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As soon as the last whistle of the game was blown, car boots opened to let out the drums that had been waiting to celebrate; doors opened to let the jubilant crowd who had been watching the match spill out on to the street so they had more room to party; traffic came to a standstill as roads in South Norwood, London, turned into a makeshift dance floor; champagne corks popped. Ghana had beaten USA and we’re through to the quarter finals.

So now we face Uruguay. In the Who Should I Cheer For social justice rankings Ghana holds the number one spot while Uruguay trails far behind in 21st place. I would have been cheering for Ghana anyway so I will just cheer even louder – especially as Ghana’s percentage of women in politics is 11.8% of compared to Uraguay’s, well – 0%.

While we’re on the subject of statistics, apparently the odds on Ghana winning are 3/1. I know this because since the last World Cup the gambling restrictions in the UK have been relaxed and gambling companies can now advertise their services on tv. This they do during all the ad breaks before, during and after the match. There was a big debate about whether gambling adverts should be allowed, but eventually the decision to allow it was taken as long as ads conformed to a set of rules to ensure they are ‘socially responsible’ and ‘must not show gamblers behaving in a way which is irresponsible or could lead to “financial, social or emotional harm’.

It’s a shame such tight regulations don’t apply to the gambling that is currently taking place on food – banks are earning huge profits from betting on food prices in unregulated financial markets. This food speculation creates instability and pushes up global food prices, making poor families around the world go hungry and forcing millions into deeper poverty. It’s ironic that tv adverts are restricted, but the actions of banks, hedge funds and pensions funds gambling on food are unregulated when their behaviour has not been ‘socially responsible’ and is leading to ‘financial, social [and] emotional harm’ to many people around the world – especially in poorer countries as affordable food is pushed further and further out of reach.

The World Development Movement is campaigning to have the financial markets regulated to stop reckless bankers gambling on food and hunger (www.wdm.org.uk/food or search #hungercasino on Twitter).

The Obama administration and the EU are pushing for regulations but the UK is siding with the bankers and standing in the way of reform. WDM’s campaign aims to remove this barrier change so we can have a safer, fairer food economy.

Posted in: Ghana, Uruguay, Uruguay-Ghana

Views expressed here are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of the World Development Movement.

One thing that is guaranteed to drive me mad during any World Cup is unfair refereeing. And just like I don’t quite get the offside rule, I don’t get why the referee’s decision is final on occasions when clearly a wrong decision has been made. (Who mentioned Kaka.) But actually, ‘bad’ refereeing is just the tip of the iceberg if you’re talking about unfairness in the World Cup. If the allocation of team places in the World Cup was a referee’s decision, the referee would have been sacked for bias a long time ago.

Europe and Africa have a similar number of countries – 50 and 53. However, Europe is allowed 13 places in the World Cup while Africa is allowed only 5 (although this year they’ve been treated to an extra one as the host country is always given a place).  ‘The World Cup’.  To me the World Cup suggests that the best teams in the world would be able to secure a place as one of the last 32 teams to play in South Africa; I didn’t realise that if African teams played better than some European teams they might be denied a place because the rules dictate that Europe must have more teams.

And the World Cup isn’t the only place where the rules are skewed against Africa. In economics the unfairness of the World Cup is replicated across African countries. Let’s look at The World Trade Organisation. Again, it sounds fair enough – a body that oversees world trade? The referee of world trade?  Perhaps a regulatory body? – this would imply some degree of fairness and indeed, the WTO supposedly operates on a consensus basis, with equal decision-making power for all.

But if you look a bit deeper, in reality, many important decisions get made in a process whereby poor countries’ negotiators are not even invited to so called ‘closed door’ meetings – and then ‘agreements’ are announced that poor countries didn’t even know were being discussed. Many countries do not even have enough trade personnel to participate in all the negotiations or to even have a permanent representative at the WTO and are too poor to defend themselves from WTO challenges from the rich countries, and change their laws rather than pay for their own defence.

