"There are no politics involved."

The Ladies in Action.

Want more proof of footie's social power? Check out the feature on the New York Times' website, which details a recent West Bank football match between a local Palestinian side and a visiting Jordanian team.

The really notable part: they were two women's teams playing in what was the Palestinians' first outdoor match at home.

The game finished in a 2-2 tie, but the Palestinian players did emerge victorious, insofar as they served as ambassadors both for statehood and equality.

Check out the entire article on the New York Times' website.

Footie's Psychological Impact

Germany and Euro 1996: Footie's role in fewer suicides.

Under the tagline "Major tournaments seem to have a major effect on suicide numbers," Simon Kuper delves into the interesting, and somewhat unexpected, finding of an epidemiological study on the relationship between football and suicide rates. In the study Kuper cites, there was a statistically significant decrease in the number of suicides during major international football tournaments, such as the World Cup.

The question now is: Is this relationship merely a correlation, or does it point to causation?

Per Kuper:

"Football gives meaning to many fans' lives. it makes them feel part of a larger family of fans of their team....That shared experience makes isolated people - high suicide risks -feel more connected to others. And this lifesaving connection is strongest during World Cups."

Thus, the study's statistical findings in conjunction with the above functional explanation work towards establishing a causal relationship between footie and decreased suicide rates.

Furthermore, in the study, a team's World Cup success did not have bearing on the decrease in suicides. In other words, it didn't matter whether a team won their games or not, the important part was making the finals and the sense of belonging that that achievement cultivated in the nation's population at large.

And this sense of belonging, fostered during the tournament, had a residual effect, decreasing suicides far beyond the the tournament's conclusion.

Again, per Kuper:

"When a country played in a football tournament, suicides fell - not just during the tournament itself, but for that entire year. Even after the team got knocked out, suicides stayed lower. That's probably because the uniting effect of the tournament lasts for months afterword."

To find out more about this study and other Kuper musings on football, check out his new book Why England Lose, co-authored with Stefan Szymanski.

Quotable

"Football is the opera of the people."

- Stafford Heginbotham, former chairman of Bradford City A.F.C.

Ceasefire: Cote d'Ivoire and the World Cup

"Football is not just a game, but is also an economic force, a model of globalisation, and, more importantly, a vehicle for conflict resolution." So began a 2006 posting on the Common Ground News Service, an organization that seeks to facilitate peaceful conflict resolution by increasing opportunities for dialogue.

This fact along with the fast approaching World Cup brings me back to the cessation of internal conflict in the Ivory Coast as a result of that country's qualification for Germany 2006, marking the first time the African nation had reached the Finals. War had raged in the Ivory Coast since the 1999 military coup, with the country soon divided between the rebel-controlled north and west and government-controlled south.

However, when Le Elephants sealed qualification, they were greeted at home by a united populace, while the leaders of the warring factions decided that there would be a cessation of hostilities, so that the country could cheer together for their team. The side itself was comprised not of members of different ethnicities but of represantitives of the Ivory Coast. As such, all Ivorians could see themselves in the team and began to recognize that common bond with their peers as well. It would be an enduring unity.

"This is proof," remarked Ollo Kambir, sports editor of 24 Heures, "that when Ivorians are united, they are capable of great things....and a catalyst for true peace in this country." Indeed, disarmament began soon thereafter in 2007.

Football 4 Peace

Who: Geoffery Whitfield, a former Baptist minister, and David Bedford, Director of the London Marathon, founded Football 4 Peace in 2001. In that year, the group gathered six volunteer coaches from the University of Brighton to work with 100 Arab Muslim and Arab Christian children in the town of I'billin, Israel.

What: Coaches, community leaders and other volunteers seek to reconcile fractured communities through football and other sport activities. The organization sees sport as a way to increase contact among segregated parts of a community, while promoting increased understanding and a greater desire among participants to work towards peaceful coexistence.

Where: Following the success of its 2001 effort, F4P has expanded to work in 24 mixed communities in Israel, Palestine, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, serving 2,500 children in 2009.

Why it works: The program is predicated on neutrality, inclusion and respect, such that the transcendent power of sport is unencumbered by the kind of sociopolitical considerations that have divided the groups heretofore. By using sport as a means to reintroduce responsible dialogue and cooperative interactions among children of different factions, F4P is able to achieve maximum results.

How to help: You can sponsor anything from a coach to a training camp to an entire program OR you can volunteer, F4P is currently recruiting volunteers for its 2010 coaching team as part of its Israel programme.

