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For much of the world, soccer comes first(Chicago Tribune (KRT) Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) LONDON _ Christianity, with more than 2 billion believers, ranks second among the major religions of the world. Soccer is first. It is not clear how many people attend the church of soccer _ or football, as most of the world insists on calling it _ but FIFA, the guardians of the faith, calculated that a cumulative television audience of 28.8 billion people tuned in to watch the 2002 World Cup tournament staged jointly by Japan and South Korea. Keep in mind that the world's total population is only 6.6 billion. This year's World Cup, which begins Friday, will be hosted by Germany. It starts with a group stage in which the 32 teams that have qualified are placed into groups of four that play among each other. The top two teams in each group then advance to the knockout round, climaxing in the championship game in Berlin on July 9. In all, 64 games will be played. The average television audience for each game is expected to be around 320 million. The Super Bowl can only muster a crowd about a third that size. It may be an exaggeration to call soccer a religion, but it is obviously more than a game. Soccer can topple governments and send nations to war (El Salvador and Honduras, in 1969). The quest for the World Cup, soccer's grail, can humiliate the powerful and make the wretched and ragged of the Earth feel like world-beaters. It almost always makes England weep. In remote areas of Africa, entire villages will turn out to watch the games on a battered television powered by a generator. Where there is no television, they will listen on the radio. In the great cities and small towns of Italy, there is no need to watch the game to know when the Azzurri have scored. The honking horns and great explosions of cheers from every neighborhood announce the news. America has not fully warmed up to a sport in which the scores are low, the play is uninterrupted by breaks for beer commercials and the offside rule really is difficult to explain. But the U.S. is catching up. The American team performed admirably in the last World Cup, advancing to the quarterfinals before being eliminated by Germany. This year's team looks even better, but the luck of the draw has placed it in an extremely difficult group with the Italians and Czechs. The build-up for this year's competition began last December when the group pairings were announced on a TV extravaganza that featured German supermodel Heidi Klum plucking balls out of a bowl. Since then, the hype machine has been running at full throttle. No subject is deemed too trivial. Back in February, Britain's serious-minded Observer newspaper dispatched a reporter to uncover the secret location in Holland where the stadium grass for the final was growing. He found it in the quiet village of Heythuysen. Shhh. "The grass is sleeping at the moment," the farmer told the reporter. In a sport where spectators carry flags and paint their faces in the national colors, you can be sure there will be some very real tensions lurking just beneath the surface. If, as the Prussian military philosopher Karl von Clausewitz famously said, war is "diplomacy by other means," then soccer is war by other means. When England plays Germany, the English fans never fail to dust off their mocking anthem of "Two World Wars and one World Cup" _ a reference to England's 1966 World Cup triumph over West Germany. England's only World Cup triumph. The group stage match-up between Poland and Germany that takes place June 14 is more than just a game. History's underdogs have long memories. Then there is the peculiar tale of Serbia and Montenegro. They are a still a team, but not a nation. Two weeks ago tiny Montenegro voted to secede from big brother Serbia. Balkan analysts are wondering whether a strong showing by the team might persuade Montenegro to reconsider its vote. Angola, one of four sub-Saharan Africa nations in this year's competition, is emerging from 27 years of civil war. Its unexpected success in soccer has helped heal some of the wounds. The Angolan team, nicknamed the Black Antelopes, will be carrying the pride of an entire continent when it opens its campaign against Portugal, its former colonial master. Although unlikely, Iran and the U.S. could conceivably meet in a semi-final. For Iran, a victory over the Great Satan would go a long way toward exorcising some of its own demons. The two last met in 1998. Iran won 2-1. Soccer has always provided an uncanny mirror of national character. The mighty German teams of 1954, 1974 and 1990 played like well-engineered pieces of machinery. Reliable. Unemotional. Very Germanic. Maybe a little boring. Brazil's play, at the other end of the style spectrum, is a joyful samba. Brazil danced its way to the last World Cup championship, and it is the heavy favorites in this year's tournament. You might expect Italian teams to attack with a certain artistic panache. They can play this way, but they don't. The Italians win games with their relentless, spirit-sapping defense. They save their artistic creativity for operatic dives intended to fool the referee into calling fouls that never occurred. The composition of the American team speaks eloquently of the nation it represents. Its players are the sons of immigrants and the sons of suburban soccer moms. Landon Donovan, Claudio Reyna and DaMarcus Beasley may not be household names, but they are mainstays of a U.S. team that has earned the respect of the soccer world. Reyna, Beasley and others like Brian McBride, who grew up in northwest suburban Arlington Heights and plays his soccer in London, are more famous in Europe than they are in the U.S. The World Cup is soccer's hero machine. Pele, the incomparable Brazilian, staked his claim as the game's greatest with scintillating performances that led his team to championships in 1958, 1962 and 1970. Bad Boy Diego Maradona was King of the World for a few weeks in 1986 when Argentina won it all. His downfall, fueled by drugs and flab, was as spectacular as his ascent. England's Geoff Hurst, who scored a hat trick in the 1966 final, was knighted for his heroics. This year, all eyes will be on Brazil's Ronaldinho, the buck-toothed marvel who once explained that God made up for short-changing him in the looks department by giving him an otherworldly grace on the soccer field. He plays the game with a perpetual expression of transcendent joy on his face. Watch him and understand why the world calls soccer "the beautiful game." ___ (c) 2006, Chicago Tribune. 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