In 2010, the World Cup tournament will finally take place in a (cold) South Africa. As the tournament begins, however, there will be thirteen European teams in the tournament, and only six African teams, with one of them — South Africa — automatically qualified as the host. Of course, it could be worse: at the time of the 1966 World Cup, out of sixteen slots there was one slot left open for either a team from Africa or one from Asia. The best team from each region played each other to gain access to the coveted spot. This began to change as a result of the boycott of the World Cup by African teams (led by Kwame Nkrumah), and Africa’s access to the tournament has increased steadily, if incrementally, during the past decades. The story of Africa’s struggle to gain power and access in world football is well told in Paul Darby’s book Africa, Football and FIFA. (Darby will also be speaking at Duke as part of the Soccer Politics series on October 29th). Still, given that Europe and Africa both have the same number of member nations and therefore national teams — fifty-three in each case — the difference in access is striking.
Has the time come for FIFA to institute equality in access to the World Cup? Why not accord berths in the tournament proportionally, according to the number of member countries in each regional confederation? At the Football is Coming Home blog, David Patrick Lane has made one proposal for moving in this direction. Obviously FIFA has its reasons and its justifications for maintaining the current situation. Still, as time goes on, and African teams increasingly field world-class players that could obviously seriously compete in the tournament, these are growing thinner and thinner. It’s hard not to feel as if unequal access to the tournament is just a reflection of the power relations that still undergird global football, rather than a justifiable policy. After all, isn’t the whole idea that anything can happen — that anything should be allowed to happen — on the pitch? If football draws so much passion, it is partly because it is one place where the broader political order can every once in a while be overturned, at least for a moment.