Quotable

"To the aesthete it is an art form, an athletic ballet. To the spiritually inclined, it is a religion."

- Paul Gardner, The New York Sun sports columnist

Football and Greek Tragedy: The Parallels

Maracanazo: Footie Catharsis.

In many ways, footie represents the quintessential human drama. The interplay of good and evil, the pursuit of cohesion and of perfection, the incessant tests of virtues, such as sacrifice and honor, and the culmintation of these forces in either the unbridled joy of a happy ending, experienced by the victors, or the searing sorrow of loss, endured by the losers.

Football makes classical Greek tragedy accessible to the masses. The games, as the plays of Aeschylus and Euripides, are cathartic, in that they provide for the cleansing of the soul in their combination of fear (of failure) and of pity (for both the losing players and their fans). Likewise, the gripping action of the matches, as with the plot action in these tragedies, transports the audience to a place where the reality of their inconsequential for two hours. The often unjust outcomes in footie match, due to the typically margin of victory, also means that teams with otherwise obvious discrepancies in ability always have a chance to win.

Thus, football closely approximates the struggle of forces explored in Greek tragedy, and so the deeply resonant and purposeful audience experience in those tragedies is replicated in the games. An apt example is the 1950 World Cup final, in which Brazil, the top, technically unmatched side in the tournament, was thwarted in the last minutes of the match by Uruguay, in front of a crowd of 200,000 in Rio de Janeiro. After the match, the CBF forswore white jerseys, favoring a change to yellow ones; indeed, introspection and the personal evolution it yields are the unavoidable consequences of tragedy.

In these ways, football, just as tragedy, has its power in the message it communicates about struggling, surviving, and sometimes emerging victorious, in the context of imperfect human nature.

Rwanda Uses Football for Reconciliation Efforts

This past summer, a benefit footie match for the One Dollar Campaign, an organization that constructs houses for orphans displaced by the 1994 Rwandan genocide, was held at the Amaharo stadium in Rwanda. It pitted the Amavubi Stars against a all-star team, headlined by Inter striker Samuel Eto'o.

After the match, Dominic Scicluna, an native Rwandan on the all-star team, professed his belief that "the players with the best technique are the ones that know that football is a vehicle for peace." After all, the first step on the path to peace involves bringing former adversaries together. There can be no real reconciliation absent social reintegration into a broader community, and football has proven itself invaluable in laying the foundation, on which a more inclusive community can develop. Indeed, football's unparalleled ability to do just that was put on display at the event, as Tutsis and Hutus of all ages gathered together to cheer on the home side.

In another example, Rwanda's National Unity and Reconciliation Commission (NURC) organized a series of football matches across the country over a three-month period in 2009. Tasked with building this "first trust" between genocide perpetrators and the villagers they previously terrorized, NURC turned to football, as it was the one sport that could draw these groups together and serve as a means of relation between the two. Through the footie matches, the participants grew more at ease with each other, paving the way for meaningful dialogue in the conversation events that took place after the matches.

America SCORES

What: This innovative program combines soccer, creative writing and service learning in the hopes of providing a basis for its students to become engaged in their communities and keep them active after school.

Why it works: The kids have to commit to attend literacy workshops every other day after school in order to play on their team. The literacy work they do also serves as the basis for a year-long community service project, which is based on the poetry they produce.

Where: What began in 1994 as a DC public school teacher's plan to keep her students off of the streets after school, has expanded to 14 cities, including Atlanta, Bay Area, Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas, DC, Denver, LA, Milwaukee, New England, New York, Seattle, and St. Louis.

Results: The program now reaches over 6,000 kids in 200 urban schools.

According to the SCORES website, their kids get 10 times more exercise than the national average, while producing more than 20,000 original literary works every year. Moreover, the program gives the students have the opportunity to publish and present their poems, building confidence in themselves and their abilities.

How to help: Go to the America SCORES website (http://www.americascores.org/) to donate or volunteer your services as a Writing Buddy, Assistant Soccer Coach, or Game Day Referee among the many other options for how to help out.

Quotable

Image via LA Times

"If this can be termed the century of the common man, then soccer, of all sports, is surely his game. In a world haunted by the hydrogen and napalm bombs, the football field is a place where sanity and hope are still left unmolested."

- Stanley Rous (former President of FIFA), 1952

"During the two hours of game time...I forget about the car bombs and feel human again"

Unity under one flag, pride in one country

In 2007 New York Times article, reporters interviewed Iraqis from various sects to survey their feelings about the recent success of their national team in winning the Asian Cup.

