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"Classifications and world soccer"
01/25/2003 Entry
Last night, some good friends had a nice dinner party; present were two Americans, an Irish, a Brazilian and a Hungarian (we also have other identities but this is relevant to the topic here). Somehow we got on to the topic of the World Soccer Championships. It's one of those rare cultural events where even those without much interest in their national identity will proudly dress in their national colors and seek out every opportunity to showcase their affiliation.
I was made to endure some painful comments about Hungary's lack of ability to qualify in the past few years. In fact, my Brazilian friend confused Hungary's presence in the finals in 1954 with its last qualifying year (that was in the '80s). Perhaps this was simply a bitter reflection of Hungary's win over Brazil back in 1954.
So how bad is Hungary these days if it can't even qualify when the US can? Cute question. If you know anything about the World Soccer Championships you know that qualifiers are broken down by continent. So while the US conveniently gets paired with countries that lack a strong soccer tradition, countries in Europe and elsewhere compete with extremely serious rivals.
That's when we got onto discussing how many slots are allocated to various continents. Latin America lost one recently. And it was at this point in the conversation that one of my friends commented: so shouldn't the European Union just send one team? You would never guess which of the five of us came up with that idea. An interesting one, to be sure. I never thought all those countries would give up on their national currencies (another important component of national identity [pdf]) so who knows, maybe one day they will join forces and send one team to the World Championships. Yeah right.
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