The argument was between a waiter and a customer in a local bar and it concerned the merits or otherwise of the British football club, Chelsea. It was heated. Chelsea is one of the ten top teams in Britain's "Premiership league" and it is owned by the oligarch Russian expat Roman Abramovitch, who has spent perhaps a quarter of a billion on his team, mostly in signing up foreign-born players. So heated arguments about Chelsea come as no surprise.

Except that the bar was in East Africa.

It has become horribly banal to observe that world football—which, like its more brutal cousin, rugby, acquired its rules in the UK—has also become a world religion but, like most truisms, it is at least partly true. Graffiti glorifying or slandering famous teams are scribbled on walls from Budapest to Buenos Aires, and replicas of the football shirts of individual players are as ubiquitous street-wear as knock-offs of Adidas and Tommy Hilfiger.

Now it is true that a number of footballers of African descent play for famous clubs, but their names were by no means the only ones on the shirts. The youth in the lube bay of the garage outside the bar, for instance, was wearing a shirt—"strip" is the British word—lettered BECKHAM 7.

Oh, yes. Beckham.

If perceptions of the United States as the only global superpower have been dimming, one of the reasons might be that the U.S. plays the wrong sort of football. True, the North American Soccer League was founded at the beginning of the '70s. But basically the game has just limped along in the United States, a poor cousin to even ice hockey.

Back then, Elton John acquired an interest in a Los Angeles team, the Aztecs, and Warner Communications, which controlled the New York Cosmos, made a terrific move and signed up Brazilian superstar Pele, the most famous player in the world—and arguably the best ever.

This was very much the inspiration of the late great Ahmet Ertegun, the Turkish-born founder of Atlantic Records, which was part of Warner, and the effect was swift and staggering. Matches became sell-outs, and rather glam, attended by the likes of Mick Jagger. Other world-class players were signed up. But no sport could command popular attention in the U.S. without consistent network coverage. So the league shriveled. But patterns of media consumption are altering, so perhaps world football's prospects in the U.S. may be altering too: Last year the Los Angeles Galaxy (of the Major Indoor Soccer League, the most recent attempt to make the game popular stateside) imported David Beckham, the star player for Manchester United, England, and Real Madrid, and gave him a five year contract worth a quarter of a billion dollars to "raise the level of the game."

Their first game was an exhibition match with, yes, Chelsea. It was played in California on July 21 and Chelsea took the victory one goal to nil, but Beckham was injured and played for just 12 minutes. Injuries have restricted his appearances since and the "level" of the game remains pretty much where it was before. So the U.S. still remains well outside the global football loop. Such are the tiny events that cause mighty empires to rise and fall.