Football: The International Language of Diplomacy

It's dusk in Jordan, and the young boys are out in the street with a football, kicking it around.  You catch one as he the moves the ball in and about his feet effortlessly, taunting his opponents to take it from him.  You go up to his father and ask a very important question: "Which is better: Barcelona or Real Madrid?"  He responds, "Barcelona, of course."  This is the language that all common men speak in this country - in this region - in this world when they can't speak any other common language: the international language of football.

I live with a host family in which the father is the goalie coach for the number one football team in Jordan: Al-Wehdat.  Football was his childhood and is his adulthood, and it will be his future.  If there is something that brings all men together in the Middle East, it's football.  My host dad is also the head coach for one of the police department divisions in Jordan, so he gets to travel internationally, coaching games of players playing against many other international players and police divisions.  This is a beautiful thing to witness because language barriers and cultural differences are broken down once the ball hits the players' feet.

For women in this part of the world, it's more of a rarity to be involved in football.  Women are seen as distractions in the rowdy football stadiums, many times risking their own well-being when entering the stadium.  However, there are women's teams in the area including the University of Jordan's women team.  Many of the players on that team also play for the Jordanian National Team, and they go to tournaments and will go to the Olympics this fall.  The women's team is a mechanism of Jordan to show that women can excel in many things that men do.

So many Jordanians know about football leagues in Europe, and they watch them diligently and read the stats of the players.  Lionel Andrés Messi's, who plays for Fútbol Club Barcelona in Spain, face is seen commonly on billboards in Jordan.  If you put an Arab boy and an Israeli boy on the same field without telling each child the other's ethnicity and then throw the ball on the field, you will witness common sportsmanship and playing rather than fighting.

I believe that football is a very practical and more peaceful tool (although there are examples of football being used to cause violence as exemplified in Egypt) than other tools of international relations such as war and sanctions, which both tend to hurt the civilian populations the most.  We should only encourage more interaction of football between different ethnicities and cultures rather than war and sanctions.  In 2010, the world witnessed as many international teams came together in South Africa, which was known for its violent, non-democratic past, to play football in the World Cup, the first time ever the World Cup was held in an African nation. As we look forward to the 2012 Olympics in London this summer, that will be another example of how possible it is for this type of practical sportsmanship and interaction to occur.  Let's kick more balls instead of shooting bullets or placing sanctions against countries.