Before a Ball is Kicked
Signing off with this letter before the start of another month of agony.
In just a few hours, the World Cup will kick off in Qatar.
A lot of people have asked about my feelings before the tournament. Every media outlet has tracked the storylines—some of the best of that coverage, so far, has come from The Athletic, The Guardian, The Ringer, and The New York Times.
There’s the Qatari corruption. FIFA’s decision to award the world’s most important sporting event to a nation that could fit inside Connecticut. One that didn’t play an international soccer game until Brazil had already won three World Cups—but that is the world’s fifth-richest, governed by leaders drunk on oil money and with a penchant for stuffing envelopes full of $100 bills and making back-room deals with guys even Marvel supervillains wouldn’t split an Uber with. The tournament was moved, for the first time ever, from its traditional summer window to winter, interrupting nearly every club season in the world and coming into direct broadcast conflict with college football and basketball, the NFL, NBA, and NHL in the U.S. All so the players wouldn’t die from heat exhaustion1 in stadiums the Qataris, who are so rich they don’t work, shipped in 30,000 poor foreigners to build (many of these laborers have died under horrible working conditions).2
The injuries have stacked up. Just yesterday, Karim Benzema, the reigning World Player of the Year, was forced out of a France squad already without two of its key stars after suffering an injury (Argentina also lost two of its key players, Nico Gonzalez and Joaquin Correa, to injury on Thursday).
There are other storylines as well. Football storylines are what FIFA Clown-in-Chief Gianni Infantino would have you call them. Saturday, in a press conference, Infantino said the kinds of things that make the most recent U.S. presidents sound like NASA scientists. The Italian has spent the entirety of the past week going back and forth between making political statements and telling people to keep politics out of sport: “Forget about the dead Hindus and being beaten with a baton if you hold hands with a dude or wear a spaghetti dress,” he’s pleaded. “Just focus on the game!”
Among the football storylines, you will find the absence of 2006 champions Italy, which failed to qualify after winning the Euros and going undefeated for a world-record 37 games from 2017–2021 (a record Argentina will tie with a win in its tournament opener against Saudi Arabia).3 You will also find questions about whether the golden generation of Belgians, English, Iranians, and Senegalese will make good on their promise (whatever that translates to by tournament’s end). And, more importantly, if Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo will finally lift the trophy in their fifth and last World Cup.
I could address it all. I could lecture about the corruption that bleeds into every professional sport—why, if you want to see the game at its most beautiful, you don’t watch it on TV but play it on patchy grass fields. I could give my take on the betting odds and the predictions made by TV pundits who know no more or less than you or I do, checking squad lists and record books on Wikipedia.
But I don’t have the energy to.
Because a ball hasn’t even been kicked yet in Doha and I’ve already cried at the thought of what might happen. I’ve sat on the couch, imagining Argentina’s elimination, watching compilations of Messi’s dribbles, and sobbed knowing that, whether on December 18 or before, I will not see him again in these colors.
The other morning, I was watching a documentary about the 2014 tournament. It included clips from the 7-1 semi-final loss Brazil endured, at home, to Germany (Argentina would lose, just 1-0, gratefully, to the same foe days later in the final). And you hear David Luiz’s interview after the game. “I just wanted to bring happiness to these people,” he said, his face red and wet with tears that wouldn’t stop pouring out of his eyes. “My people have suffered so much with other things. Sorry to everyone. Sorry to all the Brazilians. I just wanted to make them smile.”
Suffering.
“Suffering is so intertwined with sports that the verb is a favorite in headlines,” said Mexican-American journalist Fidel Martinez this week in his beautiful reflection about the 2006 World Cup for the LA Times. “You don’t just lose, you suffer defeat. And if this is the case, then it stands to reason that no other sport is most responsible for causing suffering in this world than soccer.”
“Why do we, the millions who subject themselves to the whims of a cruel sport, do it? Because we can’t imagine living without it.”
I know I will suffer, and that’s why I’m writing this now and not in a week or in the days before the final.
