The Homeless World Cup

Originally Published October 12, 2006

Recently the Homeless World Cup took place in South Africa, ending with Russia as the victor. If this is the first you’ve heard of the Homeless World Cup, you’re probably pretty confused right now. I know I was when I first heard about it. It quite simply is a soccer tournament where teams of homeless people from different countries compete. I personally thought this was a joke, just some new way to exploit homeless people like in the movie “Bum Fights”. Although it really does seem like a cruel prank, it’s a completely legitimate event. It was started as a way to give homeless people an incentive to work hard towards a goal and maybe turn their lives around. It’s a nice idea, but after the tournament the people are still homeless.

So I can’t help but feel that this is kind of teasing the homeless. When they are at the tournament they have a place to live and three meals a day. Afterwards, it’s back to the gutter. This tournament is not going to get anyone back on their feet. The idea of the tournament is to give the homeless motivation to get jobs. I feel homeless people have plenty of motivation to get a job. The main reason is that they’re homeless! No one wants to live on the streets. If you don’t have a roof over your head, you’re going to need a job to get one. It’s a common misconception that homeless people are a bunch of drug addicts, psychos, and drug addicts. Most homeless people are completely normal people who lost their jobs and can’t make enough money to pay the rent. So if there’s nothing wrong with these people, the tournament can’t fix there problems. Just because homeless people are playing soccer doesn’t mean they get jobs afterwards.

Also, are we supposed to feel national pride if our country’s team does well? I guess it would be cool to say we have the most athletic homeless people, but it would be an indicator of how many homeless people we have. If your team does well it means you have a larger group of homeless people. With a larger group of homeless people, the odds are higher that there will be more athletically capable homeless people.

So in the end of all this, no one really wins anything. The homeless people stay homeless and the fans (if any) can’t really be happy about victory because it shows how crappy their country’s economy is. Soccer is fine, but homeless people need to have some financial stability and a home before they start worrying about sporting events.