Diversity of the Beautiful Game: Rio to Merseyside

Ronaldinho and Steven Gerrard: Different styles of greatness

The greatest and the biggest game on the planet is getting more colossal every minute. Increased participation, increased media coverage and out-of-job bloggers like us add up to the grandiose of football.

The history of the beautiful game dates back 2500 years, to a province in China, where they called it Cuju.

There are many reasons behind football espousing the world’s imagination, but those are different in different provinces. So let us look into the reasons, beyond football, which define the style they inculcate.

In layman’s terms, we will look into why Ronaldinho will display so many hallucinogenic skills on the pitch whereas Zinedine Zidane, whom I personally consider the greatest footballer of my time, won’t.

The previous statement must have made you curious about my age, but trust me, I’m young enough to be a million dollar investment for Sheikh Mansour from Etihad stadium. Only if my skills…Ahhh!

It is of highest curiosity to me why the Latin Americans have a better skill set than the Europeans, in terms of football. A very interesting observation is that even the Latin speaking Europeans, that is, the Spanish and the Portuguese, have better dribbling skills than the Deutsch, the Oranges, the Azzurri and of course, the stratosphere-touching passers from the land of the Queen.

The most obvious reasoning behind it is how kids grow up idolising their heroes and how are trained. But we will take a different approach to see why Neymar will do 17 step-overs to dribble one defender and Khedira will give air-borne balls to a teammate, standing right next to him. The analogies may seem a little dragged but that is the whole purpose of part of speech.

Let’s consider that you are lucky enough to visit Brazil. Let us move ahead to the point where your flight lands at Galeão International Airport, Rio de Janeiro. You clear your immigration, speak some funny words in Portuguese and then you take a cab to your hotel somewhere near Vargas.

To look for the answer to the question of why football is so skill-based in those parts, you will have to look beyond the Rio carnivals and wander into the small streets of Santa Maria, among others. That is where you will get the answer to Kaka’s relentless 360° and not Micheal Essien’s.

Take a walk inside the Favela (the slums of Rio) and you will see thin roads with doors of the adjacent houses opening right on the street. There will be cars parked outside, taking half the space. But mostly you won’t observe all this because all you will see are kids as big as Giovinco, toiling around barefoot with a ball half torn and half gone. The economic disparity in developing countries runs parallel to their population, so you may even end up watching a 13-a-side match on a street as long as Peter Crouch.

The kids not only grow up dribbling the ball past their opposition team, they dribble past the cars, the cycles and the cattle as well. Frankly, they have no other option.