BfB

The World Cup stuttered to an end.

England lost to Argentina in a semi-final which looked good but felt wrong, and the Spanish kept the ball away from France who were not able to mount an effective press against the relatively simple strategy of keeping the ball away from the opposition.

The Spanish went on to win, and in some cover version of 2010, Argentina were equally as baffled by the Iberians keeping the ball as the French, a good decade after Jurgen Klopp et al posted in billboards how to jam the tiki-taka with an aggressive high press.

Presented

Spain scored through Ferran Torres at the opening of extra time and Argentina’s response barely qualified as an effort to get back into the game. There was a lot of talk about how terrible the half-time show was – it was – and how aggressively the South Americans played, but there was something deeper.

In a little over a month the World Cup presented over one hundred games thanks to an expanded format that, but definition, brought more of the world’s lower ranked teams to play against the higher ones.

This added another game to the calendar – against the original plans which would have been sixteen groups of three but ended with twelve of four – but also created a type of attritional game where one of a dozen seeds played only one game which could be described as open. A lot of very good players expended a lot of energy breaking down teams made of a lot of good players.

Energy

Which is not to say that such games expend more or less energy than a more competitive game, but rather than those games were what the World Cup organisers FIFA spend the energy of players on.

The Spanish played team ranked 20th, 58th and 64th, then a knockout against 24th ranked Austria before coming up against a limited Portugal and a Belgian side who like France in the semi-final seemed both mentally and physically out of options when Spain started to play the ball away from them.

One wonders how much more interesting those last three games could have been without the grind of the opening three? Without the drag out of games against Austria which seem to replicate the qualification for this tournament.

When the World Cup narrowed down to eight teams to decide the best in the world, what emerged was a group of teams who seemed fragile, as if when they were called on to give the kind of energy which creates great football matches, they could not do it.

Football, FIFA, and the World Cup produced more games of worse quality.

1988

All of which made for a weak ending to what had been a good tournament, like a world cup with the 1988 European Championships bolted onto the end of it. The final itself was overshadowed by a third placed game in which England stormed to a four goal lead over France, only for the French to come back, and England to take the game 6-4.

It was football played without defending, and Jude Bellingham’s 6-4 goal was a joy, but it rather showed the problem with the other seven games from the quarter-final stages onwards.

The Argentina team took all manner of criticism for turning its back on the Spanish players as they took the trophy from Donald Trump and FIFA President Gianni Infantino, but perhaps we might ask if they were right to do so.

Disapproval

Argentina ground their way to a final, and tried to grind out the win, and while that was not what anyone wanted it was what FIFA created. A hollow spectacle aggrandising the worst kind of people.

Trump and Infantino were booed as they walked out for the over long presentation ceremony which feels like a luxury of the age. We, in football and in society, create systems designed to reward avarice at all levels, and then call foul when that system delivers what seems to be the natural outcomes.

Every Federation President who voted for Infantino because of his promise of Development Funds, every Right Winger who put Trump into power because they imagined Purple Haired Wokes would ruin whatever, we build the system knowing what they output will be.

Better

Who would have suggested that more International football after a season of more Domestic and more Continental football would create the best outcomes? Who would have thought that allowing corruption to run through the World Cup would not result in corrupt decision-making?

We can, and should, let it be known to Trump and Infantino the level of our disapproval, but we should also ask what we’ve done other than jeering to register that disapproval.

We should build better systems.