There was a time when the approach of a football World Cup had me in turmoil. I was already anticipating the matches to come, the exploits to celebrate, the goals to revere, all this excitement born from these years of waiting after the previous one. I counted the years, the months, the weeks, the days. And when it finally started, I immersed myself in it with the delight of the amateur who, deprived of his favorite occupation for too long, comes to cease all social activity for the duration of it.
For a month, I lived by and for the World Cup. Nothing else mattered. Neither my end of the school year nor, later, the variations in my love life. I was embarking on a month of football, on an odyssey that would see me glued to my television from the opening match until the final. It was like a free dive, a fabulous journey into the wonderful world of football where nothing interested me except the progress of the competition, this procession of matches experienced as so many opportunities to discover unknown players, teams from elsewhere, unusual coaches, a whole range of new things which made me captive to television broadcasts.
In recent years, all my enthusiasm has disappeared. I started watching only a handful of games, then not watching at all. To the point of boycotting the World Cup in Qatar (November-December 2022), of which, to this day, I have still not seen the slightest image. There was a moment when football ceased to be football and became a sort of money machine used solely to serve financial interests. From one edition to another, the World Cup has become cynical, mercantile, obscene, the opposite of a popular festival where the multiplicity of matches has made most of the matches tasteless to follow.
The one that arrives with its riot of matches (104 to be exact) will probably be the worst of all. Led by the tandem of the two terrible jokers Donald Trump/Gianni Infantino, organized in three countries, Canada, the United States and Mexico, spanning five and a half weeks (from Thursday June 11 to Sunday July 19), it will definitively sign the death of football as I knew, admired and loved it. From now on, in order to please the American public and its broadcasters, the matches will be interrupted after twenty minutes of play, ostensibly to allow the players to refresh themselves, but in reality in order to numb the viewer with an avalanche of advertisements, each one as inept as the next.
Breaking up playing time in this way amounts to declaring the end of football. Damaged by the advent of VAR (video assistance to refereeing), patched up by untimely interruptions of play due to imaginary injuries and the carnival of post-goal celebrations, not to mention the crowds following each contentious decision by the referee, football was already shrinking like a shred. With the arrival of refreshment breaks, it will further lose fluidity, spontaneity, magic, this suspended time where the ball never ceased to live to better delight the enthusiastic crowds.
Football is an art, it is becoming an industry dedicated to its extinction. From a universal sport intended to entertain the working classes, it metamorphoses a little more every day into an advertising parade aimed at enriching sponsors and enriching federations transformed into cash registers, all under the patronage of FIFA, a sort of diabolical machine that has become the equal of a State.
I would be surprised if I wasted my time watching just one match. What’s the point? I would have the impression of attending a live vivisection session, a methodical unraveling of the very essence of football. Football has now become hostage to advertising, it is no longer there to delight the crowds but to serve them. When we also know that the price of tickets is so high that only the wealthiest will be able to attend the meetings, we feel like vomiting in front of all this display of wealth.
However, I have no doubt of its success. The stadiums will be beautiful, the teams ready, the audiences there. At a time when individuals find themselves dying of loneliness, sport, and primarily football, becomes a unique opportunity to share together, if not a passion, at least a common interest, this more or less good-natured patriotism which has always been the prerogative of major sporting competitions.
For weeks and weeks, you will have to live with it. Even more so in France, where the national team has a good chance of standing out. So the flags in the windows, the players on the front pages of the newspapers, the “ohs” and “ahs” of the commentators, the crowded café terraces on match nights, the inevitable excesses, the sessions of collective euphoria, the rediscovered honor, the nationalism in small doses since, during a World Cup, we will taste the intoxication of power, this elixir stronger than all contemporary melancholy.
It will be without me. But good matches nonetheless!
