World Cup: Is suffering a substitute for style?

DOHA – The key word of this World Cup is not one that Fifa would be especially happy to plaster on its marketing materials. It has become the tournament’s leitmotif, the focus of countless news conferences. It has been cast as the sport’s ultimate virtue.

We have been told, again and again over the past month, that there is one trait that a player must possess, that a team must display, the ability – as almost everyone involved in the tournament has said – to suffer.

It has been used as a warning. Luka Modric, the veteran Croatia midfielder, declared in the round of 16 that his team were “used to suffering, and if we have to suffer, we will”.

It has been used as a boast. “We have an excellent technical staff, we know how to suffer,” Croatia coach Zlatko Dalic, said.

Some teams see it as part of their identity. “We are a team that knows how to suffer,” French defender Jules Kounde said after their semi-final win over Morocco, and some see it as an option of last resort.

“We know how to suffer when it is necessary,” as Lionel Messi put it after Argentina’s semi-final victory over Croatia.

Very occasionally, a stray voice arises, wondering if it is all such a good idea. “We know how to suffer,” Messi’s teammate Nicolas Tagliafico said. “But we must try to suffer less.”

If the word sounds just a touch discordant in English – this expression has entered the sport’s lingua franca from the Spanish verb sufrir and would be better translated as “endure” – it fairly neatly encapsulates the nature of the football over the past month.

There has been no shortage of tense, compelling games in Qatar. But tense, compelling games are, after all, the World Cup’s calling card. Its rarity and unforgiving format mean this is essentially what it is designed to produce.

In truth, though, this World Cup has leant more towards the slow burn than the thrilling.

There have been few games that shone for their entertainment rather than the significance of their consequences – in the knockout rounds, perhaps only the choleric quarter-final between the Netherlands and Argentina; in the group phase, no more than a handful, generally involving one of Serbia, Ghana and Japan.

Quite why that should be is, strictly speaking, the preserve of Fifa’s grandly titled Technical Study Group, a brains trust of retired players and coaches – led by Jurgen Klinsmann and Arsene Wenger – that is supposed to offer precious insight into what the World Cup can teach us about the state of international football.

Its findings thus far, though, have been oddly untechnical. Its first update, after the group phase, started with Wenger discussing the traffic in Doha and how many games he has been able to attend each day.

Its second, before the semi-finals, offered insights no more sophisticated than Croatia’s “stamina and work rate” being important and “Asian players are less intimidated” than they (apparently) used to be.

That feels like a wasted opportunity. Once every four years, the World Cup offers an imperfect but unrivalled insight into football’s direction across the globe, and the evidence proffered by this edition has been, if not conclusive, then certainly credible.

Football is rapidly, irrefutably homogenising. Regional and national traditions are being eroded. Longstanding differences in style and interpretation are disappearing. Of the teams at this tournament, only Spain and to an extent Germany, had what could be labelled a distinctive, identifiable “style”, and neither fared especially well.

Wenger and his technical study group have touched on this only briefly. One of the reasons that most group-phase games had started so cautiously, he said, was that it was evident “the teams all know each other well”, testament to the “deep study” each team had dedicated to their opponents.

Doubtless, the professionalisation of opposition research has been a factor, but it is not the only one. Louis van Gaal, the outgoing Dutch coach, noted that “results are very tight, even between big teams and smaller countries, because compact defending is easier than attacking”.

Those teams, in other words, who did not have the depth of talent or resources of France, Brazil, Spain and England found that they could make up for that shortfall with tactical acumen, discipline and the all-important suffering.

Rather than expressing their own national style, many teams have played a baseline version of football’s increasingly default approach.

The result, largely, has been parity. Though there was a smattering of rollovers in the early days – England v Iran, Spain v Costa Rica – even apparent mismatches have been settled by fine margins.

“It is a lot harder to play attacking football than it was 20 years ago,” van Gaal said. “I received a lot of criticism when I came up with a more defensive system, at the 2014 World Cup, but now half the world plays like that. Soccer has evolved towards it.”

There are differences of interpretation and implementation, of course, separating the way that Morocco and Japan and Croatia play, but the basic principles remain the same. That is true even of the finalists, Argentina and France, countries that boast some of the richest arrays of individual talent.

“I wouldn’t dare to say which team has been the best,” Spanish coach Juanma Lillo wrote in a column for The Athletic, on tactical development over the past 20 years. “Because they are all so similar and the players are so identical.

“Everything is globalised now. At club level, if you go to a training session in Norway and one in South Africa, they’ll be the same.

“It’s crept into the World Cup. If you got the Cameroon and Brazil players to change shirts at half-time you wouldn’t even realise.”

Lillo rues the absence of true individualists in the sport, as talent is surrendered to the service of a system.

Whether it is a positive or a negative, it has given this World Cup its identity, which has provided not only its defining trait, but its key word.

After all, when all of the players have the same coaching, when almost all teams have access to the same information and ideas, when talent is no longer the great dividing line, what matters more than anything else is which side, which players, have the greatest ability to suffer. NYTIMES