Wednesday Miscellany (World Cup Edition)

So, the World Cup is steadily moving toward its conclusion. Forty-eight teams (sixteen too many!) have been whittled down to eight. The three host teams are out (in my unbiased opinion, Canada and Mexico both went out with more of a fight than the USA). Donald Trump and FIFA^® president Gianni Infantino have tripped over themselves in a clumsy and pathetic attempt to give the USA a boost (it didn’t work). And the games have been mostly great with plenty of memorable moments. In eleven days, a winner will be crowned and we’ll all move on with summer.

For the first time in almost a month, there is no match today. 

…

[Looks around confusedly]

Maybe I should go outside? I will be sure to take a “hydration break” after 23 minutes.

***

A few days ago, a friend left a link on my previous World Cup themed post. The link was to a poem by a certain Cody Dalton ominously titled “The Beautiful Game as Compliance Ritual.” Gulp. The first few lines were bracing and indicting indeed:

Do not call it sport.
Call it a mood stabilizer for empire.
Eleven men run. A billion eyes obey.
The screen glows. The flag waves. The sponsor smiles.

Trump gets his photo op. FIFA gets its cut. The platforms get the data. The beer companies get the chant. The banks get the logo. The tech firms get the stream. The billionaire class gets the one thing it always needs:

Your attention.

Well thanks for ruining the fun, Cody. 

Also, well, yes. Pretty hard to argue with any of that. FIFA^® and its corporate sponsors know very well that nothing opens wallets more efficiently than tapping into national pride. 

Wait, are we still allowed to have national pride in a globalized world? I guess national pride is bad unless FIFA^® and its sponsors sanction it.

And does identifying with a nation even make sense when we have an Englishmen coaching Swedes and a German coaching Englishmen and an American coaching Canadians and one in four players at this tournament not being born on the soil whose flag they represent?

Gosh, it’s inconvenient to feel conflicted. 

***

Like many, I couldn’t take my eyes off the match between Egypt and Argentina yesterday. It had brilliant goals and near misses and crazy Messi moments and a massive comeback by the reigning world champs and controversy aplenty (some had the audacity to suggest that FIFA^® preferred Argentina to Egypt in the quarterfinals!). 

At any rate, I was struck by a few stray theological comments of two players after the game. First, here is Egyptian forward Mostafa Zico reflecting on a goal that was disallowed when they were up 1-0 and another that was allowed to stand:

“We were hard done by [the referee] today, and everyone saw that. I won’t talk about something like this. We were winning 2-0. After the 2-0 result, everything went against us and worked against us. I don’t even know why the second goal was disallowed, I don’t see any reason for it. But we must look for a solution so that a second goal doesn’t come. He wanted to disallow the third one too, but thank God, God didn’t grant him success.

So, God evidently was ok with the injustice of the first goal being disallowed, but prevented the referee from disallowing a subsequent goal. Oh, and Egypt still lost, so it didn’t really matter anyway. I can’t help but think that if God was in the business of granting success (or not) when it comes to this or that goal, he might have done a bit more to help Egypt win the whole match. Thanking God for letting your second goal stand in a match you lost 3-2 seems… odd.

Maybe even God is no match for Messi…

Speaking of Messi, he, too was offering his thoughts on God after the match. Here he is talking about his feelings after first missing a penalty and then scoring later in the match:

The truth is that it was a moment of release, a release for all of us,” Messi said after the game. “I was feeling intense anger because of the penalty I wasted, and because of the way I took it. I felt like in that important moment, I had let the team down.

“But fortunately, God had something special in store for me once again in the end, and I was able to score the equalizer.

There is a way of speaking, I suppose, that locates the full range of human experience under the providence of God. And in very personal, direct ways. I do not easily or often speak of God in such ways myself (there are times when I think this is a deficiency of mine), but I have no interest in depriving others (even famous footballers!) of the ability to conceive of God as personally invested in their every day lives.

But the idea that God is orchestrating goals and no-goals for the benefit of some athletes and some nations at the expense of others… 

Or indeed that God might not be more concerned about the staggering wealth inequality between FIFA^® and many of the people who participate in the, ahem,  “compliance ritual”… 

It all feels rather… conflicted.