Mirror, Mirror: World Cup: The talent, the hunks

I'm not much of a sports fan. Anything contact-oriented makes my eyes glaze over. Football puts me to sleep. I only get interested in baseball after the seventh inning. And once upon a time, I watched basketball because I thought the athletes were the best looking.

Until I discovered the World Cup.

Playing this month before a backdrop of lush South African greens are the most gorgeous guys in the world. And I'm not just talking about their pretty faces. I love their muscular upper bodies clad in colorful microfiber Polos - I've recently developed an affinity for the soft fabric on men - and those knee-high striped socks that show off perfectly sculpted calves.

I may be slow on the soccer-player-as-hottie uptake, but the fashion media - and my girlfriends - are not.

In the weeks leading up to the games, the players have been at the center of clothing advertisements and magazine photo shoots - a perfect strategy from the fashion world's perspective. According to a German marketing company's 2009 survey called "Women's World of Football," there are 300 million female soccer fans in 21 countries. And 38 percent of worldwide soccer fans are women. Comparably, our beloved baseball claimed the same percentage of female fans, according to Gallup. (But baseball players already claim their fair share of centerfolds.)

"I mean, all of them are cute," wrote a friend of mine on Facebook chat. "Didier Drogba [on the Ivory Coast team] may have awful processed hair, but that face. It's just so handsome. He looks like a real man."

That oozing masculinity must be why Emporio Armani chose Portugal's Cristiano Ronaldo and his perfect six-pack abs for its summer underwear advertisement. And it's likely why beautiful bearded Frenchman Patrice Evra is a front man for Nike sportswear.

Bad boy Fabio Cannavaro (think Samantha's tight-bodied next-door neighbor in the first Sex and the City movie) flashes the most darling smile in the June issue of Italian Vanity Fair. And in the American magazine, Annie Leibovitz photographed hunks Ronaldo and Drogba along with Samuel Eto'o of Cameroon, Sulley Muntari of Ghana and our very own Landon Donovan. The men are just wearing their skivvies, the article aptly titled, "The Beautiful Game."

Oh, yes.

I'm thinking of DVR-ing future matches just so I can watch the players take their shirts off at the end of the game. (For those of you playing catch-up, the athletes switch jerseys with the opposing team as a form of good sportsmanship.)

Now, before you go and say that I'm objectifying men, let me assure you I appreciate their talent too. I don't think there's another sport that demands the same endurance and athleticism.

But you can't ignore a body that performs such feats.

Of course, I'm just a soccer novice, so I needed to ask an expert: Is everybody who plays this game this fine?

Pretty much, says Kelly Davitt, a 25-year-old University of Pennsylvania graduate and the manager of the soccer blog Kickette.com.

The 4-year-old website is "for those who love the players as much as the game" and appeals to our gossipy sides, a morphing of Life & Style magazine and reality TV. It even promises not to bog us down with boring information like sports statistics.

"We group the guys by team and pick our top five best-looking ones," said Davitt, now based in New York.

My favorite feature is "World Cup Hottie Hunting," which last week featured Chile's Mark Gonzalez, slightly mohawked and glistening with perspiration. For the label-obsessed, there is a "Well Suited" feature that pictured Milan's Alexandre Pato in a fitted Dolce & Gabbana tux.

But, Davitt said, the most popular reads are centered on players' wives and girlfriends, or WAGs, who seem to lead soap opera lives in model bodies and designer clothes and shoes.

"These girls make careers out of marrying football players," Davitt said. "Take Wayne Rooney's wife, Coleen. She's got a [entertainment] career of her own because of her marriage."

Davitt didn't become a soccer fan until she moved to England and then Italy as part of an undergraduate foreign exchange program. While overseas she went to matches for fun, but it was the players who intrigued her.

She moved back stateside and missed the fast-paced world of soccer, so in 2006, she began working on Kickette after two of her friends started the site. (For the month of May, the website attracted 2.6 million pageviews worldwide.) Today Kickette has six staffers in London, Toronto and New York. Davitt, who used to do public relations for a sportswear company, runs the website while doing other freelance work.

"Slowly but surely, we are expanding," Davitt said. "When we first started, there weren't that many people interested in soccer."

But these days, the World Cup hype means we can't help but be attracted to the eye candy, er, game.