On The World Cup
"Cold water on the flickering embers of working class optimism."
I remember
I remember when I was 22 and this World Cup was first announced. I remember almost in tears thinking about how I can finally attend and be a part of the rich history and tradition of the greatest sporting event in the world. An event, for many of us, got us through mental battles we could not find the word to redress and alleviated the pain of material conditions we endure. A game, for many, that seemingly remained open when the rest of the world seemed to slowly price us out. I remember.
The beautiful game
This game, like for so many others, has literally been my whole world. I still cry bitter tears at Ghana falling short of the semi-final those many years ago. I still remember trying to recreate Zidane’s 2006 exploits in a dirt patch outside of my apartment complex with my friends...all from everywhere around the globe. All of us, now united in Canada. I remember clinging on to a book about David Beckham, doggedly, between the 2006 and 2010 tournaments. I remember obsessively reading the only football magazine I owned over and over and over again. When I fell out of love with the game in my teenage years; what brought me back? The 2014 World Cup. I slogged through a summer of an “internship” I despised, thanks to the Caught Offside Podcast and the 2018 World Cup. In 2022, I remember brushing aside the feeling the the game was becoming something it should not be, something elitist, as the World Cup enraptured me and did not let me go.
So when this tournament was finally coming here, I told myself I would go at any cost. That finally, my inner child would rejoice, a feeling so rare to me and many many others of similar background. To my dismay, I learned that somewhere between the naivety of youth and harsh realities of a life driven by economics...I was likely priced out. I did not try to even buy tickets for fear of disappointment, for fear of having to accept that the game might have left kids like I once was...far behind. Instead, trading those moments of joy for board rooms and back room deals.
The social commentary
This tournament, I fear, will be and is a referendum on wider socio-economic trends. This tournament is cold water on the flickering embers of working class optimism; an ethos buttressed by the basic assumption that life should get better, should get easier. In 2010 it was South African communities decrying a World Cup while it’s people went through social and political upheaval. In 2014, it was gleaming stadiums shoulder to shoulder with some of the most impoverished communities imaginable.
In 2018 it was a tournament played to the backdrop of authoritarian repression and violence. In 2022 it was a tournament being held in what is effectively a slave state, illegitimate, and violent in it’s treatment of migrant workers.
And now, we are here...in what promises to be a microcosm of all of these issues; right at the doorstep of the imperial core. How many people, existences, must be made invisible so your city can look like a shining light of tourism?
Life
The game, like life, has priced you out or extracted an exorbitant tax on your need to feel something, to be in communion with your fellow man. The game, like your world, is being guided by a select group of men caught up in their own games of power, greed, and corruption to see the forest through the trees. The game, like our world, will fall apart if we do push back, speak up, care.
It will crumble and fade into something unrecognizable while we all watch TikTok compilations of the “good old days”, listen to think pieces while sinking into the quagmire of inaction. Not too uncomfortable as to act, but not comfortable enough to be content. Aware of the horrors, lucid in the reality of it all, and despairing at our powerlessness.
Like many things in our deteriorating world, this tournament is a reminder of the Thucydidean conceptualization of the world:
“The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must”.
- Ru