Brazil 2014 — Afterthoughts on the World Cup

A month passed by since Philip Lahm lifted the world cup in the Maracana.

Let’s think back about a full month of football madness:

what am I keeping out of it?

• Germany made history and made it in the semifinal annihilating Brazil with an irrealistic score and an apparently straightforward approach. The commentator on the German state TV after 30 minutes stated something like

I know in some areas in Germany public viewing has been cancelled due to bad weather. If you are just back home and starting watching us now, well, what you see on the screen is right: Germany wins 5–0, there is no mistake in the graphic.

It was simply incredible and I am still dumbstruck by that match.

• Well, simply put, closeness matters. It is very different if you experience a world cup in the stadiums and in the streets of the hosting nation or if it is organized somewhere else. The farther the organization, the most difficult it is for me to connect emphatically with the spirit of the tournament. I am lucky enough to have been able to experience 2 world cups “at home”, 1990 in Italy and 2006 in Germany: in both cases I ended up with tears in my eyes (of sadness in the first case, of ecstasy in the latter) and in both cases the experience was simply great. I loved the general openness of a very international environment, the air of joy you could feel just walking in the streets before or after the matches and the feeling to be connected (mentally, no WiFi…) with a lot of people. I missed all these points during these summer world cup, I missed them a lot and it does not depend on the (very) poor results of the Italian team.
• No differentiation. Before the all-year football orgy we experience in vast parts of this universe, the world cup was an unicum. It was the only time in which you could watch a lot of matches with very good players: now, well, that’s the constant. It was the only time you could see players from other national championships: now all the football of the world is at your fingertips whenever you want. The magic of the surprise and of the discovery is not there anymore, it was eaten up by the abundance of data and the ease of accessing them.
• Info yes, emotions no. The world cup was everywhere: web, tv, radio, newspapers, magazine, mobile, etc. etc.: we were inundated by info, by “cheap” info I would dare say, but I did not feel emotions were properly brought to the end user (me!). Football is passion and such passion should be transmitted in conjunction with the relevant data-related info.