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DR ROGAN TAYLOR: MAYBE FOOTBALL'S NOT 'BARLEY' ANYMORE

3:00pm Thursday, 14th January 2010

The attack on the bus carrying the Togo team to the Cup of Nations in Angola has sent shivers down the spine of the football world. We may be getting used to all kinds of horrors these days but most of us sub-consciously thought that football was 'barley' - somehow granted immunity from the everyday violence of global political terrorism.

Most perhaps thought that sport was immune in general, though those with long enough memories will recall the 'Munich Massacre' of the Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics, and it's less than a year since the attack in Pakistan on the Sri Lankan cricketers' bus. But the complete absence of any serious threat to the procession of great football gatherings, from the World Cup and European Championships down, during the increasingly volatile past forty years, has lulled us into believing that the terrorists must be, like us, football fans, and they don't want to mess with 'the people's game'.

Have we been living with the cuckoos? Travelling in aeroplanes; going to nightclubs and riding the London Tube are all 'the people's' activities - men, women and children - but that made no difference. And everybody recognises that public impact (usually focussed on a particular nation) is an essential ingredient for the perpetrators of terrorist acts. Football is the only truly global sport; it has all the news value and more required to attract the bad guys. Why have they held off for so long?

It all brings into sharp focus the vulnerability of the global football business. What would it take to knock it off its course? Can it really protect itself anyway? Most of us know what a pain it is to get on to an aeroplane these days, passing through expensive and increasingly invasive security checks that can take hours. And still would-be bombers get through. Can you imagine attempting that at most football grounds?

Football fans know how comparatively lax security can be at even the most important matches, and some English fans boast long traditions of being able to get in to any game, especially abroad. Football does have an historic tendency to live 'on a wing and a prayer'. After Hillsborough especially, many people in the game openly admitted that it was a disaster-waiting-to-happen; that conditions inside stadia and the draconian fencing in of fans was a recipe for mortal accident. The game was run on 'hope' - hoping night after night that it would be alright, until one sunny day it wasn't.

Maybe there is some kind of 'charm' protecting football from the worst the terrorists could do. The 'football family', so often referred to by Fifa, does include more countries than the United Nations. Four years ago this summer, the consolidated viewing figure for the 2006 WC was put at just under 30 billion; that's supposedly counting everyone watching every match (in whatever medium) and adding them all together. It's an awful lot of eyeballs. There are only 6.5 billion of us on earth, so we're averaging nearly five matches per person.

Within the stats there are some stunning insights into the sharpness of football's penetration. When England played Paraguay in Germany, 62 million Chinese watched the game live - more than the total population of England and Paraguay put together. Football is a genuinely global game which provides a rudimentary common language and focuses the attention of billions through television on the World Cup.

This summer in South Africa, the world will be watching again. Fingers crossed.

Dr Rogan Taylor is the Director of the Football Industry Group at the University of Liverpool. He is also a writer and broadcaster, with five football books and numerous radio and TV contributions. He has acted as a special adviser to The FA, The Premier League and Premier League Clubs.

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