Why an African Team Could Win this World Cup

Soccer is undeniably the world's game. The level of devotion of fans, the globally cross cutting composition of teams and leagues, and the frantic passion and aspiration footballers inspire among global youth place it in a sporting category all its own. And as the World Cup gets set to begin in South Africa next week, the story of how football is changing is a fascinating lens to understand the wider march of globalization.

For Americans, the rest of the world's obsession with soccer (or "football," as they call it) feels like the joke that everyone else is in on. Every four years, when the World Cup comes around, it's sort of like the party that we weren't invited to. Yet even here, soccer is on the rise, in part based on the emergence of a major league for soccer in the last decade, in part -- at least for folks like me -- because of travel to other places, and in part because of international cable and streaming live video allows games to be seen in real time anywhere in the world.

But the more interesting football globalization story is the story of the shift in global competitiveness. While international events like the World Cup used to be entirely dominated by teams from Europe and a few other places like Brazil, there has been an explosion in recruitment of top players from around the world to major European leagues, meaning that when the World Cup comes around, nations from every corner of the world are represented by world class professionals who have experience in highly competitive settings. For example, just about every member of the Cameroon World Cup team plays professionally in a major league -- and many of them are at Champions League-quality teams.

A fascinating article last week in Time noted how dramatically this shift might influence the outcome of this year's World Cup -- and how poorly investment banker predictions seem to understand the new reality. Recently, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and UBS have all published guides to the games, but their predictions seem discontinuious with the current reality, according to folks in the know. The article suggests the problem is how heavily the predictions weight past performance (with, perhaps, a dose of Eurocentrism thrown in).

There seems to be an interesting lesson here: as the rate of change increases in the present, it gets harder and harder to use the past to predict the future. The linear scale just sort of breaks down, and new variables confound even good guesses. What's more, it turns out that the "barriers to entry" are almost never about talent or capacity, but about how hard it is to train, grow, and harness natural ability.

Sound familiar? Like, uh, our economy? The idea that the only countries that can win the World Cup are the countries that already have is as fallacious as the notion that the companies that have been leading the industry (whatever that industry may be) for the last fifty (or even ten) years are here to stay.

We live in a world of impermanence, and the interval of disruption is shortening. What's more, as the World Cup shows, talent is distributed equally everywhere. It's just opportunity and organizational experience that aren't. In the future, no institutions can count on the past to save them, and the ability to manage -- and more importantly, lead -- change is going to be the most important ability of all.

Photo credit: Katie@!