It is World Cup time! Last night while in the lounge waiting for a burlesque show to begin my dear friend asked why the World Cup was so important to me. It is because it is one of the very few things that we do together as a planetary society. And I think that considering (waves arms) everything this is a very important thing to do and to encourage. Sure, there are the Olympics and to a lesser extent, Eurovision. But neither of them comes close to the World Cup for its ability to have a very large portion of the entire human species just take a break and enjoy something together for three weeks every two years (I’m including the women’s game here).
There is something about the tension and the stakes of World Cup games that takes the shared emotional experience of a big sports occasion and dials it up to eleven. (Tip of the hat to Brian Phillips: Footnote 1: See Nationalism. Footnote 2: See Colonialism.) In his delightfully goofy and informative podcast, 22 Goals, essayist and sports writer, Phillips reflects on the South Africa 2010 third group stage game between the US and Algeria. The US was in a must-win situation, facing elimination. The game was an entertaining back-and-forth affair but was still scoreless entering the final minutes. This is the weird thing about football. Sometimes a nil-nil game is just shit. But raise the stakes and let two teams just go at it and watching the game transforms into an exercise in emotional labor.
It’s a strange thing about hope. In the long term, hope makes life easier. But in the short term, when you’re hoping from one second to the next, when you’re hoping for something RIGHT NOW, hope is a labor. Hope is WORK. You’re waiting for the phone to ring, you’re waiting for the plane to land, you’re waiting for the last seven to spin up on the slot machine. It’s WORK.
22 Goals, 15 landon donovan (2010)
Many Americans may recollect the viral moment of national euphoria after Landon Donovan scored the game-winning goal in the 91st minute. Google it if you don’t. Anyway, Donovan Scores! and the US advances. We lost the next game to Ghana and were eliminated. But that wasn’t really the point. The point was the shared emotional labor and its euphoric release of the finish against Algeria. But put yourself in the shoes of Ghanaian fans that won the next game. If your empathetic imagination needs help, here’s this. And that was just Ghanaians in New York. And now expand your empathetic imagination to encompass maybe one or two billion people sharing that emotional work together. Maybe they had a rooting interest in that game. Maybe they didn’t and were just neutrals who just tuned into watch a crucial group stage game. What matters was that for that ninety-two minutes we were all connected in that joint work of hope.
The calendar pages turn and four years later we do it again. The World Cup’s institutional regularity builds ongoing story lines that compounds our emotional investment. In the very next World Cup in 2014 in Brazil, the US were “coincidentally” drawn into the same group as Ghana. Another wildly entertaining game and another last-gasp finish ensued. It connects us all. If you ever run into a Ghanaian, if you ask them if they remember the games against the United States, and they do? Well now you have a shared cultural connection. And if you remember those games, as I do, you will have a shared emotional connection as well. How important is that in our world today? I think it’s actually vitally important.
I could write (and I did and then deleted) at length about the manifest problems of the global game of football in the year 2022. I also wrote and then deleted, a diatribe on the corruption, injustice, and just the general practical lunacy of holding the tournament in the nation of Qatar (and in Russia in 2018). But really, these things are well known and those criticisms will be on full display in the coming days and weeks for anyone who cares to hear them.
What I want convey here is possibility and the necessity of holding the good and the bad together. We can both embrace the joy and human connection of the ongoing story of incredible physical human specimens competing against one another, the national stories (Footnote 3: See Wales, who play the US on Monday. Iibid Colonialism.), with the disgust and revulsion of how far past mere parasitism into destruction, the corruption of many of our most important and cherished institutions has gone. Set the second aside for ninety minutes and when the whistle blows, go back to the work of doing something about the second. I think that makes taking the time out for this World Cup especially important. For all the pleas from the sponsors, and corrupt officials that we keep politics out of sports, we all know the notion is absurd. Sports, especially global sports, are human institutions, and all human institution are a microcosm of the world they exist in. But we can both feed the joy and international and intercultural human connection that comes with the event, while at the same time commiserating and building solidarity with one another that the situation in the game and in the world in general is pretty fucked up and could use some reform.
So, that’s my case to the casual sports fan to take some time out for the World Cup this month. You may not be able to escape it regardless. The status of game has been inching up year by year. Failing to qualify for 2018 meant that we missed a cycle and it’s been eight years since the US Men have participated, while in the interim the US Women won a stunning back-to-back victory in the last World Cup held before the pandemic. Considering the timing around the Thanksgiving holidays and the run up to the winter holidays, the 2022 edition will be more present in the culture than ever before. For example, if one is out and about on the morning of Black Friday one will almost certainly not be able to avoid the fact that the US is playing England. As a person of Irish background, I am already gleefully donning my tools to do the emotional work.
cmananderson 