Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Another Iron Curtain

Weird World Cup 2010 Fact: The only two eastern European countries in the tournament will be two countries that did not exist as sovereign countries when Communism fell: Slovakia and Slovenia*. And neither host country for the Euro 2012 championship (Poland and Ukraine) will be there. It's a funny old game.

*It depends on whether you consider Serbia as the successor to Yugoslavia and indeed whether Yugoslavia was an Iron Curtain country. The point is that for all the talk about an eastward shift in soccer (which was used to rationalize the location of Euro 2012), there's no sign of it in the qualifying.

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