Go, Egypt!

Against all odds, I ended up attending a World Cup game with sister #1; the Egypt vs NZ one on Sunday (Egypt won 3-1). A few minor observations:

Somewhat surprisingly, the crowd was totally dominated by Egypt - their flag (which, btw, is one of the most attractive, IMO, and also somewhat aligned with the general knowledge of the country, which is almost never true - it has a symbol on it which looks totally Egyptian (Gemini says it's called the "Eagle of Saladin" and is widely associated with Egypt, much like our maple leaf is to Canada, I guess).

I was vaguely expecting NZ to dominate a) because they are so much wealther and likely to be in Canada, I guess and b) I thought they would have had a much stronger football culture (in Egypt, I guess there is less time to appreciate football while trying to avoid the butt of an army rifle, but maybe that's not fair, and/or maybe that generates MORE passive entertainment demand).

On the other hand, Cairo alone has a population about 5x that of the entire of NZ (total: Egypt 120m, NZ 5m, smaller than BC).

I was also mildly impressed by how well the logistics ran - despite an unbelievable mass of people entering BC Place, it all went quickly and smoothly, and they had helpers (also police) everywhere. Plus, FIFA really knows how to run their graphics on the big monitor; lastly, they did an impressive flag unrolling that covered most of the field perfectly, no folds visible to me, and, was so fast that I didn't actually see them do it; I looked away for a few seconds and poof, there they were (one for each country plus a smaller one for FIFA itself).

Also, it seemed to me that every time an Egypt player went down, they made a huge show of it, usually rolling a few times, grabbing their shin as if they it had been whacked with a sledgehammer, and immediately popping their head up to see if the ref was watching.

The stretcher came out twice, but never onto the field. I guess this happens all the time and they usually stand down before actually picking up a body. The medics looked a bit bored by the whole process.

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Economist had a mildly interesting article comparing FIFA popularity to worldwide cultural trends. The gist of it is that while it is indeed nice that we still have there multi-national events, and FIFA is huge, FIFA is also an outlier. Since 2000, the trend has been more and more towards local content. They had many stats such as (I am making this up but you get the idea) in 2000 9 out of top 10 songs in Denmark were American; now, 9 of them are Danish. This trend is obvious across all media and most countries.

DJT's antics surely aren't helping make USA more popular, but the real culprit, if you want to call it that, is the collapse in the cost of producing and distributing content. In 2000, to get a song out there was not practical without a multi-million dollar budget. Now, anyone can and does, and, inevitably, a small% hit it big. A small % of hundreds of millions of people has a real effect. The Taylor Swifts of the world are still ever-bigger, but part of a declining trend overall.

Whether it's good that USA is losing soft power along with everything else is an exercise for the reader.