The World Encroaches

some thoughts on the World Cup

The game used to be played in forty-five-minute halves. I feel, at 34 years of age, that I am too young to be making statements like this. The men who, when I was child, orated from their sagging place on the sofa or their stiff place at the head of the table about how the game had been when they were young, when they could still feel true excitement about it, when they lived and died and lived again over the course of each match, were at least a decade older than I am now, usually much more. But change has come, as it tends to do in its clichéd and annoying manner, and the game is no longer played in forty-five minute halves, and despite widespread protestations and general unhappiness, grumbling the likes of which only oldhead futboleros can perform, might never be again, at least not in this country, and at least not during World Cups. FIFA has codified what referees have long had leeway to make happen according to their own discretion: a water break, now officially called a “cooling break” or a pausa de hidratación if for you, like for me, fútbol exists primarily in Spanish.

Attachment to the forty-five-minute halves is not merely nostalgic, despite the fact that complaints about their disappearance, including my own, certainly have the sepia sheen of reminiscence. That the game has historically been played continuously, without stopping, over the course of forty-five minutes, and then paused to let the players reset, check in with each other and their coaches, drink water and shake out their legs, only to begin again a mere fifteen minutes later, almost anew, almost like you could forget the first part had happened at all were it not for the numbers on the scoreboard—and if it’s 0–0, really forget it, the match really hasn’t even begun—is fundamental to its essence both for the players on the pitch and for the people watching. Over the course of forty-five minutes, everyone enters a flow state. Players find each other’s feet and heads and bodies with ease, they settle into a rhythm enough to figure out how to upend it, they make a scaffolding out of themselves and find ways through the structure of the other side; holes appear where there didn’t seem to be any before; the impossible happens. Something ineffable.

It seems unforgivable, now, to still believe that there is anything magical about this sport, when its international governing body had no problem allowing hundreds of workers to die while building the stadiums that would house its signature championship only four years ago; when off the pitch players get traded like cattle and treat themselves that way, too, because even they have figured out they have a price and it’s a specific number; when players and functionaries alike wheel and deal with politicians regardless of what they do or don’t stand for because it’s convenient for them and their sport, which is ultimately what everything else is in this world, i.e. a business, which is in turn enraging and a truism so banal it hardly seems worth contemplating. It seems unforgivable and yet here I am, forgiving myself for entering yet another World Cup in a haze of sheer disillusionment and high-definition awareness of the sport’s parasitic global exoskeleton and then cutting right through it when, for example, Paraguay, a team that has played in nine out of twenty-three tournaments and never made it past the first elimination round, defeats four-time champions Germany.

Something ineffable does happen out there. During the time that the players occupy the pitch, everything else stays just on the margins; it’s there but waiting, inert, present but unobtrusive, like those ads that trace the perimeter of the sidelines:
Coca-Cola Cola-Cola Coca-Cola Coca-Cola Coca-Cola Coca-Cola.
It’s just the ball that matters, and nothing else, for forty-five minutes. The way it gets plucked out of the air by, of all things, a foot. The way it gets where it means to go again and again, pass after pass after pass linking themselves together like meditation beads. The way it finds the back of the net before you ever thought it would, or when you never thought it would, or right when you expected it, and the thrill is fresh every time, either like a cool shower on a hot day or like a blood-red wound. Except, now, no longer. The intrusion happens earlier, much earlier, just when things are just getting started, the players and the people watching them settling into a choreography that will only ever be performed this one time, in fully improvisational fashion, and, if all goes well but even if it doesn’t, will end up remembered as a once-in-a-lifetime event, because that’s what it is. In the U.S., Fox has been cutting to ads during the cooling breaks, while Telemundo has lined up sponsors to, in a two-dimensional simulacrum of those sideline ads, frame the screen with their logos while the announcers and commentators and cameras se quedan en la cancha. Watching, I feel relieved to be able to continue to give the players my attention, but my own momentum has deflated along with theirs; I’m only hoping they can get it back already before the world around them, decidedly unmagical, encroaches any further.

In his last-ever press conference as Uruguay’s manager, Marcelo Bielsa said that the players, frustrated and unable to pay attention during team talks, had asked him to reduce their length and frequency. These talks had been, in Bielsa’s recounting, ten minutes long. The world encroaches. It strikes me as particularly apt, if devastating, that players’ attention spans seem to be shrinking at the same time that the sport itself is beginning to demand shorter periods of engagement. If I don’t want to become like those old men and their folded-up bodies, I have to make peace with the fundamental contradiction at the heart of this sport, which is that something beautiful and something heinous not only do coexist but, apparently, symbiotically, must.