So it’s all over. I had a great world cup seeing football with various friends and family – visitors and locals – in places ranging from a church garden to a cinema and from the fan mile and ‘puma centre’ in cafe moscau to a variety of local pubs and restaurants – and my own livingroom. Seeing the local and national carnevals, the football tourists and the Germans (from the grannies to punks and the gays to the Turkish Germans) celebrating has been fantastic.

The great thing about the world cup is that it’s really heavy, intensive – and at best like this year here on home ground in Germany at least – a festival! Intuitively, i’m against those wanting to increase the frequency to every two years: the event would suffer from inflation! Ideally, one would be on holiday during the world cup, although a lot of lazyness at workplace is allowed during the competition. If that’d happen every two years, or including the continental contest, like here the European Cup, every year – things would not be quite the same. In comparison I would point to the ice-hockey world championships that take place every year – and people cannot be bothered to express their excitement to the same extent – even in the ice-hockey countries like my native Finland.

Nevertheless, there are a lot of things that I disliked about the world cup:

1) commercialization: everything was for sale – or sold to the large companies who bought out a monopoly of advertisement.

2) lack of truly public space: even in the football capital city berlin there weren’t really truely public screens. even the fan zone was gated. one had to see the games at pubs, restaurants on these designated, specifically catered areas. i had had this vision of berlin with big screens everywhere in the public spaces of the city. for example on squares

3) hierarchies: related to the previous there was a real issue of access to the stadiums and the venues to watch the broadcast. tellingly, on the fan mile there were two sets of seats where to see the screen, but these were VIP areas. i’m alright with broadcasted football – this seems to be the norm by now in many places and with the fans’s international interests, but then this really should be radically democratic. In four years I can imagine people watching football on the big screens in front of the Viennese City Hall – the same way as they watch opera there during the summer… (if the opera lovers wouldn’t mind too much, of course!)

4) defensive play: boring to watch when teams try to hang on and wait for the penalties – which they, with the 50:50 chance, often lose. at least the germans have been transformed under ‘Klinsi’ but even they lost against Italy in part because of this anticipation and the strong belief in Lehmann’s hands.

What was really amazing was how the Germans have rediscovered the concept of nationhood (that they hopefully will start ignoring more now that the games are over). By getting so excited about football, in a way that continued until the end was a fantastic thing. They provided a really great World Cup for themselves and for their guests. At some point I really got worried thinking that perhaps they would be so upset if they’d lose that they would simply give up interest on the competition. This didn’t happen – and they confessed being happier for the third place and having won their last game than they would have been had they made it to the final and lost it.

And how do the Italians feel? – I hope to catch up with my Italian friend today or tomorrow to get an idea.