1995, file photo. Covering the 43rd World Table Tennis Championships in Tianjin, China we also did some stories about the broader aspect of the sport. Among other things we visited a school – where the pasttime centered around the game. According to some stastistics, there is one table tennis table per every seven Chinese. Table tennis has been the national sport since the fifties. With around 100 million players, there are bound to be some expert players. China is the undisputed, dominant superpower of the game.
The British football team has just won the UEFA Women’s Euro 2022 football final against Germany 2-1.
The final game was the most watched women's football match ever in the UK, reaching a television audience of 17.4 million on the BBC and attracting 5.9 million streams on digital platforms.
Afghanistan, Sudan, Bosnia or Lebanon doesn’t matter, wherever I travel around the world it is easy to notice that football is the most popular sport in the world, with more than 265 million players and an around 4 billion people that actively watch the sport. The sound of laughter that echoes in the ruins of Beirut or the scream of “offside” in Haiti is, for me, always a ray of light into the darkness of despair.
