At the famous Camp Nou stadium, almost all the stars of modern football gathered. They gathered to hold a charity match called "Football for Hope." All funds from this event were transferred to the victims of the December tsunami in Southeast Asia. In matches of this kind, the result does not matter much, so everything that happened on Tuesday in the capital of Catalonia turned into a big show.
Each team was led onto the field by players who received special recognition last year. The team of the best player in Europe according to the weekly France Football, Andriy Shevchenko, faced the team of the best player of 2004 according to FIFA, the Brazilian Ronaldinho.
Shevchenko's team, which came out for the game in blue uniforms, was stocked with such stars as Zinedine Zidane, Thierry Henry, Alessandro Del Piero and others.
The organizers of the match tried to cover world football geography as much as possible. That evening at Camp Nou one could see players from Switzerland, Finland, South Africa, Honduras, but there was no place in either team's lineup for a representative of Russia.
The list of invitees for this match also included the newcomer of French Paris Saint-Germain, Sergei Semak, but the Russian footballer never came onto the Camp Nou pitch. However, on the same team as Shevchenko appeared his Milan teammate, Georgia national team player Kakha Kaladze.
The stars' game, attended by former IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch and current FIFA President Sepp Blatter, was officiated by the most famous referee of modern football - Pierluigi Collina.
Despite a pile of dazzling stars in the UEFA team, as Shevchenko's team was also called, the winner in this match was the "rest of the world" team. The hero of the first half was the Cameroonian Samuel Eto'o, who a few hours earlier had been named Africa's best footballer of 2004. It was Ronaldinho's partner in Barca's attack line who scored the first goal of the match, and he also sent another ball into the Europe team's net in the last minute of the half.
The teams went to the break with the score 3:1 in favor of the FIFA team, and the final result of the match was a victory for the stars of the rest of the world with a score of 6:3.
However, none of the players who came onto the field seemed to have set the goal of scoring at any cost. They tried, above all, to play beautifully. A demonstrative example was when Zidane, juggling the ball, reached the goal line of the "world team," laid Dida on the grass, but instead of shooting into an empty net, preferred to backheel the ball to a teammate. And there were quite a few such moments in this game.
Interestingly, for "Europe" only players performing in Italy scored - Alessandro Del Piero, Gianfranco Zola and the Honduran David Suazo. But Europe's best footballer Andriy Shevchenko, unlike the player of the year on a planetary scale Ronaldinho, failed to score.