From where I live, in a modest quarter of Sydney’s eastern suburbs, I often frequent the cafe hub of Double Bay. It is there that I find my favourite comfort, slipping back to my cultural roots, the languid bohemia of central Europe where—in my memory at least—the daily dose of swing is to sit around in espresso bars, high on caffeine, endlessly discussing mainly two subjects: politics and football. This does not just go on in Budapest by the way. It’s the same in Athens, Rome, Prague, Madrid, Lisbon, Vienna, Rio, Buenos Aires, Tel Aviv and Damascus. In Britain and other parts of northern Europe, you can substitute pub for coffee house. That’s the only difference. The planet is dotted with clusters of humanity, like lesions brought on by an incurable plague, endlessly preoccupied by the principal things that concern them, one of which is football. I have observed this all my life and continue to do so. As a child in Budapest I would pass outdoor cafes where grown men, smoking cigarettes and gulping down short blacks, would chatter endlessly on about football. They would still be there four or five hours later. When I first walked across the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, the only locals among the hundreds of tourists on the bridge were two gentlemen, with copies of La Gazzetta Dello Sport tucked under their arms, debating why and how Fiorentina had lost to Juventus the previous day. Two hours on, they were still at it. In Verona, at a cafe on the Piazza Brà, two elderly gents, dapperly dressed, argued feverishly at the table next to mine. Shakespeare came to mind, except that these gentlemen of Verona had only one subject that concerned them: football. In Rome during the 1990 World Cup, while lunching at our constitutional trattoria, Johnny Warren and I noticed an unholy row going on between an elegant young man and a striking woman at another table. The waiter told us their marriage was safe. They were arguing over whether or not Roberto Baggio should start in Italy’s next game. Much has been said about the astronomical numbers of people who watch the World Cup, or the hundreds of millions who play football, but I wouldn’t mind getting a figure on how many people around the world sit around in cafes and bars talking football on any given day, and how long they spend doing it.

I make this point for a number of reasons, one of which is to propose that the universal affection in which football is held is not restricted to the couple of hours during which matches are played but is a continuous, endless thing, consuming interest and curiosity for many waking hours of, I would guess, billions around the planet, every day for most of their lives. Sure, there are parts of the globe, such as North America, where other sports dominate conversations. But the numbers would be small by global comparisons. This is not only because football happens to be the world’s most popular sport, it is also because football, uniquely, seems to be a cause for intellectual stimulus, argument and debate. Hence its second home, away from the fields and the stadiums, in the coffee houses that, historically, have been venues for intellectual discourse and ferment since the seventeenth century. Isaac Newton would frequent The Grecian coffee house in London’s Devereux Street to parley with other scientists. In the modern era, science has made way for less exhausting and challenging preoccupations, football principal among them.

But why is this so? Why is football so dominant in everyday thought around the globe? Why does one football match, like the final of the 2006 World Cup, command 3 billion television viewers, almost half the world’s population? Why is it the world’s most popular sport? Why was it that, in the first place, football conquered almost the entire planet when any one of a number of other sports might have done so instead?

An Australian fan appears to pray for divine intervention during a public broadcast in Sydney of the Australia v Italy 2006 World Cup clash in Germany, a match won 1–0 by Italy in the 90th minute.

To deal with the last question first, it was partly an accident of history. More about this in the next chapter, but the principal cause of football’s being able to plant seeds around the world ahead of other sports is that at the time, towards the end of the nineteenth century, football had already conquered Britain, and Britain was then the greatest source of influence in global development. As the Industrial Revolution galloped forward everywhere, with Britain as its chieftain, it was natural that Britain’s favourite sport, like everything else British that acted as a model for the rest of the world, would be taken up by its conquered subjects.

But why football and why not rugby, or cricket, or tennis, or hockey? Why not another of the myriad other sports that also began to prosper in Britain at the time?

