Those with an inclination to stochastic will know that the chance of him predicting these eight games in a row correctly was 1 in 256 – a likelihood that does not require us to resort to the paranormal in the search for explanations of the accuracy of his predictions, considering we easily started off the World Cup with hundreds of animals (the homo sapiens kind included) being called upon to make such predictions. And if the proud parading of a rubber model of an octopus by the scorer of the only and decisive goal in the final, Andres Iniesta is anything to go by, Paul’s prediction had become somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophecy, too, further boosting the confidence of players having been predicted to be on the winning side.

What is more remarkable than the accuracy of Paul’s predictions, was the absence of compelling onfield stories and game play that allowed for Paul to become the major story of the World Cup. Paul is thus a fitting metaphor for the World Cup in the global television era in two senses: firstly, they are both kept in an artificial environment detached from their original context. For all the self-congratulation by FIFA officials of having hosted a World Cup in Africa for the first time, to most viewers, the only invasion of a sense of place and culture on the bland televisual stage of interchangeable football stadia was the Vuvuzela – one much maligned by television audiences outside South Africa – and the ever clichéd representations of local culture by media correspondents whose knowledge of South Africa perfectly resembled the tourist gaze in having arrived in the country only days, if at all weeks, before the tournament. FIFA itself kept the event in much of a vacuum from the local economy too, by making host countries’ acceptance of a tax bubble that exempts FIFA’s commercial activities from VAT and other taxes a precondition of awarding the tournament – leaving FIFA with a profit of more than a billion US Dollars and South Africa and its people with a deficit no smaller.

Secondly, Paul’s existence, like that of the World Cup, is grounded in spectacle, their apparent purpose being to be looked upon. Their attractiveness as an object is thus rooted in their extraordinariness. Yet is it’s the latter that seemed sorely missing from this year’s World Cup. Few will doubt that pre-tournament favourites Spain were deserving winners, yet scoring a meagre eight goals in seven games, Spain’s performance was tactically apt, yet anything but rousing. Indeed, the fact that the World Cup had to rely on a German team that had hardly been accused of providing particular flair to past tournaments for some of its most convincing attacking football reflects that, beyond all the hype, the 2010 World Cup delivered mostly football of a distinctly ordinary quality.

None of this is surprising. As football has entered a global era, the international structure of national teams no longer reflects the global spread of talent. The Bosman ruling by the European Court of Justice in 1995, the global televisual circulation of domestic leagues and continental club competitions and the emergence of a truly global labor market for professional footballers (and indeed other athletes) have transformed global professional football dramatically. Many of the world’s best footballers never make it to the World Cup finales, because they represent nations in which their talents are not matched by their fellow countrymen. Conversely, given the now global competition for places in the starting line ups of teams in Europe’s top leagues, almost every national team included players from lower divisions or players struggling to hold down a regular first team place at their respective clubs. A leading European clubs side, one suspects, would have easily marched through the competition – and indeed Spain’s success has been in many ways an extension of FC Barcelona’s recent successes.

In a global world, transnational club teams play football of a quality unmatched in international sides. The World Cup in turn has to rely on its nature as a media event, on hype and nationalistic hyperbole to attract its audiences. For now, it no doubt still succeeds in doing so – but the speed with which, for instance, the St. George’s crosses disappeared from cars on English roads following England’s second round exit, illustrates the inherently ephemeral nature of such spectacle as an increasingly hyperreal focal point of temporary jingoism– of an event as Jean Baudrillard (1993: 79-80) remarked two decades ago “so minimal” it “might well not need to take place at all – along with [its] maximal enlargement on screens”. As the row between fans in Germany and their national team in which some fans criticised the team for not holding another parade and street party in Berlin following their third place finish – whereas players felt they had little to celebrate – illustrates, audiences’ determination to celebrate (and drink) is now only loosely related to the competition: many German fans seem to feel that they did not want a lost football game to get in the way of a big street party.

