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Invictus
I recently found the article “2018 World Cup in Arizona can Unify and Heal Arizona and Rest of America,” which I thought was very interesting and would like to recap.
According to Nielsen, 24.3 million people watched the 2010 World Cup final match between Spain and the Netherlands. This was a record audience for a soccer game telecast; ABC had about 15.5 million viewers, while Univision drew 8.8 million viewers. We know that many US viewers watched the game on TV, so if the World Cup was brought to the US, would this increase the number of US viewers not just on TV but also attending the games? I assume that yes, the number of US viewers would increase, and they would go to the games as well. Besides this being a great marketing event, the World Cup could also become the beginning of a new era, where Hispanics and Whites disregard any type of racism that is still out there, especially in the state of Arizona. This event would not only bring peace and love, but also unity, as we know the United States national soccer team has a percentage of Latino players on the team.
If we all remember, Apartheid was a system of legal racial segregation enforced by South Africa´s National Party government, under which the rights of the majority ‘non-white’ inhabitants of South Africa were ruled by white people. These were bad times in South Africa, as portrayed in Invictus; but the 1995 Rugby World Cup hosted in that country changed the nation for the better.
A World Cup event in the United States may or may not change the nation in terms of racism, but we have nothing to lose, so why not give it a try? FIFA, please bring the World Cup to the United States.
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