The day before the World Cup kicked off in Mexico City, Pope Leo took to social media to weigh in on the tournament and the nature of life itself.
“The World Cup begins tomorrow, and many will watch the matches,” he wrote. “Soccer reminds us of something we must not forget: life is not a race to show off on our own, but a path we learn to walk together. Anyone who does not know how to pass the ball, even if they have talent, has not yet understood the game. Anyone who does not know how to live with and for others has not yet understood life.”
The Pope, a longtime resident of Peru and former defender in pickup games with fellow seminarians in Trujillo, clearly understands that soccer is a microcosm of life itself: how you play the game, how you relate to it, says something about how you live.
If Donald Trump is a symbol of everything that has been wrong with this American World Cup—the price gouging, the visa denials, the mistreatment of the Iranian team—Robert Prevost, born on the southside of Chicago, has been a symbol of everything right with it.
The Pope has, in relation to this World Cup, represented the open, cosmopolitan nature of the many Americans not represented by Donald Trump’s xenophobia and misanthropy.
The other great representatives of this spirit have been the residents of Lawrence, Kansas, who have formed a rather head-spinning bond with the Algerian national team based at the Double Tree Hotel in their fair college town. This unlikeliest crossover has produced scenes that could make even a hardened cynic consider that there may still be hope for this country yet.
Who’s Up?
- The World Cup
For all the deserved upset about FIFA greed and the cost of travel and tickets, the World Cup has thus far exceeded expectations. The stadiums have been packed and vibrant, the host nations are into it, FOX and Telemundo have scored huge ratings, and the games have been tremendously entertaining.
Consider: More than 70,000 people showed up in Los Angeles on a Monday night to watch Iran and New Zealand, two teams who have never advanced past the group stage, with no international stars, play a highly entertaining 2-2 draw. The last week has been full of reminders of the tournament’s grip on the world and capacity to thrill us, despite it all.
- Leo Messi
The world’s greatest ever player made his tournament debut on Tuesday night in Kansas City just eight days shy of his 39th birthday and struck his first World Cup hat trick—becoming, in the process, the first player ever to appear in six World Cups and the tournament’s joint all-time leading goalscorer.
To see any player perform so well on the World Cup stage is thrilling. To see a player so revered that one of his Argentina teammates has a tattoo of him touching the World Cup trophy perform like that is much more remarkable—like watching a deity walk among men.
- The Tartan Army
The Scotland supporters charmed their way through Massachusetts over the last week, threatening Boston’s beer supply, taking over Fenway Park, Boston Harbor, and a number of local pubs, and producing a spine-tingling, ear-splitting rendition of “Flower of Scotland” ahead of their first World Cup match since 1998. The tournament was much poorer without them.
- The Little Guys
World Cups in the past were often defined by a massive gap in quality between the top European and South American sides and the rest of the world, but that gap has been closing in recent years—and the expansion of the tournament to 48 teams has seemingly done nothing to change the trend.
With the exception of teams like Curaçao, Iraq, and Tunisia, few underdogs have looked overmatched against European and South American opposition. In fact, plenty of European teams have labored in the heat and struggled with the athleticism of their opponents.
Part of the story is that as the world has globalized, so has the World Cup. Teams like Cape Verde, Haiti, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo are filled with players born in European diasporas and developed in European academy systems, with those countries using their scouting apparatuses to ever-so-slightly rebalance scales tipped against them by the forces of colonialism.
Who’s Down?
- The Trump Administration
When Cape Verde’s 40-year-old goalkeeper Vozinha was interviewed on the field after shutting out the mighty Spanish during his team’s first game in Atlanta, he was in tears—and not for the usual reasons.
“I cried after the game because I grew up with my grandparents when I was a kid, and they could not be there,” he told The Athletic. “They passed away a few years ago. My mum could not be here either for a visa issue, and the money we had to pay for it. We did not manage to do this in time.”
The State Department has claimed it has no record of Vozinha’s mother applying for a visa, but Cape Verde is on a list of countries drawn up by the Trump administration whose citizens must post $15,000 bonds in order to secure the visa required to enter the U.S.
Vozinha’s mother will be allowed into the country for Cape Verde’s second game following an intervention at the highest level of government, but the bond policy, which affects citizens of numerous nations in the tournament, is the antithesis of the spirit of the World Cup.
The treatment of the Iranian team, meanwhile, which was forced to move its base camp from Arizona to Tijuana and had to depart the country immediately after their Monday game, has not only been a moral outrage but has compromised the competitive integrity of the tournament in an unprecedented way.
- Mandatory Hydration Breaks
They absolutely suck, and are changing the way the game is being played for the benefit of advertisers and television networks.
The jig was up when FOX, who had been cagey about their plans for the breaks, suggesting they might use them for match analysis, immediately cut to full-screen commercials during the first break of Mexico’s curtain-raising win over South Africa, and then did so again for the second break—cramming in too many ads and missing 45 seconds of the game.
- Sabri Lamouchi
This poor man spent the better part of six months preparing to lead Tunisia in its three group games, only to be kicked to the curb after just 90 miserable minutes in Monterrey, where his team was thrashed 5-1 by Sweden. He is the first coach fired during the World Cup since 1998—when Tunisia also axed its manager partway through the proceedings in France.
How’s Our Team Doing?
If you watched the United States thrash Paraguay 4-1 in L.A. last Friday night, you likely watched this country’s most dominant World Cup performance ever. The U.S. had not won a World Cup game by multiple goals since 1930 and had never scored more than three goals in a World Cup match. It was an historic night.
How’s Our Team Doing?
Jordan is based at the University of Portland for the tournament, and you should cheer ‘em on now because they might not be with us for long: the Jordanians lost their first game 3-1 to Austria on Tuesday night and still have to face Argentina.
