Globalization--How Soccer Explains the World

Foer does a phenomenal job in his analogy of comparing the game of soccer to globalization in his novel How Soccer Explains the World. Soccer is one of the few if not only sport that is played all over the world and it is open to everyone and anyone regardless if you are male, female, young or old and every game is open for everyone to view and scrutinize. Like most aspects of the world, soccer is a male-dominated sport, and adult male soccer receives more attention than women’s soccer does. Like with most governments in the world, there are many critics (citizens) constantly complaining about decisions made by government officials, this is similar to what occurs in a soccer match when fans are angry at certain calls that the referees make and yelling at them to make better decisions.

            One thing to consider with globalization is the fact that America is a world power and likes to uphold this prestigious title and like America everyone else seeks to be the best. This is one of the major challenges in globalization because while it is usually more efficient for countries to come together and work on the product that they are best at producing, the idea of comparative advantage does not always seem ideal to everyone. If certain products are more attractive to one country than the other certain countries will not acknowledge it even though it could benefit countries globally.  America is not globally known to be successful in soccer and as a result of that it is not a popular sport here even though it is huge in almost every other part of the world.  Likewise with soccer, there are a few countries that cooperate with “globalization” and we see this during the national soccer matches primarily because they are players who are from one country but play on another soccer team because their skills are more useful for that team. For example, Lionel Messi is a native citizen from Argentina and he is the captain for their national team, but he also plays as a member of the Spanish club FC Barcelona soccer team.

            Economies in various parts of the world have been suffering drastically  and as a result countries care to do what is best for their country in order for them to recover and achieve success. Some countries care about nationalism more than they care about humanitarianism or the idea of various countries coming together to increase economic efficiency. This defeats the purpose of globalization because of the fact that many countries refuse to cooperate, the resulting factor is failure of globalization. This is similar to soccer because major matches such as the world cup are created in order to unite the world and bring everyone together for competitive fun. However every country has many differences present because of various cultures that are all around the world. Fights break out among players and among fans. Rather than uniting and finding ways to come together, these citizens bicker and grow further and further a part.

            Globalization is nowhere near perfect just as the sport of soccer. In a perfect world the ideal situation would be for everyone to cooperate with what is best for the common good however nationalism and many other factors will always stand in the way.