With less than three weeks to go fans from across the world are searching out their passports, ensuring they have Euros in their wallets and most importantly making sure their tickets are always within an arms length at all times.

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While the time for patting children on their heads and kissing loved ones goodbye is yet to come, it will arrive in the blink of an eye. Yes, the World Cup is almost here. One cannot move for the merchandise and the marketing as the global purveyors of soft drinks, hamburgers, cars and electronics attach their names to the world's biggest sporting occasion. Yet as the competition has become more global, little bar Wars of national survival has the galvanizing nationalist effect that the upcoming clashes of football civilization can.

In Brazil, a nation that escaped participation in the Two World Wars on the twentieth century national achievement and progress is measured in winning world cups. The counterpart, losing, is seen as nothing less than national disaster. For better or worse, football and nationalism are as pervasive in today's society as they were when Mussolini claimed Italy's victory in 1934 for himself, or the Argentinean Junta victory in 1978.

In the run up to the World Cup in France, the right wing politician Jean-Marie Le Pen attacked the multiracial make up of a France team that would go on lift the cup for not being French 'enough'. Le Pen conveniently forgetting the impact France's immigrants have always had impact on there 'national' team. From the Pole Raymond Kopa in the 1950s through the great side of the 1980s with Platini and Tigana, to that team of 1998 replete with Henry, Desailly, Viera, Djorkaeff et al and at is fulcrum the Algerian Zidane, France has always had a multicultural team.

The same can be said in the last 15-20 years of the Netherlands, with the contributions of Ruud Gullit and Frank Rikjaard through to Edgar Davids and Patrick Kluivert prominent in the mind. Yet football has not always had a galvanizing effect for the right reasons and the events which began on the terraces of Red Star Belgrade in the early 1990s filtered all too easily into ethnic hatred.

It is perhaps fitting therefore that this World Cup will mark the end of what is left of Yugoslavia following this week's referendum in Montenegro which will mean the splitting of Serbia and Montenegro. In this regard a team in its final hurrah and with a defence which only let in a single goal in qualifying could well be worth a Euro or two of anyone's money. (See more of the latest World Cup betting odds at pinnaclesports )

Regardless of the individual winners and losers, nationalism and the world cup will be intertwined, from the unmentionable songs of the terraces, through the booing of national anthems to politicians and celebrities wrapping themselves up in the progress of their team - their nation.

By J Simon Rofe,
Englandfans member since 1995, England fan since birth.