Do you hate Donald Trump? Why not lose your rag over his whispering loudly into the ear of Gianni Infantino and getting a US football player’s red card suspended? The shame! The corruption!
Are you an Israel-Palestine person? Why not (depending on preference) get outraged one more time about antisemitism, since Egypt dedicated its victory over Australia to Palestine, or blame the dubious refereeing decisions in the Egypt-Argentina game on the Zionist Entity?
Are you an immigration obsessive, of one sort or another? There’s so much World Cup fodder for you. The European teams are full of immigrants from the Global South. The African and South American teams are full of immigrants who grew up in Europe. It all proves the glorious success of multiculturalism, or is it the tragic annihilation of national identity and security in the era of Mass Immigration? Either way, the World Cup is definitely about immigration.
Why not decide that the World Cup is teaching us some valuable lesson about the Nation State in general?
Better still, why not decide that the World Cup is teaching us some valuable lesson about the Nation State in general? It involves nations, after all. It is a manifestation of their toxicity: look at all this national pride, so easily kindled into war. Or maybe the World Cup shows the touching endurance of nationalism, against all of the dreams of the globalists to turn all peoples into a united sludge? Or maybe a new, enlightened, brotherly nationalism is emerging. Or are we seeing the post-ideological reduction of the nationalist project to fodder for entertainment? I’m not sure, but there is definitely something profound to say about nationalism, with all those flags and chants and face-paints.
If you’re truly desperate, you can always try to get worked up about the Falklands, or to complain that we just call it the “World Cup”, rather than the “Men’s World Cup”. Or take the other gender tack: this is is a sporting event, so why lose an opportunity to talk about trans athletes? It is always time to talk about trans athletes!
But really, focussing on details is for wimps. Why not go the whole hog, and anathematize mass sporting events in general? They are a nonsense, a distraction; their enormous popularity is a sign of a degenerate culture. Bread and circuses! If people knew what was good for them, they would turn off the TV, and focus on religion or class struggle or saving Western Civilization / abolishing the cisheteropatriarchy. There’s serious work to be done, and the sports-industrial complex and its henchmen in global media and politics want to make sure you forget to do it.
It’s the last day of the 2026 World Cup, but it’s still not too late to ruin it.
It’s the last day of the 2026 World Cup, but it’s still not too late to ruin it for yourself, and, if you’re very lucky, a few people around you. But I’m afraid you’re not going to get much further than that. Billions of people will watch the final, and if it’s a good game, they will enjoy it tremendously. If it is not, the Spanish or Argentinians—whoever wins—will still be ecstatic for weeks. No amount of hectoring is going to stop that, because telling people to stop taking pleasure in sports is like scolding schoolchildren for enjoying recess. That’s what recess is for. Sports-lovers know perfectly well that politics, economics and all the world’s other sad realities hover on the edges of the game. But the essence of sport is to create a space where, for a little while, none of that matters, because sport itself doesn’t matter. That’s why we call it a “game”, why the participants are “players”. Sport is time out from thinking about death and taxes: the seriousness usually exacted by life’s sorrows gets diverted towards the now-crucial question of whether these guys can, according to some arbitrary rules, get the ball in the net, or cycle faster than those other guys, or take twenty wickets. It is a joyful exercise of our freedom, this investment of so much passion and intelligence and energy in something so essentially unserious. We care because we don’t have to. It matters because it doesn’t.
What good does it do? About as much as singing and dancing and all the other childish ways grown men and women can never quite seem to put aside.
