On the evening of December 18, the 2022 Qatar World Cup officially ended. After a stirring final, arguably the best of the century, Messi won the Gold Cup and the up-and-coming star Kylian Mbappe was crowned the Golden Boot.
Argentina won the World Cup, Messi and his teammates were celebrating. Photo: Xinhua News Agency
The old king is complete, the new king is standing, which is very much like a standard script that will make this generation of fans talk about it for many years. However, in many ways, this World Cup is so "non-standard": it has settled a controversial organizer since before the start of the competition, the first time it has been played in the northern hemisphere winter, VAR technology has never been so present...
Fortunately, compared with the changing real world, the World Cup still seems to be what "naked apes" author Desmond Morris calls an "enclave" of everyday life. It provides solace, joy, and a precious sense of certainty to all on a quadrennial basis. From the tradition of collecting celebrity stickers to the sounds off the pitch, we rediscover the purest and strongest sense of love and hate, possession and loss, and long-lost meaning.
"Prints may die gradually, but World Cup stickers won't"
There has been a saying circulating on the Internet: the World Cup is a festival for "ball blindness", even if you don't usually watch the league, you know more or less Messi Cristiano Ronaldo, follow the stars to choose a home team, you can also have fun together. At the 2018 FIFA World Cup quarterfinals in Russia, Argentina and France, the world had not yet experienced the ravages of the coronavirus pandemic, people could move freely, and the air on summer nights was full of enthusiastic hopes for the future. Four years later, watching the World Cup on TV, the circle of friends can occasionally brush up the news of which friend is "Yang". The world has changed a lot, but the rare sense of relaxation that watching the World Cup can give remains the same.
In the past two days, Fox Sports also released an interesting article, saying that this year's Panini World Cup sticker sales in the United States have increased significantly, even more than the total since 2018. You know, collecting this star sticker is a World Cup tradition, but it only began to be sold in the United States in 2010, and it was not until 2018 that it really began to attract a lot of attention.
According to Panini's official website, all sticker types for the 2022 World Cup are currently sold out.
The article analyzes that the sudden popularity of this sticker this year, in addition to the factors of the return of the US national football team to the World Cup, is more important that people have begun to regain many "pre-digital era" traditions under the influence of the new crown epidemic. Interestingly, while the convenience of online communities makes it easy for Panini enthusiasts to exchange their excess star stickers, young people still choose to pack these stickers in envelopes the old-school way, write the introductory text, and interact with others by post office delivery.
When asked if such a product might exist only in digital form in the future, the head of a Panini sticker manufacturer did not hesitate to say: "Prints may die gradually, but I don't think World Cup stickers will be." It was a very emotional answer, as if the boss was reminding everyone that no matter how the world changed, the World Cup would come on time every four years and remind everyone of those timeless traditions.
The World Cup in the Age of Social Media: You Can't Stay Away, You Don't Need to Stay Away from Politics
But describing the World Cup as an "enclave" of everyday life doesn't all mean boasting. Looking at this month's circle of friends, you will find that when the group stage is underway, the fire in Urumqi accidentally broke out. Meanwhile, across the ocean, researchers at the University of California continue to protest low wages, and for a few days, information about these two events appears frequently, and for a while people are not interested in paying attention to whether Argentina has been resurrected in the group, or what kind of East Asian miracle Japan and South Korea have created.
It's also reminiscent of a cultural review published in The Atlantic last March, on the topic of how the pandemic will affect comedy? The article believes that persistent negative information will make society gradually lose the atmosphere and mood to enjoy comedy, and laughter will become a kind of burden and become out of place in the "post-corona" era. Although the conclusion seems a bit fussy, the phenomenon that the author fears does have value.
Modric wears medals to interact with children. Photo: Xinhua News Agency
Hoping that football would truly become a utopian enclave is becoming increasingly unrealistic, and a big factor in that is the social media boom. It may also be a subtle but important change in the way people watch the World Cup over the years. Some scholars also refer to this phenomenon as the "mediation of social life."
