ABSTRACT
Since Japan and South Africa have been host of the Men's Football World Cup, the incorporation of their continents into the world of football has been accomplished. With an estimated 250 million active players around the globe (this is the gross outcome of FIFA's ‘Big Count’ at the beginning of the 21st century), which today would be roughly 1 out of every 28 people in the world, football truly deserves to be called the global game. The sport's governing organization, FIFA, never tires of emphasizing the fact that the number of its national member organizations (208 in June 2011) actually exceeds the number of states with membership in the United Nations Organization (n = 194). Because of its reach, FIFA, like the International Olympic Committee, is granted semi-official ambassador status, allowing its directors and board members to mingle on an equal footing with the world's most powerful and influential elite. The symbolic weight of football in the political arena is also evident in the case of goodwill programmes such as Football for Peace, a values-based project for Arab and Jewish children in Israel, or Football for Development, which seeks to use the power of the game to positively transform communities in Third World countries. Because of football's ostensible ability to traverse all cultural boundaries and unite the world's citizens, the ‘beautiful game’ was even nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2001 (International Herald Tribune, January 24, 2001).
