ABSTRACT
Soccer is, without any shadow of doubt, the world’s most popular sport. It is, as Lawrence Kitchin put it as long ago as 1966, the only ‘global idiom’ apart from science.1 Some idea of the game’s development towards its premier world position is provided by the fact that, when FIFA started life in 1904, it had only seven national associations as members, all of them European. By 1986, however, it had a membership of 150 drawn from every quarter of the globe.2 In short, soccer as an organized game is now played in the majority of the world’s nations at a level sufficiently high for their national teams to be recognized by FIFA as qualifying for entrance to the World Cup.
