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On air: Is football one of mankind's greatest inventions?

Nuala McGovern Nuala McGovern | 15:00 UK time, Wednesday, 9 June 2010

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Two days until the start of the World Cup and there is little talk about anything else for huge swathes of the world. Ros and some of the team, (well Mark and Ben) are in Soweto gearing up for what many people think is the biggest show on earth. Our Writer in in Residence at the ´óÏó´«Ã½ World Service, Hamid Ismailov, has been outlining his devotion to the game.

Do you consider football as one of the greatest inventions of mankind?
Or, is it something 'vulgar, of a low pop-culture' as one of Hamid Ismailov's acquaintances thinks?

In this article Tom Horan, argues

"From my World Cup years I have to conclude that it should indeed. If art is an attempt by man to recreate recognisable patterns of his emotional life, to replicate and mirror aspects of the human condition through an artificial form, then football definitely does these things."

Arsenal coach Arsene Wenger said in March this year his team's clash with Barcelona was the

This article tends to fall on the side of .

While in the United States football, or soccer, is a growing sport from enjoying it as a youngster into wanting to play professionally:

Does football have the ability to pull people and communitities together like nothing else, does it transcend sport? Or is the nothing more than a game? With the money spent on staging tournaments like the World Cup a waste, bordering on offensive?

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