The great Bob Collins of MPR recent wondered aloud on twitter, “How many World Cup stories are actually about soccer?”  It turns out that football, or whatever you want to call it, really is a bit dull outside of the cultural stuff.  The stories are all about people, not the game.  Take that to an extreme and it’s hard to not notice a solid trend right now among the nations that are having a great time in South Africa and those that are not looking so wonderful.  Does World Cup performance say something about the mood of a nation – and perhaps even its future?

The biggest disappointments so far are, without question, in Europe.  Germany lost its first Group game in 20 years, European Cup champion Spain did their usual early choke, and the French team was just one guillotine shy of a revolution.  The less said about England, frankly, the better.  The one bright light that seems to make European football something interesting is Slovenia, a nation that never even existed before 1991.  The old regimes are not what they once were.

It has to be disheartening for European football fans.  But what makes this interesting is how this all comes just as the Euro itself is under fire.  The European Central Bank (ECB) is struggling to reign in decades of letting national accounts slide in the name of unity.  As John Mauldin put it, “When the euro was created, the Germans got a Mediterranean currency and the Mediterranean countries got German interest rates.”

If Europe isn’t much of a team, no wonder their football teams aren’t performing, eh?

Contrast this with the incredible performances being put in by Latin America.  The usual powerhouses Brazil and Argentina look like machines, as can be expected.  But we even have Mexico and Uruguay advancing to the next round and generating a lot of national pride and energy.  All of Mercosur looks to advance, including Paraguay and Chile.

This may be dismissed as a mere coincidence, but keep in mind that the 2014 World Cup will be in Brazil – followed closely by the Olympics in 2016.  Brace yourself for the decade of Brazil, the leader and most populous nation in the region.  This is a nation regularly lauded by the Economist magazine and so awash in foreign investment that they started taxing it to turn some of it away.  What has gone so right in América Sur?

The example of Brazil cannot be over-stated.  In the 1990s they angered many environmentalists by draining and damming the Amazon to create farms and hydroelectric power.  Their offshore drilling push wasn’t very popular, either.  But today they are regularly praised as an example because Brazil is, almost uniquely among developing nations, fully energy independent and not beholden to volatile world energy markets.  Industry is booming.  They’ve gotten past much of the race and class strife that defined their first 200 years as well.  And they did it all the Brazilian Way.

Back in the 1980s my Dad was a frequent consultant for chemical companies in South America, so we talked about what was happening there a lot.  We both wondered what might happen to the region if the USofA and other nations stopped screwing around with them and let them go off and succeed or fail on their own.  Now we know.  Some of them are doing pretty well.

It’s not all perfect, of course.  We still have Hugo Chavez messing with things he shouldn’t and some real pockets of serious corruption and poverty.  But the excitement of the region is real and strong.  You can see it in their economies – and also in their futbol. National pride may be a dangerous thing at times, but when it gets a people to work together when previously they were busy grabbing what they could and booking plane tickets to Miami to spend it there may be a lot more to the hype than appears on the surface.

If the World Cup tells us anything, Europe is dying a slow, choking death and Latin America is exhaling the ecstasy of the loud and strong shout “Goooooal!”.   It may only be football, but in the poetry of the game it may have a much deeper meaning.