M.J. Akbar, writer extraordinaire, says in the Asian Age that little Togo’s showing in the FIFA World Cup erases all excuses for India’s no show.
How small is Togo’s economy? Its growth rate in 2005 was 1% and its GDP just under two billion dollars. Ivory Coast had the same non-growth rate, and a GDP of $16.5 billion. Paraguay’s economy grew at 2.7% and had a GDP of $7.2 billion. Ghana was in single figures as well, with a GDP of $9.4 billion and a growth rate of 4.3%. Don’t doubt these statistics. They are from the CIA’s World Factbook. One squeak and you could end up in Guantanamo Bay…
Compare with booming bursting buzzing blazing buoyant India. India’s GDP is $720 billion, its purchasing power parity over three trillion dollars, its growth rate 7.6% and its population over one billion. The population of the other countries would lie unnoticed in an Indian district, and the Togoans could be fitted comfortably into a satellite town of Delhi….
It’s not the money, stupid. It’s the will. Without the will there will never come the power.
Also see: Prithvi Datta Chandra Shobhi‘s World Cup Notes
Anno akbaraaaaaa
why the hell are you comparing nation’s GDP with game of football?
Its an illogical way of telling why India cant participate in world cup.
Frankly, I don’t understand all this breastbeating about India not qualifying for the FIFA World Cup. Do German, French and Italian media similarly bleat about their teams not qualifying for the ICC Cricket World Cup? They don’t, do they? Then why is our media so insecure that they have to cry because we didn’t do something that some others did? It is the same thing during Olympics too – just because some tiny nations manage to get some medals in that stupid circus our media goes into a frenzy. Why not accept that as a nation we are not interested in those sports, so we don’t do well in them. Personally, I am happy that we have chosen a beautiful game like cricket rather than some of these other sports – Football atleast can be called a sport, some of those circuses in Olympics don’t even deserve to be called sports in my opinion.
As for Football being a “global sport” whereas cricket being limited to only 10-12 countries – let us not fall for that either. Total population of the 32 countries participating in the FIFA world cup is 1.47 billion. Compared to that, the total population of the 14 countries that took part in previous Cricket World Cup was 1.66 billion. Guess which world cup has a better claim to be truly representing the world! It is not true that only 10 countries play cricket either. While those 10 are the only full members of ICC, almost every country on this planet, including the likes of Germany, France, Italy etc are associate/affiliate members of ICC and they do have a chance to qualify for the world cup. It is just that they don’t do well enough, so while the likes of Netherlands and Namibia qualify, these bigger countries don’t.
It is just as a nation what game are we obsessed with .If every school and every kid dreams about being a footballer .certainly we can put two teams in next world cup. All that our kids aspire like ‘IQBAL’ to be budding Sachin tendulkar , so no surprises in that .
Mohan,
The breastbeating by the Indian media is more a reflection of India’s mediocre performance in all sports including cricket. If India were the top team in at least one chosen sport (say cricket) then there would have been a smug satisfaction and less of this breast beating. But lets admit it, India has had its moments in cricket but has always languished in the 3-4 position. It has never been an Australia or a 1970’s West Indies. We have been obsessed with cricket for so long and yet, can never hope to beat Australia consistently, and performances against teams like Pakistan, SA, and SL have been patchy/equally matched. (Our last WC win was in 1983, remember?? That too with just 8 teams)
And regarding the population statistics, why don’t you compare it with the last world cup when China qualified? Lets not compare with simple population statistics. Football is truly global just by the number of countries (including world cup) aspiring to be part of the world cup. Even if you compare population, you should compare it with the qualifying rounds when around 180 countries (including India) participate.
Goldstar,
Point taken that we are not really the most dominant team in cricket. But I feel even if we were world beaters, our media would have discounted it on the basis that “it is only played by a handful of countries”.
As for your statement “Football is truly global just by the number of countries (including world cup) aspiring to be part of the world cup”, I disagree. I don’t think number of countries is the right measure, because all countries are not equal. Europe has some two dozen countries, each of which is smaller than our states or sometimes even cities! So that bumps up the number of countries where football is popular, but if you really look at the number of people crazy about the game – then football is huge mostly in Europe and Latin America (as indicated by the composition of the final 8 in the current world cup) and India alone has more cricket crazy fans than the number of football fans in those two regions combined. As for 180 countries participating in the qualifiers, do note that even in cricket some 92 member countries go through the world cup qualifiers finally resulting in some 5 or 6 teams who join the 10 full member countries in the world cup. So point is, football is not orders of magnitude more global than cricket – not as much as indicated by the 180 countries vs 10 countries etc. It seems that way only because they have lots of teams from smaller countries whereas cricket has this one team followed by a billion Indians. But I think that should change too – cricket will be a much better sport if they get rid of this nationality based teams. Let there be some 10 teams from India, 3-4 from Australia and so on and we will have much better contests rather than the current scenario where you have to keep playing amongst the same old 5-6 decent teams and some 4-5 other pathetic ones.
But anyway, I digress. Basic thrust of my comment was that India is changing. We are no longer some poor, developing country that we should continue to look up to other countries as our role models and be unhappy if we don’t do what others are doing. We have always been huge in terms of population and size, but now we also have the economic muscle and global standing to match. We have the second biggest movie industry in the world. Our curries and dosas are becoming diet of choice all over the world. A significant portion of phone calls that people make anywhere in the world to check their credit card balance or to book an airline ticket is answered in India. The software that we develop is helping keep businesses running all over the world – so much so that if an aged regional actor dies a natural death and Bangalore takes off for a day it creates near global panic. We are even making our presence felt in creative areas like advertising, literature, fashion industry etc. We have the fastest growing market for pretty much anything you can think of. While all this is being noticed by overseas media, it seems to me that our own media is still caught in that “we are a poor developing country, no good at anything” image. By that I don’t mean that they should go to the other extreme and start signing paeans about the new shining India, but atleast a little less of wailing would be nice.
“so much so that if an aged regional actor dies a natural death and Bangalore takes off for a day it creates near global panic.” ..
term it as Global PANIC…LOL @ Mohan.
Is this Violence to show we can cause Global Panic or hang our head in shame??