We should note, as a precursor to answering these questions, that football’s root source of joy is in playing it, not watching it. The universal love football commands is usually measured by the numbers of its television viewers and how often the turnstiles click at its stadiums around the world. But probably more important is the numbers that play it, for the vast majority of its fans once played it or at least have tried to play it. It is through that experience that players of whatever standard, and those close to them, graduate to fandom. David Goldblatt, recalling the game’s pioneering days in his excellent work, The Ball Is Round: A Global History of Football (Penguin), puts this into historical context:

The fin-de-siècle gentleman player could have played whatever he wanted—football was not the only option left after financial and social costs had been discounted. People played because they just loved to play. Once seen, the prospect of trying it out for yourself was irresistible. We can reasonably argue that many of the reasons that make football a particularly good game to watch applied to playing it too: its continuous flow, its unpredictability, its combination of teamwork and individual bravado, its respect for both mental and physical labour.

The principal edge that football had then on other sports, and continues to have, is its accessibility, that it can be played by anyone: rich, poor, tall, short, skinny, fat, old, young, black, white, man, woman. Football does not distinguish or prejudge, apart from deeming that wins and losses are determined only by ability. This is the ultimate strength of football. It is the core source of its capacity to conquer and woo, for it places the spectator in the position of a would-be, wish-I-was player, even a would-be star player, the onlooker harbouring the supposition that he is no different from the man on the field, save for the latter’s superior and enviable ability. This cannot be said of most other sports in which social accessibility, affordability of equipment, physical attributes and gender disallow opportunity and therefore make improbable such a personal relationship between watcher and player.

Given that football is so easy and cheap to play—simple rules, minimal equipment, no restrictions on space or time—its appeal to the poor, and therefore the masses, delivers and guarantees its broad popularity. When the British first began to plant the seeds of football in foreign lands, they did so with a game that was primarily still for the gentry. In the main the British engineers, schoolteachers, businessmen and diplomats who began forming teams in South America and elsewhere in the late nineteenth century had no conscious intent to popularise the game in those lands. All they wanted was to play it themselves. But the game’s bewitching appeal soon gripped the local populations and it was especially appealing to the poor working classes.

So-called ‘street football’ was the essence of the game before its rules were codified and, despite the high level of professionalism, organisation and intoxicating preoccupation with a commercial elite in the modern era, that remains the case today. The great footballers of the past and present, from Pelé to Cristiano Ronaldo, and hundreds more in the decades before them, all learned their craft on dust-covered streets, abandoned plots of land, backyards and beaches. This is still so in much of the world today. In Africa, Latin America and Asia, which represent the bulk of the world’s population, the joy of playing football remains the reason it is the universal diversion that attracts millions of children, and adults, to these unofficial football fields every day.

In my experience and travels, the only other activity I have found that even remotely resembles this is the magnetism cricket holds over the people of the Indian subcontinent, where kids gather in vacant spaces, bowling used tennis balls to other kids batting with a stick or a plank, with a fruit box or a kerosene tin acting as the stumps. Like football, cricket too can be accessible, cheap and a conqueror of the poor. Where cricket failed and football succeeded in world conquest is, in my view, due to the unique temperament cricket requires, both as a player but, in particular, as a watcher. A cricket test match, which can take five days to complete and end in a draw, will not appeal to the temperament of an Italian, a Brazilian, a Russian or even a German, who will always be more readily thrilled by an all-action, 90-minute football match. This is why, under the pressure of market competition, cricket is turning more and more to shorter versions of the game, such as the one-day form and 20/20, and with serious success.

Xabi Alonso converts a 91st minute penalty to secure Spain a 2–0 Euro 2012 quarter-final win over France at Donbass Arena in Donetsk, Ukraine.

In the developed world street football has diminished in recent times but only because affordable recreational technology, especially for children, provides a compelling distraction. Even in these places the absence of impulsive street football is increasingly being filled by organised forms of the same thing (such as small-sided games and futsal) as parents strive to instil in their children the virtues of play and a healthy life. The joy of playing and the need to play remain the food of football’s staying power as the world’s favourite sport.

