Tag Archives: world cup

Put it in the Prado

There are plenty of reasons to resist the World Cup’s siren song. As a sport, soccer requires patience with slow builds and small tactical wins; like baseball, it requires an understanding that something is in fact happening when one’s eyes would tell one otherwise. Its highest levels of competition are a club of a few select nations competing for a prize, with the rest relegated to a sideshow or trying to scrape together as many skilled members of their diaspora who wound up in Western Europe as they can. (Looking at you, Morocco.) FIFA, the World Cup’s steward, is a corrupt, money-grubbing mess, and a mirror to too many international institutions. Ad breaks (err…“hydration” breaks) and an overstuffed, schmaltzy halftime show in the final were more signs of an unholy union between Gianni Infantino and profit at all costs. (At least Shakira still has it, and there were Muppets.) But yet here it was, addicting me for the past month, regular nightly viewing and a few half-vacation days locked in for key midafternoon matches. And once again, the World Cup delivered.

My enjoyment of soccer was built on late 00s FC Barcelona, a team that added a young star named Lionel Messi to the core of a dynastic Spanish national team that won two Euros and one World Cup between 2008 and 2012. Some people found that era Spain boring, but I was more often than not mesmerized. The dizzying passing rhythms revealed a deeper art, something I could watch and study and come to understand why exactly the world was so fond of this low-scoring sport. The skill and strategy were next level, and I understood, even then, that the likes of that dominant group would not come around often. I was thus quite pleased to see a World Cup final composed of a Spain group that seemed like worthy heirs to that 2010 era game-controlling force, plus Lionel Messi.

This Spain was more than a mere retread, though. After 2012, as their core aged, the Spanish passing really did become inane and lifeless, snuffed to death by any decent defense. As it so often is, Barcelona was the innovation lab for world fútbol, and Barça’s 2015 Champions League run took it all to another level: the dominant midfield was still there, but they combined it with lethal pace in the form of Messi, Luis Suárez, and Neymar. FC Barcelona literally went for broke with that group and is still rebuilding, but the lesson to the world was obvious: the old model of parking the bus, dominant for a long stretch of time, was no longer enough. Great teams now controlled the ball and won with pace. The 2024 Euro champion Spain exemplified this turn, with Nico Williams and Lamine Yamal adding the flashes of pace previously absent in Spanish soccer.

Those two were still working their way back to health from injuries in this World Cup, but it didn’t matter. The ball control was back at its classic levels, with Rodri and Dani Olmo and Pedri and Fabián Ruiz absolutely smothering all comers in the midfield, turning attacks back and beginning the metronomic passing that now defines a nation. Yamal wasn’t even Spain’s best teenager, a title that goes to defender Pau Cubarsí; the relentless fullbacks, Pedro Porro and David Cucurella, added to the firepower down the wings. Yamal did just enough to spark fears, Mikel Oyarzabal is a classic Spanish hardworking false-ish nine, and Williams found the flair to hit Ferran Torres with his headed back-pass to create a championship goal. They didn’t need superstar scorers because they would create chance after chance, and a few of them would eventually pop. The wealth of attacking options to keep up the pace and grind opponents into submission proved unassailable.

My lingering memory of Spain from this cup will be from the semifinal against favored France. Kylian Mbappé and company had looked like they could flatten anyone in their way to date, but the Spanish masterclass made one of the greatest assemblages of attacking talent in history look anemic. I would say “put it in the Louvre,” but the Prado is a more appropriate resting place for such a performance, or perhaps the Reina Sofía: this was sports as modern art, perfect tactics within a magisterial scheme of Luis de la Fuente, a man from the Rioja wine town of Haro, where I wandered through and saw his shrine last spring. This is sports at its absolute peak, the seamless system executed to perfection.

On the losing end of the championship were Argentina, the team of destiny times two, finding ways to escape time and again before the last ounce of Messi magic exhausted itself. Cape Verde, Egypt, Switzerland, England: no mater the caliber of their opponent, it went down to the wire, and each time, they found a way, usually through the feet of their longtime hero. If watching Spain invoked the awe of watching a perfect team, Messi invoked the awe of a peerless athlete, the best to ever do his thing, constrained by the march of time but able to adapt and still pull forth new moments of wonder. His late-stage evolution was a confirmation of greatness, an avoidance of fading into the night the way so many top players do, and he knew it. The emotion he showed this summer, both in victory and then in the final tears of defeat, sealed a pact between man and nation and destiny, and the rest of us were just privileged to watch.

