Please Just Freaking Enjoy The World Cup
This is why we can’t have nice things. Humanity has been handed what may end up being one of the greatest World Cups ever played, and a substantial portion of the internet has responded by opening an investigation. Not one of the most controversial World Cups. Not one of the most political. Not one of the most horribly officiated. One of the greatest.
The soccer has been phenomenal. The atmospheres have bordered on religious experiences. Entire cities have collectively decided productivity is somebody else’s problem. Teachers have wheeled televisions into classrooms. Perfectly respectable adults have hugged complete strangers because someone they’ve never met kicked a ball into a net from twenty yards away. That’s the World Cup. For one month, civilization collectively agrees that perhaps the quarterly report can wait.
And this one has delivered. Lionel Messi is thirty-nine years old and somehow still sees the field about six seconds before everyone else. He no longer needs to outrun defenders because he appears to have already read the next page of the book while they’re still sounding out the first sentence. Cape Verde arrived as the smallest nation ever to reach a World Cup and apparently decided history books were merely suggestions. For 120 minutes against Argentina, every neutral fan on Earth suddenly discovered a deep and previously undocumented Cape Verdean heritage.
All three host nations made it through the group stage. Stadiums stayed loud. Cities stayed invested. North America didn’t merely tolerate the World Cup. It inhaled it. There have been aging legends, ridiculous goals, underdogs, heartbreak, packed stadiums and the sort of moments sports spend decades trying to manufacture and almost never can.
And somehow... people still can’t stop complaining.
Don’t Let Scapegoating Ruin It For You
We have reached the point where some sports fans would complain about finding a suitcase full of cash because the bills weren’t organized by denomination. Every loss now requires a defendant: the referee, the coach, VAR, the federation, the goalkeeper, the weather, Mercury, FIFA. Someone must be punished.
Within minutes of the final whistle, anonymous accounts named things like @BallKnowledge420 begin explaining tactical errors with the confidence of Sir Alex Ferguson despite having learned what a throw-in was approximately three Tuesdays ago. The manager is incompetent. The referee is corrupt. The federation has betrayed the nation. The left back should never be allowed through customs again. Nobody just loses anymore. Losing has become evidence of misconduct. And it’s exhausting.
Take Didier Deschamps. After France went out, he questioned Spain’s penalty. I understand the emotion. Losing a World Cup semifinal is probably not the ideal moment for detached philosophical reflection. But there are still limits. If your defender introduces himself to an opponent’s hip with something resembling a roundhouse kick, the referee is generally going to object. You don’t need a forty-seven-minute YouTube breakdown narrated by a man named Nigel. He kicked him. Penalty. Moving on.
The Referee Is Not Personally Trying To Ruin Your Summer
Let’s talk about officiating. Are referees perfect? Of course not. They’re human beings. Human beings screw things up constantly. I have walked confidently toward the wrong car in a parking lot and attempted to unlock it for an embarrassingly long time. I once waved enthusiastically at someone in a grocery store before realizing I had absolutely no idea who they were. Mistakes come standard with the operating system. World Cup referees make them too. But the idea that every close decision is evidence of incompetence — or worse, conspiracy — has become completely detached from reality.
Take Egypt’s disallowed goal against Argentina. Was it heartbreaking? Absolutely. Did Egyptian fans briefly contemplate launching household appliances into low Earth orbit? Understandable. Was the call wrong? No. VAR found a foul earlier in the attacking sequence. That is exactly the kind of thing VAR exists to review. Nobody enjoys celebrating a goal for two minutes and then watching it disappear. It feels awful. But the alternative is knowingly allowing an illegally created goal to stand because correcting it would make people sad.
That isn’t officiating. That’s customer service.
You are allowed to hate the rule. You are allowed to hate VAR. You are allowed to argue that the review process interrupts the emotional rhythm of the sport. Those are legitimate conversations. But “I hated the outcome” and “the call was wrong” are not the same sentence. Sports fans have become alarmingly good at pretending they are.
