ATHLETIC ARTIST: French striker David Trezeguet

At a time when nothing, not even life itself, can be taken for granted, the World Cup of football has arrived in the East for the first time. It would be crass of me to address this month-long tournament in South Korea and Japan as some kind of global celebration of man and his neighbour finding harmony through playing games.

Yet we are here, and we are in their hands. In the skies, there are said to be E-3 Sentry AWACS planes over the Korean peninsula. In each of the 20 new stadiums-10 in Japan, 10 in South Korea-there are 1,500 security personnel armed against anything from hooliganism to chemical warfare. Such forces cannot be discreet, but after September 11, discretion is a permanent casualty of terror.

We feel the struggle between joy and enmity, between great expectation and fear. Football lost its innocence decades ago. FIFA, the international governing body, is riven by corruption. The teams of 32 countries who reached this 64-match event possess the most privileged and pressured athletes on earth.

Zinedine Zidane, a wonderful footballer and now one of the richest individuals performing any sport or art, is a champion of France where racial intolerance recently re-entered politics. "Zizou" is a modest man who summons hypnotic match-winning moments in finals where upwards of half the world's population watches through television.

He is the son of an Algerian immigrant. His father is a janitor, a meek man of Marseille who scraped a menial living. His grandparents belonged to the Berbers, the nomadic Muslim tribe who roam north Africa. And it was on long summer holidays in the nearby desert that Zidane amused himself by mastering a ball and became, like Pele, like Maradona before him, a player who enriched the world and grew incredibly rich out of a simple, some might think frivolous, gift.

How typical of this beautiful, bewitching sport that when France began her defence of the World Cup, against one of her former protectorates, Senegal, over the weekend, the greatest player of the greatest game was laid low by injury. How thankful he is that the years have given him such a stage. And how symptomatic that sportsmen are the icons of the new age, and soccer the most nationalist and widely abused of sports.

In Seoul, two days before the World Cup kicked off, FIFA was split between members who wanted to impeach its president Sepp Blatter for alleged corruption and mismanagement and a majority which voted resoundingly 139 to 56 in favour of re-electing him for another four years. Blatter's detractors say he systematically diverted hundreds of millions of dollars from FIFA's income to perpetuate his hold on power. He denies everything and says it is others, five vice-presidents among them, who are framing him because they are jealous. Sometime soon, a Swiss judge will decide if Blatter faces a criminal trial.

This president, like his mentor, the Brazilian Joao Havelange who ruled FIFA as if it were his fiefdom for 24 years before Blatter succeeded him in 1998, uses a legalised kind of bribery to sustain his office. He distributes $1 million to each of the 204-member national associations every four-year cycle, and in addition he has inaugurated a so-called GOAL Project that has benefited almost a hundred of the countries with hand-outs to provide training and administrative facilities. In effect, Blatter provides the cash, the members provide his power base, and few of them are concerned with probity as much as profit. But enough of the seedy seam in football.

It is the prince, the sultan, of games because it transcends all barriers. Rich or poor, black or white, Jew, gentile, Christian or Muslim, no one is excluded; all play to a common book of rules. This, for most of us, is what football is all about. I doubt that anything else could persuade Japan and South Korea to suspend their half-century of enmity to cooperate in a cross-border event.

You in India will understand when I suggest that it is not so much one tournament as two back-to-back versions. Japan spent $4 billion (Rs 19,600 crore) establishing its 10 fantastic new stadiums; Korea spent $2 billion (Rs 9,800 crore) matching the building of modern amphitheatres. If one Asian tiger built them, the other had to save face by building at least the equivalent. If economic depression threatened them, neither scaled back these monuments to their ability to harness computer technology to reflect their separate cultures.

And so we move around Japan and Korea, using two languages, two currencies, two mind-sets ... two of everything. And so, clearing the stage for the performers who have everything millionaire salaries can buy, half-a-million visitors from all backgrounds descend on these stadiums under airspace cleared of commercial aviation.

Who will win? I happen to be English, but I suspect my country, like two-thirds of the participants, are here to make up the numbers. France, having discovered schools of technique beyond most rivals, and despite Monsieur Le Pen employing talents from former colonies in Africa, has a more balanced side, with better goalscorers than it had in 1998.

Argentina, which always seems to rise when its nation is troubled by military or, as now, economic despair, has arguably even more world-class talents, a greater pool of resources. The Argentines, from Juan Sebastian Veron to Gabriel Batistuta, say their motivation is to lift the morale of their people rather than to crave bonus money they scarcely need. That motivation could spur Argentina to the final.

But to reach it, the team would probably have to eliminate France. And Les Bleus, as the French are known, might have to contend with Brazil whose claim to the most successful football nation on the planet is threatened. In recent weeks, Ronaldo and Rivaldo have returned from injury, and Brazil has a new belief.

So, of course, do the emerging football continents. It is hot here, and humid too. The monsoons are coming, and already thunder and lightning visit the evenings. And we wait to see if Korea or Japan, or both, achieve the minimum expectation of host nations, to qualify for at least the second round.

Both hosts are running with zeal unsuspected in their footballing past. Both have European coaches. Both have the advantage of climate and of taking their players into training retreats lasting months at a time. Finally, for now, there is a new population unleashed on this World Cup. The Chinese, unlike their sad communist cousins in the shuttered northern half of Korea, are part of the action. And on June 8, on the beautiful island of Jeju, Brazil takes on China in a match that, from their two populations alone, represents the biggest television attraction of this new millennium.

If you have the time and the inclination, try to see this game. At the heart of it is Li Tie, the midfield fulcrum of China. In 1993 he was one of 23 boys sent to live, to breathe and to sleep football in a rural training camp near Sao Paulo. Li Tie was the best, or the most dedicated of those adolescents and he has become the product of a remarkable social and human experiment, a Chinese man sent out of a closed society into one that, through football, conquered the world.