My nerves will not be able to handle writing before Argentina faces off against Mexico next Saturday at 2 p.m., when their fate may hang in the balance, and even less so in the Round of 16 or any single-elimination game afterward. What so many of us are about to throw ourselves into is not pleasure—we are not blocking out time on our work calendars and setting up get-togethers with friends to celebrate. I don’t imagine enjoying any more than 10 seconds immediately after any goal the Americans or Argentinians score before retreating into my mental bomb shelter, crossing my fingers for it to end and for my team not to be sent home.
This aspect of sport is why I fundamentally cannot understand the people who do things like putting rival players on their Fantasy teams (some go one step further and make them the captains!). I don’t understand anyone who will tweet inside the 90 minutes when their country’s 11 are clenching their teeth and chasing glory. Or who will follow the odds more closely than the ball so they know where to put their money. The only acceptable bet is on your team to win it all, whether you’re Costa Rican or Japanese (two cultures, which I imagine, are too sensible to bet anyway).
As I was writing this, I decided to share with Haley the contact info for my boss, so she can write her on the morning of Argentina’s potential elimination: “Brian will not be able to make it into work for the next week because he has been laying on the bathroom floor eating Tums and murmuring about German strkers while covered in his own mucus.”
And I know it’s crazy. I’m crazy.
Because, for some strange reason, my suffering and preoccupation this time are not at all connected to the U.S. team. If I could, I’d negotiate with the devil or Sepp Blatter to rewind time and have us placed retroactively in Russia rather than here, in a World Cup that also happens to be Messi’s last.
How can I think of Gio Reyna and Timothy Weah and Christian Pulisic (all, believe it or not, still younger than 25) and whether they beat Wales on Monday when I’ve got the retirement of the greatest player since Diego Maradona hanging like a dark cloud that follows me from room to room?
In 2010, I suffered the American second-round defeat to Ghana in a bar in Jersey City. I was furious at the people around me saying, “I don’t know how we can lose to an African team when we’re the best country in the world.” I vowed never to watch an important game in public again. But optimism, no matter how foreign a feeling, tends to trump memory. So I watched in a bar, this time in Bristol, Connecticut, as the U.S. fell to the Belgians in 2014 in a game celebrated more for Tim Howard’s goalkeeping heroics than any chance we had of winning.
Three years later, in 2017, when the U.S. was bounced from qualification for Russia in Trinidad (and before I was married), Haley sent for a wellness check after I shut off all the lights and answered only one phone call, from Mickey, who was suffering that elimination from his apartment in the Dominican Republic. We lamented how American soccer would never be fixed as long as it was the sport of the suburbs, governed by lawyers and coached by either Englishmen or guys who say goaltender and tape NFL games instead of watching the Champions League.
My concern for the Yanks ended after we lifted the Gold Cup against Mexico in August 2021 and will restart only after the World Cup trophy is lifted (and, hopefully, Gregg Berhalter is gone).
I’m back to being the 9-year-old kid crying in front of an old television set in ‘98, refusing to eat barbecue and watch fireworks on July 4 because Argentina had been beaten by the Dutch and Batistuta was going home instead of Dennis Bergkamp. The teenager who ordered qualifiers on PPV, paying $50 to watch Argentina lose 6-1 to Bolivia under Maradona, and did everything I could to fine tune the accent I had learned from my parents and grandparents, despite never spending more than three weeks in Argentina, so no one could question my authenticity.
The other day, Haley sent me a podcast by the Argentine-American journalist Jasmine Garsd called The Last Cup/La Última Copa, brilliantly done (with episodes in English and Spanish). It tells the Messi story from a different perspective: an Argentinian boy whose family left Rosario for Barcelona in the middle of his country’s worst economic collapse, when the banks wouldn’t let people take out their money and the presidency changed hands five times in two weeks. And how, despite leaving in 2001, he always sought to return, even as he lost the subtle elements of his argentinidad, as all immigrants do the more time they spend away from home.
While I was not born nor have ever lived in Rosario—and my cousins called me a yanqui when I visited in 2009—in Bayonne, New Jersey, so many of us identified not as American but by the countries of our ancestors. Some were closer to those cultures than others. My Argentinian bubble featured sándwiches de miga and pastafrola, liters of mate, grandparents who got their U.S. citizenship and still, 30 years later, couldn’t say “Good morning, how’s the weather today?” to the postman in English.