Beyond Messi the Argentines were a step back from four years ago, less incisive and at times somewhat plodding, if not downright thuggish, as they were at the end of the final. The whole operation seemed to revolve around one man, and when the Spanish denied him the ball, they were left directionless. Four years ago they had an array of options; this time it felt like all the eggs were in one aging basket. And even if they had been more than Messi and a prayer, it still probably wouldn’t have been enough to breach Spain.

The familiar faces had a mixed record in North America. The Brazilians remain in the wilderness, learning that even expensive coaches cannot unlock their classic flair that they have abandoned, any lessons they take seemingly a decade behind the cutting edge. Joining them are the Germans, a long distance from the relentless force they were in the first 15 years of this century. The Brits blew a game against Argentina with a sorry retreat, but they continue a general crawl upward, and will be inspired to finally bust through when they host the Euros in 2028. France’s offensive dominance, impressive at it was, papered over some holes in back that the machine-like Spanish clinically exploited. US soccer generated hype and then produced the same reliable result, though the assemblage of talent continues to edge in the right direction.

What makes the World Cup magical are the spurts of randomness from around the whole world. Vozinha in goal for the remarkable Cape Verde; Erling Haaland and the Norwegians rowing their way past Brazil and into the quarterfinals. Swan songs for Cristiano Ronaldo and Luka Modric. Paraguay toppling Germany and the Swiss outlasting Colombia. The Mexicans turning Estadio Azteca into the greatest home field in sports, and the Brits finding a way to bunker down and win there. Armies of fans from across the globe descending upon North America, and, for all our international strife, a great carnival following suit. I would say we need more opportunities like this, but I’m not sure we should give FIFA any ideas, and there is a beauty in something happening only every four years that makes us wait.

So I will pour another glass of Rioja, enjoy the scenes from the parties in Madrid and Barcelona, and ponder what the future of this still young Spanish team might hold. I made a halfhearted play at tickets for this World Cup, but did not go; perhaps they will be somewhat less awful in a different country. And next time, the tournament’s primary host will be in my favorite country to visit. The wheels are already turning. Anyone else fancy a trip to Spain in 2030?

An Imperial Birthday

Perhaps I should give it another try, but Revolutionary Era America has never been high on my list of times in history that intrigue me, nor that I find particularly instructive to our present moment. The extent to which commentators of all political stripes try to harness the Founders for contemporary purposes, or to which modern jurisprudence is grounded in that era, do not, I think, do us many favors in our attempts to construct a just or opportunity-driven society. The more one digs into it, the more the Revolution feels like a sideshow of squabbles among small-colony elites in a far greater drama from which the putative loser of that struggle, the British Empire, rose to an unprecedented position of dominance over the globe that it would hold for the next century-plus.

No, the best way to understand America remains a road trip across it in the here and now, to see all its different corners and glories and complicated stories. The sheer size and scale of this country, even in a digital age, will always render its project somewhat imperial. I don’t use that phrase pejoratively; I just mean that it is going to have to accommodate a ton of different people, and that it will always be hard to govern in a communal, more parliamentary manner. To the extent that history can be a guide I am more drawn to tales of empire: Rome and Byzantium and Britain, and at the more local level I will always cast my lot with the Greeks. But I also think there are limits to the benefits of historical knowledge in a very different world, too.

After 250 years, I will submit that the United States’ triumphs are real. Its political origins were at the front end of a global wave, ideas that then trickled across the pond and southward to Latin America and eventually filtered into institutions we Americans imposed on the world when we supplanted the British for good after World War II. I don’t have a ton of use for hagiography of the US Constitution or political system, but they were achievements for their time. Some aspects have aged well, others less well, but none of them unrescuable, and I will forever acknowledge my incredible good fortune to be born in the time and the place that I was. Much of how we wound up here are products of geography and wealth and the exercise of raw power, but some of it was visionary and shrewd decision-making, sometimes very admirable.

