The World Cup is pure, just and so very beautiful…
There is a certain sort of man – it’s always men, I don’t know why – who are obsessed with rating the best and worst of everything. Any cursory glance online will reveal them going bonkers at each other for claiming one album, song, musician, actor, movie, curry or footballer is better than another, outraged that someone has a view that isn’t their own and determined to prove them wrong, somehow.
The Ronaldo v Messi: Who is the Best? debate is as good an example of this as any. It is a hoary, weary old thing that any sane person wants nothing to do with, but it rages on to this day, with both sides coming armed with statistics.
It doesn’t take a genius to work out that such a call is purely subjective and trying to assert the primacy of your taste in subjective matters is a pointless waste of time. There are few if any absolutes in ‘best’ when it comes to football and no matter how many statistics are produced to argue one case or another, if you don’t feel Player X is better than Player Y, those stats make no difference at all to how you feel. It’s the same when you look at a work of art. It doesn’t matter if some chin-stroker tells you it’s a work of genius, if you don’t feel it, it might as well be a big bag on a stick.
So it is with the World Cup. It has become fashionable in recent years to decry the tournament as inferior to the Champions League in quality. Indeed, that international football in general is wholly inferior to anything domestic and European competitions can deliver.
Whether this is true, I have no idea, and don’t care. The endless fascination with measuring everything to try and discern truth has always felt a little soulless to me. Football is art, not maths. Personally, I love international football competitions over and above anything else and the reason why is nothing to do with the quality of the football at all. It is due to the brilliant competitive nature of them.
World Cups and European Championships are football’s purest art form. Why? Because they are the game unsullied by money. They are what football was like without financial doping, without billionaire owners, without being able to buy your way to a greater chance of success instead of coaching, organising and motivating your way there.
In Russia 2018, as at all World Cups, nationality matters. Cash does not.
It’s worth pointing out that the level of investment in footballing infrastructure, on coaching and developing players within each country is obviously a financial matter. Poor countries are at a huge disadvantage. However, because the best players are often snapped up and developed elsewhere, it can still mean that those nations have excellent players and can to a degree compete.
It means that supposedly big countries can get beaten or draw with supposedly lesser nations in the manner of Iceland against Argentina in 2018. It’s why unfancied sides often go far into the tournament the way South Korea and Turkey did in 2002. Sides like Senegal, Costa Rica, Cameroon and Paraguay to name just four can reach the quarter-finals. And while the likes of Germany and Brazil often rise to the top in the end, the journey to their victories are almost always bumpy.
I write this as Mexico are putting Germany to the sword with high-speed counter-attacking and in doing so, upsetting all the default thinking about Germany being infallible. Brilliant. That’s why the World Cup is so good.
With the domestic leagues all across Europe being dominated by one or two teams and the Premier League being top six v the rest forever from now on, domestic football has probably never felt less competitive. That’s why, when Iceland or Mexico score, it doesn’t just feel shocking, it feels almost transgressive.
There is simply a purity to World Cup football that you don’t experience at any other point in your football life unless you’re a fan of the lower-league game. It might seem fanciful but there is an honesty to World Cup football that is only found once you drop down the leagues and the money evaporates. It is just our lot versus your lot. That’s wonderful.
And on top of that. Every. Game. Matters. Again, this gives the teams with less depth the chance to pull off a win in a one-off game. In the World Cup we have seen some brilliant teams play brilliant football in the knowledge that they have been brought together, not by some human rights abusing quasi dictator with bulging pockets, but by simple nationality. That is beautiful. It feels just. It feels fair. It allows you to appreciate the genius of players for what they are, not resent their presence in a team due to the overpowering wealth of a club owner.
All that matters is football’s eternal quartet: teamwork, organisation, a little bit of genius and a big dose of luck. That’s how football should be. And that’s why the World Cup allows us all to feel the romance and the joy that such purity brings. It is unadulterated competitive sport that not even VAR has been able to squash yet.
So for those who can’t wait to get back to the weekly grind and favour league over international soccer, I understand the joy of that, but every World Cup is like the best, most passionate holiday romance you ever had. It is how you wish your real-life relationships were like all of the time, but never are or can be.
For one month, nothing else matters.
And that’s how football really should be.
John Nicholson