In the end, it could only be this. Messi, the past decade's candidate for greatest of all time, against Mbappé, the coming decade's candidate for greatest of all time. Messi scored once and helped create a second, and we thought that was that. Then, with ten minutes left in the game, Mbappé conjured a couple of pieces of magic to take the game to extra time. Messi scored again to win it, once and for all, but at the death Argentine nerves frayed and gave France a penalty, which Mbappé scored to take the game to penalties. And even the shootout was a thriller, as pretty much all of them have been this World Cup: France first (Mbappé, of course), then Argentina (Messi, of course), then two misses from France and three scores from Argentina...
And the cup's been won by a non-European team for the first time in 20 years. At the same time, we got a classic match, probably the first good final in... certainly as long as I've been watching football. And the first final-game hat-trick since 1966, scored by (who else?) Mbappé.
I had slightly mixed feelings going into this match, since both teams' talismanic players are employed by Paris St-Germain, which is owned by Qatar, which is, of course, the host. Whichever team won, it'd be a propaganda/soft power win for Qatar. At the same time, you could forget the background for a moment, the unhinged speeches and hollow justifications from various functionaries of the game, and just enjoy two teams playing really good football.
Did Qatar put on a good show? Yes, I think they did. The venues weren't exactly full, but it seems like things ran as they should. People had a good time, the venues were easy to reach and there weren't any instances of hooligan violence that I read or heard about (you assume the Guardian and whatever other outlets would cover it). This also might be unpopular to say, but I actually appreciate how Qatar stood up to FIFA and the sponsors and said that, no, you wouldn't be able to buy beer in the stadia after all.
Does any of that invalidate the abuses of workers that enabled this World Cup to take place? No, those worker deaths and the obfuscation and double-speak around them will remain a black mark on FIFA and the game in general. Other countries are culpable too, not least Russia, which bookended its hosting in 2018 with two separate attacks on Ukraine and has also passed law after law criminalizing the "promotion" of LGBTQ lifestyles. People have highlighted homophobic chanting in Mexico, and the overturning of Roe v Wade in the US, but none of those things invalidates the criticism of Qatar doing it, at least as long as reporters and NGOs note when other countries are doing bad stuff.
Some numbers
Turning briefly to the numbers, I've put the final touches on my spreadsheet looking at how the Western European teams have done against the rest of the world. In 2006, Western European teams took 2.59 points from their matches against the rest of the world, which remains the highest average this century (this counts penalty shootouts as draws, but games won in extra time are counted as regular wins or losses). For comparison, in 2022 they took 1.66 points per game against the rest of the world, which is actually the second lowest total, after 2002, which was also the last time a South American team won the tournament and the last time an African team went on a run past the round of 16.
That's for all Western European teams, so the likes of Wales or Belgium or Denmark, who didn't make it out of the group stage, are dragging the average down. If we look at the performance of the 5 big Western European countries - England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain - then they took 1.85 points per game against the rest of the world, which is actually the third-highest in this same period since 2002. The only tournaments where they did better were 2006, when Italy met France in the final, and 2018, when France won and England got to the semifinal.
What's impressive is that these numbers have been improving since the nadir of 2010, when they got 1.63 points per game, especially when you consider that in that period at least one of the big five has always failed to progress from the group stage. It's even more impressive when you consider that Italy hasn't even qualified for the last two World Cups. So really it's only four big teams posting these numbers, and getting better against the rest of the world since 2010.
That seems to be a confirmation of Soccernomics's argument that the Western European football networks are helping the region dominate. They are home to the biggest, richest leagues, as well as France, which doesn't have an amazing league but which does create world class players who ply their trade in Spain and England, and less importantly in Italy and Germany (I say less importantly because the two biggest leagues are clearly the Premier League and the Primera Liga).
Colonialism vs multiculturalism
This point about the strength of the networks raises another point, about the makeup of these teams. I've seen a few people on social media talk about how these big Western European teams do well only because of colonialism. It's a persuasive argument, especially when you consider that certain French players were born in overseas departments, or have their ancestry from there. Those overseas departments may be officially part of France, but that's just colonialism too, since it means France hasn't let go of them in four or five centuries.
The other way of looking at it, though, is that these players of African or Caribbean or Middle Eastern descent demonstrate the strength of multiculturalism. French right-wing nationalists complain when the French team wins (seriously) because there are so many "black-blanc-beurre" players; at the same time, England's black players get horrific abuse on social media when they miss penalties, and also when their white colleagues miss penalties (Bukayo Saka got abused for England losing to France, even though Harry Kane missed the penalty that would have kept them in the game). But it's actually a good thing that these national teams are selecting the strongest players they can, regardless of skin color or how "French" or "English" or "German" their names are.
I think we can agree that the worst of both worlds would be for, say, France to maintain these overseas colonies, but to deny their residents, who pay French taxes, speak French and use the same currency as Metropolitan France, the opportunity to represent their country in football?
It gets more complicated when you consider the multiracial makeup of the other big Western European countries. Bukayo Saka is of Nigerian descent, but Nigeria isn't part of the United Kingdom, just of the Commonwealth. In contrast to other independent members of the Commonwealth, its currency doesn't have the English monarch (and I say that deliberately). Yet Saka was born in England and came up through its academy system, and represents his adopted country at the highest level. There are clearly colonial links, but as I say, it speaks to the willingness of the football authorities in England to look for talent outside of the traditional groups that provided players.