I will not be saying anything new when I claim that the foundations of American exceptionalism are in its engine of growth and hunger, and in the belief in new beginnings inherent in its early colonization. From the conquest of the frontier to space age pursuit to Silicon Valley’s present rush into the virtual future, the US sets a frenetic pace, less constrained by trappings of culture and tradition than anywhere else. The drawbacks of some of these rushes forward are well-documented: the extermination and subjugation of people who already lived on that frontier, the vacuousness of consumer culture, the anti-human profit hunger of some people on the cutting edge of the technological arms race. But to it we owe incredible material wealth and comfort.

Like any great power the United States has behaved venally and exercised its might, sometimes with great consequences. What has made it at times exceptional was the range of its vision, and the humanity with which it pursued some of these goals; the Marshall Plan and some Cold War era artifacts like the Peace Corps and foreign aid played a longer, more careful game, one that understood that careful long-term foundations could produce far more peace and stability than endless crude power politics, at the same time creating new markets for export and isolating geopolitical rivals. These strategies were often self-interested and carried certain excesses, but in the sweep of human history, they are a high point of hegemonic leadership. The great power peace and rampant acceleration out of poverty enjoyed by billions since 1950 are direct products of that vision.

The US is now drifting out of that role. Shortsighted politics is a key part of that story, but like the British in their late imperial phase, American overextension is real, and the long-term fiscal picture makes the same footprint hard to sustain. Trump Era America simultaneously knows this but wants to maintain the illusion, and uses its characteristic spectacle to try to achieve it cheaply, sometimes to dramatic effect (Venezuela) and sometimes disastrously (Iran). But the Biden Administration’s fumbling Afghanistan withdrawal and attempts to say America was back and unchanged on the world stage were much in the same vein. As it enters its next 250 years, the renegotiation of the imperial footprint is one of the two great questions looming over the United States.

I say renegotiation because, for as petty and miserable as its politics have grown, the US colossus looks firm in its absolute position. Europe is comfortable and beautiful but has lapsed backward economically, in need of at least some reinvigoration lest it drift into a senescent old age and see its incredible cultural wealth and diversity fade into mere kitsch. Developed East Asia faces similar pressures, likely even more to the extreme. China is of course the great rising power, theoretically capable of displacing the US with its remarkable trajectory post-Mao, but its demographic time bomb is real and its over-engineered culture runs greater risks than America’s legalistic one; moreover, Chinese civilization’s global pretensions have never matched the totalizing beliefs of the West, to which we Americans are heirs. Russia is an impoverished imperial rump, armed and dangerous but a model to no one. India is interesting, but still has a long way to go. The Middle East, as the Iran War has brought home, remains a bloody basket case, even behind the veneer of Dubaian towers and Saudi scheming. Africa has demographics on its side but little else. Latin America nestles somewhere between all of these worlds, with no claims to much beyond its shores. Someone has got to guide the rule-setting in an anarchic system, and it might as well be us.

There are a few different ways this renegotiation could go. The British, for example, managed a retreat from empire with little loss of their own lives and a national myth largely intact. The impact of that retreat on the nations they left is much less consistent (ask the Indians and Pakistanis about that partition), and we could argue about the extent to which Britain’s increasing ungovernability today is downstream of that imperial fade. But reorientation with dignity is possible, especially when there are allies who understand the stakes and adjust accordingly, as the Americans did with their erstwhile colonialists. Further back in history there are the Habsburgs, brilliant balancers of power for centuries. There is the example of Byzantium, the Roman successor who, while diminished, remained the golden center of the West for another thousand years, and the mythical ideal for Europe for centuries after that. And if things go badly awry there is the model of St. Benedict and the retreat from the worst of a fallen world into intentional communities, there to preserve knowledge and carry something forward on into modernity. I list these examples not as prescriptions, but as pathways of understanding on how things can go.

The second great question facing the United States is one of national identity. The US has done as well as anywhere at integrating a sweeping range of immigrants into a loose national culture, and even haltingly coming to terms with its two great early sins, slavery and the annihilation of Native Nations. In this, the US once again better resembles some empires of old, which had to tolerate a certain level of cultural diversity and decentralization because they were so sprawling and contained so many peoples, and periodically tore down the statues of the old gods and replaced them with new, more useful ones. This stands in stark contrast to the nationalist bloodbaths that consumed Europe between the Napoleonic Era and the Second World War (and in some places beyond), an impulse that turned catastrophically destructive when the hunger for national glory blurred with designs of old-school imperial growth, whether in Napoleonic France or Nazi Germany or Stalin’s Soviet Union. We see a version of this hunger now bubbling on the American right, though lacking obvious pathways outside of niche Greenland fantasies.

