A World Cup pilgrimage coated in uneasiness

What we usually feel about any football World Cup is perfectly represented by a two-word headline in an Italian newspaper in 1950 which described the enchanting powers of the Brazilian team.

“Come resistere?”

“How to resist?”

And so even if you’re not an addict of 3am weekly football and even if your nation’s participation has stalled at the dream phase, the Cup still calls you. It’s a part of our shared heritage, wherein every generation is religiously handed down the same one-name treasures like Pele, Maradona, Milla, Baggio. It’s a single planetary language which is why the 2022 final reached 1.42 billion people. It’s a raucous theatre of paint and passion which included a Brazilian fan interrupting my colleague David Lee’s piece to camera in Russia in 2018 by giving him a gift.

A kiss on the cheek.

How to resist indeed?

And so how bewildering, and sad, that when in passing I ask fans who romance football if they’ll like to go this summer to the Cup in the United States, no lottery-winning grin breaks out but instead they hesitate and talk about “second thoughts” and “probably not”.

This pilgrimage, in modern times, has never felt so jittery. The primary host is warring with one of the participants and tension tugs harder than a rip current. Apprehension lurks like an ICE agent on a street corner and it is unsettling for prospective visitors. Who attends a carnival to be questioned? Less than four weeks remain and concern – over visas, social media posts being scrutinised, fans sent home, racial profiling – is overriding anticipation.

Americans adore sport and play it with rare muscularity but still we wonder if football’s unique music wholly consumes them. This is not the World Series whose baseball contestants are local, this is a shirtless, body-painted United Nations whose variety of languages are not to be suspicious of. Relax, fellows, those excitable dudes are only discussing whether Lionel Messi’s left foot has anything left in it.

FIFA’s high ticket pricing has not helped, turning inclusivity into a mockery. A Cup for everybody is reserving itself for some bodies. In 2018 in Moscow, my journalist friend Jayaditya Gupta met a couple from Kolkata, 85 and 79, who were attending their 10th Cup, who’d been welcomed by the world on their travels, met Pele, saw Maradona dismiss England in 1986 and stayed in both a temple and red-light area in Rio in 2014.

They had a fund at home into which they deposited their savings every month for four years. If they required a withdrawal for a medical emergency, then for a month they’d eat modest fare. This is love and longing, these are the fans a Cup deserves, this is the sort of people who can’t afford it this year.

From its early beginnings the Cup has been familiar with strife and sulks. When Argentinian fans arrived for the final against Uruguay in Montevideo in 1930, they were – wrote Brian Glanville in The Story Of The World Cup – checked for revolvers.

Uruguay pouted and did not attend the 1934 edition. Argentina refused to travel to France in 1938. In 1978, when the military junta ruled hosts Argentina, Amnesty International put out a poster in German which translated as “Football yes, torture no”. Even in 2018 and 2022, there was pre-Cup agitation as Russia and Qatar were lectured on human rights. Yet rarely did visitors feel unwelcome.

But this Cup feels coated in uneasiness and the US urgently requires a bigger welcome mat. Preferably knitted in the colours of all 48 teams. Outsiders, they should know, are the charm of this gathering. After all, at the 1950 Cup, when the US pulled off a historic 1-0 heist against England, the only goalscorer was Joe Gaetjens, not even a US citizen (he declared his intention to be one) but a Haitian accountancy student whose ancestry was reportedly German.

This Cup, only 96 years old, might be a child compared to the Olympics (1896) and golf’s British Open (1860), yet it has rapidly morphed into the planet’s most joyous secular gathering. It draws the world’s largest TV audience, magically allows us to transform into Brazilians or Spaniards for a month, and possesses mysterious powers of unity. Harmony, in these times, deserves every chance it can get.

The Cup is not only entertainment but also distraction from the real world, a half-time between conflict, peace-prize blather and chest-puffing war talk from all sides. At the ancient Olympics, the “ekecheiria” or truce was established to permit the safe passage of athletes and spectators and now, centuries later, humans carry the same hope.

Sport has always been mucky, cynical, political and some athletes don’t even shake hands these days. Yet we have to believe in sport as a balm, a bridge, a thread of connection, a cultural kinship, and this is what makes this Cup precious. But like all things beautiful it requires protecting and as host this is now America’s responsibility. They are the guardians of a Cup which is not about them but the Lions of Mesopotamia from Iraq, the Taegeuk Warriors from South Korea, the Fennec Foxes from Algeria, and their accompanying peaceful followers.

Maybe in the end America will be charming hosts. Maybe though, what will save us, as it always has, is the game itself. Once the whistle blows, it doesn’t matter where the field is, for it will still be 22 men, one ball, and imagination.

How to resist?