Grilling the Messenger

The 2010 World Cup has produced many losers: the Italian and French national teams left South Africa without winning a single game; football superstars like Rooney and Torres failed to score once; FIFA has had to face heavy criticism for disastrous refereeing decisions; and Mick Jagger has become the angel of death by always supporting the losing team. South Africa looked like it might be a winner hosting a smooth World Cup, but thousands of fans are bound to disagree after they missed the semi final last night as the newly built King Shaka Airport could not deal with all the private jets wanting to land.

But among all these losers, there were some winners.

Despite losing the semi final to Spain (utterly deserved according to German media), the German national team “die Mannschaft” came out of the tournament as one of the big winners. A new generation of footballers has excited spectators with beautiful fast-paced combination and counter-attacking football and the multi-culti collection of Germans and immigrants has united Germany and brought the nation closer together.

But the real winner of the World Cup never scored a goal or set foot on a pitch. The biggest talent in the history of international football and the single star of all global media attention is Paul, the Oracle Octopus.

When I first mentioned Paul, not many people had heard of him.

Since then a lot has changed.

Psychic Paul has made the headlines of all newspapers worldwide: The Daily Mail titled “Traitor! Paul the Oracle Octopus predicts Germany will beat England... (but everyone knows you can't trust a mollusk)”; Le Monde reported “Paul le poulpe, un pronostiqueur quasi infaillible” (whatever that means...), and headlines in a Japanese newspaper were “的中率100％！「タコの予言」にすがるドイツ人サッカーファン”, which supposedly has something to do with Paul! Even oh-so-strict FIFA mentioned Paul on their website and world renowned scientists and mathematicians are investigating the phenomenon of Paul (apparently the probability of getting all six German games right was around 2%).

Paul also has its own Wikipedia site, according to which he is “a common octopus which has been used as an oracle in an attempt to predict the results of major German international football matches”. There are several Facebook pages demanding “Paul for President” and the Octopus ranks number one on worldwide twitter feed charts.

When Paul made his prediction for the semi final, the world media– from CNN to the BBC to reporters from the Australian Bush - reported from the Sea Life Aquarium and a German TV station broadcasted it live as “Breaking News!”.

But when the Oracle predicted a Spanish win, which turned out to be true and maybe a self-fulfilling prophecy, things quickly turned against Paul and dozens of delicious recipes for calamari were circulated on the net.

After initially laughing about the octopus, the Spanish soon fell for Paul’s charm and are now desperately trying to save him from ending up as calamari sausage. The Spanish Minister of Environmental Affairs has demanded that Paul be added to the list of endangered species, the Minister of Trade and Industry suggested that Paul be brought to Spain and Prime Minister Zapatero offered to provide Paul with his own security guard to ensure his safety!

On Friday Paul will make predictions for the Germany game as well as the final. Paul’s word has gained so much importance that Dutch Newspapers have gone through the effort of faking his prediction!

Should Paul decide that a career as a football oracle is too dangerous after all, he has plenty of other offers for less life threatening oracle jobs such as predicting presidential election and currency reforms!

While the hype around Paul may slowly be getting annoying, there are two things that will provide relief to cephalopod-phobics and those wanting to read real news again: First of all, the World Cup is over soon and Paul will get his deserved holiday; and secondly Paul is already 2 ½ years old – a significant age for octopi, who normally don’t get older than three years – and he will most likely not be around during the next tournament.

(Un)Fortunately Sea Life is already looking for another octopus who Paul can teach the secrets of being a football oracle... the show must go on and so we can all look forward to more octopus stories in two years time!