Football is football, football is a way to understand the world.
Now we are facing the biggest thing in football, which is definitely Qatar against Ecuador.
wonder:
Did we really want to understand this much?
Last Chance: Pick your dream team for the Waters XI here
I’ve been dreaming about this, and I’m not kidding.
Since I picked up this simple and wonderful sport when I was four or five years old, it has taken me all over the Earth. I’ve seen matches on six continents, traveled from Australia in the south to Troms County in the north, ended up in places I would have never otherwise landed and met people I once thought only existed in Tolkien’s books.
Career, mission, love, life. A way to approach and understand the world. No other cultural expression comes close to opening as many doors as this one.
It’s so small and so big at the same time – you can approach a stranger in a medieval village cave anywhere, as long as you can devour ‘Juventus’ or ‘Juventus’.RonaldoYou can see all the heaven and hell in the world just by rolling a ball in a rectangle and following where it takes you.
And nothing is grander than that, nothing is as romantic and intuitive as a toilet. For exclusivity, he waited four years. Because even in modern football that lacks capital, there is a sporting balance, because success cannot be bought overnight; luka modric croatian, Robert Lewandowski Pole, Sadio Mane plays in Senegal. a point. No national team can sign them no matter how much money they throw at them.
This will be my seventh bathroom at the place, and yes, in a way, I really did dream about that very thing.
A major tournament in the Middle East, in a part of the world that is strange and criticized, but football culture in many places is deeply rooted and passionate. Imagine being able to see a world championship in a free Iran, for example. Nothing attracted me more.
But the world is not like that and neither is football.
It doesn’t matter as long as the money comes in
play tonight Qatar The World Cup opener is against Ecuador, and it’s impossible to imagine an opener saying more about what the (soccer) world has become. It is a curtain that goes up, and a cover that goes down.
Here it is: Soccer 2022.
Rotten, bought, vulgar, false, inflated. It doesn’t matter where the money comes from, as long as it comes.
This really shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone.
The past 30 years have brought us to this point, through a series of surprising dogmas that football has turned this far. It is economics and politics, far from any ideal. With the epicenter in England, the stands are flexible and the clubs are communal, in the EU the movement is free, property is finally global, the market is open to nation-states and oligarchs or billionaires from all the dark corners of the world. Through football you can make money or run politics, you can wash your reputation and build your brand. Competitive equilibrium was sacrificed, and ideals lost their last ties to reality.
That could have been grumbled about, but who cares about whining if the audience and the money remain?
I think Argentina will win – can football do it again?
This week I wrote a script that tried to look at the systems and structures that got us here, to Qatar, and explain that Qatar is the symptom, not the disease. Not to attribute the absolute criticism that oppressive anti-democracy deserves, but to state the obvious: This is not something that arises simply because Qatar is playing its first World Cup bid. The Europa League plans have little to do with the Agnelli family being mean and not holding Utsiktens BK.
The counter forces were too weak, the corruption (within Fifa, in the Elysee Palace, in a hundred other places) too strong, and the sooner we realized it, the more opportunities we had for change.
We get the sport and the world we deserve.
Now we have this.
Iran will face the United States, in a repeat of one of the most charged matches in World Cup history. Lionel Messi (the tax planner and dictator hugger) will try to write his fairytale end, Christian Eriksen is back from the dead, Senegal has a chance to go further than any African national team has ever done. There will be the same kind of magnetic appeal to the game that you have always had, the same great stories that you have always had.
But the big story about Qatar will be about the decline of Fifa, about a Nepalese migrant worker who barely escaped in the 50-degree heat and never returned home to his family, about all the steps that allowed football to end here.
I think Argentina will win the World Cup. I really don’t know if football can do that again.
Last Chance: Pick your dream team for the Waters XI here