Yet decisions made at the WTO usually impact most heavily on the poor resulting in trade deals that are often disastrous for African and other poor countries where many of their people must survive on less than a dollar a day. Yes, in football unfair rules leave fans disappointed but in economics they can be the difference between one or two meals a day or even life and death.

Today Ghana play Germany. With the unbalanced allocation of World Cup places I guess some might say that Ghana should count themselves lucky – the Black Stars have a chance to shine.  But on the economics playing field the chances to break through are virtually non-existent.  Trade rules rigged against Africa in favour of rich nations have seen Ghana’s buoyant tomato and poultry industries devastated. ‘Liberalisation’ economic polices imposed by the WTO over a fifteen year period have cost Ghana’s population the equivalent of £350 per person – it’s as if everyone in Ghana stopped working for one and a half years.

Other trade practices also affect the lives of poor people around the world.  Currently bankers are betting billions of pounds on food and oil markets in secret, unregulated deals.  While they collect a tidy profit, their big-money gambling has made food prices around the world more expensive and more unpredictable. This directly affects millions of people in developing countries, who often struggle to feed their families and are forced deeper into poverty.

This is why the World Development Movement works with people in Ghana and across the world to stand up to these unjust practices and to bring change where it’s needed most.  And this is why I’ll be cheering for Ghana as they take on Germany tonight and also why I’ll continue to cheer them on as we join them in their fight for economic justice. Things can change. The referee’s decision does not have to be final.

Posted in: Germany, Ghana, Ghana-Germany

Views expressed here are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of the World Development Movement.

Ghanaian supporters hung out of windows, waving flags, cheering, singing, blowing whistles. Roads were jammed as fans partied in the street. Anyone would have thought Ghana had won the world cup, yet this was the scene in South London in 2006 after Brazil knocked Ghana out of the tournament. As one passer by apparently commented – ‘If this happens when they lose, what on earth would they be like if they won?’

This year I wanted a taste of Ghanaian football. I headed to the Gold Coast Ghanaian Bar, South Norwood, for the Ghana v Serbia match (ranked No1 and No17 in the Who Should I Cheer For ratings). The atmosphere was fantastic. Everyone was in party mood. Cheering and whistle blowing was the backdrop to intermittent roars of triumph as Ghana’s Black Stars approached the goal mouth.

Suddenly the screen went blank. The patrons, who’d been tightly packed into their viewing area didn’t moan, they just scrambled their way over chairs in the rush to watch the screen outside. Cheers and whistle blowing resumed and we continued to enjoy the match. A guy closest to the screen, decided to get up and dance. There were no shouts of ‘sit down – I can’t see the screen’, everyone seemed happy in his happiness! Dance over, he sat down and everyone could see the screen again.

Until that screen went blank too. Surely this time surely people would get agitated.

But they didn’t. They danced! All I had to compare this scenario to was what I thought it would have been like had it been England playing – tutting, shouting, demands for a refund and maybe objects thrown at the screen in frustration. But the Ghanaians danced!

Their patience was rewarded. Within a couple of minutes of the screen flickering back on Ghana’s Gyan scored what was to be the winning goal. If a screen going off in the middle of a match can generate dancing and signing, imagine the reaction to Ghana’s first goal of World Cup 2010! It was electric.

I began to wonder how life would be if Ghanaians were running things. For years Ghana has been fighting privatisation of its water supply. Fighting water companies from rich countries from taking over the Ghanaian water supply because the companies would be focusing on profit not on supplying water to those who need it most. Ghana, along with other countries in the south want their own communities to manage their water. How would it be if Ghana was doing its own thing?

In England and the west we have been taught, consciously or subconsciously, that individuals have top priority and this sometimes manifests itself as having a right to be happy even at the expense of others. So it follows that a western company will see nothing wrong in going in to a country and maximising profit even at the expense of the individuals who live there. But in Ghana there seems to more of a community spirit thing going on – what is important is doing things together as a community and being happy together. In terms of supplying clean water, this wouldn’t mean maximum profit for a few – this would mean ensuring fairness for all.

