Oh yeah, and I love it when folks get all pissed and say, no, games are never fixed, refs are never paid off, you have to be a fool to think that...pffft...
JUVENTUS of the ITALIA SERIE A. Not some dumbass 3rd division Polish team, no no, King Juventus......
Grobbelaar was just shooting his mouth off to a journalist - nothing ever proven..................it wasn't the Bundesliga, it was a pre-season German Cup match and............it's unclear how bad this Italian impropriety is just yet (but the signs don't look good).
"The cumulative audience over the 25 match days of the 2002 event reached a total of 28.8 billion viewers. The corresponding audience for France 98, with unaudited viewing figures for China, reported 33.4 billion."
As long as the map or globe you are looking at is to scale, it can give you a very clear visual if that helps.
Look at the size of the United states (where even here there will be some interest) and then look at the rest of the entire world (no ecxeptions) and it's population (where stores, banks, churches, airports etc.) will close down on their countries match days.
The Brazil-England match received a 94.2% share in Brazil despite being on at 3 AM local time. 46 million watched this in Brazil alone at 3 in the morning.
The World Cup Final was watched by 54.1 million viewers in Japan alone.
The opening match of WC 2002 (Senegal vs. France) drew 500 million viewers worldwide.
"2.5 billion people saw the 2002 World Cup final between Germany and Brazil live, making it the largest single day viewing event in the world (3 billion live television viewers saw the 1998 World Cup final)."