Why the World Cup Matters
The World Cup is sociology by other means. It tells us the most about ourselves as members of groups.
The beautiful thing about soccer — in Portuguese (Host language of the 2014 World Cup), futebol — besides the fact that one has to exclusively use the grace from their feet to play it, is that, as an organized sport, within the confines of its white striped boundaries, it emulates the unbroken denouement of life itself. This distinction is made evident by the conditions under which futebol is played.
In life their are no backsies or pauses for a Kia commercial; neither in futebol. Each half, the clock continues unabated by run ins, knock-offs, aggressions, crosses, run, nutmegs, and fired shots — on target, long and/or wide. Futebol is the only organized sport that replicates the continuing clock that is life on this planet. Since its inception, the game is played as the ninety plus minutes pass and no decision can be reviewed to deliver the fairness that only exists in mechanically arbitrated American leagues like the NFL. There is no rewind because as in life, we cannot get time back.
This year will mark the first time that objective mechanic eye has been implemented to slightly degrade the veracity of this thesis distinction. The governing body that puts on the competition, FIFA, will for the first time in history employ goal line technology — to offer a technological assurance of a goal scored. Now the game so susceptible to the human elements of frailty, doubt, and at times corruption, is getting netted in by digital precisions that are incorporated ever increasingly into our lives — exercise, sleep, diet, motion, location…and the whole rest of it being informed by numbers and calculations humans are innately incapable of making.
Nevertheless, the game is a race against time for which there will only be the confirmation by buzzer a la hockey, and not the tedious review process that makes way for advertising (The real reason soccer remains less broadcasted in America) and arbitres’ interpretation; things that don’t arise in the heat of the moment — like a Zack Morris reality freeze.
Beyond the sanctity of the conditions it is played in, there are economic reasons the competition matters for participants and hosts alike. How does the World Cup impact the working people of victorious nation? Well, simply put — throughout the history of the tournament it has delivered slight boosts to the GDP driven by the fleeting rise in spirit of its native population. A hot topic in the lead up to the opening kickoff, lavishly expensive constructions for the single purpose of hosting a pittance of games, have turned into rotting “white elephants” that leave in the Cup’s wake plastic and steel carcasses and remind local inhabitants of how empty promises of long term growth really were. In the short term, memories of wild jubilance, nail biting tension, and swollen hearts at the sight and sound of a victorious ball etching another letter in the ultimate prized word — Champion!
Happiness levels as measured through national surveys have shown to spike for winning nations. Rampant and unmitigated pride does that to us, when validated by a confluence of athletic prowess, arbitrary rulings that sway or deny an advance into the opponent’s box, and so forth — every success owes itself in part to good fortune. But suspended above this is the attachment one has to a dribble, a pass, a reception, a cut, and a strike to the defeat of the guys in the other kits. That one was there to witness it in the middle of their individual lives, working a job in a steaming laundry mat, running the numbers on a desktop, washing glassware at the bar, and in today’s mobile crazed world you might stream it while mowing the lawn or looking for the gluten free cookie dough at the supermarket — if you’ve been cast in such a commercial caricature. I digress.
Undeniably, the competition is about the people of nations. Less the individualism of the Olympics that exhaust individual backstories for tears and ratings; the World Cup revolves around the collective, the squad on the field and the band of supporters in the rafters — representative of a wide swaths of the population but all certainly sharing deep sentiments for sport, the team, the colors. A sports renouncer cannot bring themselves to root and expend their energy for the success of others. But to a supporter, an admirer of athletic prowess and physical competition, this is what brings us around the proverbial water cooler, propells us inexplicably to fervent genuflections and brusque arm gestures that spill the piss out of our glasses and the spit from our mouths. When I was a young boy and France took the trophy in a 3-0 rout of the colossus, Brasil, it gave my life meaning despite me not having an personal investment with the players. They represented something intangible in the jingoistic thread of our characters. And they did so while exuding determination in camaraderie — in french called “se donné” or “gniac”.
Conjuring up marxist images of nineteenth century miners covered in sout or a band of soldiers chanting their enlistment, to analogize soccer as the opiate of the hoi polloi compared to the individualism of bobsled, that is the spirit of camaraderie transmitted; what generates group fervor.
For this reason, the international futebol competition is a window to the shared socio- and geo-political circumstances the supporters inhabit. In How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization, Franklin Foer provides anecdotal evidence of futbol as the game through which political and cultural differences play out. Through Foer’s lens, the stadium is more than a bowl with a round ball being kicked around. From Serbian warlords (Red Star Belgrade) to the satellite moms of American suburbia (Soccer made popular stateside by youth soccer anchored in the “safety” of the American middle class), cultural context is displayed in the microsystem of one matchup between cities, regions and nations. Foer teases out the underlying sensibilities that give combative flavor to the supporters sides.
Peeling the onion that is any one game, you see layers of strategy executed through movements that define one team’s style over another. These often come to reflect the perception of the nation. The ticky-tack of this past generation of spanish players, the suffocation and tone setting of the Mannschaft, and the vertically improvisational or eratic flair of the Selecao. It turns into a battle of bending 11 moving parts to your will by diluting the opposing team’s techniques into your own sauce.
Funnily, and at times tragically, opposing sides always share the same deeply rooted primal sentiment of fandom for their territory and their colors. But in this tragicomic way, as well articulated by the ever so lucid John Oliver on Last Week Tonight, futebol is just like religion. We righteously adopt the tenents of our chosen faith and vehemently oppose differing views in the name of religion. In futebol, supporters participate in the same relativity of faith. I chose red because I’m from here and you chose blue because you’re from there but if I was from there I would also chose blue. Fanhood chews up rationality across all competitive sports and the World Cup is the greatest stage on which this ludicrous mash up of feelings plays out — fear, ecstasy, anger, solidarity, egoism, despair, hope, and the countless others I have no more time to list. It reminds us that ultimately, we are reduced to wildly unstable emotional creatures and not the delusional in-controls we think we are during the four years in between, or at least until the next league game our team(s) are playing in 90+ minutes of time. That’s what is great and important about the World Cup.
