A football match can start a war. A real one, like the one between Honduras and El Salvador in June 1969. The spark was the victory of the latter who then qualified for the World Cup in Mexico, obtained in a narrow shootout thanks to penalties. Street violence between supporters degenerated within a few hours into a real armed conflict opposing the armies of these two small neighboring countries in Central America, including aerial bombardments. “The football war lasted a hundred hours, it left six thousand dead and several thousand injured. Nearly fifty thousand people lost their homes and land,” noted the great Polish reporter and writer Ryszard Kapuscinski, who witnessed this absurd and fortunately exceptional confrontation.
The exasperated chauvinism of supporters is nonetheless always formidable, even if, as the novelist George Orwell, tireless fighter for freedom, pointed out, “Sport is war minus the guns”. With obvious political and geopolitical issues, even if sporting institutions continue to proclaim that sport is apolitical or should be. This has never been more obvious than in this American World Cup, revealing the international balance of power in all their complexity.
A young sport whose rules were established in the United Kingdom in 1863, football quickly became universal. Today it is the richest, most popular, most practiced and most publicized sport on the planet. Hence its importance for the powers in place, particularly for authoritarian regimes.
/2022/12/02/638994d9d5adf_61168cfc8256bf7ea5ef3720-1.png "DIRECT. War in the Middle East: Iran says it has not yet accepted the agreement brandished by Donald Trump after the cancellation of American strikes")