In this Qatar World Cup, news other than pure football attracted almost half of the eye: many media reported the phenomenon of a large number of overwork deaths of workers during the construction of Qatar's World Cup infrastructure, and FIFA, which still approved Qatar despite the current situation of labor labor, has frequently become the target of public criticism; Several European teams, including England, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland, wore the rainbow "OneLove" armband in solidarity with the LGBTQ community suppressed by Qatar's local culture. Before the start of the group stage between England and Iran, the Iranian team refused to sing the national anthem as a way to show support for the struggle of women in the country...
These news are almost the first to coincide with the real-time matches, and you can not only learn about the situation on the ground, but also immediately see the various extended discussions around these events, which makes FIFA President Gianni Infantino's previous statement "don't politicize football" seem somewhat funny.
In fact, recent World Cups have not only been unable to stay away from politics, but have also become the spotlight on political issues, and even the social background of the host place will play a blessing effect. The 2014 World Cup in Brazil saw mass demonstrations about government corruption and inequality, and the 2018 World Cup sparked a social media debate about racism in sports. A recent article in The Atlantic pointed out that the politicization of sporting events and athletes around the world, including football, will become increasingly prominent in the coming years. Important public events such as Black Lives Matter have contributed to the mix, but the influence of social media is crucial, and as its influence on contemporary politics continues to grow, players are gradually consciously speaking out on related issues.
Messi and Di Maria celebrate the goal. Photo: Xinhua News Agency
In the many articles that wrote about the World Cup this month, the relationship between football and politics at its source was constantly raised. Sitting on the cultural identity of the "working class movement", football has since become a hotbed for shaping collective consciousness and brewing political action because of its characteristics of teamwork and physical confrontation, supplemented by the highly contagious emotions of crowded spectators. Not to mention that football is deeply embedded in the historical development of many countries and has become a political symbol.
In the case of Argentina, a recent article in The Guardian reported on a group of avid Argentine fans – just not in Qatar or Buenos Aires, but in the southernmost state of Kerala, India. They painted their houses blue and white and erected giant statues of Messi and Maradona in the village. Lacking a national team to support, India and many other countries in the South Asian region have developed a special loyalty to other teams, especially Argentina.
One local villager interviewed said that "the country and its football team symbolize the irresistible impulse of mankind to liberate itself from oppression," a symbolic understanding that is just as Maradona's controversial "Hand of God" in 1986 is seen by many as a response to the Falklands War.
Messi celebrates after scoring a penalty. Photo: Xinhua News Agency
History and reality prove to us that if the "enclave" is a pure land completely insulated from politics, then the World Cup has never been, and probably should not be, a sacred and passionate place for our daily lives, and a deep involvement in real history.
More importantly, we don't have to worry about football becoming politicized, but we need to guard against realpolitik becoming "footballed". A psychology article in 2020 pointed out this problem, in a world of increasingly polarized politics, people's understanding of politics has increasingly become "choosing a team and standing in line", and coexisting with their own "team" is a more hidden problem for human beings.
Witnessing Messi's dream come true at the end of his career is the best reward for every ordinary person who struggles
In addition to politics, "unpopular" is also a word that has often appeared in this month to describe the World Cup. From Saudi Arabia vs Argentina at the start of the group stage to the suffocating penalty shootout between Croatia and Brazil in the knockout rounds, the sheer number of plot reversals has led people to doubt the definition of the word "unpopular". A sports magazine once commented that compared with the usual football league, the teams of the World Cup tend to play more conservatively and attach importance to defense, so they often do not play high scores, but the results of the game often reward these seemingly modest but resilient teams. This style of competition is the birthplace of natural "drama", and all kinds of miracles of defeating the strong with weakness often occur in this stalemate of hand-to-hand combat.
In a sense, this is also the point where the World Cup seems less like an enclave – it is more like the truth of life itself. It "won't be as good as you think, nor as bad as you think," it's full of occasional surprises and sudden misfortunes, but never hesitates to reward those who do their best.
