Love and Blood At the World Cup with the Footballers, Fans, and Freaks [Paperback]

Every four years the thirty-two-team, sixty-four-game World Cup captivates the planets populace for a month. Work absenteeism skyrockets. Political campaigns grind to a halt. Fans mortgage their houses to buy tickets. And teams employ every means possibleeven consulting witch doctors and astrologersin their quest for national glory.

Veteran soccer commentator Jamie Trecker traveled to Germany for FIFA World Cup 2006. Here, reported from the restaurants, trains, bars, town squares, hostels, press boxes, and brothels, is his unvarnished account of the games and parties, great plays and fistfights, gossip and tacky souvenirs that turn the largest sporting event on earth into a true world bazaar. With equal measures insight and irreverence, Trecker captures the passion, politics, controversies, and economics that make soccer a reflection of the world.

1 
WINTER IN GERMANY
 
While junkets like the draw seem exciting to fans and outsidersYoure going to Germany! How thrilling!the truth is that this part of the World Cup, however important for the teams and the competition, basically entails sitting in a modified hall with a bunch of tables and computer hookups, staring at a large TV screen. In Leipzig, the draw was held like a trade show at a new convention center, essentially a long glass aircraft hangar, full of dour, chain-smoking Europeans desperate to return to the hallway for another cigarette. The centers entrance was decorated with a steel rose by a Berlin artist. Viewed dead on, the sculpture looked like a thin, flaccid penis atop a set of glass ballsnot the best omen. As the drizzle came on and the temperature dropped, the setting seemed increasingly depressing.
 
           In times past, the draw had been a bit more conviviala great time to meet colleagues, trade war stories, discuss the finer points of padding ones expense account, and,lÓ.