Your Manager Cannot Operate The Players With A PlayStation Controller
Then we arrive at my favorite post-loss ritual: THE COACH HAS TO GO. Really? Let’s use the United States. Apparently Mauricio Pochettino became an incompetent football terrorist because Belgium eliminated the Americans. Okay. Let’s examine the evidence.
Belgium’s first goal came after three American defenders appeared to simultaneously begin installing a software update. Everyone stopped. Belgium did not unlock the United States with some tactical sequence developed in a secret laboratory beneath Brussels. They noticed several defenders had briefly forgotten the game was still happening. On another goal, Matt Freese made one of the biggest goalkeeping mistakes of the tournament. Later, Chris Richards — exhausted, chasing the game and trying to force something that wasn’t there — surrendered possession and handed Belgium another opportunity.
Those things happen. Sometimes your left back slips. Sometimes your goalkeeper drops one. Sometimes your center back chooses precisely the wrong moment to donate possession to the opposition like he’s participating in a charitable initiative. Not everything is tactical. Not every individual mistake is proof that a manager has lost the dressing room, misunderstood the formation or committed crimes against soccer. A coach cannot remotely control eleven human beings from the technical area with a PlayStation controller.
Not yet, anyway. Give FIFA another decade.
Yes, FIFA Is Corrupt—Thank You, Woodward and Bernstein
Speaking of FIFA... “FIFA IS CORRUPT!”
Yes. Thank you for your groundbreaking investigative journalism. Next you’ll be informing us that casinos generally prefer winning money to losing it. Of course FIFA has corruption problems. The amount of money flowing through international soccer could make small sovereign nations suddenly reconsider their career choices. Deals get made. Politics influence decisions. Power protects itself. None of this is new. And none of it means you have to sit on your couch during a brilliant World Cup final screaming about procurement contracts.
Two things can be true at once. FIFA can deserve scrutiny. The soccer can still be wonderful. The mistake is believing that acknowledging one requires refusing to enjoy the other. It doesn’t. You are not endorsing every decision FIFA has ever made because you enjoyed a bicycle kick. You are watching soccer. That is still allowed.
Maybe The Other Team Was Better
This is really what all the scapegoating protects us from. Sometimes your team loses because the other team was better. That possibility is strangely unbearable. If the referee screwed you, you don’t have to acknowledge the opponent. If the manager blew it, you don’t have to acknowledge the opponent. If VAR, FIFA, the moon, Mercury in retrograde and a suspicious pigeon perched on the crossbar all conspired against you, then your worldview remains beautifully intact.
Your team didn’t lose. Something was done to you. That’s comforting. Reality rarely is. Sometimes another team plays better soccer. Sometimes a defender makes a mistake. Sometimes a goalkeeper guesses wrong. Sometimes the shot that went in last Tuesday hits the post tonight. Sometimes your country spends four years preparing for a tournament and gets sent home because a twenty-two-year-old you had never heard of six weeks ago suddenly produces the greatest ninety minutes of his life.
That’s not a design flaw. That’s the entire reason sports work. If every outcome could be explained in advance, we wouldn’t watch.
There Is One Match Left
So here is my request: Stop. Just... stop.
We have spent the past month watching incredible soccer, ridiculous underdogs, overflowing stadiums, aging legends refusing to leave quietly and entire countries collectively losing their minds over a ball crossing a line. Enjoy it. You do not have to surrender your critical faculties. You can disagree with a substitution. You can hate a VAR decision. You can believe your federation is run by idiots. You can even think the referee had a bad game. Just resist the modern compulsion to turn every disappointment into a prosecution.
When the tournament ends, all you’ll have left are highlights and memories. Don’t spend those memories arguing with @BallKnowledge420 about whether FIFA secretly instructed a Slovenian assistant referee to destroy your childhood.
Scapegoating has one beautiful weakness. It requires an audience. Stop listening. Stop participating.
Pour a drink. Sit down. Watch the World Cup. And for once, just freaking enjoy it.
SPORTSWRITING WITH RECKLESS INTEGRITY
If you made it this far, you already know what we do here. We write about greatness and delusion, triumph and collapse, and the strange emotional hold sports keeps on people who should probably know better.
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Torsten
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