The integrationist impulse is under direct attack now from a right that wishes very dearly that the US had a more coherent, rooted sense of self; one that could somehow encompass 350 million people from very different places and of very different origins that somehow also does not settle for the lowest common denominator of 20th century mass culture. It has also taken some blows from a left on a doomed quest to throw out any sense of American history as tainted; a more moderate left couches the US’s role strictly in the realm of noble but somewhat airy ideals, as if rootedness in place and time is an abstraction we can wave away. A few things are simultaneously true: immigration has been a powerful force for American innovation and dynamism, a through-line of new energy. But shared culture is the secret to the success of the strong state (including, and perhaps especially, a welfare state), and beyond a certain level of immigration, there is a regular and extreme backlash that makes such cultural cohesion hard to attain. At the policy level, it requires a balancing act that satisfies few people with strongly held ideas about nationhood or human rights.

Even in an era of optimized algorithms, the US’s size and built-in variety make reproducing a true national culture here a tall order. It is no wonder that American culture so often reduces itself to what can feel like an empty consumerism and commitment to a relentless economic engine: it’s the only thing big enough to bind it all. As a localist who accepts the reality of empire, I do not necessarily mourn this weakness of national unity. It gives us good reason to double down on the more local and tangible, and it lets the rich variety of this country come out. But it does bake in an inherent tension between the rooted hunger for community and the crusading desire for universals baked into the American founding project, twin strands visible anywhere on the political spectrum. The centralizing forces, especially in an increasingly less physical world, threaten to overrun the unique pockets that are at the true heart of the American mythos.

So I once again urge: step out of the imagined community and appreciate the reality on the ground. Immerse yourself; see the great spaces of the West and the immigrant neighborhoods of a global city, the endlessly reinventing metropolises and the struggle for a renewal in an old industrial or agricultural town. Appreciate the commonalities, respect the differences and why they came to be. See us as the empire we are, great and sprawling and flawed. At 250, we are neither a melting pot nor a salad bowl but instead float in a soup. It contains many ingredients all bathed in a general broth, some flavors coming out stronger in certain bites but none coming to dominate the whole meal.

It seems appropriate to see a World Cup played on American shores at time of the Semiquincentennial. Of course the US team’s performance was the same as it ever was, generating irrational hype with victories over such powers as Bosnia and Herzegovina before succumbing when faced with a halfway respectable opponent. (Emphasis on the halfway.) From visa trouble to an overturned red card, the bluntness of American power has been on display. But this is, largely, a pageant that gets past the dumb geopolitics and FIFA corruption. Some of the greatest fun has been in seeing foreigners marvel at such American wonders as air conditioning and Buc-ee’s and parking lots larger than some European micro-states. A love affair grew between Boston and the Scottish masses that descended upon it, and between a Lawrence, Kansas and the Algerians who set up their team camp there. Here is Lionel Messi in an SEC football stadium, uniting the two most rabid fan bases in sports; there is Erling Haaland, the Norwegian cheat code of a striker, trying on a cowboy hat. Amid it all one can still see a sense of how the United States can still be a benevolent hegemon, and of how people from everywhere can find a home here, if only for a little while. The empire’s reach is long, but its touch can still be light.

Rich as an Argentine

Destiny is a dangerous phrase in sports. Many suspect they know it when they see it, most of them blinkered partisans who believe in what they know. It’s impossible to capture fully, scorned not without good reason by the quants who have distilled so many sports down to the barest essentials that can separate wins from losses. To call a squad a team of destiny is to make an irrational leap, to claim to see something others cannot, likely in athletes one has never met, seen only on a TV screen from half a world away. It is perhaps even more ludicrous for someone who is only a passing fan of a sport; someone who’s followed on and off over the years and has down the names of the main protagonists, but has no claim to deep expertise.

