Thursday Cannon Fodder: World Cup

The World Cup starts a week from today, but you could be forgiven if you hadn’t realized. Maybe it’s just my online circles, filters, and algorithms, but it feels as if this has been the least-hyped World Cup of my lifetime. I’ve got some theories as to why that may be.

The expanded format has diminished the jeopardy of the group stage. All the good teams should go through to the knockouts. In the past, we knew there would be top teams with well-known stars who crash out early. It’ll happen again this year — that’s just the nature of tournament football — but the watered-down feeling is helping to kill the excitement.

The flip side of that is all the countries making their first World Cup / getting back to the tournament after decades out of it. The excitement and joy experienced by those teams and countries has been lovely and uplifting. That’s a decent silver lining on what was, overall, a misguided and poor change to the format.

For those of us who follow the club game closely, I think there is some degree of football fatigue. The gap between the Champions League Final and the start of the World Cup is less than two weeks. There are always games. And they’re better games, too. International football has it’s own appeal (that I enjoy, don’t get me wrong) but if you want best-on-best, you’ll find that at the club level.

This perception — that there doesn’t feel like there is the right amount of hype around the World Cup — is absolutely being effected by my personal feelings about this particular version of the competition. It is by far the least excited I’ve been about one. That this World Cup is coming on the heels of Qatar 2022, a similarly problematic host country, certainly isn’t helping things.

It’s a shame. I have fond memories of attending the Belgium-Saudi Arabia match at RFK Stadium in D.C. in ‘94 as a child. It was the coolest thing for a young soccer player and fan. I was incredibly excited when it was announced that we’d be getting another World Cup here in the U.S.

D.C. wasn’t named as a host city, partly our fault for not having an appropriate venue. That was a bummer, but I was alright with the idea heading to Philly or NYC. Then the prices came out. The unholy alliance between Gianni Infantino and Donald Trump hasn’t helped things, either. Again and again, FIFA make decisions that seem to prioritize profits over people. Most recently, they decided that people would not be permitted to bring refillable plastic water bottles into match venues . During the American summer. And also screw you, environment.

Without getting to the U.S. politics side of things, it seems bad that a World Cup team ( Iran ) still don’t have visas to enter the United States to play matches here. They’re scheduled to play their first match on June 15th. That’s the sort of thing we’re dealing with and it’s really putting a damper on my personal excitement.