A decade on: the boy wonder and the child laborer
Soccer
By Rob Hughes
Published: October 21, 2008
Ronaldo, the man who has scored more World Cup goals than anyone else in history, is hard at work sweating off surplus pounds in the quest to make one last comeback.
He is 32, he dreams of South Africa 2010, and, though technically unemployed, he is in training with Flamengo in his home city, Rio de Janeiro.
His ongoing contract with Nike sportswear should banish any thoughts of a pauper status; but Ronaldo does, desperately, want to play at the highestt level again.
Tahira Bibi, a child of the Punjab who might have stitched the ball for any of Brazil's games in the four World Cup tournaments in which Ronaldo was part of the squad, is also still earning a living.
Her's is a story of comparative success. I met Tahira when she was a child, diligently and relentlessly sewing panels into Adidas balls for the equivalent of a third of a dollar a ball. Stitch by stitch, panel by panel, she and her mother Haleema were the bread winners for the family that included two infant boys and a younger girl.
Their father had hanged himself from a tree within sight of their home.
It was 1998, the summer of Ronaldo's strange turn when he suffered convulsions on the eve of the World Cup final against France in Paris. Instead, Zinédine Zidane became the star, though O Fenômeno, as Brazilians know Ronaldo, returned to eclipse all others and shoot Brazil back to the title in 2002.
His trauma now is in the left knee, where a ligament snapped on Feb. 13, and in his pride after his latest professional club, AC Milan, paid him off in the summer. He tells reporters now that he will, as he has before, prove the doubters wrong and recover from his latest career threatening injury.
Ronaldo is still in a sense child-like, still convinced he can recapture the fitness of his comparative youth, still sure in his mind that he has tools to be worth his next million, and still defiant to those who say he came from poverty and could go full circle.
He has to recapture the special quickness of body and instinct that gave him 62 goals in 97 games for Brazil, and 319 goals from 452 matches in the top leagues of Brazil, Netherlands, Spain and Italy. He began training with Flamengo last week, and his progress interests Manchester City, Paris Saint-Germain, and he says an Italian Serie A club he will not name.
Meanwhile, Tahira Bibi has passed her first hurdles. She has matured from the 11-year-old with a sewing needle to a girl who managed to progress through sixth grade in school, thanks to the program run by the International Labor Office.
Its field workers went back to her village last week and found that Tahira is married, with two children of her own. Her mother helps the daughter now.
The ILO's never-ending work against child labor, through projects such as the one centered on Sialkot's sewing factories, has always worked at the extremes. A child stitching until her fingers and eyes are at risk is persuaded into the classroom, the manufacturers using her cheap labor to enrich soccer stars, or potential stars, with sponsorship.
Soccer's industry does not like the connotation, and neither do the agents of Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods who, like Ronaldo, are Nike men just as David Beckham is an Adidas icon.
The financial crises we are all now confronted with will affect all sides of the equation. Juan Somavia, the director general of the ILO, said in Geneva on Monday that the number of global unemployed could rise from 190 million in 2007 to 210 million in late 2009. He estimated that those existing on less than $1 a day could rise by 40 million, and those on $2 a day by more than 100 million.
Sports in that climate will surely have to shrink some of its largesse. This week's European Champions League matches, involving 32 clubs, have financial implications extending to $1 billion.
Manchester United, the defending champion, has a bank loan for more than that sum, but it netted €42.9 million, about $57 million, from the Champions League alone last season. Overall, 13 clubs, from England, Italy, Spain, Germany and France, each cleared at least €20 million from that tournament.
Some of them tell us they are not expecting any kind of contraction in the current financial year. They have already spent the anticipated proceeds of this season and, just like the big name players they employ, each of those elite clubs has more than one foot firmly in the market of one footwear manufacturer or another.
( More ) http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/10/21/sports/SOCCER.php?page=1
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