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Competition and National Confidence

With the World Cup final on Sunday, the world will finally see if France?s ageing team will be able to beat the Italians in a Europe-only final to the world?s biggest soccer tournament. What have the effects of this year?s World Cup been on the national confidence of the countries involved? For the teams that made it into the final rounds, was it a cause of national pride in the homeland? How about for the teams that went away from Germany with their tails between their legs? One of the notable, yet unsurprising early exits from this year?s World Cup was the United States.

The American team performed better than expected ? after an embarrassing first game ? but showed once again how little the United States care about soccer, even with youth soccer leagues and the Major League Soccer organization. The U.S. did manage to get their first goal scored in a European World Cup, meaning that they didn?t go home entirely empty-handed. And one nation that might have gotten a confidence boost from advancing in the World Cup, state-sponsor of terrorism Iran, went home after doing marginally well until their final game.

One country that didn?t make it to the World Cup but which wanted to, Israel, got a bit of a confidence boost when a Ghanian player who plays for a soccer club in Tel Aviv raised the Israeli flag for his fans in Israel after a match won by the national team of Ghana. One can only imagine the fury felt in the Muslim world seeing the Israeli flag paraded on the soccer pitch, but the world also got a lesson in the tolerance in Israel that is almost non-existent in the Arab world, especially by having a black non-Jewish soccer player wave the flag of the Jewish state in, of all places on Earth, Germany.