Futbol Mondial's FIFA 2008 Fanatics

Futbol Mondial is a great programme at the best of times, with the offering from the Trans World International stable normally bringing us such delights as the Asian Champions League, how an Ecuadorian footballer copes with life at Wigan Athletic and Tomas Brolin – life after football. However, I was left feeling a little disturbed by the last item they ran on tonight's show. After running a perfectly pointless, if perfectly enjoyable and fairly nostalgic story about a Romanian all star select playing against the World in a charity match organised by Gheorge Hagi and Gica Popescu in Bucharest recently, they went and spoiled it all by bringing us a report on, wait for it, the FIFA Interactive World Cup held in Berlin at the end of May. The competition featured 32 young men (they were all young men) each of whom possessed a pair of eyes normally only seen on ordinary people at the end of a very long week of caffeine-fuelled exam cramming. Their skin complexions paled in comparison.

Some of the player profiles left me genuinely bowled over. A certain Mr Smit from the Netherlands, the reigning champion, claimed to spend 70 hours a week practicing. From the cut of him I'd say this was a gross underestimate.

Anthony Baffoe, the second Ghanaian to play in the Bundesliga according to Wikipedia (after Ibrahim Sunday, if you needed to know) and the patron of the competition, was heard justifying to the interviewer his own brood’s obsession with football video games as opposed to the real-life version of the 11-a-side game. ‘My kids, they play them all the time, and you know, they learn the names of 600 real life players, which is great.’ So there you have it – spending hours and hours developing arthritis of the thumbs and playing a game of Russian Roulette with an epileptic seizure as the prize is preferable to reading the German equivalent of Shoot! and gleaning their useless soccer trivia that way.

The narrator noted that for some reason Barcelona v Barcelona matches proved to be very popular with the competitors. A Spaniard won the blasted competition in the end – the young Real Madrid supporter opting to be, surprise surprise, Barcelona. An omen for things to come in Euro 2008, asked the voiceover guy to no-one in particular. Actually no, the antics of these FIFA 08 fanatics have absolutely no bearing on the outcome of this summer’s tournament. Gott sei Dank!