This year I asked a Ghanaian supporter what on earth would have happened if Ghana had beaten Brazil instead of being knocked out by them in 2006. You know what he told me – that the crazy, exuberant, happy celebrations would have been the same – because what they were rejoicing in was even bigger than world cup football.

They were celebrating their community.

Posted in: Ghana, Serbia, Serbia-Ghana

Views expressed here are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of the World Development Movement.

Côte d’Ivoire is a favoured Who Should I Cheer For? underdog. A quarter of the population lives below the international poverty line of US$1.25 a day. Water and electricity are scarce. Life expectancy is 47 years.

At the same time Portugal is objectionable in a number of ledgers: ungenerous aid; few women in government; Cristiano Ronaldo.

But, as they say, the game isn’t played on paper. World Cup success for the Côte d’Ivoire could have a perversely unjust impact on poor West Africans by stimulating the growth of so-called ‘football trafficking’.

When Ivorians watch their captain, Chelsea’s Didier Drogba, lead out the Elephants on Tuesday they will see a role model in the fullest sense. Despite prohibitive odds, many young men consider their best chance of escaping poverty as following in Drogba’s footsteps.

So it is that thousands of unlicensed football academies have been set up in the Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana over the last decade.

Those in charge promise expert coaching, transport to Europe and arranged trials with elite professional clubs; local parents often reason that the fees are worth the sacrifice and take their sons out of school. In reality few ‘academy’ players will ever leave Africa and those that do will be travelling illegally with negligible prospect of professional football.

An overwhelming majority of academy operatives have no serious credentials. They cannot prepare their apprentices adequately or fulfil promises of trials with AC Milan and Paris St Germain. The crisis is compounded by unscrupulous agents and clubs, who take promising youngsters to Europe with no serious safety net in the (highly likely) event of their not making the grade.

The effects of the trafficking are evident to charities across West Africa and Europe. Foot Solidaire, a small Paris-based NGO, sees hundreds of abandoned would-be footballers in the French capital alone. In 2008 a BBC special report highlighted a typical trafficking story: the family of a 13-year-old Cameroonian paid €750 to an agent, travelled to Lyon and were abandoned on arrival. The previous year a leaking fishing trawler was beached in Tenerife containing 130 young African men suffering hypothermia and dehydration, among them footballers trying to reach Real Madrid.

FIFA promises it is “working hard” to address the issue. President Sepp Blatter has decried the trade in African teen footballers as “social and economic rape” and action has been promised under their ‘Win in Africa with Africa’ initiative, which aims to position the World Cup as a force for good on the continent.

Unfortunately FIFA’s corporate responsibility record is dismal with football trafficking no exception. Charities lobby in hope rather than expectation and counter-measures are few.

Foot Solidaire recently lamented in an open letter “ten years of hypocrisy, immobility and what may seem to be discrimination towards us”. They want to disseminate information across West Africa on the dangers of illegal academies but cannot get FIFA support for an annual €200,000 budget. They believe that the governing body discriminates against African groups in its funding, making a mockery of ‘Win in Africa with Africa’.

Certainly FIFA is not short of money for its preferred projects and partners. On Friday they opened the tournament with an announcement of US$196million annual profit and $1billion equity. Yet one month ago a report by South Africa’s Institute of Security Studies showed that the nation’s poorest may end up worse off (PDF) as a result of the World Cup.

This ongoing crisis gives pause for thought ahead of Tuesday’s game. The limitations of our rankings are clear. Ivorian success would doubtless feed the cycle of exploitation that blights football in West Africa. Foot Solidaire fears an increase in trafficking after the tournament.

The match itself threatens to be what some English Premier League mangers call ‘a damp squid’. At the draw in December this looked the tie of the first round – arguably the strongest two unseeded teams pitted against one another and in the same group as Brazil.

But both are on a downward trajectory. This Côte d’Ivoire team has been called (albeit wrongly) the greatest Africa has produced but they are ageing and blighted by internal conflict. Drogba enjoys an unhealthy cult of personality in the squad and new coach Sven-Göran Eriksson is an odd choice on a HPI-busting daily wage of £22,000.

