Football and Nationalism

 On 14 July1969, a Football War broke out between two Central American countries i.e El Salvador and Honduras.

The war (ended on 18 July 1969) was caused by political tensions between both countries that coincides with inflamed rioting between fans of their football teams during the second North American qualifying round for the 1970 FIFA World Cup. For details on the Football War, please click here.

This Football War shows that a Football match is not just an ordinary sport match but it can also be a competition between national prides of the countries competing in the matches.

This is quite obvious because unlike other sports e.g Badminton, Tennis, Athletics, which rely on individual skills of the player, in Football, a player must not only be good playing by himself, but he must also be good playing with ten other members of his team.

Most countries have their national football teams with members consisting of best players in their country, to compete against other country's national teams.

Like in other countries, football in Indonesia is played by men from all walks of life almost every time there is a celebration, that is why Football is often described as the People's Sport.
But until the recently, the condition of football here was actually not good whereby our team loose many times against other countries.

But all that has changed after the Indonesian national team won all five matches in the qualifying round of the 2010 AFF-Suzuki Cup. Therefore, many people who never enjoy watching football matches before, like children, ladies, famous celebrities, have became supporters of our team. Every day all the news media reported about our national team players, their private lives etc.

Tickets for the 85,000 seats of the main stadium in Jakarta have been sold-out during the last several games

Our national team's fans are so fanatic that they are willing to travel to Kuala Lumpur where our national team will meet Malaysia in the First leg of Final Round tonight, whereby 15,500 tickets allocated for fans of our team have been sold-out.

For the last several days, they have been willing queue for many hours to buy tickets for the second leg which will held in Jakarta on 29 December 2010. This is amazing considering that the prices of tickets are very high i.e. between 50,000 Rupiah (US$ 5+) and 1 million Rupiah (US$ 100+), compared to the prices of tickets in Malaysia i.e. RM 30 (87,000 Rupiah) and RM 50 (144,500 Rupiah). For details on the Tickets, please click here.

I am very happy with this rising nationalism among our people in supporting our national team. I hope that our leaders in the government, parliament and judiciary bodies would be able to use this momentum to gain support for development programs that benefits our country and people.


Logo : Courtesy of AFF-Suzuki Cup.