The last time France won the World Cup, in 1998, they brought cross-culturalism – which in football is an augmented reality – into the media spotlight. Winners again, they were one of three semi-finalists who had significant numbers of players with a mixed heritage, sons or grandsons of immigrants. That mix, that blend, is to football what poverty always was too: proof that the game itself discriminates according to a player’s worth on the pitch, not his social status – a true meritocracy. The fact that the marginalised continue to find paradise in a game that’s ever more conditioned by money is not insignificant.
It is a relative conquest because the perspectives on this phenomenon continue to carry the same prejudices as ever. When Brazil failed to win the tournament in 1950, the narrative that won out was one that attributed that to the supposed impurity of their race. Eight years later, Didi, Garrincha, Pelé and company brilliantly won the World Cup in Sweden – in what was, you can only assume, proof that race could be purified in record time. Nowadays, depending on the score and depending too on who is talking, much the same things are said (or thought).
There is another, more telling message contained within the current sociological and cultural composition of national teams. This is a more purely footballing one. There was a time in which the way football was played was similar in some way to the place it was played. The theory held that we played as we were, and it found literary expression in Pasolini to whom we turned to hear him talk about the poetic football of South America and the prosaic football of Europe.
As globalisation imposes itself, in football too people and ideas are ever more mixed, identities fragmented. And yet within that, identities survive and shift: to take just the famous example, no one can deny that Pep Guardiola’s teams play in verse, Diego Simeone’s in prose. I have no objection to that. I seek only to underline that football continues to reflect social pulses, heartbeats: there are tendencies here too. There are changes and challenges to ideas and ideals. Nothing is inalterable.
Let’s take that idea on to the field of play, because there the pitches of Russia showed no respect for even the slightest glimmer of greatness, whether that’s national teams, players or dominant ideas. It didn’t care that Germany, Argentina, Portugal and Spain departed to the thunderous noise that surprises always provoke, opening up furious, bloody debate upon their return home.
On the same day, the two Napoleonic leaders of world football were eliminated at a stroke – goodbye to Messi and Ronaldo – and the World Cup didn’t care that their departure left a sense of emptiness among football lovers. The greatest act of disdain for the established order, though, was the merciless way Russia 2018 swept aside Germany and Spain, the previous two winners of the World Cup and also, more even than that, representatives of a way of being, an identity, that revolutionised the game, imposing an abusive domination of the ball over the last decade.