Football is also a team game. In this it is not alone of course but already being the world’s most popular team sport helps it maintain its regal position. A team sport, because of the relationship teams have with the broader collective they represent (their fans), will always draw higher levels of affection than individual sports. For example, in Australia we often refer to the Socceroos as ‘us’. If they win, we won, and if they lose, we lost. We never make this reference to our heroes of individual sports, such as Lleyton Hewitt, Ian Thorpe or Cadel Evans. Probably the most loved individual athlete of all time is Muhammad Ali. Why? Because, far from representing just his country—which he did reluctantly in any case—he stood for an entire race, symbolising the aspirations of blacks of African origin from Seattle to Durban. This is one reason that the football World Cup has such sweeping audience appeal, generally double that of the Olympic Games where individual achievements are paramount. The teams at the World Cup represent countries, continents, cultures, races, languages and even religions. Even though only 32 teams take part in the finals, the emotive lure of the World Cup is totally global.

Of course in pockets of the world football has its critics who generally, in my experience, at least in Australia, are those who either do not understand it or harbour an agenda against it, often both. These critics most enjoy brandishing the argument that football is a low-scoring game, which it is, and therefore dull. The most obvious counter to that claim is that if football was in any way dull, how does one explain its massive global popularity, which now spans well over a century? When football hooliganism is discussed, the hypothesis is often put forward that the low-scoring nature of the game must be the root cause: boredom and frustration set in and crowd violence becomes an outlet. In fact the opposite is true. Football is just about the only sport in the world capable of arousing the levels of partisan passion that will lead to civil violence. That unwelcome capacity for crowd violence is in fact a commentary on football’s greatness: it is capable of seducing and intoxicating humans to the extent where some of them will lose their grip on their emotions. It is a game in which fans will see themselves not as spectators but often as de facto extensions of the team and will do whatever they are able in order to be party to the collective quest for victory. In Argentina the most notoriously violent community of football supporters, the barras bravas, see themselves as la doce, the twelfth man, and will stop at nothing in their mission to make the point that their tribe is above all others. How can this be so, given that football is not a game in which goals come gushing at every turn?

This is football’s greatest irony—that its beauty is not in the ease or regularity of scoring but rather the difficulty of it. The elation and the sense of release that is experienced when one’s team scores can be incomparable as a source of joy. This is because it takes enormous technical expertise, creative invention and often luck, to score a goal in football. It is the only sport in which a 1–0 score can be a triumph and even a 0–0 result can be gripping entertainment. It is this, above all else, that explains the stirring crowd atmosphere at football matches and especially the rising crescendo of noise that accompanies the build-up to a goal and the deafening roar that follows it. And it doesn’t have to be a goal. An acrobatic goalkeeping save, a long-range drive that whistles over the bar or a shot that rockets against the woodwork—the near misses—can be as exciting as the goals themselves and just as precious mementoes of the occasion.

The two fundamental and central elements of football, and why it attracts and fascinates, are that the ball is round and that the game is played primarily with the feet. Some consider this second element a curious quirk. The noted Australian historian Manning Clark once made the assessment that he could never understand why a sport’s rules would not allow the use of the hands when the hands are naturally made for grasping, throwing and manipulating. He missed the whole point. The difficulty of controlling a sphere with one’s feet, which are only made for standing, walking and running, is the first thing that beguiles and captures the eye about football, and creates the envy and awe enjoyed by footballers who can do things with their feet others can barely hope to do with their hands. It is essentially this that fascinated me, for instance, and made me a captive of football when my father first took me as a small boy to a village game. I have been a fan ever since. A fan of the game and not of any team, and it is my suspicion that football’s pioneering pilgrims, the many thousands who were drawn in by the game when they first set eyes on it, were drawn in for the same reason. The shape of the ball is an educational point, for this is what makes football a game of skill and thereby characterises its soul.