Portugal meanwhile boast an unlikely double: both a weaker coach and a more narcissistic and irritating captain than their rivals. Carlos Queiroz and Ronaldo (named after President Reagan, of all people) scarcely deserved their qualification and hardly merit the favouritism afforded by the bookmakers for this game.

It is difficult to get away from supporting the Côte d’Ivoire against Portugal and World Cup success would doubtless be great for national morale. But it may be a Pyrrhic victory for a majority of young Ivorian footballers until information about illegal academies and their consequences improves.

Posted in: Cote d'Ivoire, Cote d'Ivoire-Portugal, Portugal

Views expressed here are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of the World Development Movement.

I am a soft touch when it comes to underdogs: I wear a badge that says: ‘I heart migrants‘; I buy the Big Issue; and I work for the World Development Movement to combat the injustice that is rife through out the world. And now I am faced with a choice between Ghana – the top dog of the underdogs according to Who Should I Cheer For?; and Serbia – the country that shot to fame in the 1990s as an international pariah. So for most people, the choice of which team to cheer for based on ‘underdog’ criteria would be simple. For me, not so simple.

But life, politics and war is never simple. Let me announce my bias: my father’s family is from Serbia, from a city called Kragujevac, which is known for a massacre of up to 5000 people in 1941 at the hands of the Nazis. My grandfather fled the country and walked across Europe with nothing but the clothes on his back.

Massacres and deeply held resentments have been prominent in the former Yugoslavia’s turbulent history for centuries and the war crimes that took place at the hands of the Serbs in the 1990s are clear to everyone. And now to the Serbs themselves, who because of the propaganda pedalled by Milosevic and the closure of independent media, did not know of the true extent of the genocidal war that was being waged in their name.

But what they did know is that they were under attack from sanctions, from NATO bombing and economic collapse. By the year 2000, Serbia was the poorest country in Europe. It was the year that I went to visit my family in Kragujevac and saw the embarrassment and anger in my cousin’s face when admitted that she had been ‘paid’ in eggs that week.

This was also the year that Milosevic was finally forced from power.  The Milosevic regime’s tactics to stay in power were violent and omnipotent, including hundreds of thousands of fake ballot papers, the arrest, detention and ‘diasppearances’ of journalists, opposition activists and judges who sympathised with the opposition. One judge was murdered when he refused to issue an arrest warrant for two opposition leaders. And the disappearance and death of Ivan Stambolic, the former Prime Minister, who turned against Milosevic and gave support to the leader of the opposition party, Vojislav Kostunica.

Kostunica was leading a shakey coalition of 18 opposition parties, and despite Milosevic’s repression, they organised election monitors, mobililsed people, and collaborated with the powerful student movement, Otpor.  After the contested election of September 2000, a month of mass strikes and one million people descended on Belgrade from across the country, including elderly  farmers on tractors and bulldozers. They broke through police lines and faced tear gas and stormed parliament forcing Milosevic’s resgination on October 5th.

The last decade has not been easy for Serbs. The chasm between the rich and the poor has widened. Although, there’s no data available in government numbers for the clever people behind whoshouldicheerfor.com to crunch, inequality has increased after the IMF imposed its usual draconian economic conditions, like privatisation of electricty, education and health care, in return for loans.

The poorest people in Serbia (and Eastern Europe) who have suffered greatly are the Roma population. Roma people are widely discriminated against, are the target of racist attacks and fail to access public services. Currently, in Serbia the situation of Roma people is particularly worrying with 30 per cent of the population living on less than $2 a day; entire communities unable to access health care, education and live in shanty towns. It’s my bet that data for the Roma population is not included in official government stats, because Roma people tend not to have birth certificates, ID or permanent addresses. If the stats for Roma people were available to us the maternal mortality, hunger and life expectancy results would be a lot worse.

So I will be cheering for Serbia: for the Roma people – the underdogs of Europe; for the Serbs who bravely and peacefully overthrew a genocidal dictator; and for my family, and all families, who are still struggling to get by.

p.s. Amnesty International is running a campaign to stop forced evictions of Roma communities in Serbia, please do get involved.

