The football World Cup will kick off today in South Africa. I will watch some matches on television with some caution, because the doctor told me that my health cannot bear a lot of excitement, and that is why I choose to cheer for Zamalek out of all the Arab teams. Before someone calls for my death, I was joking. But football fans do not put up with jokes, should they target their favourite team. In fact, I support al-Ahli. I learned to read in the fifties, and in my family's house we often had al-Hilal magazine, al-Hilal books, and Al-Mousawer, Al-Ithnayn, Al-Kawakib and Samir. At that time immemorial, Fekri Abaza Basha was the president of al-Ahli, and at the same time, the editor of Al-Mousawer and the chairman of the Press Syndicate, and so I supported him and his club as I still do now. The above means that I still prefer Al-Zazwi and al-Fanajili over Ronaldo, Messi, Rooney and Kaka. What can I do? I usually go with the poor, thank God. In English, the term ‘football widow' was coined, because when the football season begins, the husband neglects his wife and sits on a sofa in front of the television until the season is over. One of these widows stood one day in front of her husband who is a coach, wearing revealing clothes and told him with a threatening tone: let me play or sell me. There was also a player in a street in a neighbourhood who told his neighbour that there is a match in the afternoon between the neighbours. He replied that he cannot play because he has a romantic date with a beautiful woman. At that point, the player accused him of being homosexual because he preferred the belle over the ball. Nevertheless, I find that when an intellectual ridicules football, this is a kind of snobbery, especially that players earn millions of dollars for playing, while the same ‘intellectual' receives peanuts for lectures or articles. As we know, the cost of buying a famous player from a team to another is about one hundred million euro or dollars, or enough to repay Greece's national debt. Football is immune to the global financial crisis, and FIFA will receive three billion dollars from the bankrupt media in return for coverage rights of the 2010 World Cup. FIFA will pay 400 million dollars in prizes to the winners, i.e. 60 percent more than the prizes in the 2006 World Cup, including 30 million dollars to the winner and 20 million for the second place, or the team that loses in the final. In addition, South Africa spent two billion dollars to build five new stadiums and revamp five existing ones, in a country where 50 percent of the population lives below the poverty line. As an aside from these figures of the FIFA and the players, I will return (rather angrily) to humour mocking players and spectators. After I moved to the United States in the eighties, I found that they have a tradition of using very pretty young women in stadiums as cheerleaders, wearing the jerseys of the team and shorts shorter than those of the players. They dance and cheer and do some acrobatic moves in the halftime period to cheer the team. However, what I could not understand at the time was why the players who score would hug other players instead of kissing the pretty cheerleaders. I do not understand either how there are 22 players who are extremely physically fit, but still practice and train every day, while there are around fifty thousand fat spectators around them who play no sport other than opening the refrigerator door in the kitchen at home. What I understand is that the World Cup winners will never be Arab or African, because the history of the World Cup has no winners outside of Europe and Latin America. I expect to see some exciting game play and players of the highest calibre, which makes me lament the level of football (and everything else) in our countries. The level of football means that I will only see the flags of Spain, Germany and Brazil on cars in Arab streets on the eve of the World Cup, and I admit that I did not see Algerian flags on Egyptian cars. I heard that a team in one of the countries in the Arab Peninsula (the reader will notice that I am not specifying out of cowardice) will build a roof over the stadium. I found this unusual because it doesn't usually rain there, but then I heard that the reason a roof is being built is so that penalties would stay inside the stadium. But this is less scandalous than the decision of an American team to fashion their stadium's pitch out of artificial lawn. The coach of the angry team said that the reason is that the players had eaten the natural grass. In our countries, we suffer from every football-related problem except eating the grass. I will not reopen old wounds by going back to the famous match between Egypt and Algeria. I was in Cairo at the time and I saw how the common struggle was lost under the feet of the players and the minds of the spectators, and I realized with that experience that the person who says: it's no big deal, it's just a football match, must be on the winning side. Personally, I could have become an international player who earns millions. But I could not sign any contract because I insisted on having a day off in the weekend like everyone else. [email protected]