Ipanema Beach in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, provides a postcard setting for a game of football.

On my drive home from my coffee-house sojourns in Double Bay I pass a park where a friend, Hector Martinez, an ex-professional player from Argentina and a ball wizard in his day, makes a livelihood by giving football tutelage to children. Whenever I stop he asks me to say a few words to the kids. I do this with some pleasure for it gives me an opportunity to pass on to the young ones what I believe is the essence of football: the shape of the ball. It is that which sets it apart from the other so-called football codes and governs what makes a footballer. The primary virtue of the ball being round is that its movement is predictable and therefore a willing subject of instruction. A round ball rolls true, bounces true and if you have total control of the ball you can make it do most of the work for you. There’s no need to make a 30-metre run carrying the ball to make ground, as you do in rugby, when you can make that same ground with one accurate 30-metre pass to a teammate with a football. But first you have to be able to control that football with your feet. It’s no good trying to boot it 30 metres if you don’t have control of its trajectory for it’s likely to go just about anywhere. So that is the key to the game and to playing it well.

This is why football, essentially, is a game of skill (as are golf, tennis, cricket and many other ball sports), and it is this that gives it both its entertainment value and its source of fun. The greatest-ever players in football owe their greatness to a cocktail of sporting qualities but it is always their superb command of the ball, and their sense of invention with it, that sets them apart. The truly great players are remembered every time for the unique things they were able to do with the ball, especially under pressure. It is this that makes football and footballers entertaining, a source of joy and a cause for smiles and laughter. The immortal Brazilian, Garrincha (about whom there is more in Chapter 3), spent an entire playing career mesmerising and fooling defenders with his skill and sense of surprise. George Best the same. The greatness of Pelé was in his capacity to shock and awe. With the ball at his feet the onlooker saw maybe three possible options for his next move, but somehow he’d find a fourth. Pelé was great for many reasons. He was quick, explosive, strong, intelligent and of a winning character. But all that would have counted for nothing without his unrivalled technique. The essence of his greatness was his impeccable skill with the ball and what he could do with it.

Manchester United’s George Best had sublime skill, photographed here playing against Newcastle United in the 1960s.

Football is fun primarily because of this. It is this that we admire most in accomplished footballers and it is this that we, old and young, aspire to and try to imitate every time we grab a ball and step onto a patch of green on a Sunday morning. It is because of this that you can play football, and enjoy doing it, until you are just about old enough to collapse. The ball technique, once acquired, never leaves you. You may become slower and weaker of muscle and bone as you get older, but your capacity to trap the ball and make an accurate pass stays with you forever. Football is a game you can play for life.

But above everything, football is and always has been a players’ game. At its most elite level football is a colossal business that in turn puts immense pressures on the game’s innocence. Yet football has managed to resist most of these pressures remarkably well, given its age as an organised sport and the many decades of its development as a commercially attractive form of entertainment. This is not the case with most other professional team sports, where all manner of profit-driven forces have in effect elevated the coach above the players as the determiner of who wins or loses. The most extreme example of this is American football, now the quintessential coaches’ sport in which the players determine very little and merely act out strategies and counter-strategies devised by the boss on the sidelines. The players are effectively pawns in a chess game in which there are no queens, kings, bishops and knights. With American football’s interminable stoppages, time-outs, unlimited substitutions, rehearsed moves and the coach’s ability to have radio communication with players, there is almost nothing the players decide for themselves.

In football things are still the opposite, even at the game’s most elite and ruthlessly commercial end. Of course in football, too, the coach is desperately important. It is he who picks the squad who will take the field, it is he who devises the tactics, it is he who most often recruits the players and it is he who gets fired when things turn bad. But once the whistle goes for the kick-off he is pretty much powerless and the players decide everything. Football coaches do their share of shouting and screaming from the sidelines but mostly the players don’t even hear them above the din of the crowd and just get on with it. The coach is allowed a maximum of a paltry three substitutions throughout the game, a facility of not much more than desperation value to plug a hole left by an injured player, to turn things around when the chips are down late in the game or to maintain the status quo. In football there are no time-outs, meaning the coach has little chance of interfering with the flow of a game governed by the performance of the players.

