WHO HAS WON THE WORLD CUP? [1997]

Who should have won the World Cup? Columbia, as Pele had predicted at the beginning of the tournament, only to be proved wrong in less than two weeks? Brazil, as Diego Maradona predicts, after being thrown out of the competition for drug offences and crippling the Argentinan team? Or Italy with its band of elegant, gifted players? I have no answer to that question? But I think I know who have already won the World Cup establishing total dominance on world soccer. And my answer will please neither Pele nor Maradona nor the devotees of football the world over. I am afraid it may not even make any sense to many readers of this column.

I think the cup has already been won by the global market which we Indians are trying so hard to enter at the moment. The proof lies in the assassination of Andres Escobar, the gifted defender in the Columbian World Cup team. Escobar, in trying to save a goal during Columbia's first-round match against the unfancied United States, accidentally scored what in my childhood used to be called a same-side goal and which the South Americans in their wisdom call auto-goal.

In response to the killing, editorials have already come out in Indian and international press about the Latin American passion for football. This passion, it is being said, has led to violence in the past and, not suprisingly, has burst into the open at the first opportunity during the 1994 World Cup.

Many have chosen to remember in this connection the war that took place over a football match in Central America more than two decades ago, to the great amusement of the rest of the world. Much of that part of the world was then under military rulers whose sole source of legitimacy was their manifest hatred towards communism and their subservience to American economic and political interests. These rulers would have been a comical presence in global politics but for their unending blood-thirstiness and avarice. Nobody took them seriously, not even their American patrons. What the press called a football war only confirmed the worst stereotypes about Latin temper, particularly about the immature, excitable Latin personality that allegdly required firm, patriarchal rulers who paragons of human decency but would fit the political culture of their societies.

It is now obvious that Escobar's death does not fit in with that hoary stereotype. Contrary to the impression created by the first reports on the shooting of the footballer, this was not a typical Latin crime of passion. The killers did say `Thanks for the auto-goal' while pumping into Escobar twelve bullets and that does give the impression that it was another case of irrational anger and loss of self-control in South America's volatile football fans.

However, later news reports have not allowed us to stick to that easy interpretion. Passion might have been involved in the killing, but it was obviously packaged in self-interest. It now transpires that the anger against Escobar was triggered not so much by nationalist sentiments or by the humiliation at the hands of the hated big brother in the north but by financial losses and hard calculations about what the auto-goal cost in terms of bets lost.

It seems millions of dollars are involved in the transactions that take place over the course and results of football matches in South America and Europe. In Columbia in particular, these wagers often involve the easy fortunes amassed through drug trafficking and laundered by tainted financial, bureaucratic and political institutions.

Escobar was from the city of Medellin, Columbia's drug capital, and the gamblers who staked their fortune on Columbia's easy success against the United States were some of the most ruthless drug barons of the world. Escobar's very success in the game of soccer made him an important player in the big league of financial transactions. Unwittingly, he had acquired the ability to affect the economic fortunes of thousands, but could not share that unwanted responsibility with anyone except the other players in his team.

Escobar's death only a dramatic portrayal of what is fundamentally wrong with international sports today. It shows that, increasingly, it is not the quality of football or national self-respect that determines the fate of footballers; it is their location in the alternative liminal world of high finance. The World Cup, like most other sports events today, has been taken over by these financial interests. Sponsorship, contracts, endorsements, advertisements, transfer fees--these are the things that determine a player's status and worth today and in this world has now entered more shadowy investors.

My daughter, when she heard of the killing of Escobar, felt that the World Cup contest this year should be cancelled as a protest against such mindless brutal violence. The organizers of the event would have found such a idea silly, if not hilariously funny. World Cup is no longer a human-scale affair; it is mega-event involving investment of millions of dollars, long-term planning and detailed calculation of financial gains and losses. The nature or quality of the game and the personal fate of the players are, after a point, incidental to such an event.

Perhaps it is this sense of being caught in a soulless grid that makes players like Maradona so self-destructive. They come to sense that, after a point, despite all their talent and all the adulation they get, they are no better than gladiators in a Roman amphitheatre. Their sporting skills, their bodies, in fact their entire careers, have been commoditified and and are controlled by the methods and technology of the global market. Drugs probably give them a sense of having a choice and mastery over self, however false or transient that sense.

I hope it will not sound heartless if I say that Escobar's death has no intrinsic dignity to it. He might have looked upon himself as a simple footballer playing according to the rules to the best of his ability. But he was only an old-fashioned cog-in-the-wheel, a lifeless factor of production, for many others. The World Cup will go on, not as a defiance of the forces that brought about his death, but as an abject surrender to the first principles of the industrial civilization.