Soccer is the world's most popular sport and one of the globe's best known cultural practices. The pinnacle of the sport worldwide is the FIFA World Cup, a competition held every four years, which crowns one nation as the world champion in front of huge global television audiences: over half of the planet's population watched the 2010 FIFA World Cup final between Spain and the Netherlands. From the humble origins of modern soccer in Great Britain in the 19th century, world soccer has become today a vast, commercialized global industry, with huge salaries paid to the biggest stars due to the...