The World Cup and the Things That Escaped It

The World Cup is approaching, and I notice my son developing a relation to football that feels familiar in its very indeterminacy: neither indifference nor devotion, but a minor enthusiasm mixed with a diffuse awareness that something enormously consequential is unfolding around him.

As a Brazilian, this already borders on a minor confession. Football is supposed to arrive early, as fate rather than preference. It did not quite work that way for me. I followed the World Cups from 1986 to 2002 with fluctuating attention, never quite becoming what might properly be called a believer. What remained was not the continuity of competition, but a scattered archive of images, as if the sport had offered itself only intermittently, through sudden breaches in the ordinary flow.

I remember Sócrates in 1986, somehow out of register with the occasion itself: bearded and thoughtful, wearing a headband in solidarity with the victims of the Mexico earthquake. I remember Maradona charging through defenders like a comet, and the mythology of the Hand of God (later framed by him as a kind of symbolic revenge for the Falklands defeat four years earlier). I remember Roger Milla in 1990 (still one of my favorite players) dribbling René Higuita, scoring, and dancing by the corner flag as Cameroon captivated the world, making me a passionate supporter of them throughout that tournament. I remember Bebeto and Romário as a magical duo in 1994, while Roberto Baggio remains suspended in a single, overdetermined gesture. I remember Brazil’s bitter defeat to France in 1998, and then the uneasy relief of 2002, after the tension of the match against Belgium.

What binds these fragments is precisely their resistance to becoming mere football. They survive less as sporting memories than as condensed emblems of something larger: joy, failure, collective enchantment, political commitment, national disappointment. They seem, even now, to exceed the game that produced them.

Contemporary football, by contrast, leaves me oddly untouched. Not because the technical level has declined. Quite the opposite. The game is faster, more physically exacting (but also way more violent), more statistically refined. The difference lies in the slow reorganization of its surroundings: between a world of partial attachments and the fully globalized ecology of platforms and continuous circulation.

Within the limits of my memory and ignorance, somewhere between the era of Sócrates and that of Neymar, a whole configuration of the sport’s life seems to have grown stale, and the overbearing world of commercial spectacle can never, in my eyes, rejuvenate it. Sócrates, who famously never celebrated his own goals, embodied a vision of football grounded in collective ideals. A committed opponent of Brazil’s military dictatorship and associated with the democratic movements of his time, he seemed to understand the game as inseparable from civic life and shared experience. By contrast, despite his undeniable genius, Neymar’s theatrical dives, alongside his explicit alignment with political figures on the Brazilian far right, sit squarely within the contemporary grammar of ultra-individualism: one defined by visibility, branding, and permanent self-exhibition, in which even the familiar yellow shirt has been drawn into a more recent and divisive symbolic economy.

One is of course tempted to dismiss this contrast as nostalgia, and not without reason. Some may say I am being unfair to Neymar and romanticizing Sócrates. Memory smooths some figures and sharpens others. And yet I cannot shake the impression that they sit at opposite ends of a transformation. Not because football has lost an original authenticity (it was already a business in the 1980s), but because it has become perfectly adapted to a world in which authenticity is no longer required.

My own position in this is slightly displaced. I was never absorbed enough to become disillusioned. And yet I remain attached, in a secondary way, to what football once intermittently offered: not devotion, but brief openings onto something like collective life; moments when the sport seemed to exceed its institutional frame. The joy of Milla and his teammates, Higuita’s eccentricity, Sócrates’ symbolic presence, Maradona as a force of nature. These figures felt larger than the sport without feeling manufactured by it. Whether that perception is accurate or not, those openings now feel rarer, or more quickly absorbed by the machinery that surrounds them.

Football persists, more global than ever before. What feels harder to locate is not the game itself, but the occasional escape from it. So I find myself watching my son approach it with the same suspended hesitation I once knew, still unable to explain why I will not, once again, be supporting Brazil.