As this World Cup went on, however, it became clear that Argentina was one of those teams. It didn’t guarantee they would win the thing, but it did mean they would be there at the pivotal moment, would rise to the occasion, would push to the brink in ways others could never will themselves because they just felt it in their bones. It simply meant more in Argentina. They have known they have a window for a championship ever since Lionel Messi began showing the world what a different level of skill meant, and as the five-foot-seven magician from Rosario turned thirty-five, knew this would be his last chance. Their fans, after 36 long years of waiting, overflowed with raw emotion. Argentine tears flowed out at every goal (insert Evita joke here), and as they fought past the resilient Dutch in the quarterfinals, triumph felt more like relief, like completion of a solemn mission, than the mere victory enjoyed by other nations.

By that point, I was fully on board the bandwagon for the ride, using unspent work personal time to catch their remaining matches. After the sky blue and white carved up Croatia in the semifinals, they earned a clash for the ages against France. The final was about the juiciest imaginable: perhaps the greatest of all time against the golden child of the next generation, two otherworldly talents trading blows on the world’s most dramatic stage, the defending champions against the fútbol-bleeding nation determined to send out a sporting deity on top. It somehow outdid all the hype.

Messi had the supporting cast in his quest; the Argentines, unless defending a late lead, were the most cohesive unit of this tournament almost all the way through. The work rate in the midfield, from Alexis Mac Allister to Rodrigo de Paul to Enzo Fernández, took apart their vaunted French counterparts. On the sideline, the other Lionel, the little-heralded Lionel Scaloni, pressed all the right buttons as he molded his squad, boldly putting a few stars on the bench in favor of the right supporting cast for Messi’s skills. His master stroke: starting the wily veteran Ángel di María, who had the half of his life in the final, as he drew the penalty converted by Messi for Argentina’s first goal and finishing off a majestic passing sequence on their second. The Argentines were in complete control against the world’s deepest footballing machine, and in normal times, this would have been enough for a coronation.

Destiny, however, demands drama. No podía ser de otra manera sino sin sufrir, sobbed Andrés Cantor to his Spanish language audience at the end of the night: they had to suffer, there couldn’t be any other way. The source of that drama, aside from suddenly ragged defending: Kylian Mbappé, the French virtuoso who drifted through most of the game who needed just 93 seconds to knot the score. His vicious strike on the second goal hushed the singing Argentines for the first time all tournament; soccer, perhaps, was ready to pass the torch to a new superstar. But after that it was sheer, magical chaos, the teams powering up and down the pitch trading chances at reckless abandon, substitutions one-upping another, a net-crashing Messi seemingly winning it all before Mbappé snatched it back again in the dying minutes of extra time. So often in soccer penalty shootouts seem unspeakably lame, a way of euthanizing a game that has long since run out of energy, but it felt like the only sane conclusion here. One by one, the Argentines came forward and clinically finished their penalties, while their keeper, Emiliano Martínez, rose to the challenge once again.

When Gonzalo Montiel sealed the Cup with the final penalty, Argentina went into a catharsis to end all catharsis, a pure release, from the pitch to the broadcast booth and everywhere beyond. Montiel ran around cluelessly before his teammates swarmed him, di María bawled for the third or fourth time in the span of two hours, and Messi raised his hands to accept the worship of the masses and channel it through him. On the other side, abject shock, with dazed stares of exhaustion and Emmanuel Macron down on the pitch to console Mbappé. (I here picture Donald Trump coming down to the pitch to inform a United States team in a similar spot that they are all losers, or Joe Biden forgetting who all these people are anyway.) Who needs great conquests or wealth when a two-hour game can provide the apogee of human emotion?

The next night I found myself ignoring Monday Night Football to pour myself a Mendoza Malbec and watch footage from Buenos Aires: a drone sweeping over the Avenida 9 de Julio, the view from a lonely cyclist peddling up a deserted street as the city suddenly explodes, relentless song and dance, a few insane souls scaling the obelisk in the Plaza de la República. Then came the scenes from the victory parade, which had to be abandoned and completed by helicopter to get around the crowds. Oh, to someday be able to party like an Argentine.

And then it occurred to me: a few months ago, I’d been offered a spot on a trip that would have begun in Argentina in late December. I declined: a bit too much money, a bit too complicated logistically. I looked back at the old string of emails and, sure enough, if I’d accepted, I would have been in Buenos Aires on the day of the final. FOMO, you have consumed me.

