Cristiano Ronaldo, Didier Drogba Shirtless Vanity Fair June 2010 Cover

Cristiano Ronaldo, Didier Drogba Shirtless Vanity Fair June 2010 Cover

Soccer stars Cristiano Ronaldo and Didier Drogba appear Shirtless on Vanity Fair's June 2010 Cover. The June issue of Vanity Fair, features photos by Annie Leibovitz, who capture some of the soccers biggest stars : Sulley Muntari (Inter Milan/Ghana), Landon Donavan (L.A Galaxy/USA), Kaká (Real Madrid/Brazil) and Samuel Eto’o (Inter Milan/Cameroon), Pato (A.C Milan/Brazil), Gianluigi Buffon (Juventus [Turin]/Italy), Dejan Stankovic (Inter Milan/Serbia), Carlton Cole (West Ham United/England), and Michael Ballack (Chelsea/Germany).

Leibovitz’s portraits are, well, revealing. And underwear has never looked so patriotic. In America, these men might not enjoy the same name recognition as the stars of the N.F.L.—that game that we call football—but for most of the planet, they are more than just showstoppers. They are gods.

A. A. Gill, in his accompanying June-issue essay, captures just how important football (don’t you dare call it “soccer,” he warns) and the World Cup are to the 6.8 billion of us who live on Planet Earth. “Football took to the world pitch at about the same time as the modern independent nation-state,” Gill writes. “After a flag, a national anthem, and a press release decrying Yankee imperialism, the next thing newly minted nations do is build a stadium and come up with a national grudge match.”