Most big Western European teams have opened up their selections to non-white players, both from former colonies and from immigrant populations. The big exception, however, is Italy. There have been a couple of notable exceptions, like Mario Balotelli and Moise Kean, but the first black player selected by the Italian national team was Fabio Liverani, hardly a household name, and he was only called up in 2001, long after France and England were well-integrated.
I don't think Italy's lack of multicultural players is the main or only reason why it's had so much trouble at the World Cup since 2006. It has, after all, reached two European Championship finals and won one of them, and has generally done much better at that level than in the World Cup. But Italian society is changing, with the aging of the society and the lack of opportunities driving young Italians abroad, while the country's position in the Mediterranean makes it the first port of call for many refugees and migrants. Saying that welcoming in these migrants will help in football may seem silly, but if that's the way to show Italians that people of color can benefit their society, then I think it's an avenue to explore.
Is Messi the GOAT?
I'm not even going to try to segue smoothly from that section to this, even though Lionel Messi is a migrant twice over: once when his Italian forebears came to Argentina and again when he moved to Spain to receive treatment for his hormone deficiency and to develop his footballing skills.
But the question of whether Messi is the greatest of all time has been bandied about a lot this tournament, since it's probably his last. I don't know if winning this tournament cements that status for him, because he's associated more with his time at Barcelona, where he won everything he could possibly win and dominated Spanish football alongside Cristiano Ronaldo and Real Madrid. I wonder if winning this tournament, where he's no longer at the otherworldly heights he occupied in the previous decade, really puts him on the same level as Pele or Maradona or Zidane, who are (at least in my mind) associated more as World Cup all-time greats.
On the other hand, Messi is such a cultural force because of football that it would be odd if he'd only ever been a nearly-man footnote to the tournament, like George Best or Zlatan Ibrahimović or other great players who never won or like Best, even qualified. Winning this tournament doesn't necessarily make him the greatest player who ever lived, but it makes sure he's in the conversation.
These arguments apply to Cristiano Ronaldo, by the way. He's never won a World Cup, and now he never will, at least as a player, but he was just as much of a cultural force as Messi. You can appeal to numbers as much as you want: goals, goals per game, league titles, etc. Each has also won their regional tournament, but winning the 2022 World Cup certainly gives Messi a leg up on Ronaldo.
But what does it mean to be the greatest? Pele is the player most people think of, especially if they don't know anything else about football. He was involved in two World Cup wins, including when he came out of retirement in 1970 to play as part of possibly the greatest team the game has ever seen. Yet Ronaldo and Messi (and Neymar, and Ronaldo o fenomeno) have all surpassed certain of Pele's achievements, like international goals, appearances or career goals.
The point about everyone knowing about Pele points to another way of looking at this "greatest" debate, specifically influence. Pele became the face of football for decades, including the 1970s and 1980s' North American Soccer League, which was the previous big shot at selling soccer to American viewers before MLS. But I think the most influential player ever was Johan Cruyff, even despite (or because of) never winning the World Cup.
Cruyff became the game's biggest thinker, along with his manager Rinus Michels, and the two took the concept of Total Football from the Netherlands to Barcelona, from where it grew into the big tactical innovations in the game. This is all an abbreviated version, and to get the full picture of how tactics developed you should read Inverting the Pyramid by Jonathan Wilson and Zonal Marking by Michael Cox. But the basic point is, without Cruyff you don't get Barcelona (the concept thereof), and without Barcelona you don't get Messi.
What's next?
What's immediately next is a return to the regular season, which was interrupted by this World Cup. It seems less important than these big national questions, but it will be interesting to see how the English Premier League develops now, especially since we'll see what happens with Erling Braut Haaland, possibly the world's best player of the moment who wasn't in Qatar. Will he help Manchester City win the Champions League, or will that prize continue to elude the Gulf petrostates' teams?
At the international level, next summer we'll have the Women's World Cup, where we'll see how the rest of the world has caught up to the US. The team of 2019 may not be at the same level as last time, so will they refresh or get overtaken by other, upcoming powers?
The year after that is Euro 2024, which remains my second favorite tournament. My hope is that Italy will do well again there, and that England's progress under Gareth Southgate will also continue. Having now seen Croatia reach its second World Cup semifinal in a row, I'm also curious how they and the rest of the Eastern European teams will develop. That will depend on how well they get integrated into the existing networks around the Big 5 leagues, of course.
And finally, World Cup 2026 will mark the tournament's return to North America, the first time it'll be held here since 1994 and, really, the beginning of the modern era of football and of the World Cup. It feels a little like over-egging the pudding to hold it in three countries, all of them large enough to host a tournament on their own, especially given how 2022 was effectively held in one city. But FIFA and the media's need for spectacle is insatiable, and holding it across the US, Mexico and Canada means bringing the show to a lot of people who wouldn't otherwise get to watch it. I, for one, would like to go to matches if I'm in the US.
Anyway, that's the end of this World Cup. It's been a problematic one, but in truth, aren't they all? Without discounting the human cost, in lives lost and in dictators propped up and in corruption enabled, the fact that the World Cup comes every four years like (almost) clockwork, is a way to take stock of my life and where I am. I watched my first World Cup final in 1994 on summer vacation in Italy, and I know where I was for every single tournament since. It's given me a lot of exciting moments, like Germany's 7-1 demolition of Brazil to Italy beating France on penalties in 2006 just a month after I'd moved back to London for my first job post-grad school.
It's my favorite sporting event, and I hope to enjoy it for a long time to come. I just hope it gets less shady, and I hope Italy comes back to it.
No comments:
Post a Comment