The Ball 2010 will be “an African ball made for the poorest African communities - the very embodiment of development through football in Africa.” says James Flecker of Alive & Kicking.

Barack Obama inspecting an Alive & Kicking ball in Kenya

Please visit our page on Just Giving where you can donate an Alive & Kicking ball to a community that will appreciate it more than you can imagine.

The ‘FIFA World Champions Badge’ on the Italian shirt

In fact, it looks like the Italian FA has incorporated the stars into their badge design — previously the stars would circle the national FA’s badge, with a new one added for each World Cup won.

Four stars on the 2002 Brazil football shirt

Why is this relevant to us? Well, at one point we thought that The Ball could represent the star that gets awarded at the end of the competition. That’s why the 2002 and 2006 films start with The Ball emerging from the heavens, descending to its starting point in Battersea Park like a shooting star coming down to earth. In a sense, the star on the shirt is a memory of that year’s Ball and the games played with it.

A soccer ball identical to the balls to be used in Olympic soccer competition is seen in an Adidas store in Beijing Tuesday July 29, 2008. The ball, called Adidas Magnus Moenia, or Great Wall Star, and featuring the Chinese characters for “China” was specially designed for the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games.

via Yahoo

Our congratulations go to Padania, who were 2-0 winners over the Aramean Syriacs in this year’s VIVA World Cup final.

Padanian fans with their flag (see this photo on Flickr)

The VIVA World Cup is a competition for countries that do not have UN or FIFA recognition. It’s run by the New Football Federations-Board, whose General Secretary is “Luc Misson, a lawyer who represented Belgian footballer Jean-Marc Bosman in a case that led to the Bosman ruling that established greater freedom of movement for professional players in Europe.”

Further reading suggestions: James Montague, author of When Friday Comes: Football in the War Zone, has written a good article about this year’s the VIVA World Cup and Kurdish attempts to join FIFA. There’s also Outcasts!: The Lands That FIFA Forgot, Steve Menary’s book about the footballing nations not recognised by FIFA.

We’ll be passing right through Occitania on our way to South Africa — perhaps we should suggest a game?

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

I have to say that I really enjoy the light-hearted and inclusive feel to this latest video — previous ones didn’t include other people the way this one does. And I say “hats off” because the guy gets paid to do this!

Although he’s a little bit too inconsiderate towards the unwitting “goalkeepers” in this video for my liking, I enjoy the way he uses the urban landscape as his “pitch”. And his skills are pretty decent too.

Thanks for the heads-up, Ian

2010 promises to be a great year for South Africa if everything goes as planned.
Is South Africa ready to host the 2010 World Cup?

Let’s hope it does.

The monument (photo wallyg on Flickr, CC license)

2008 Torch Relay on Google Earth .kml

If you’re in the UK, this is the route through London tomorrow.

It’s interesting to note that the last time there was a purely overland relay was to the 1980 games in Moscow and indeed how few relays have actually been entirely overland (only three: 1936 Berlin, 1972 Munich and 1980 Moscow). The 2004 games in Athens (the torch relay went global, visiting all the previous hosts of the modern games) seems to have set something of a precedent which has been expanded for this year’s games to a route that seems to be a somewhat aimless promotional tour around the world.

Personally I think this is a pity — and possibly even a mistake — as it seems to detract from the value that the torch has (largely accidentally) accrued as symbolic of the ideals of athletic endeavour. That lofty symbolic quality has been replaced by a return of the torch to its original purpose as something of simply promotional value for the hosts.

UPDATE: Here’s a gallery of photos of the disruptions to the relay