The symbol of Otpor's resistance against the Milosevic regime, it appeared in badges, stickers, posters, banners, graffiti, t-shirts and as a tattoo on my colleague, James' arm!

Posted in: Ghana, Global injustice, Serbia, Serbia-Ghana, Teams, Who am I cheering for?

Views expressed here are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of the World Development Movement.

Group C

Algeria

An overdue return for the Desert Foxes, whose best-known World Cup moment was as victims of the notorious Austro-West German stitch-up in 1982. Armchair psychologists looking for wider significance in this campaign see them as the Arab world’s only representatives – and drawn against the USA. But Algerians consider their greatest rivalries with neighbours Egypt (whom they defeated in a spectacularly ill-tempered qualifying showdown) and former colonial masters France (who are potential quarter-final opponents). We rank Algeria 22nd, a distant fifth of six African countries, not least due to high military spending.

England

The Three Lions have perhaps their weakest squad since failing to qualify in 1994. But in that time they have had nine managers and Fabio Capello has won more honours than the rest put together. Much depends on the pragmatic Italian, who is on record as an admirer of Francisco Franco and Silvio Berlusconi. Certainly he will envy their media control if his men bow out early and the tabloids go rabid. England is as low as 27th in our rankings thanks to high carbon emissions, military spending and inequality.

Slovenia

Slovenia are at their third major tournament in eight years, a remarkable achievement for a nation of just two million, after defeating Russia in a David-and-Goliath play-off. Among the most prosperous and stable of all post-Soviet states, there is marked inequality across such a small country from the wealthy north west, which borders Austria and Italy, to the poor south east, next to Croatia and Hungary.

USA

One of only seven teams at their sixth successive World Cup, the US are overdue to make serious progress. To this end they may benefit from familiarity with altitude after regular trips to Mexico and last year’s Confederations Cup. The Obama effect may be enough for the Nobel committee but it has no effect on the Who Should I Cheer For? rankings, which rates the US as the least supportable of all 32 nations due to their combination of wealth, high military spending and rampant inequality.

Group D

Australia

A second successive World Cup appearance for the Socceroos but without the guidance of former coach Guus Hiddink they are expected to struggle. Australia’s famously sport-centric culture extends to immigration policy, where the citizenship test asks ‘Who was the greatest cricketer of the 1930s?’. In 2008 the new left-centre government reasoned that the question was biased against many new immigrants and moved to scratch it – only for a populist outcry to force a climb-down. (It’s Donald Bradman, FYI)

Ghana

‘They are good, these Africans!’ hollered a startled John Motson in 2006 as the Black Stars progressed at the expense of more fancied Czech Republic and USA. Runners-up in January’s Africa Cup of Nations, they look likely to invite more European condescension although the magnificent Michael Essien has withdrawn injured. Ghana tops our rankings as the most supportable team. It’s a poor country with a lot of hunger, and across all factors only scores badly on maternal mortality.

Germany

‘This is not a great German team’ is the pundit’s biennial refrain and that has probably been true back to their last World Cup win at Italia ’90 (or, to a certain anti-German mindset, their first in 1954). But in the noughties ungreat German teams have managed two major finals and a further semi-. That other ubiquitous cliché – ‘Never write off the Germans’ – is probably more apt even without their captain Michael Ballack. Our rankings place them 9th overall, reflecting their commitment to equality both in income distribution and opportunities for women.

Serbia

Serbia qualified comfortably ahead of France under veteran coach Raddy Antic, formerly of Barcelona, Real Madrid and Luton Town. This is their first World Cup as an independent nation after regular appearances within Yugoslavia before 2002 and as Serbia & Montenegro in 2006. Battling high unemployment in the wake of the global recession and overcoming turbulent internal politics, 6% of the Serbian population is chronically hungry despite its upper-middle global income and advantageous trading position between Europe and Russia.

Posted in: Algeria, Australia, England, Germany, Ghana, Group previews, Serbia, Slovenia, USA

Views expressed here are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of the World Development Movement.