Not everyone is passionate about football, and in their eyes, football exposes many bad aspects of human nature, and if it has anything to do with politics, it may only add more group irrationality to the politics that should be full of rational trade-offs and complex games. Among these cold-eyed people are well-known writers and scholars, such as Orwell, who has always been wary of totalitarian politics, who called football the war of the naked civilized world, associating "serious sports with hatred, jealousy, boasting, and the sadistic pleasure of witnessing violence." Borges mocked even more mercilessly: "Football wins the hearts of the people, because stupidity wins the hearts of the people." The words of left-wing historian Hobsbawm have been used by many cultural commentators to criticize the frenetic nationalism that football has spawned: for humanity, imaginary communities of millions are more real than teams of eleven.
No matter how famous these commentators may be, their cynicism will hardly prevent football from becoming truly the world's number one sport, or even the religion of the modern world. In an age of disenchanted values, football offers a rare collective jubilation with a sacred connotation, so it is unstoppable to touch everyone's heart. In the famous author of Naked Ape, Desmond Morris, in Why Football? The reason why football has become the world's most popular sport is that it helps us "return to the basics": we return to tribal battles in football, and we worship stars as we once believed in priests and gods.
Why Football? By Desmond Morris, translated by Yi Chenguang, unread| Beijing United Publishing Company, June 2018.
An article in BBC Culture made a somewhat neat comparison, and the author found that many photos from the World Cup site were in line with famous paintings with religious connotations. For example, the picture of Yeri Mina of the Colombian team scoring the first goal of the tournament for the team in 2018 resembles the famous painting of "Ascension of Jesus". The close-up of Neymar, who is frequently violated by his opponent, falls to the ground and the referee comes to inquire about his injuries, coincidentally reminiscent of Caravaggio's famous "St. Thomas the Doubtful" - in the eyes of fans, the referee who comes to inquire about Neymar's injury is like Saint Thomas huddled around the resurrected Christ and poked his wound with his finger to test its authenticity.
In a World Cup ceremony, we re-experience the purest and strongest sense of love and hate, possession and loss, and long-lost religious meaning, and the star is the indispensable carrier. But the reason why football is a "modern religion" is because these existences that are worshipped by fans as gods and meanings in the spotlight are not really high and far from red dust. People who witnessed last night's victory night with Messi must have felt this even stronger. On Douban, some users called this "the best night of 2022", and on Weibo, some people said that Messi, who has been working low-key, finally fulfilled his dream at the end of his career, which is the best reward for every ordinary person who struggles.
These words also implicitly say the way the stars of the World Cup give people power in this era: they give us dreams that are above the everyday, but each of us can see ourselves in them. The World Cup is over, but we have not said goodbye to it completely, and the traces it has left on the daily lives of each of us remain.
Reference Links:
1. The Qatar World Cup Exposes Soccer’s Shame
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2022/11/qatar-hosting-fifa-world-cup-soccer/672171/
2. Is football the universal religion?
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20180713-is-football-the-universal-religion
3. ‘What do I want to stand for here?’: Why footballers and politics are more entwined than ever
https://theathletic.com/3325111/2022/05/24/footballers-political-statements/
4.
As Qatar’s World Cup ends it is time for truth: Fifa chose death and suffering
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2022/dec/16/as-qatars-world-cup-ends-it-is-time-for-truth-fifa-chose-death-and-suffering
4. As soccer’s popularity grows,so does a World Cup tradition with sticking power.
https://www.foxsports.com/stories/soccer/as-soccers-popularity-grows-so-does-a-world-cup-tradition-with-sticking-power
5. The Cultural Significance of the World Cup
https://medium.com/@muirucngugi/the-cultural-significance-of-the-world-cup-c668371b1efc
Author/Liu Yaguang
Editor/Li Yongbo
Proofreader/Chen Diyan