And lots and lots of Argentinian soccer.
When I got to college, I used my scholarship not to study something that could actually secure me a job. I majored in Latin America so I could read books in Spanish and learn to write as well as I had taught myself to hide my American accent. Build my knowledge of the history, literature, and politics of the region so that when I reversed my parent’s immigrant journey and moved back to Argentina I’d fit in seamlessly, dulce de leche inside an alfajor.
While this is my story, I doubt it’s unfamiliar to any of you who live with at least another identity inside you. And it’s why, perhaps, my relationship with Messi has been so deep, on a subconscious level, since I saw him for the first time from a television set in Nono’s kitchen in 2005 when he led Argentina to the Youth World Cup championship in the Netherlands. As Garsd shares in her podcast, Messi had been approached by Spain two years earlier; at 15, he had already been considered, within Barcelona, to be the next big thing to come out of La Masia. But he rejected his adopted nation, choosing to wait for a call from his homeland—the one that he couldn’t predict, over the course of the next two decades, would brand him an imposter, a traitor, an intellectually disabled European.4 In the U-20 World Cup, Messi scored the third goal to eliminate Spain in the quarterfinals. A year later, he played at the senior World Cup, scoring against Serbia in the group, before being left on the bench by Jose Pekerman as Argentina crashed out to the Germans in the quarterfinals, causing fury to explode across the pampas.
Messi has always tried so hard to be Argentinian, leaning in to convince the doubters. He married a girl he knew from the same city. He kept the houses in Rosario and traveled every chance he could to see his family, enduring harassment and the fists of a teenage idiot.
Because Messi wasn’t Maradona and did not lead Argentina to a major trophy until last summer’s Copa America, fans and media were quick to squawk whenever he did a not-Maradona thing—like not winning the World Cup in 2010, 2014, and 2018 or being a loud asshole. Finally, though, he’s been accepted. He’s earned his redemption song. And the first line of another, sung by Argentinian supporters in Qatar this November ties him irrevocably to his homeland.
I started writing this in the morning, while Haley was at the gym with the kids. When she got home, she walked in and I stood in the kitchen, sniffling and looking out the window. “Did something happen?” she asked. “Or is it Messi again?”
A few weeks ago, I woke up choking in my sleep, like I was upside down in water. What startled me awake was seeing Thomas Müller holding another World Cup trophy in his hands as white confetti rained down around him. Beside him were Robert Lewandowski, Kylian Mbappe, Harry Kane, and Luka Modric, also in white German uniforms. They were all laughing and pointing. And I never saw Messi.
That is when I realized I was still in the dream layer. Or a sensory deprivation tank. I woke up sweating and grabbed my phone to check the date, making sure the World Cup hadn’t started yet.
But on Tuesday morning at 5 a.m., it will. Messi, Lautaro Martinez, or Angel Di Maria will kick off in Doha. The clock will start ticking, and only the timekeeper will know when it’s to cease. For my health and sanity, I hope it’s at 11:30 a.m. ET on December 18. If it’s not, it’s unlikely you will hear from me here or on social media. You will not get a response to your text messages or DMs until Christmas. Haley will tell the world that I’m okay. And I hope to God I will be.
For games played in the group stage, temperatures will range between 85 and 94 degrees, with 60% humidity. Yes, this is winter weather in Qatar.
Only 330,000 of Qatar's residents are Qatari citizens. Oil-rich Gulf nations only award citizenship based on very strict requirements, and most foreigners—Indians, Bangladeshis, Filipinos, Kenyans, and Egyptians—do not qualify no matter how many generations of their families have made homes there. Currently, Indians in Qatar more than double what you could call the native Qatari population.
In 2026, the tournament, to be held in North America, will move from 32 to 48 teams to make sure no big boys ever miss out again. That tournament will also feature the first-ever 57-0 scoreline when Brazil faces Oceanian runners-up New Caledonia.
Wright Thompson, back in 2014, wrote a story for ESPN that touched on this. The title: “Here and Gone: The Strange Relationship Between Lionel Messi and His Hometown in Argentina.”