Through this, football maintains a living link with its grassroots and its amateur origins. Football in its original form conquered most of the world over a hundred years ago and the game harbours a natural instinct to resist change and to protect the virtues that made it popular in the first place. Rule changes in football are extremely rare and usually minor, mostly because such manipulation has had little chance of succeeding even in the face of massive commercial pressure. In its on-field essence and spirit there is even today little difference between a glamour game of football at Old Trafford and one played by children in a village in Africa.

The faithful gather in the Anfield Kop in Liverpool, circa 1970.

This, heaven forbid, may change in the future of course. For now FIFA, football’s world governing body, has to take much of the credit, as it presides not only over the sport’s present but also the need to protect its future as the world’s most popular sport. As the game’s overlord, FIFA suffers from all the trappings the global football industry, valued at more than $500 billion per year, can bring. Not unnaturally, FIFA and its officials are held accountable for the way they run the sport and the way they dispense much of the money it generates. But while FIFA is not perfect, and neither can it ever possibly be, there is no denying that the organisation’s zeal to protect the game’s traditional on-field virtues and its minimalist attitude to rule changes now stand between the football we have known for 150 years and the football some would like us to have in the interests of modern commercial pressures.

I once put it to a high-level FIFA official that maybe we should think about reducing team numbers, from 11 to 10, in order to create more space on the field, ushering in more goals and more entertainment. The answer to that was that we wanted more kids playing the game, not fewer. The response was characteristic of the FIFA position on change, which many see as too conservative or even old-fashioned. FIFA takes a similar view on other suggested innovations, such as enlarging goals, time-outs and the intervention of video refereeing, all of them driven by populism and by people concerned only with the pointy end of the vast football pyramid. What the FIFA attitude reminds us of, and warns us about, is that football is not about Manchester United or Real Madrid, or the Premier League, or the UEFA Champions League or even the World Cup, but the hundreds of millions who play it and the billions who follow it.

When Australia was knocked out of the 2006 World Cup finals after a controversial penalty was awarded to Italy late in the game and Francesco Totti broke the 0–0 deadlock, Australians were heartbroken. One of my daughters telephoned me in Berlin the next day saying she had lost all interest in a game that was so low on justice. She was right. I had learnt long ago that there is no justice in football. In 1954, when I was eight, the country of my birth, Hungary, tragically lost the World Cup final to a modest West Germany in Berne when it had gone unbeaten for four years, was hailed as the best team of all time and started as the biggest favourite in the tournament’s history. Then there was the Australia–Iran World Cup qualifier in Melbourne in 1997, when Australia was coasting at 2–0 deep in the second half, with a foot in the World Cup finals, only to see its dream shattered by circumstance. A lone protester’s solo pitch invasion held up the game for eight minutes, threw the Australians off their momentum and allowed Iran to draw level, ending the dream.

Socceroos forward Mark Viduka [left] holds off Fabio Cannavaro of Italy during the round of 16 World Cup football match between Italy and Australia in Kaiserslautern, Germany, on 26 June 2010.

Those two episodes taught me that football is not about justice. That sport is not about justice. That it is about fair play and a level playing field, which are very different things from justice. In a perverse way this is among the things that ultimately make football beautiful. It is a purely human endeavour, warts and all. As we permit ourselves to enjoy and thrill at the sight of exceptional players, who are above the ordinary and the imperfect, so we should be willing to accept the need to have the ordinary and the imperfect, above which the exceptional can rise. And that means not just the players, but the coaches, the referees, the administrators and even the fans, all of whom can influence a game and make a mark on its outcome. It is the beautiful game and it is the imperfect, as much as the perfect, that makes it beautiful.