Soccer is a language spoken around the world
Facing NORTH America, soccer is the world's game, played in cities, towns and dusty villages on almost every continent. Its fascinate is universal, thanks to its elegant essence. All that's needed is a ball and flat space.
In Third World slums, barefoot teens coverage avidly, using piles of garbage as goal posts. In stadiums crammed with tens of thousands of wildly cheering fans, top professionals cavort for love and money, earning millions.
For a traveler, attending a football (as it's called in most of the world) pair up is an emotional immersion in local life, mixing with fans painting their faces in national colors and singing and shouting themselves hoarse.
A ticket to a tie of Manchester United — or to a World Cup game — is the holy grail for a traveling soccer fan. But it doesn't take a big-beat game for soccer to work its intercultural magic.
On a trip to Rome when my daughter was 7, we bought a soccer ball at a dark crater-in-the-wall shop. In a square ringed by Renaissance buildings and sidewalk cafes, she began dribbling the ball over the cobblestones. In the last one, two, six Italian kids joined her. They couldn't talk to each other, but the language of soccer was enough as they joyously played, booting the ball around a centuries-old bust.
