （赢得，获得）a place in the finals, they were accompanied by the country's president, and the crowds were so thick that the 15-mile drive back from the airport to central Dakar （达喀尔(塞内加尔首都)took four hours. Even countries that never get near the finals can get caught up in the World Cup. When Diego Maradona, an Argentine football superstar, was disqualified from the 1994 World Cup for drug use, thousands of people in Bangladesh demonstrated against the decision.

Sports administrators like to debate which event draws the bigger audiences, the World Cup or the Olympics. In truth, nobody knows how many people watch either event on television. Many people will see the World Cup in bars or even—as in Brazil—on big screens put up on street corners. FIFA, the world football authority, claims that 33.4 billion people (equivalent to five times the world's population) watched some part of the 1998 World Cup; it arrived at this figure by adding together the audiences for all the games, including those who watched snippets （片断, 摘录）on the news. But whereas the audience for the Olympics is spread out across scores of events—many of which are deeply obscure for all but two weeks every four years—the World Cup has a unique ability to concentrate global attention on a single sport and, within that, a few crucial matches. Moreover, whereas most Olympic stars disappear from the horizon when the games are over, the stars of international football—such as France's Zinedine Zidane, Brazil's Ronaldo and England's David Beckham—are full-time global celebrities（名人）.

The staging of this year's World Cup finals in Japan and South Korea is an important moment for world football. The tag “the world's most popular sport” is already justified by the number of people who play and watch the game, but for now only three continents—Europe, Latin America and Africa—are truly football mad, with vast numbers of fans, well-established leagues （联赛）and a tradition of producing top players and teams. The first World Cup took place in Uruguay in 1930, and for the next 64 years the tournament was staged only in Europe or Latin America. But, in a deliberate attempt to globalize the game, the football authorities awarded the 1994 event to the United States, where it played to huge and enthusiastic crowds. Staging this year's tournament in Asia was the obvious next step. And the 2010 World Cup has been promised to Africa.

Whether the game will really take root outside its traditional heartlands must remain open to question. Soccer is now said to be the most popular participatory sport for girls and boys in the United States. But although a professional soccer league has been established there, the game shows no real signs of displacing American football or baseball in the affections of the man in the sports bar, nor has it generated any real stars. Japan and China both set up professional leagues in the 1990s that are drawing respectable crowds, but their future remains uncertain. Much will hang on the success of this year's World Cup.

Even if professional football fails to take off in Asia and the United States, it will remain the most widely played and followed sport in the world. Like golf, cricket（板球）, tennis and rugby（橄榄球）, soccer (or Association Football, to give it its proper title) was invented in Victorian Britain. Cricket and rugby are now largely played in countries that formed part of the British empire, but soccer was spread around the world by the “informal empire” of trade and industry as British workmen and businessmen set up clubs around the world. The first Italian soccer team was the Genoa （热那亚(意大利西北部的州及其首府)）cricket and football club, set up by British expatriates（移居国外者）; the first Argentine side was the Buenos Aires （布宜诺斯艾利斯)football club, founded in 1867 as an offshoot （分支，衍生物））of the local cricket team.

Why was it football, rather than the other great Victorian sports, that captured the world? One reason may have been that it does not require expensive equipment or a well-manicured （修剪）playing surface. Football is ideally adapted to kick-arounds in the favelas （巴西的贫民区）of Brazil or the shanty （简陋小屋, 棚屋）towns of Africa, which continue to produce many of the world's leading players. Football's simplicity may also have contributed to its popularity as a spectator sport（吸引许多观众的体育比赛）. It means not only that everybody can play, but also that any country or club can aspire to win. Even the most famous players from the richest nations or clubs can be defeated by 11 inspired opponents. Whereas the Olympic-medal table tends to reflect the global pecking order（任何团体中之长幼强弱次序）—with the United States invariably at the top—in football the Americans are amiable also-rans（失败者,落选者）, last time beaten by Iran. Football's superpowers are Brazil, Argentina, Italy, France and Germany. Its rising powers are in Africa.

Any event that can attract the attention of billions of people would seem sure to be a big money-spinner（赚大钱的人，赚大钱的事业）. What business or product would not yearn （渴望, 向往）for exposure on such a scale? Certainly there is an ever-increasing amount of money washing around the game. The television rights for the 2002 and 2006 World Cups were sold for a minimum of $1.7 billion, an eightfold increase on the deal covering the previous three championships. Companies such as Budweiser, Coca-Cola, Toshiba, Hyundai and MasterCard queued up to sign World Cup sponsorship deals, said to cost up to $45m apiece. MasterCard's Deborah Hughes says the World Cup “delivers the most broad-based international TV audience possible”, and points out that after the last tournament MasterCard issued 1.5m “World Cup Affinity” credit cards. Most of them were new accounts.

