Players react after Argentina's Lautaro Martinez scored a goal during the World Cup semi-final match against England in Atlanta, on July 15.Jacob Kupferman/The Associated Press
Everyone who’s involved in a World Cup wins, because they are all being paid to be at a World Cup. Even the volunteers got those Parachute Club tracksuits.
This iteration was mostly winners, and most of them won big. But a few abstract ideas took a light beating.
Winners
Soccer
The North American, rather than Australian, variant. There was a world in which one or more of the hosts got every advantage from FIFA and still landed on their heads. Instead, all three excelled, but not too much. It was a realistic snapshot of where the game is now.
One of the problems with soccer in the northern part of North America is that it has a tendency to get ahead of itself. It’s been arriving since the Cold War, and, like Zeno’s hare, can’t quite close the gap. Outside and the protection of an event like this one, it’s baseball junior, but won’t accept it.
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Major League Soccer is so rinky dink that they’ve restarted their season while the World Cup is ongoing. What does that tell you?
However, soccer writ large comes out of this tournament in a good place. No longer the next big thing. Just a thing. Part of the sporting furniture.
FIFA
Think about the IOC’s problems – transgender controversies, Russia invades Ukraine, Trump’s threats over L.A. 2028. The Olympics has culture war problems and actual war problems.
What does FIFA have? Hydration breaks and VAR. These are sports problems.
Sports problems aren’t problems. They’re business solutions. They grow your brand because everybody’s talking about you.
Even the ticket pricing controversy was a massive advertising psyop – ‘This, right here, is the thing everyone wants to do. Why aren’t you able to do it? Where did it all go wrong for you?’
FIFA proved here once again that they are well ahead of the outrage curve. Expect the next World Cup to include more countries than the United Nations.
Murat Yakin
A lot of big stars at this World Cup, but none cut quite as bella figura as the Switzerland coach. Having seen it up close, I can tell you–the hair really is that lustrous.
Yakin arrives at the stadium before the Argentina versus Switzerland match on July 11.Albert Gea/Reuters
Erling Haaland
World’s most recognizable striker to world’s alternative boyfriend. Haaland’s next move is obvious–ditch football, gin up a crypto coin and launch an AI startup. Sport is too small to contain an online personality this big.
TSN
One need not go back far to remember the days when every Canadian soccer broadcast sent you looking for a way to pirate the BBC.
The accent of soccer in this country remains British (and Irish). But at least the guys deploying it are Canadian residents speaking to Canadian concerns. Amidst the expected cheerleading for the home team, there were even occasional flashes of real criticism.
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Donald Trump
It’s one thing to fix a thing. It’s another to let everyone know you’re fixing it, and then have the fix fall apart on you. For any other political figure, this is a disaster. But for this guy it’s proof that his Teflon coating remains unchipped.
Asked about Trump’s interference recently, JT Batson, the unfortunate who runs U.S. Soccer said, “The president is the president.”
I guess that explains it then. Folarin Balogun’s red card or the Strait of Hormuz – different things, same principle.
This is written before Trump shows up in New Jersey on Sunday, where he’s sure to hear it from some of the mega-elites in the crowd. And that will prove what exactly? Only that America remains more amused than angry.
In the end, this tournament reminded everyone who’s in charge.
Schedulers
Putting Sunday’s final in an open stadium was a risk. Then the wildfires blew in.
From the vantage of late Saturday afternoon, it seems like they dodged that problem. Part of the reason they dodged it was rain early Saturday afternoon. And we’re talking Biblical downpours.
I was in Soho as it starred. Within an hour, the whole area was flooded out. Subway stations closed. Stores running bucket brigades out of their basements. The whole thing. And there’s apparently more to come this evening.
Had the big finale happened one day earlier, we might not have had a big finale.
Lionel Messi
Messi reacts as he leaves the ground after their win in the semi-final match between England and Argentina in Atlanta on Wednesday.Jacob Kupferman/The Associated Press
If his team loses on Sunday, he’s still bigger than John Lennon being bigger than Jesus. But if Argentina wins, he’s somewhere way beyond that.
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Losers
Tradition
Two of the game’s great advantages are its simplicity and its adherence to ancient codes. It helps that all of them are written down in one place and applied universally. The world may change, but football doesn’t.
Well, not until FOX Sports gets involved. The imposition of hydration breaks puts everything on the table. What’s next? A half-hour interval? Robot refs? Holographic players?
Once you start chipping away at this thing, change becomes its own rationale. You aren’t maximizing profit. You’re modernizing.
BMO
Deluged us with an inspiring series of ads featuring an office drone so desk-bound that he brings his workstation to the soccer stadium.
If they’d aired this campaign during the 19th century, Karl Marx would’ve been all, ‘Forget capital. I’m going to write a book about this. Let’s get this revolution started stat.’
Luckily, this created an alternative way for Canada to catch sight of Alphonso Davies. We will never know what difference a fully fit Davies could have made for Canada in this World Cup, but we can feel certain whatever he made here is in a nice, safe ETF.
Outdoor stadiums
Who will ever build one of these again? The idea died at this World Cup.
Weather was supposed to play a big role in this tournament. And it did. Sort of. On those intermittent occasions that a game wasn’t being played in a state of the art, open-air, but still covered and air-conditioned arena.
You could watch players dripping sweat in 23C in the Azteca’s open bowl, or swanning about, looking ready to go out for dinner, after 90 minutes in Houston, where it was 32C and humid enough to swim to the game.
All ambitious stadiums constructed from now on will be climate-proofed, thus helping us to push off doing anything about the climate. A real win-lose.
Uniforms
From Belgium’s tie-dye togs to Canada’s Jackson-Pollock-paints-with-his-feet effort to the surplus of warm-up hoodies in tropical conditions, not a great outing for the costume designers at this thing.
I get that people want to be different, but there’s something to say for staying the same. France hasn’t really changed its look in decades. If anything, they’re getting more minimal. By the next World Cup, it might just be a blue t-shirt.
Who are any of us to question the French when it comes to fashion?
Canada's Tani Oluwaseyi (12) reacts at the end of the World Cup round of 32 soccer match against South Africa in Inglewood, Calif., on June 28.Gregory Bull/The Associated Press
Time
Does anybody believe the clock in soccer any more? Where did that extra eight minutes added on at the end come from, and why, in application, does it become 12 minutes? This is a disorienting feature of all top-tier soccer, but it was hallucinogenic in some of the games at this World Cup.
You watch enough of this back to back and you find yourself questioning the reality of time altogether.
Instead of letting the referees play Doctor Who, why not project his watch on the scoreboard? That’s the only way to keep the officials within the boundaries of Einsteinian physics.