The World Cup is experienced by most as ambient noise, not immersive reality. That is the sensation that lingers after a long, hot day by Lake Annecy, where the sun and the driving and the food and the boxed wine press the life from your body like air from a juice carton. I fell asleep at some point during the Netherlands v Japan match, waking only when it was 2-1 and everyone was heading to bed, drunk on tiredness, drunk on life, drunk on drink. Not all my friends care for football in any case, so the tournament had become a kind of mood music – something to fill the silences in conversation while chat ranged over home renovations and Andy Burnham, the Mayor of Greater Manchester, a figure from a different political universe entirely.
Through the meandering talk, an indistinct French voice cut through from the television. Maeda. Gravenberch. The Low Countries tempted to reach the final for the first time since 2010. Someone prised open a bottle of Heineken. Bodies draped themselves over the couch, fingers scrolled through phones – the immaculate decadence of boredom. I did manage to stay awake for Belgium v Egypt, albeit remembering very little beyond Romelu Lukaku forcing an own goal and the sight of Mohamed Salah sauntering regally around the pitch like a PE teacher willing himself not to get involved. What I do recall is getting a couple of beers out of the fridge at the second hydration break and challenging Ed to chess, which I lost. Lukaku, of Naples. An overwhelming knight-and-queen attack down my a-file. Ssssake, Ed forgot to tap his clock again. Not telling him next time.
The match I fell asleep to – Netherlands against Japan – ended in a 2-2 draw. Virgil van Dijk, the 35-year-old Netherlands captain and Liverpool defender, scored a commanding header, assisted by Ryan Gravenberch, the Dutch midfielder who has won titles with Ajax, Bayern Munich and Liverpool and who also set up Crysencio Summerville earlier in the game. Japan arrived unbeaten in eight matches, having not conceded in their previous five. That context, of course, I learned later. At the time, I only caught van Dijk angling the ball into the far corner before consciousness slipped away. Such is the fragile way World Cups measure out our lives – some fragrant cocktail of collective and personal memory swirling into one, the sensation of waking up and feeling as though you watched the entirety of Iran v New Zealand, even though you didn’t.
That Iran-New Zealand match, it turned out, was politically charged. Outside SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles, Iranian American demonstrators gathered waving pre-revolutionary flags – banned by FIFA – and protesting the Iranian government. The match itself took place shortly after a peace agreement was announced to end the US-Iran war, and came amid reports of players being arrested or not selected for speaking out against the regime. On the pitch, Iran twice came from behind to draw 2-2 with New Zealand, Elijah Just scoring both goals for New Zealand, Ramin Rezaeian and Mohammad Mohebbi for Iran.
But I did not watch that game. I was somewhere else, half-attending, half-drifting. And I suspect everyone will have a story like this. I watched the 2006 final – Italy v France – at a seafood restaurant in Hvar, on the Croatian islands. It was one of those giant televisions on a stand, the kind they used to wheel into science lessons at school to show videos about gametes. I missed Zinedine Zidane’s headbutt on Marco Materazzi because the waiter was standing in front of the screen. The headbutt itself occurred in the 110th minute of extra time, with the match tied 1-1; Materazzi had reportedly provoked Zidane with insults directed at his mother and sister. Zidane was sent off in the final match of his career, after which he was awarded the Golden Ball as the tournament’s best player. Italy won 5-3 on penalties, David Trezeguet the only man to miss for France. And although I have watched the game in full many times since, if you ask me to pick out the overriding memory of that evening I am still more likely to recall the tenderness of the monkfish than anything that happened on the pitch.
The professional experience: fused into the tournament
Then I started covering World Cups for work, and that is an entirely different, more immersive experience. Very quickly you fuse into the tournament, to the point where you are basically an extension of it, a slave to its rhythms and moods. From the moment you wake to the moment you go to bed – far too late – your entire nervous system is built around the game schedule, the reliable drumbeat of regimented kick-off times, ideas and angles, content and deadlines. The rest of the time you spend thinking about transport or food. When I get home my smartwatch typically shows that my resting heart rate has been about 10 to 20 beats above normal for an entire month. People visibly age during these things. It is like going to war.
The scale of the broadcast operation underlines the event’s weight. Host Broadcast Services produced the world television feed using a minimum of 42 cameras per match, including ultra-high-definition and high-dynamic-range capabilities. The 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar generated record revenue for the governing body from television broadcasting, reaching approximately five billion engagements across linear TV, digital streams and social media; the final alone drew 1.42 billion viewers. In the UK, the BBC and ITV shared free-to-air rights, with the BBC offering some matches in 4K Ultra HD and HDR. These numbers measure the tournament’s reach – but they do not capture the way most people actually encounter it.
The detached viewer: freedom to let football swim in and out
During the many breaks in play at this year’s tournament, the camera inevitably pans across the crowd, and here the difference between World Cup football and regular football is perhaps at its most distinct. Everyone is dancing and putting their thumbs up. Nobody is having a bad time. Nobody is protesting or chanting about sacking the board or hurling abuse at the referee except in the most performative way – unlike the ticket-price boycotts at Liverpool, the anti-Glazer protests at Manchester United, the fish cakes thrown onto the pitch by Norwegian fans demonstrating against VAR, the widespread opposition to the European Super League. Under most circumstances, to attend a football game – and what elevates this art form above a gig or a blockbuster movie – is to submit willingly to the possibility of misery: your team can lose, the game can be terrible, your weekend can be ruined. But when you have paid £800 for a ticket, and probably many multiples of that on hotels and flights, is it remotely conceivable that you could allow yourself not to be entertained? How would you even admit it to yourself?
By contrast, television grants us the freedom to detach. The freedom to allow football to swim in and out of our consciousness, to fill the gaps in life rather than life the gaps in football. The freedom to be bored, pleasantly bored, decadently bored. To go for a smoke, to get a round in, to go to bed. In Talloires, a little resort in the Haute-Savoie, the bars and restaurants advertise “Coupe de Monde” on wooden chalkboards – the greatest sporting event in the world as an accompaniment to dinner, in between cheese and dessert. The G7 summit was taking place just up the road in Évian, and as the sun set helicopters flew low over Lake Annecy, a reminder of football’s basic transigence, its mutability, the extent to which – for all its airs and graces – the world continues to spin around it.
How luxurious it is to drink boxed wine and half-watch football as the world burns and blisters. To rail at refreshment breaks and the decision not to award a penalty to Kylian Mbappé. To see these 104 games spread out across the Americas like a lustrous map and not feel the need to watch all of them, or indeed any of them. To see this World Cup for what it truly is: utterly gripping at times, diverting at others, disposable for the most part. A kind of beautiful human-made slop, the flower arrangement at the gates of hell.
