His name begins with the French word for soccer, ("le foot") and rhymes with that of Asterix, the comic strip hero of ancient Gaul. If you haven't yet encountered Footix, by next summer you are sure to. The red-headed rooster with a yellow beak wears a blue track suit with "France '98" emblazoned across his chest and carries a French tricolour or a soccer ball. Footix is the official mascot of next year's World Cup.
"The world has a rendezvous with passion," crows a pamphlet published by the French Committee for the Organisation (CFO) of the World Cup. "France '98 will be the most important media event of the 20th century." An estimated 37 billion television viewers worldwide are expected to watch next year's competition (which runs from June 10th to July 12th) - twice as many as watched the Olympics. During the same 33-day period, 2.5 million sports fans will attend 64 matches in the French cities of Paris, Saint-Denis, Lens, Lyon, Saint Etienne, Marseille, Montpellier, Toulouse, Bordeaux and Nantes.
More than 600 qualifying matches, to narrow 172 aspiring countries down to 30 (plus France as host, and Brazil, the winner of the 1994 World Cup), must be completed by November 16th this year. On December 4th, a lottery in Marseille will arrange the 32 teams in eight groups of four. From June 10th to 26th, each team in a group will play the three others; in the last 16 matches, the winners from each group will eliminate each other. The French boast that theirs is to be the biggest World Cup ever - previous competitions involved only 24 teams.
This modern-day equivalent of gladiators versus Christians has enormous commercial promise. The Japanese company Sony purchased the rights to Footix the rooster and the Cup logo, which looks like a soccer ball covered with the hexagonal symbol of France looming menacingly over the horizon. Sony has so far completed 100 licensing contracts in Europe for T-shirts, shoes, stuffed animals, visors. . . in all, some 250 products. With Footix standing in the window, a boutique on the Champs has begun hawking official ties, dishes, shoulder bags and even dog leashes.
Soccer, according to the CFO, is the most popular sport in the world, played by 250 million people, including 30 million women. It was a French journalist, Robert Guerin, who founded the international federation FIFA, host of the World Cup, in 1904.
And two other Frenchmen, Jules Rimet and Henri Delaunay, organised the first World Cup in 1928. Michel Platini, the charismatic former soccer star, is co-president of the CFO and travels abroad with President Chirac to promote next year's Cup.
The French bought up the first 1,270,000 World Cup tickets that went on sale. The passes, which allow the holder to attend five or six matches in one city, were already sold out by last May - 13 months before the Cup. More tickets will go on sale in mid-September, and a third of the two and a half million seats will be reserved for foreigners.
One of the highlights of the World Cup will be the new Stade (stadium) de France, in the industrial town of Saint-Denis, just north of Paris. Both the opening match on June 10th and the final on July 12th will take place there. Saint Denis was previously better known for its ancient history - the third-century King Denis is said to have walked there carrying his head in his hands after being decapitated in Montmartre - and for always voting Communist. The stadium, with a capacity of 80,000, has been compared to a flying saucer. It was designed and built specifically for the World Cup at a cost of £288.88 million. There are jacuzzis and massage rooms for the athletes, and three restaurants, one of which has a rooftop panorama of Paris.
The French authorities are grappling with the problem of lodging hundreds of thousands of foreign soccer fans in addition to the normal summer influx of tourists. When the mayor of Paris casually suggested that the French might open up their homes, English bed-and-breakfast style, he was so ridiculed that he dropped the idea. The Catholic church tried the same thing this summer for the World Youth Days, and it was a great disappointment. The French, it seems, are a private people.
Ireland's chances: For Mick McCarthy's squad, all depends on the final qualifying matches against Iceland (Saturday week), Lithuania (September 10th) and Romania (October 15th). Then the best runners up go into the play-offs on October 29th and November 15th.
