This Was the Perfect World Cup for Our Strange Era

Whatever happens in the World Cup final this Sunday, Europe will remain the dominant power of global football. An Argentinean victory over France will not change the facts of economic globalization. The English Premier League alone usually turns over more money every season than the quadrennial World Cup, and European football towers over the rest of the world, which is why half of the players at the tournament play in just five big European leagues. Yet something will have changed, too.

It is now 16 years since a World Cup final was played in Europe, as some of the rising powers of the Global South — South Africa, Brazil and now Qatar — have taken their turn. South Africa 2010 carried Pan-African aspirations that for a moment seemed to become reality, with Ghana poised to make a semifinal. Brazil 2014 was a celebration of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s Brazil, and by association the leftist governments that had transformed the continent, though it ended up as more of a wake.

Qatar 2022, by contrast, was always about Qatar — its visibility, its reputation and its strategic survival. Despite criticisms of the country’s treatment of migrant workers and disregard for L.G.B.T.Q. rights, it has achieved much of what was intended. After four weeks of near-constant football, and the sometimes bitter off-field conversations that accompanied it, Qatar’s position in the world is palpably stronger.

Yet as the first World Cup in an Arabic-speaking, Muslim-majority nation, it also aspired to stand for something more. In its timing, its crowds and its narratives, the tournament offered a version of the world in which the Global South, in all its myriad complexities, is more present and more powerful. This, truly, was a World Cup for our era.

The Southern Hemisphere is used to a winter World Cup, but in the North, especially in Europe, watching the tournament is a monthlong summer fiesta of outdoor revelry in public spaces and beer gardens. Even FIFA, though, couldn’t face the prospect of playing in the heat of a Gulf summer, air-conditioned stadiums or not, and rearranged the entire world football calendar around Qatar’s climate. The upshot is that Europe right now is cold and indoors; although viewing figures are good, there is much less sense of the World Cup as a collective ritual. The considerably warmer streets and squares of Dakar, Rabat, Rosario and Riyadh, by contrast, have been flooded by celebrations.

The crowds in Doha, inside and outside the stadiums, reflect this global recalibration. Of course, what we see of them on the screen has been carefully curated. Qatar recruited its own “ultras” — highly organized soccer fans who can be found across the globe — from Lebanon and from among Arab migrants to Doha, and paid for groups of fans to travel from every qualifying nation. But we have still seen enough to know that these are the most diverse World Cup crowds on record — and despite the earsplitting volume of the stadiums’ public-address systems and the relentless music they emit, it is still the crowd, its voices and energies, that is the living heart of the spectacle. (...)

If France wins, we’ll be heralding the first back-to-back winners in 60 years; if Argentina prevails, it will be Lionel Messi’s ascent to divinity that concerns us. Either way, this has been the most closely scrutinized and culturally contested World Cup ever, and that is a good thing. The personal, cultural and political presence of the Global South has been made tangible and that, too, is important. Perhaps the tournament’s biggest legacy will be a global media and public more critically sensitized to the political and cultural meaning of spectacle? 

by David Goldblatt, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Martin Meissner/Associated Press via

[ed. The crowds watching worldwide are amazing. Must be in the billions. Truly a global phenomenon. See also: Qatar Gets the World Cup Final It Paid For. And, The Genius of Lionel Messi Just Walking Around. (New Yorker):]

"On Sunday, a global audience of a billion plus will tune into the World Cup final to behold the most transfixing spectacle in sport: a small man walking back and forth. The Argentina-France match, at Lusail Stadium, in Lusail, Qatar, will be a showdown between two of the world’s great footballing powers that holds the potential for all sorts of thrilling action and endeavor. (...)

Yet the telling difference may be found in the least dramatic, least kinetic activity on the field. Sunday’s result might well turn, as so many games have before, on the meandering movements of Lionel Messi, who will spend much of the ninety minutes simply walking around—drifting here and there, wandering the field at the pace, and with the apparent dreamy purposelessness, of a flâneur on a psychogeographic dérive.

Messi is soccer’s great ambler. To keep your eyes fixed on him throughout a match is both spellbinding and deadly dull. It is also a lesson in the art and science of watching a soccer match."

UPDATE: Argentina wins it in what some are calling the greatest World Cup Final of all time.