As you flick on your television to watch England take on Spain on Saturday, you may like to thank your lucky stars for being able to follow the game so easily.
It's second nature - a ritual almost without thought - as is playing football for most of the world's enthusiasts. But would you risk your life to carry out either pastime?
I only ask because they do in Somalia, which is why you might like to root for their embattled footballers on Saturday - especially if you have Britain's traditional fondness for the underdog.
Because there can be few teams with the odds more stacked against them than the collection of individuals who face a daily fight just to play the game - often having to disguise their intentions to do so.
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Fifteen months on from the elation of receiving wide praise for staging a triumphant Fifa World Cup, South African officials are now plumbing the depths.
In case you don't know, Bafana Bafana failed to qualify for the 2012 Africa Cup of Nations on Saturday after a 0-0 draw at home to Sierra Leone.
But that tells a mere fraction of the story, for the real problem was that South African FA (Safa) officials were so unaware of the rules that they erroneously believed that a draw was good enough to take them through.
Late on, coach Pitso Mosimane even threw on a midfielder for a striker to shore up the points only to later ask: "Do you think I would have left (a striker) on the bench and put on a midfielder if I knew we needed a goal? It doesn't make sense."
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It's not every day that a nation's footballers get barred from playing in a country but that's precisely the fate awaiting Zambians in Finland - albeit unofficially.
For last Tuesday, seven Zambians were found guilty of selling out their team Rovaniemi Palloseura - popularly known as RoPS - as gambling-related match-fixing plunged yet another league into abject despair.
"We will never take any Zambians again - and I don't think any other Finnish club will ever take a Zambian player (again)," RoPS chairman Risto Niva told the BBC.
For the dented image of Finland's game, with 24 games judged to have been fixed, means that sponsorship and advertising revenues have already dropped, angering the clubs as financial insult adds to the injury of realising the corrupt nature of their league.
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Born in Wimbledon, my enthusiasm for the global game was already sizeable before the tragic demise of the boys from SW19. Having covered football in over 50 countries, I've been working in the BBC's African sports section since the early noughties, recently spending three years in Africa to report on the run-up to the continent's first World Cup.
© 2011