#8 The Beautiful Game, as Told by a Noob
I now get football. But also, I do not get football.
“So what’s your team?”, Ena asked me. She knew I wasn’t a football fan, so I readily admitted that I didn’t know. Argentina? Because you know, Messi, GOAT, the bandwagon. But I told her there was this cute French guy I’d met on vacation a few years ago, which was clearly enough reason for me to also root for France. (I wore a denim-colored top so I could swing both ways.)
I wasn’t completely in the dark about football when I walked into the hotel room, bearing lemons and a pack of salt to pair with the tequila they had—a token for letting me crash their World Cup final watch party.
For one, I knew France was the standing World Cup champion because of my job in 2018. I was working for an international brand then, handling the HORECA (Hotels, Restaurants, and Cafes) space. A month shy of the start of the season, bar owners approached us for support for game viewings: matching personalized jerseys for the whole staff, hand-held country flags for every match, mini football balls as table centerpieces. One hotel even wanted us to mount a small indoor football pitch! In my head, I was like, really? All this work for a league?
Throw it back eight years earlier when I first heard of this football player called Lionel Messi. My ex was obsessed with him. Striped blue and white jersey, posters, the whole shebang. I vaguely remember her justifying that Messi was better than this other guy Ronaldo. I couldn’t relate, nor did it register that her hype was due to the World Cup season that year.
So I knew of FIFA, Argentina, and Messi. While waiting for the final to start, Ena filled me in on other key information. Kylian Mbappé, she said, is the star player of France. A lot younger than Messi, predicted to be one of the GOATs of the sport.
“So they’re like the Verstappen and Hamilton of football!”, I answered.
(I can feel certain Formula 1 fans mentally burning me at the stake.)
When she wasn’t parsing the game, cursing, and reacting like any true football fan would, Ena answered my football 101 questions: A match runs for 90 minutes without the clock ever stopping. Extra time is added to make up for the time delays that took place. A yellow card is a warning card; get two and you’re out. A substituted player cannot come back. A hat trick is when a player scores three goals in a single match (With Argentina enjoying a two-point lead early in the game, Ena warned us, “Mbappé is going to do a hat trick, for sure”). Over time is another thirty minutes. And if by the end the teams are still tied, then we go to a best-of-five penalty shoot-out, which is exactly what happened.
And, wow, that Argentina-France showdown wasn’t just the greatest World Cup final of all time, it was one of the most thrilling spectacles in sports, period, and a fairy-tale ending for the game’s best-ever player.
Obviously, I couldn’t have written that previous paragraph. Brian Phillips did—a veteran football writer who debriefed the final match less than ten minutes after its conclusion. “My hands are still shaking,” he wrote. “There are tears in my eyes.”
His piece was the first thing I read the morning after the game. I googled “World Cup Final” hoping to have a better grasp of what transpired, which led me down a rabbit hole of football stuff, and I’m happy to report that I’m now… less of a noob.
“Why does the World Cup only happen every four years?” was one question I had in mind. Unsurprisingly, Google said it’s mainly the logistics. As the biggest sporting event ever, the host country needs time to prepare and ensure they can accommodate the influx of fans. Another reason is the qualifying process that involves virtually every country in the world. Lastly, prestigious as this league might be, it’s not the only thing on a football player’s calendar. They have to make way for other international cups, too, and, you know, the Olympics.
It’s on that note that makes this a critical moment for Messi. It turns out he’s won everything else there is to win in the football universe—except for the World Cup. This was Thanos brandishing his gauntlet, shiny, mighty, but glaringly missing one last Infinity Stone.
But the thing I found out about him which makes this the profound “fairy-tale ending” Philipps described, was that, per the title of a New York Times piece, this “World Cup Final Caps a Complex Saga Between Messi and Argentina.” A la the prodigal son, he left Argentina, played (and won a lot) for Barcelona, then came back to his national team (and did not win as much). But the more interesting layer here was cultural: Over the years, Messi had been pitted against his Argentine predecessor Diego Maradona not only on skill or achievement—but for personality. The NYT piece explains:
Maradona, who led Argentina to the 1986 World Cup title, was outspoken, raw and freewheeling — characteristics that Argentines saw in themselves. Messi, by contrast, is polite, polished and guarded, and some Argentines have struggled to identify with that.
So Messi’s trash talk in Argentina’s quarterfinal match against the Netherlands, when he was filmed telling an opposing player, “What are you looking at, dummy?” has become a moment of national celebration in Argentina.
In the middle of the final, Ena’s colleague shared something she heard about goalkeeping: As a goalkeeper, you can do your best to read your opponent’s free-kick, but in the split second he makes that kick, it’s nearly impossible to know which side the ball is going. So, basically, you just pick left or right, dive, and pray to all the angels and saints that the stars will align. I didn’t know if that was true, but Philipps seems to support this. Explaining Messi’s milder penalty kick, he wrote: “Messi, older and more cunning, checked his run before shooting, then gently rolled the ball into the net after seeing which way French goalkeeper Hugo Lloris would dive.”
That’s some crazy stuff. And I’ve only scratched the surface!
But here’s the thing: everything I’ve discovered about the game so far didn’t stun me half as much as, well, just watching it. Sitting on the hotel room carpet, merely three feet from the 55-inch TV streaming the France-Argentina final, all I could think of was: How the hell is it humanly possible to play football?
Let me get this straight. You, a professional soccer player, have to run around a 120-yard long and 75-yard wide field (for us basketball-crazed Filipinos, that’s the size of eleven basketball courts) possibly for a full ninety minutes while maneuvering a ball with your feet. You think about your play, keep an eye for an opening, and kick the ball to your teammate who’s also running around. You can’t trip. I mean, you can, but you gotta roll around, recover—alive and literally kicking.
Look, I know people train for this stuff, but I just couldn’t wrap my head around it! I just can’t. My eyes were glued to the player in possession, and his footwork felt like a mind trick! Every steal, pass, and assist, magic! Each clean fall and contact, a miracle!
Here’s another early memory of football: In a High School English class, my friend Maia wrote an essay about her love for the sport and read it in front of everyone. I can’t remember the specifics, but I do remember how moved I was at the end when she concluded, with such demure authority, “And that is why it’s called The Beautiful Game.”
As per Google, there’s no set universal explanation of why football was given that nickname. There’s the sheer unpredictability of the game, the way it brings people together, how enamored its fans are, and the show of pure guts, skill, and passion, that seems to border on artistry.
But casting my mind back to all the times I crossed paths with the sport, John Green’s words about beauty come to mind. Beauty, he reasons, “is as much about how and whether you look as what you see… It is our attentiveness [to wonders] that is in short supply, our ability and willingness to do the work that awe requires.”
Despite my ex’s ardent fandom, I never bothered to know more about the sport. Eight years later, despite activating the World Cup season for my job and catching the France-Croatia final at a company-sponsored viewing in a sports bar in a five-star hotel, I don’t remember tuning into the game. My sister plays football! I was in Paris when the 2016 UEFA Euro Final was played there!
The Beautiful Game, or “O Jogo Bonito” in Portuguese, is a term that’s known to have been popularized by the late Brazilian footballer Pele. In his autobiography, he wrote: “To all those who have contributed to making The Beautiful Game the great game it is.”
After years of missing this, it’s about time I finally witnessed it up close.
Also, hope the New Year has been treating you well!