In its ephemerality, the World Cup might still prosper long enough to support FIFA’s current leadership regime. Yet it has begun to become increasingly interchangeable with other forms of spectacle. With the end of the World Cup most professional football leagues around the world now embark on a six to eight week hiatus from the game; time to find different sources of entertainment – and to make that trip to the local sea life centre to visit the World Cup’s biggest star and his relatives.

Let’s back up a bit first, though, to discuss why a room full of Malawians cared so very much that Ghana, a country that is almost 2800 miles away, would win against the seemingly innocuous “villains” of Uruguay.

I want to start by backing up to my frustrations of watching several first round games in the US. Not only is ABC and ESPN’s announcing shockingly bad, but I found that it often walked straight into nasty racist tropes of treating “Africa” as a singular entity. The stats bothered me in particular – I was often told by the screen that “no African team had ever won a game it was losing at the first half,” or so forth. The stats seemed as eager as the announcers to consign “Africa” to being a single unit, either a blameworthy one (as if to say, “damn Africa, why can’t you win a game after the first half? What’s wrong with you?”) or a pitiable one. ABC and ESPN’s treatment of “Africa,” therefore, fit too easily into a centuries-old hackneyed and sloppy racism that can’t see differences within Africa, that frequently treats Africa as a single nation, and that either scorns that nation’s dysfunctionality or pities it and hopes for its small victories as a parent might laugh and clap at an infant saying a funny word for the first time.

And yet I’d seen at Euro 2008, staged during my previous visit to Malawi, how much Africanness matters. Many Malawians I spoke to then had supported France, due to the large number of players from African countries; when France spluttered out of the tournament early on, most shifted allegiances quickly to Spain, and many explained that this was because Spain had several Arsenal players, and Arsenal had several Africans. Eto’o jerseys abounded.

Here in 2010, again Africanness mattered. Earlier, I’d watched The Netherlands play Brazil, and the room had a decidedly lighter feel to it than when Ghana took the stage. Tension gripped the room, and “Ghana moto!” (“Ghana fire!” or “go Ghana!”) yells interchanged with “Africa moto!” The South African channel’s announcers, led by Nelson Mandela’s example earlier in the week, had embraced Ghana whole-heartedly as “our” team. And the celebration following the Ghanaian goal was like no goal celebration I’d seen; earlier in the day, The Netherlands was the room’s clear favorite, but cheers at their goals were tepid by comparison.

From all of this, I want to draw two conclusions.

One is to reiterate the perhaps banal point that when a subjugated group is discursively constructed, members of that group are bound to make what was a semantic and semiotic trick (making all of Africa a single unit) something of a reality through identifying with their fellows in subjugation. Malawians could and perhaps should vigorously assert their individuality – and at other times, of course they do – but if on one hand nobody bothers to listen when they do, and on the other hand there are pleasures in the strategic essentialism of “being African,” one can understand why it happens.

Two is to encourage readers not to fall headlong into the generalizations themselves by seeing this as “Africa’s heartbreak.” Sure, it would have been nice if Ghana won. But the ills that have been delivered across Africa by centuries of Euro-American aggression and exploitation were hardly going to be redressed by Ghana winning a football match or three, nor has the continent felt this as a shattering blow to the heart. Today, business is back to usual, and I saw way more day-after depression when Canada crashed out of Olympic hockey in Gretzky’s last year than I see here today. If “Africa” exists, it is only in brief moments anyways, so to pity Africa and feel sorry for “its” loss is to fall into the discursive trap of giving the term “Africa” – complete with its significant colonial baggage – more mileage than it deserves.

In the week since the World Cup kicked off, much ink has been spilled about the vuvuzelas, those long plastic horns that produce a sound like swarming bees when they are blown en masse during a soccer match. This cacophony, which is audible on the telecasts, has been the defining story from the first round of group games at this World Cup. It is the early days of the tournament when teams play in a cautious and uncertain fashion as they feel themselves and each other out. With lacklustre soccer after the protracted run-up to the tournament, many fans and pundits have chosen to focus their energies on the vuvuzelas. Their vague and persistent din appears to be that much more audible when it serves as the aural backdrop to a dull match between a desultory would-be contender and a reluctant hanging on for dear life. The aggravation caused by these horns has prompted many a columnist to weigh in on the matter, inspired plenty of Twitter activity, and resulted in a Facebook group petitioning FIFA to ban the horns that has attracted more than 250,000 users as of this writing.