What's striking is the frequency with which those interviewed touched on the ability of their national team to bring together the various religious factions. In the words of Adnan, a 29 year old Shiite, "the team includes all the Iraqi sects, but they are all Iraqis and they are our brothers." He went on to lament the fact that the politicians would learn from the example of "these simple football players who managed to unite the Iraqi people."

Obviously, it would be a gross exaggeration to say that footie, in and of itself, will be able to create a lasting peace, but it would be just as foolish to neglect football's potential to create channels for national reconciliation and a means for dialogue between and amongst sects.

Ode to Footie

In the universality of football lies its power; it is, in a way, the world's language. Children in Riyadh, London, Rio de janeiro and all in between have access to it. They can play anywhere - on concrete, dirt, barefoot - with anything - a sock filled with hay and shaped into a ball, for instance. Each understands this language; it is one intimately connected with the human form - a feature common to all.

Football is transcendent, precisely because it does not rely on words: it is a language unto itself. Thus, it is not confined by nationality, geography, ethnicity, economic status or any other divisive grouping, which manifests itself in linguistic differences and so in group-segregation. Football speaks to man on a level deeper than cognition. It relates one individual to another by communicating common themes closely related to our humanity, such as sin, as with Maradona's "Hand of God" goal in the 1986 World Cup finals, and redemption, as with his "Goal of the Century" brilliance minutes later.

The superiority of football to all other sports is further found in the dichotomy of difficulty and simplicity that is its unrivaled beauty. It is the beautiful game borne of technical skill, physical endurance and sheer athleticism, which are inextricably intertwined and demand a complex understanding of position and movement into space. The action in football, as John Lanchester observed, is "hard to describe and it is even harder to do, but it does have a deep beauty...this is the reason why soccer still sinks so deeply into us: Because it is, it can be, so beautiful."

Grassroots Soccer International

Partnering in the field

Who: Grassroots Soccer (GRS) was started in 2002 by Dr. Tommy Clark and three other former professional soccer players (including ex-Survivor contestant, Ethan Zohn). After an period of initial success with its pilot program in Zimbabwe, the group received additional funding and was able to expand to reach a total of 13 sub-Saharan African countries. It currently has a permamnent staff of 60 and some 300 volunteers in the field. Learn how to become a volunteer by clicking here.

What: GRS program is a unique synthesis of football and community health education, designed to educate youth about HIV/AIDS, and, in so doing, equip them with the knowledge to lead healthy, disease free lives. They affect such empowerment through their Skillz curriculum, which draws connections between football and the life skills that enable the students, who range in age from 12-18, to be proactive in protecting themselves and their communities from the spread of HIV/AIDS.

Where: The program began in Zimbabwe and operates other flagship sites in Zambia and South Africa. In addition, it joins with "implementing partners," which work in conjunction with GRS to enact the Skillz curriculum in another 10 states (Liberia, Cote d' Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, Botswana, and Namibia). They have also expanded their outreach to Central America, partnering with organizations in Guatemala and the Dominican Republic.

Why it works: The fundamental power of football is its ability to create connections amongst people. Thus, the organization smartly focuses on capturing footie's immense popular appeal to make inroads into otherwise insular communities, while also redeploying the sports' tremendous power to increase the efficacy of its community education initiatives.

GRS uses footballers as role models and teachers, precisely because they are best able to channel the popular legitimacy and prestige that footie lends, and so they are uniquely situated to break down the stigmas surrounding HIV/AIDS and to affect the attitudes and behaviors of their students.

Results: GRS has already reached out to 272,000 kids through its direct programs and partnerships. In terms of actual impact on these participants, a 2004 Children's Health Council evaluation found that the percentage of kids who knew where they could go to for help with HIV related problems increased from 47% to 76%; the percentage of kids who thought condoms were effective rose from 49% to 71%; and the percentage of kids who could list three or more people they knew they could talk to about HIV surged from 33% to 72%.

A 2008 behavioral study revealed similarly promising results. In fact, in the 2-5 years after a GRS intervention, students were "six times less likely to report a sexual debut between 12-15 years, four-times less likely to report sexual activity in the last year, and eight times less likely to having had more than one sexual partner."

How to help: Beyond volunteering as a GRS intern, you can of course donate, or, for the more actively inclined, you can host a 3 v. 3 charity footie tournament or even have your team partake in the 2009-2010 commemorative games...or both!