Come to the party!

This week the reading is a little more dry, but important. I promise it will be spiced up with a couple of videos, though, and next week's will be (I think) really good, so stay tuned.

In America, whenever we say that teams are in the "finals", we usually mean that it is the last two teams in a tournament. For the World Cup, though, you will hear people talking about all of the teams as being in the "finals". The reason? The World Cup has already been going on for almost 2 years, and this summer really is the final part of the huge event. Here's how it works:

FIFA, the international governing body of soccer has a little over 200 members. Not all of these are independent countries - Great Britain, for example, has 4 teams: England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland - but most of them are. Every one of these members had a chance to get to the World Cup finals in South Africa, and they all played each other over the course of about a year and a half to see who goes.

In order to make this fair, FIFA had divided the world up into regions. The regions are South America, North/Central America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Oceania (quick - try to name the countries of "Oceania"). Then they decide how many spots in the finals each region gets, based on how good the soccer teams from that region are. For example, the teams from Europe are usually outstanding, and there are a lot of them, so they get 13 spots in the finals. Africa - also with lots of countries - gets 6. South America, who produces champions all the time but does not have as many countries competing for spots gets 4 spots plus a chance at a fifth.

Different regions use different formats for qualifying, which would be waaay too boring to describe, but basically what this involves is playing a home game and an away game against each team in your region. Not surprisingly, teams use every chance they can get to gain an advantage. For example, when we play Mexico, they make us play them in the high-altitude, very polluted, massive Azteca Stadium in Mexico City. We then turn around and make the Mexicans come play us in Columbus, Ohio in February, where it's about -20 degrees, and the Mexicans are mostly concerned about not freezing to death. In South America, the country of Bolivia (which isn't very good) makes everybody come play them in their capital of La Paz, which is at 12,000 feet elevation in the Andes mountains, and where players try not to pass out. You can see how this would be a lot of fun. Below is some footage of Josh Wolff scoring for the USA against Mexico during a 2001 qualifying game which the Mexicans still call "La Guerra Fria" (The Cold War).



What all of this means is that for many countries, it's a GIGANTIC deal just to get to the finals. Take Honduras, for example: It's a small, central American country going through a low-grade civil war, and hadn't been to the World Cup finals since 1982. They had gone through their 1.5 years of qualifying, only to come up a little short (or so they thought). In order to qualify for the finals, they needed to win their last game (which they did), and then hope the USA scored a goal to tie Costa Rica in a game that was going on at the same time, which would move Honduras past the Costa Ricans in the standings (how one team tying another helps a third team will be explained in a future post). Below is a video of the USA scoring the last-second goal, and you can hear the Honduras radio announcers while they watch it.



What happened afterward? The president of Honduras declared a national holiday. Like I said, it's a huge deal.

So who is coming to the party? Below are the squads. Next week we'll start to do the actual fun part of this blog, which is to go through each team and talk about which great players to watch.

The Host:
South Africa

Europe:
Denmark
England
France
Germany
Greece
Italy
Netherlands
Portugal
Serbia
Slovakia
Slovenia
Spain
Switzerland

South America
Argentina
Brazil
Uruguay
Paraguay
Chile

Africa:
Ghana
Ivory Coast
Cameroon
Nigeria
Algeria

Asia:
Japan
South Korea
North Korea
Australia (bet you didn't know Australia was in Asia...it's a long story)

Oceania:
New Zealand