OK, given all the Kiwis, Aussies and Americans on our team, probably more of us follow rugby or American "gridiron" football than soccer-football.

But we also have a large number of Europeans and Latin Americans on our team, especially Germans. So with the "Football World Cup" due to start in Deutschland later this week, it seems only fair to give this some electronic ink here on the BOB.

For the record the 32 teams that have qualified:


Seven of the ten countries with AC32 teams are represented, so over the next few weeks we would expect some friendly World Cup rivalries developing among our teams here in VLC. FIFA's official website is particularly good.

Given the June-July schedule of the World Cup matches, the timing of Act 12 came in for much debate among ACM, the Defender and the Challenger of Record when we were setting AC 32 up in 2003-04. We knew we wanted Act 12, if possible, to be a dress-rehearsal for the grand finale in 2007. That meant running Act 12 as nearly as possible over the same dates in 2006 (with hopefully the same wind/weather) as the LVC finals and AC Match in 2007. But we realized that would place Act 12 in the midst of the World Cup elims.

Would that be bad for Act 12 TV coverage? Some said "for sure, yes" as we might not be able to get the airtime, and it was assumed most would rather tune in the World Cup games. Others said it would actually be good for the AC, given the propensity of TV viewers (especially men) these days to channel surf. "Get them in front of their tubes watching the World Cup, get the AC televised live at the same time, and you will end up with more eyeballs than would otherwise catch the AC on TV."

We'll see. It will also help if the ACTV production is particularly good. The jury's still out on that (and our Challenger Commission colleagues will appreciate the pun).

Having Act 12 during the World Cup has hurt the VIP guest counts expected by other teams, or so we hear. Not so for BMW ORACLE. Mirko Groeschner (GER, marketing director) reports we have even more VIP-guests booked for Act 12 than we had for Acts 10 and 11. Great news, and nice work by our sponsor-partners and marketing team.

And there's also BMW ORACLE Racing action in New York City the last two weeks of June (stay tuned -- suffice for now to say we'll be blogging from NYC 12-16 June).

So with five days to go to the first match, likely this is the BOB's one-and-only post on the Beautiful Game's 2006 World Cup. Meanwhile, Ian "Fresh" Burns (AUS, design coordinator) and his Aussie mates will be cheering on their entry, as will some of the less-parochial Americans if our highly ranked (for the first time) USA national squad does well. Juan K (ARG, design team) will be leading the charge for the Argentine side, our French Connection is of course led by Laurent Esquier (FRA/USA, operations director) and Bert Pace (FRA, sailing team). Kazuhiko Sofuku (JPN, sailing team) and Craig Christensen (NZL, sailing ops, but his partner is Japanese and he speaks the lingo) are our fans for Japan. All our Spanish colleagues are aficionados, especially Team Doc Francisco "Kiko" Espi-Escriva. And the aforementioned mega-fan Mirko will be commuting up to Germany for a match or two whenever Dicko gives him a 36-hour pass out of VLC.

Many of our families will be following the World Cup action on TV as a number of our kids are playing soccer-football on youth/school teams here in Valencia. And after all, like the America's Cup, it is a Beautiful Game.


An approach road to one of the stadiums in Germany where the matches
are to take place has this clever archway in celebration of the World
Cup. Photo courtesy of Valencia Life.


The French Connection lunching together at our Base last week. Were
they talking about their highly rated World Cup team? Or our team's
highly-regarded Austrian/Kiwi cuisine? Vive le schnitzel!