The world is round

I was on a flight from Manchester, UK to Atlanta on the day that the USA were playing Portugal in the 2014 FIFA World Cup. On the tiny screen jiggling around irritatingly on the seatback in front of me, I was following the game. USA scored and went ahead and all around me the whole plane erupted with cheers. Suddenly I realised that I was surrounded by American ‘soccer’ fans following the game as passionately as any in Manchester itself.

I began to compare notes with my neighbour who turned out to be an ex-US Army colonel who had then embarked on second career with a major oil and gas company. He was clearly a sports nut – it hardly takes one to recognise another.

‘C’mon,’ the colonel muttered to his players from 30 000 feet, ‘stay on offense.’

‘Attack,’ I correctly him mildly, ‘in football we say ‘attack’.’

‘Same difference, buddy, our wide receiver is playing for too deep.’ I peered at my bouncing screen. He had a point. Maybe he didn’t need my help understanding the beautiful game.

By the time Portugal had levelled the game 2-2 and we had both ripped off our headsets in disappointment, we could agree that the game provided us, if not with an exactly common language, then certainly a very useful set of shared metaphors. We quickly got into how the role of a sports coach differs subtly from code to code around the world and yet how fluidly the lessons of any successful coaching seem to apply in running a business.

I told him of a colleague of mine who had once opened a corporate training workshop in Saudi Arabia by asking who supported Manchester United. Half the room cheered wildly and the other half booed equally spontaneously. From there on a potentially tricky workshop simply hummed along. Football had provided us with a sure kick-off in the unlikeliest of arenas.

He told me all about his final football game for the Army and a never to be forgotten touchdown. I got it in a heartbeat. Sport can so easily be the container for our most precious memories.

Throughout the current World Cup I have heard American sports fans using the rich and expressive language of their own embedded sports vocabulary to help analyse their ‘roundball’ team’s strengths and weaknesses. They should be playing ‘man-to-man defense’ not ‘zone’. Their ‘playmaker’ is killing us ‘box-to-box’. Look at that great ‘pick-and-roll’ get right round the ‘perimeter D’. And so on right down to the agonising wire of those last minutes against Belgium – a state about the size of Maryland for crying in a bucket. In all sports there is the exquisite agony of heroic failure.

In the next two weeks this visceral pain will be felt in seven different countries from all around the globe. One winning population will bask gloriously in the fleeting euphoria of victory and then wake to a world that has rapidly moved on. However, what every sports glued to the World Cup will share is a renewed sense that great emotional well spring of globalisation, ‘we are all connected, we are all in this together.’