I will be out of town this weekend so there will be no updates until next week. Thanks for reading.

Argentines are nothing if not passionate. They attack tango, wine, and politics with gusto. But none of these things compares with their true passion: fútbol.

Soccer connoisseurs worldwide are familiar with the passion at Boca Juniors matches, where the players’ entrance is greeted with enough toilet paper to wipe the asses of a small country.

The scene at Boca Juniors’ La Bombonera Stadium

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I would not be so presumptuous as to assume that major news outlets get their ideas from reading my website, but it sure was a coincidence that so many things I have written about popped in stories this week.

The Irish Independent, for example, ran a story on Brazilian maestro Kaká revealing his “I Belong to Jesus” t-shirt after AC Milan won the Champions League. As I have previously written, Kaká is perhaps the most high profile evangelical Christian soccer player. Given his incredible skill, Kaká is often given a platform to share his religious views and he never fails to do so. Hopefully, though, this doesn’t mean that God approves of the cynical catenaccio that Milan used to win the final (Spanish newspaper AS had a headline the day after the match reading Campeón sin Fútbol, roughly meaning “Champion Without Playing.”)

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In the years after World War II, Germany faced a drastic labor shortage. The country lacked the manpower to rebuild the country whose destruction had been brought by Adolf Hitler. Germans came up with a solution to this problem and created a guest worker program, which would be pivotal in restoring the country to economic prosperity. The so-called gastarbeiter (German for “guest worker”) program began with 7,000 Turks arriving in 1961 and peaked in 1973, when 2.6 million Turish workers were living in Germany.

Turkish guest workers

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In November of 2004, Robinho was reported to be on the verge of moving from Brazilian team Santos to Real Madrid. The transfer fees being discussed in the media were about $23 million. Robinho’s contract at Real Madrid would make the boy who had grown up in desperate poverty into a rich young man. Robinho had only one thing on his mind. And then, his mother was kidnapped.

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Given how often he sticks his foot in his mouth, it’s a bit of a surprise that Sepp Blatter has become president of FIFA. Blatter, who has previously called for female players to wear tighter shorts, recently made headlines by saying that FIFA had alternate plans in case South Africa is not ready to host the 2010 World Cup. Blatter apparently thinks little about how his proclamations will be received, and this case was no different.

The Christian Science Monitor’s Scott Baldauf wrote this week that in South Africa itself, Blatter’s words were seen as insulting and border-line racist. Many there believe that Blatter’s willingness to question South Africa’s readiness is because it is an African country. Baldauf writes that “any public statement about South Africa will be seen through the lens of race, even if it is about something as harmless as sports.”

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