While it is difficult to know how many of those users will stick with the cause as the tournament evolves and becomes more interesting, the mere existence of this group reflects what is arguably the larger story of the 2010 World Cup. This is the first World Cup to be conducted during the Web 2.0 era and participants on every level – from coaches to players to commentators to fans – have taken to platforms like Twitter and Facebook with tremendous alacrity. Newpapers like The Guardian have assembled multi-media World Cup web centers that feature recaps, opinion pieces, podcasts, and tweets among other sorts of content. In North America, ESPN has made all of the games available as streaming content via its ESPN3 web channel and on smartphones. With all of these mechanisms that enable one to follow the event over the Internet, fans have more ways now to take in the games and engage with the event than ever before.

The vuvuzela controversy is in part a function of this. The mildly irritating buzz has become something of a phenomenon through an abundance of media coverage and fan discussion. One wag even created a Twitter account for the item – @The_Vuvuzela – that produces entries like “Things to do today: bzzzzzzzzzzzz, bzzzzzzzzzzzzzz, BZZZZZZZZ, and the laundry” and there is the score for the vuvuzela concerto that has been making the rounds (the horns can play but one note, a bflat).  This has produced a stream of tweets that satirize the fact that the vuvuzela effectively produces the same response to every event that might occur over the course of a match, particularly when it is wielded by over-eager foreign fans. Meanwhile, the BBC has revealed that it is contemplating offering vuvuzela-free broadcasts. For those who love the sound of the vuvuzela’s Bflat monotone, there is always the free vuvuzela iPhone app, which will turn your smartphone into a virtual vuvuzela.

Yet for all of this engagement, we might observe that the vuvuzela controversy has thus far obscured two arguably more significant and problematic issues: the decision of security workers to strike over missing pay packets and the swathes of empty seats that have been visible at most games thus far. The former has resulted in South African police stepping into the breech to cover the games while the latter has been variously attributed to ticket brokers failing to unload their stocks, foreign supporters not making it to South Africa, or visitors misjudging the distances between various match venues. As in the case of the vuvuzela, FIFA has mostly responded to these situations with platitudes and non-committal statements. Football’s governing body knows as well as anyone that, once the quality of the matches picks up, these issues are likely to be forgotten or overlooked by football-mad supporters. They also know that these issues on the ground are of only limited interest to foreigners following the game via live broadcasts and the Internet. The vuvuzela controversy exemplifies this in an odd way. These little horns have become so controversial in large part because they affect the viewing experience for those at home. It is unfortunate that the potentially more important issues concerning compensation for event workers and ticket availability have not attracted anything close to the same degree of attention in the virtual realm. As often seems to be the case with participatory culture, individuals only see fit to participate when they believe that their interests are directly affected by the events that are occurring. As a result, we have a massive Facebook group in favor of banning the vuvuzela, but little in the way of protest or commentary concerning these other issues.

The coming weeks are likely to bring a higher caliber of play to the tournament as weaker teams are eliminated and the games grow more important. These events will likely push the vuvuzela controversy off the front page and eliminate any chance of the world casting an eye towards the larger social issues positioned just beneath the tournament’s ebullient facade. If this should occur, this writer might be forced to acknowledge that Terry Eagleton makes a fair point when he writes that football is a distraction that primarily serves the interests of capital. In the social media era, more people are engaging with the “beautiful game” in more ways than ever before. This participation is the story of the 2010 World Cup, but it won’t mean much unless fans and onlookers set aside petty concerns to engage with the more substantive  issues that lurk just beyond the fringes of the world’s largest sporting event.