Football is a truly global phenomenon. Statistics about the real support are problematic, but there are estimates of up to 3.5 billion fans of football globally. A study conducted in 2006 by the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), which represents 211 members as the global governing body of football, estimated 270 million people being active in football worldwide. FIFA’s data give a rough idea of the global importance and global distribution of the phenomenon football, even if the numbers will have changed since this study was conducted.
From the statistics published, Asia emerged as the biggest player with 85 million footballers (Europe 62, Africa 46, North- and Central America with the Caribbean 43, South America 27, and Oceania 0.5 million). In terms of population share, Europe, South America and North/Central America with the Caribbean are ahead of other regions with about 7 per cent of their respective populations.
European football remains the most relevant globally, when it comes to the revenue of its national sports leagues. England, Germany, Spain, Italy and France (with Monaco) have the most profitable football leagues in the world. This makes the European administrative body, the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) the perhaps most important of the six continental confederations that are part of FIFA.
UEFA consists of 55 national members, which in part are also on the Asian continent. According to their 2016 report, 20344 players were participating in UEFA competitions back then. Here, geography plays an important role in understanding the global dynamics of football. European football leagues see significant inner-European flows of talents into the most prestigious leagues. But being such an important player internationally, 1374 international players from outside the UEFA countries compete in UEFA tournaments. In comparison, the largest single national representation from within Europe is that of Spain with 865 players. It should be noted that these numbers do only count those in the European competitions, rather than all players in national leagues.
Tag Archives: globalisation
A brief geography of time
Sometimes referred to as the fourth dimension, time has a highly geographical relevance. For human geography, population sizes can have as much impact on the ‘tempo of places’ as culture or even climate. In physical geography, the concept of time is indispensable for an understanding of how the natural environment has changed and keeps changing.
In the 21st century, time has been described as being a commodity itself, affecting everything from manufacturing and trade, to financial flows and global transport links.
The general geographic distribution of time zones is based on the general concept of dividing the world into zones of equal time following a 24-hour day around the world. In theory, this means that there are 12 time zones of 15° width in which each differs by one hour’s time difference.
The necessity of time zones was closely linked to growing needs of transport and communication links during industrialisation. British railway companies began adopting Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) which helped to coordinate timetables. In 1880, GMT became standard across Britain and time differences of tens of minutes between cities in the country started vanishing. At a global level, time zones became established in the first decades of the 20th century.
Mapping the global village
Changing times was the title of a session at this year’s Annual Symposium of the British Cartographic Society (not to be confused with the Society of Cartographers which will have its annual conference in September).
My contribution as a speaker in this session was titled Changing views of a changing planet. In the presentation I took a look at how changes in data and technology can provide alternative ways of mapping a globalised world, and mapping cities as the hotspots of globalisation. Continue reading
Geovisualisierung im Zeitalter der Globalisierung
Unlike the post-apocalyptic scenario in infamous Waterworld, what would a world without oceans look like? An oceanless world, so to say, but not like one of the supercontinents that we already had. Instead, more like our today’s continents in the shape of the living space of humankind. In the digital era of cartography, this kind of map is just a few clicks (and much processing time) away, and results in this map curiosity: The image of the world as an oceanless population planet:
The map has been presented first at my talk for the DGfK‘s (German Cartographic Society) colloquium at the University of Applied Sciences in Karlsruhe (a German summary can be found here). In 2013 it has been published as a E&P A feature (see here).
As it was all about visualisation (and maps, of course), I used the Prezi presentation tool to visualise this talk. Here it is: