DEEP in the jungles of Myanmar there is a camp stocked with guns, maps and medical supplies. Medics and former rebels regularly practise dodging bullets on its flat exercise ground. Then they dust themselves off and kick a ball at makeshift bamboo goals. The communication difficulties attendant on the aftermath of civil conflict mean they may not have seen Real Madrid win the European Champions League last month. But they know how its famed Portuguese winger, Cristiano Ronaldo, stands over a free kick.

An interest in getting a ball to some sort of goal, by one means or another, over the opposition of another team has been shown by all sorts of cultures throughout history. But the particular version codified in Britain in the 19th century, which ruled out moving the ball with hands or anything held in them, quickly won the hearts and feet of industrialising Europe and many of its colonies, current and former. Simple rules (offside provisions notwithstanding) and no need for equipment, apart from whatever might pass for a ball, have allowed the game to flourish in the favelas of Brazil, the shanty towns of South Africa and the jungles of Myanmar. The notorious corruption of the sport’s governing body, FIFA (see article) has not stopped it enrolling more members (209) than the United Nations (193). In 2006 FIFA estimated that the game’s players, both serious and casual, totalled 300m.

The world does not just play football—it watches it, bets on it, argues about it and spends money on it. The English Premier League (EPL) is broadcast in 212 territories, reaching 643m homes. Brand Finance, a consultancy, values Bayern Munich’s brand at $900m. The world’s 20 richest clubs made €5.4 billion ($7.4 billion) during the 2012-13 season, according to Deloitte, another consultancy. People do not just write books about the game, they write books about how it illuminates all manner of other things, such as “How Soccer Explains the World” by Franklin Foer, or “Futebol Nation”, a study of Brazil by David Goldblatt (see review). Such broad thinking might seem ambitious. But then half of mankind is expected to watch at least some of the World Cup, which begins in São Paulo on June 12th.

The balls less kicked

The sport’s global dominance is unprecedented—and all the more remarkable given that, of the four countries in the world larger than Brazil, only one, America, qualified to be among the 32 countries to send a team there. For various reasons, football is a much lesser preoccupation in the world’s giant countries than elsewhere.

Though its presence in Brazil shows that America fields a decent national team, there are a number of other sports its citizens pay greater heed to; in India there is another sport so deep in the national psyche that football seems hardly to get a look in. In China and Indonesia football teams from other countries have devoted followings, but the national teams are pretty poor. Neither Indonesia nor India has travelled to the World Cup’s finals in the competition’s 84-year history; China did once, in 2002, but failed to win any games, or indeed score any goals. How can football be the world’s game if nearly half the world hardly plays it?

Exceptions on this scale stand as something of a rebuke to football fans’ declarations of their sport’s planet-encompassing importance. They also show that football has the potential to get even bigger. These countries are “just starting to switch on” to the game, says Simon Kuper, the co-author of “Soccernomics”, a statistical analysis of football. European clubs—the richest and most popular in the world—see lots of potential for growth in the big markets of Asia and have increased their missionary work there. American, Chinese and Indian domestic leagues have seen an influx of cash and have improved as a result.

These various indicators have many in the footballing establishment hoping that the hold-out nations will soon join the football-mad small fry. Sceptics are entitled to a sense of déjà vu. Football has been poised to take off in these places before, only for the rocket to stall on the pad or fall back to Earth in flames. But a mixture of market opportunities, new approaches and demography means that football looks more likely than ever before to conquer the places it has passed by.

In America, the beachhead is well established. On the day of a football match, being in Seattle is like being in another country, says Clint Dempsey, a forward with the Seattle Sounders who is also the captain of America’s national men’s team. The Sounders’ fans meet in the heart of the city an hour and a half before kick off and march to the stadium with their scarves held high and flares alight. A 53-member marching band leads the way. Mr Goldblatt compares Sounders fans to the ultras, Italy’s fanatical football supporters—but though they have borrowed some traditions from European football culture, they also created their own. If ever there was a sign that football is taking off in America, this is it, says Mr Goldblatt.

Americans have heard this before. The first purported turning-point for football in America came in 1975, when the New York Cosmos signed Pelé. Though the Brazilian legend raised the profile of the game, the North American Soccer League in which the Cosmos played folded ten years later. When America hosted the World Cup in 1994, it was again thought that football was on the up. But Major League Soccer (MLS), the country’s professional league, failed to build on the momentum; a few years later it nearly went bust. Other dramatic developments—America reaching the quarter-finals of the World Cup in 2002, David Beckham signing with the Los Angeles Galaxy in 2007, Landon Donovan’s miraculous last-minute goal against Algeria in 2010—were heralded as game-changers. The games Americans showed most interest in, though, did not seem to change.

Songs in the street

Football’s critics took all this as evidence that America would never embrace such a low-scoring game with few statistics to fuel fantasy leagues. Youngsters of both sexes might play football in large numbers, and the women’s game (at which America excels) would occasionally capture the nation’s attention, but there was no way football could challenge America’s four major team sports—baseball, basketball, ice hockey and American football. And yet, without making any single dramatic breakthrough, football has surreptitiously entered the mainstream.

Teams that once played in near-empty American-football stadiums now boast arenas designed for football and frequently full. Average attendance, though down last year, has risen to 18,600 per match, which puts MLS ahead of both the National Basketball Association (NBA) and National Hockey League (which play more games). According to Forbes magazine, the average MLS franchise is now worth $103m, up more than 175% over the past five years. The league had 13 clubs in 2007; next year it will have 21, including a new club in New York. The improved MLS has lured America’s best players, like Mr Dempsey and Michael Bradley, back from the European leagues. There are ten players from MLS teams in this year’s American squad; there were just four in 2010.

Last month MLS signed a new eight-year deal, estimated to be worth $90m per season, that will see more of its games broadcast on more television channels. In 2012 NBCUniversal, a television and film company, paid $250m for the rights to broadcast the games of the EPL for three years. The previous three-year contract had gone for under $70m. Over 30m Americans tuned in to EPL matches this season, more than double the number that watched the previous one. Kevin Alavy of Futures Sport + Entertainment, a consultancy, expects America to come third, behind Brazil and Germany, in terms of World Cup viewers this year (being in the right set of time zones is a big help). Digital technologies allow America’s fans to keep up with foreign leagues even when television takes no interest. Stephen Nuttall, senior director for sport at YouTube, says 300 of the world’s top football clubs run official channels on the site. That may not matter much to the older, more sofa-bound sports fan; but football’s American fans are much more likely to be young. Rich Luker, a pollster, says football is second only to American football in its popularity with Americans between the ages of 12 and 24 (and concerns about head injuries have an increasing number of parents holding their children out of that sport). Mr Luker notes that two international footballers—Mr Ronaldo and Lionel Messi, an Argentine who plays for Barcelona—rank among the ten most popular athletes for Americans under the age of 34.

Olé, olé, olé, olé

America’s demography is working in football’s favour, too. Hispanics in the United States, as elsewhere in the Americas, love the game. Though they make up only 16.9% of the population, the number of Hispanics grew by 43% between 2000 and 2010. Over that same period the number of non-Hispanic whites, who tend to follow America’s long-established team sports, grew by just 1.2%. Based on current trends, Mr Luker believes international football will soon be four or five times bigger in America than it is today, and MLS’s fan base will triple or quadruple.

After a recent stretch of mediocrity, America has headed off to the World Cup ranked 14th in the world, though its draw means it is unlikely to get through the group stage into the final 16. It is a measure of how far the game has come that Jürgen Klinsmann, the German who coaches the team, not only felt that he had a strong enough squad to leave the ageing Mr Donovan at home—he was also called on to explain his decision on live television.

Robert Baan, the Dutchman who is technical director for India’s national team, must dream of such interest. In cricket-mad India, football is an afterthought—just ask Bollywood. In “Lagaan”, a hugely popular film from 2001, Indian villagers beat British colonial officers at a game of cricket, and win relief from oppressive taxes. But the real-life version of this tale, or the closest thing to it, actually involves football. In 1911 Mohun Bagan, from Kolkata, beat the East Yorkshire Regiment for the Indian Football Association Shield, becoming the first Asian squad to defeat a foreign team—a much celebrated event in the febrile atmosphere of the time.

The All India Football Federation (AIFF) was established in 1937, and an Indian team was invited to the World Cup when it was last hosted by Brazil in 1950 (it did not attend, due to the expense and the requirement that its footballers, who played barefoot, wear boots). Up until the death of Syed Abdul Rahim, a revered national coach, in 1963, India’s football was in reasonable fettle. The national team won the Asian games in 1951 and 1962 and came fourth at the 1956 Olympics, the best ever finish for an Asian country at the time.

Not a sporty nation?

Never, though, did football enjoy anything like the hold on the nation that cricket exerts. As many as 400m people will watch the national cricket team on television when the stakes are high; the immensely popular Indian Premier League (IPL), a professional cricket tournament set up in 2008, draws tens of thousands of fans to each match, and its brand is valued at $3 billion. In contrast, around 6m Indians watched the final of the World Cup in 2010, held in South Africa. The average crowd for India’s top professional football league, the I-League, is around 4,000 and most of its teams face financial hardship.

Indian football is not just eclipsed by cricket; for a long time it has been in absolute decline. The national team has sunk to 147th in FIFA’s world rankings—behind Afghanistan and North Korea. As the nation’s fortunes fell, investment drained out of the game and the country’s football infrastructure deteriorated. Professional teams play in rickety stadiums. Sunando Dhar, the head of the I-League, touched a nerve last year when he claimed that “India lacks sporting passion and is not really a sporting country.” But he may have a point. Apart from cricket, India does not excel at sports: at the last summer Olympics, it won six medals, none of them gold.

But even Mr Dhar is optimistic about football’s future in India. As in America, there are signs of a generational shift. India’s World Cup television viewers in 2010 may have been few in number, but they were also disproportionately young. Foreign leagues are already popular—IMG, a global sports-management firm, estimates that 131m Indians watch football on television each year, mostly tuning in to matches from the EPL or Spain’s La Liga. Other studies show this audience growing. European clubs like Manchester United, Liverpool and Barcelona have opened youth academies in the country, mindful of what discovering an Indian superstar would do for their fan base. A document promoting the creation of the new Indian Super League sums up the mood: “Cricket was the game of the fathers. Football is the game of the sons.”

Cricket’s promoters have been aware of the generational issue for a while; they set up the IPL, which features a shorter version of the game, to appeal to a younger audience. Now football is cheekily using the IPL as a prototype for the Super League, which will kick off in September. Set up by Reliance Industries, a big Indian conglomerate, and IMG, the league is expected to feature eight squads of Indian players alongside recycled foreign stars like Freddie Ljungberg, a Swede, and Robert Pirès, a Frenchman. It has even co-opted some of cricket’s star power, with Sachin Tendulkar, the sport’s greatest batsman, taking a stake in one of the teams. A number of Bollywood actors are also involved. The league is gimmicky, to be sure. So was MLS, early on.

When Mao wore the yellow jersey

Some fear the Super League will disrupt the poorly run I-League; others think one will subsume the other. Either way, the creation of the new league reflects an optimism surrounding the sport. It will never come close to unseating cricket, but it could benefit from the increased appetite for less-staid sport that the IPL has tapped into and encouraged. If India becomes a somewhat sportier nation, the world’s default sport will be well placed to benefit.

For that to happen, though, the country needs to improve its football infrastructure. As a spur to such improvements, FIFA has chosen India to host the World Cup for players under the age of 17 in 2017 on the understanding that it will spruce up its stadiums. By virtue of being host, India’s junior team will get into the 2017 tournament regardless of its quality.

By then, if all goes to plan, Indian football should show other signs of improvement. The Super League clubs have promised to invest in grass-roots efforts to teach the game, while the AIFF has opened up four academies to develop talent. But even Mr Baan, the first technical director the AIFF has had, thinks the country is a decade or so away from fielding squads that might qualify for the World Cup. Others would see that as impressively optimistic.

India can, to some extent, blame cricket for a lack of footballing success. China can blame communism. Under Mao Zedong, who played as a goalkeeper in school, the country was isolated from football’s growing popularity. Even after China started to open up under Deng Xiaoping, another football fan, the game was difficult to play, as meetings of ten or more people needed official sanction. The Chinese will tell you that they invented football, and they have a point; there was a formalised way of kicking balls around fields in China two thousand years ago. But they do not play it in large numbers today, nor do they play it terribly well. The men’s national team ranks 96th in the world—which is, as it happens, one spot behind Qatar.

The government is well aware of what some commentators call the country’s “football crisis”. And it takes policy for sporting prowess seriously in a way that India’s government does not and America’s does not need to. But interest shown off the pitch—the Chinese are keen to watch football played elsewhere, and to bet on it—is not proving easy to translate into participation and success on it. The top-down approach that works well for sports that depend on individual athletes is less suited to producing winning teams. Rather than investing in the coaching and infrastructure that might lead to long-term success, party leaders have sought quick fixes, such as shipping promising young players abroad to hone their skills. They often fail to flourish.

Chinese football also faces a cultural challenge. Most parents insist that their children cram for exams rather than kick a ball. Most kids do not aspire to success on the football pitch. Chinese football has no Yao Ming, the phenomenal Chinese star of the Houston Rockets basketball team, to inspire them. The result is that in 2011 the Chinese Football Association (CFA) reported just 7,000 registered players under the age of 18. That helps explain the national team’s ineptitude.

Yet the Chinese love watching foreign teams. Games from Italy’s top division, Serie A, have been aired on national television for decades. The EPL is often broadcast on regional channels, which have a wide reach. Many watch games online as well. In 2010 over 300m Chinese tuned in to the World Cup, with 17 stations airing nearly 3,000 hours of the games. (The 11-hour time difference is expected to put a big dent in this year’s numbers.) Big foreign clubs, like Barcelona and Manchester United, often make pre-season trips to the country. Simon Chadwick, a professor of sport business at Coventry University, says support for such teams needs to be seen not so much as participation in the vicarious joys and sorrows that fans are heir to as a form of conspicuous consumption: “Manchester United is just another Western consumer brand.” Foreign clubs seem content with this superficial, if lucrative, engagement; they fly in and play but do not invest much in the country’s footballing scene. This contrasts sharply with the attitude in basketball. America’s NBA has worked hard at encouraging basketball in China by building new facilities and opening up training schools. As a result it is one of the country’s most popular sports. Professional football in China has largely been known for foreign stars, like Nicolas Anelka, a Frenchman, and Didier Drogba, an Ivorian, who arrive to fanfares but leave soon after. It has also been known for corruption. In 2010, match-fixing saw the Guangzhou team relegated to the second division. That team’s fortunes, though, have changed. Shortly after its demotion, Evergrande Real Estate Group bought it and began pumping money into it, hiring Marcello Lippi, a World Cup winning Italian coach, in the process. Guangzhou Evergrande, as it is now known, has won the Super League, China’s top division, three years running. Last year it beat FC Seoul to become the first Chinese team to win the Asian Champions League. On June 5th Alibaba, an internet company, announced that it had agreed to buy 50% of the club. It is a reflection of China’s building boom that most of the other teams in the league are owned by property developers, too, and they are also spending freely on foreign talent. The Super League’s top scorers are from Brazil, Sweden and Morocco. Last year Guangzhou R&F hired Sven-Goran Eriksson, a Swede who managed England, as its coach. The average attendance at games is a respectable 18,600, on a par with the MLS’s.

Well it beats quidditch

Rowan Simons, the author of “Bamboo Goalposts”, believes Chinese football would benefit more if the money shelled out for foreign coaches and players was spent on helping young Chinese players get really good. Evergrande has already made a big investment in this area. The club has built an enormous football academy in the southern province of Guangdong that students compare to Hogwarts, the school in the Harry Potter novels. With 2,300 students and 50 football pitches, it is China’s largest such institution, and perhaps the biggest in the world.

When the school opened in 2012 Xu Jiayin, the billionaire head of Evergrande, said, “Our long-term strategy is to use teenagers to turn Evergrande into a team of only domestic players in eight to ten years, making them stars in China, Asia and the world.” At least one other club has followed Evergrande’s lead, opening up a smaller school. Others are likely to do so if the academies are a success. The CFA has also hired Mr Beckham to promote the game to children and sell Chinese football to the rest of the world. Until the sport finds its version of Mr Yao, he’ll have to do.

Football’s situation, and prospects, in each of the sidelined countries differs. But there are common themes. In all of them, football is to some extent a deviation from the cultural mainstream, and following it expresses an interest in the world beyond the country’s borders. In some ways, indeed, football in these countries is more global than it is elsewhere, where the fiercest devotions are normally reserved for local teams. In its glamour, its appeal to the young, its international investments, its consumerist sheen and its easy integration with new media, football can be seen as a poster child for globalisation, and to many in the countries which have yet to excel at the game that increases its appeal. This is not to say it does not have its dark side. China is still getting over its latest match-fixing scandal, which saw dozens of officials sent to jail. Indian officials say their I-League has been targeted by a Malaysian betting syndicate. A recent report from the Sorbonne and the International Centre for Sport Security states that football is under siege by criminals. And the global game is overseen by a FIFA elite some of whose concerns about corruption seem to be limited to ensuring that they get their fair share.