A friend in Ireland who does not usually watch football messaged a group chat on Wednesday evening during the Brazil-Scotland match: “Is there a particular reason why there is such a long delay between a goal and then the TV replaying that goal. The American TV producers, if it is their fault, seem much more interested in crowd reactions than goals.”
It struck me because I’d had a similar thought as I sat in the Hard Rock stadium in Miami, waiting for a replay of the same moment that had apparently prompted his message: the Matheus Cunha goal that made it 3-0 to Brazil. It had been a fast and fluent Brazilian attack that had surprised and confused me as much as it did the Scotland defence, and I was eager for the replays so I could pin down exactly how they had done it.
In my case, though, the thought went no further than a vague sense of frustration with how long the TV people were taking to show me a replay – “come on, get on with it ...” – as though it reflected incompetence on their part. To my friend, not blinkered by a narrow focus on football, it was immediately clear that the long delay was a deliberate decision, reflecting a conscious preference.
The TV producers know what they are doing. Their job is not to show football, it’s to transmit images of emotion. The mistake I’ve been making is to think the World Cup is about football, when the game is just a platform for what it’s really about, which is feeling.
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Looking at the group stage draw before the tournament, I was struck by how uninteresting many of the matches in this 48-team monster seemed to be. Egypt v New Zealand in Vancouver, seriously?
I ended up watching Egypt v New Zealand among a crowd of a couple of hundred Egyptians packed into the Eastern Nights cafe on Steinway Street in the New York borough of Queens, a street you could walk down and easily imagine yourself in Cairo or Algiers.
As a game of football it was indeed truly dreadful, probably one of the worst ever seen in the World Cup. As a night out, it was unforgettable – living the struggle with the Egyptians as they went from 1-0 down to 3-1 up for their first-ever World Cup win. At the end the street flooded with crowds waving flags and flares and leaping on to the roofs of cars.
It was a reminder that the appeal of the World Cup has about as much to do with the technical standard of football as the appeal of a fight in the playground has to do with the technical standard of boxing. There is nothing as magnetic as the direction of other people’s attention. If others are watching it must be worth watching; when you see something matters to others it starts to matter to you.
[ World Cup standings: Who has qualified, who needs what, and the third-place raceOpens in new window ]
It’s not a simple question of national feeling because the feelings are contagious across national borders. Take Ecuador v Germany, another match that on the face of it did not seem hugely exciting. Germany had already topped the group, Ecuador hadn’t scored in two games. Some experienced colleagues cancelled their media tickets, judging that there would be more valuable ways to spend their time.
I ended up getting more messages from people back in Ireland about Ecuador v Germany – or specifically about the scenes at the end of Ecuador v Germany – than about any other match so far. The sight of the Iggy Pop-looking Ecuador manager climbing over the fence to celebrate with his family, as what looked like about 40,000 Ecuadorean fans cried with happiness in the New Jersey stands, had captivated people at home who didn’t care about Ecuador in the least.
The TV producers have been encouraging everything along by employing the century-old advertising technique of the celebrity endorsement on a scale never before seen in this sport. Just at USA-Turkey on Thursday night, they picked out Brad Pitt, Usha Vance, Leonardo DiCaprio, Paris Hilton, Will Ferrell, James Cameron, Jessica Alba, Scottie Pippen, Dwyane Wade and many others whom I didn’t recognise but who are apparently god-tier famous to Americans.
Such old techniques are multiplied by the new architecture of the ubiquitous media. The crowd reaction shots that fascinate the American TV cameras largely consist of people holding up their phones to capture the moment with cameras of their own. They post their videos to socials and friend groups, transmitting the feeling to millions more around the world, reflecting and proliferating and amplifying the moment down the networks so that in the end nobody on the internet remains untouched.
[ Brazil happy to live out Neymar fantasies as Scotland endure defensive nightmaresOpens in new window ]
Another unusual – and for Fifa extraordinarily welcome – feature of this World Cup has been the outstanding performances of the poster boys: Messi, Mbappé, Haaland, Vini Jr, Harry Kane, and finally even the 41-year-old Cristiano Ronaldo. For once, the players the pre-tournament hype and advertising has billed as the biggest stars really have been the biggest stars.
In an age of hyper-celebrity, this matters to people more and more. Anyone who has been to a game featuring Messi or Ronaldo in the last few years knows how the crowd now focuses almost entirely on them. When Mohamed Salah scored the 2-1 against New Zealand, the celebrations of the Egyptians in Eastern Nights were palpably more joyous than for the goals scored by their normal players. Somehow everything feels better when the heroes do it.
The World Cup’s conscious evolution into a frenzy of mass emotion and hero-worship means the tournament now feels more wrestling than boxing, more spectacle than sport. And accompanying this evolution is an ever-more casual disregard for the integrity of the sport, which is after all just the excuse for the stuff people really care about.
The clearest distortion is the quarterly ad breaks, a genuinely radical change to the basic structure of the game, introduced suddenly by Fifa with blithe and shocking arrogance. And the world football audience is also gradually being conditioned to the concept of plot armour. Ronaldo’s three-game suspension? Expunged. Messi’s studding of an Algerian calf in Kansas? Ignored. Ezri Konsa’s wild lunge at Prince Adu? Come now, surely nobody wants us re-refereeing the games (and possibly wiping out that tasty-looking England-Brazil quarter-final in Miami)? If the rules threaten the spectacle, it seems they can be bent.
And yet when the spectacle surges along like this, it’s hard to find anybody who cares. It was plainly ludicrous when Gianni Infantino billed the 2026 World Cup as “the greatest event in human history”, but it already seems likely to end up the most-watched. When you live in a world mostly made out of screens, maybe that amounts to much the same thing?
Source: The Irish Times