Life goes on, though, and rewards in Christmas parties and holiday retreats and good hockey. And before long there will be new windows into that full range emotion, life to the fullest, joie de vivre in the face of everything. May the bursts never stop coming.

Good Journalism, 7/9/18

This feature is no longer in a place where I can accurately call it “weekly,” but the content will, hopefully, make up for the prolonged absence. Here are some thought-provoking things I have read recently:

Jonathan Franzen, the Great American Novelist(™) whose work both inspired me to write both through its successes and its failures to talk about The Way We Live Now and other such grandiose themes, no longer cares. He’s a rebel against the court of public opinion, and instead of reacting angrily to a host of trends that in the past that he saw as sources of civilizational decline, he has found equanimity in ignoring Twitter feuds. The question is, has it come at the cost of his skills as a searing social observer? Can one write about The Way We Live Now without living it directly? Or is that very question the wrong one to ask about contemporary literature? If the new novel he’s starting mentioned in this New York Times Magazine piece takes place in the present, we may soon find out.

Why have I not been blogging much lately? One, because I have been having a social life, but also because I’ve been absorbed by the World Cup, which remains a delightful exercise is international athletics, even if Neymar flops too much. It’s been an odd one, with my ancestors the defending champs bombing out in the group stage, Argentina looking like a royal mess, the Spanish dynasty running out of gas, and the Brazilian whole once again failing to equal the sum of its parts. It’s provided some moments of joy; for me, the high water mark game was probably Uruguay, a personal favorite, using its lethal two-man strikeforce to vanquish defending European champion Portugal in the Round of 16. Now, however, we are down to a final four. The French are the mild favorites, with 19-year-old Kylian Mbappe being the breakout star of the Cup, but Belgium’s dynamic attack will pose a great test in a tasty-looking semifinal. On the other side of the bracket, England has been exorcising demons and look like a team on a mission under Gareth Southgate, but first must get past maestro Luka Modric and his orchestra from Croatia. (Few things in sports are as aesthetically pleasing than a diminutive midfielder slaloming around a pitch and singlehandedly running an attack.) But yes, the four semifinalists are all European. How does that happen in what should be a globalizing sport? FiveThirtyEight crunches some numbers on the question here.

Shifting gears: Mexico has a new president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. AMLO has been a polarizing public figure for the better part of two decades since his rise to become the Head of Government of Mexico City and his narrow, contentious loss in the 2006 election. When I spent a semester in Mexico City as an undergrad four years after that election, there were still regular protests in the Alameda disputing the result. By 2018, however, the script has flipped: AMLO won last week’s presidential election in a landslide, and his fairly new party, MORENA, has huge pluralities in both chambers of congress.

Mexican politics has been flipped upside down. The conservative PAN, which led the way in Mexico’s democratic revolution in the first decade this century, finished a distant second. The long-ruling PRI, which was an exhausted relic even before Enrique Peña Nieto’s miserable six-year term, got shellacked. The original leftist party, the PRD, was eviscerated. The election could be a watershed moment in Mexican history. Something revolutionary is afoot in Mexico, for good or ill, and if AMLO, a fascinating figure, can deliver on his lofty expectations, it could have implications for politics in a lot of places. Here, Jon Lee Anderson, the New Yorker’s remarkable roving Latin America correspondent, profiles AMLO as he follows his campaign.

Another random World Cup season note: Cuauhtémoc Blanco, one of Mexico’s most accomplished fútbol stars, was elected governor of Morelos state under the MORENA coalition banner. I did a double-take when I saw that one.

Meanwhile, back in the States, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a self-described Democratic Socialist, has won a Democratic primary in New York. But what does that look like in practice, and how does it compare to the Democratic Socialism of the movement’s standard bearer, Bernie Sanders? Reihan Salam investigates in the Atlantic.

Finally, in the London Review of Books, John Lancaster pens a superb overview of global economy since the start of the Great Recession in plain English. It’s a thorough take that puts the macroeconomics of the past decade into sobering perspective. I particularly enjoy his note, paraphrasing Napoleon, that to understand someone’s view of the world, one must understand what the world looked like when he was twenty. Expect me to riff on this more in the coming weeks, both in terms of my own outlook at that of others.