The best soccer in the world is not played in the World Cup every four years but almost every Sunday afternoon in Italy and Spain. The teams that routinely display the world's best soccer are not the national selections of Spain or Italy but the top teams that play in these countries' professional leagues. Real Madrid, Milan, Barcelona or Juventus get to be the best teams in the world because they are able to recruit players on the basis of their soccer-playing prowess, not their nationality. In contrast, the selections that countries field to the World Cup are limited to their nationals. In this respect they face the same constraints of governments. Both national teams and national governments have to ignore the global pool of talent available and only use what is locally available. Passports count more than merit. As a result, national teams - in soccer or government - will always be at a disadvantage when facing rivals that are able to recruit globally - and pay better.

Another interesting parallel between soccer and world affairs is how the problems that have besieged FIFA mirror those that have traditionally affected the U.N. The relationship between FIFA and its local chapters has always been fraught with conflict and friction. Both the U.N. and FIFA have been riddled by corruption scandals and dysfunctional governance. In this sense they both mirror their constituency and show that it is not realistic to expect any multilateral organization - even a wealthy and relatively independent and commercially oriented as FIFA- to overcome some of the most problematic attributes of its national "owners."

Finally, the personal characteristics of Ronaldinho, who is perhaps the world's best soccer player and Nelson Mandela, perhaps the most admired public figure alive today, also show interesting similarities. Like Mandela, Ronaldihno is an excellent team player, always ready to cheer and motivate his partners. They are both generous players who allow others to shine and take credit. They like to win but they are known to be very generous with their opponents and to avoid humiliating them in defeat. Both have worked with some of their fiercest enemies. Mandela and Ronaldinho share a penchant for building constructive relations with erstwhile opponents and rancor is not part of their personality. Finally, both are masters at administering their resources and energy and know how to save them for when they will most need them: at the end of the game when their more impatient rivals are exhausted.

These are not the only parallels between soccer and politics in the age of globalization. In his excellent book "How Soccer Explains the World," Franklin Foer shows why the analysis of global soccer yields very interesting insights about world politics today and Branko Milanovic's article "Learning about Globalization by Watching a Soccer Game" uses soccer to speculate about the globalization of labor.