In Western Europe, the popularity of football has played a big part in the evolution of the media industry over the past decade. In Britain, the success of BSkyB, a subscription-based satellite-television service that has broken the monopoly of terrestrial broadcasters such as the BBC, was built on Sky's acquisition in 1992 of the rights to live Premier League football. In France, Canal Plus, a subscription-based channel, wooed its audience with a formula of football and films. The print media too have become devoted to football. In Spain, France and Italy, some of the countries' best-selling newspapers are given over to sport, and above all football. And even such publications as Le Monde and the Financial Times (as well as The Economist) now write about the game.

Footballers and football clubs are also playing with ever bigger amounts of money. Mr Zidane （齐达内）recently attracted the biggest transfer fee （转会费）in football history, when Real Madrid paid $64.5m to secure his services; his post-tax pay is thought to be over $150,000 a week. That is still less than a top American sports star such as basketball's Michael Jordan can command, but perhaps not for long. Calculations by Deloitte Touche Sport, a consultancy, show that Manchester United, the richest club in international football, now has larger revenues than any franchise in America's National Football League (the kind that is played with helmets and hands). Stefan Szymanski, an economist at Imperial College, London, suggests that the football industry worldwide is worth about £150 billion ($216 billion).

But large revenues do not necessarily mean profitability. The world of football seems beset （困扰）by commercial disasters. The last two companies to own the rights to World Cup football—ISL of Switzerland and Kirch of Germany—have both gone bankrupt. Kirch made a profit out of selling on the World Cup rights, but suffered big losses on its pay-TV operations in Germany, mainly because it had overestimated the public's willingness to pay for watching televised German league football. Similar problems have sunk ITV Digital in Britain, which had paid £315m to get the rights to some low-grade English soccer games, only to find that viewers were not very interested. ITV Digital is now in administration and says it cannot pay England's lower-league clubs the money they had been promised. As many as 30 of the less glamorous （富有魅力的, 迷人的）professional English football clubs are thought to be in danger of going bust.

The big money in international soccer is concentrated on the elite European clubs, but some of them are also suffering serious losses. In Italy, top clubs such as Fiorentina and Lazio have had trouble paying their players this year. The English Premier League （英超联赛）is widely regarded as admirably businesslike, yet almost all Premier League clubs will lose money this year. The share prices of the 20 quoted football clubs in Britain have been plummeting, generally to around a third of their level two years ago. European problems, however, are dwarfed by the financial chaos in Latin America's clubs, where bankruptcies and strikes are commonplace.

Some of Europe's difficulties can be explained by technological and commercial change. When pay-TV arrived, it became plain that football rights were seriously undervalued, so their price shot up, making them too expensive in many markets. Now the inevitable correction has set in.

This is the kind of thing that could happen in any business. But football as an industry may also have a more systemic problem. The very passion that excites football crowds (and once excited investors) often causes decisions to be taken on non-commercial grounds. Many football clubs across the world are run at a loss by rich men, either for the love of the game or to boost their ego. With so many rich sponsors willing to burn money to fund their teams, even the clubs that are quoted companies—and thus obliged to put profits first—are sucked into a desperate struggle to secure the services of the best players. Footballers' pay has spiralled out of control. The more money the clubs receive, the more they are compelled to spend. Alan Sugar, an English businessman who retired from football-club ownership after a disillusioning decade, calls it the “prune-juice effect”: you can pour a lot in, but it all comes out at the other end. In Italy, according to recent calculations by UEFA, the European football authority, the cost of the players now averages 125% of club revenues (see chart 1).

But it is not just free-spending tycoons and glory-hunting clubs that make football a bad business to be in. Many football fans also seem to think that the sacred rituals of a football match should be protected from vulgar （庸俗的）commerce. For example, when Brazil's national side secured $160m in sponsorship before the 1998 World Cup from Nike, a sports-goods manufacturer, Brazilian fans, far from being delighted, complained that a symbol of national pride had been prostituted. Even club sides are sometimes pressurized not to behave commercially. Barcelona, one of the biggest clubs in Europe, has forgone a possible euro10m ($9.2m) a year in sponsorship money by refusing to take advertisements on its shirts. Club officials explain that the team is a symbol of the Catalan region (or nation), so its shirts must remain pure.

But perhaps the biggest example of the anti-commercial impulses that run through the game is the World Cup itself. Football clubs around the world have to lend billions of dollars-worth of talent to their national sides, free of charge. The clubs will pay the players' wages throughout the tournament, and have to accept that their precious stars may return exhausted or even injured. Ronaldo of Brazil and Inter Milan entered the 1998 World Cup as the biggest and most bankable star in world soccer, but picked up injuries in the tournament and has never been quite the same since. Now he has returned to fitness—just in time to play for Brazil in this year's World Cup. Some clubs may find that they have a new star on their hands after the 2002 finals, but even that may be a mixed blessing. “It just means that their wage demands will go up,” laments a spokesman for the G-14, a lobby group for the biggest European teams.

Even so, it remains unthinkable for the clubs not to release their prized assets to the national sides. For a start, it would be against FIFA rules. Besides, most football administrators are also football fans and patriots. They want to see the best players perform in the World Cup. Football is not just a sport or a business. At the top level it is also closely intertwined with politics and national pride.

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