FROM THE ARCHIVES: Champions of the World
Looking back at the World Cup Final, the suffering, and the dream I can't wake up from.
This Sunday, Argentina plays possibly its last important tournament final with Lionel Messi and Angel Di María, two players I’ve been watching since I was a 16-year-old sitting at Nono’s kitchen table with bad hair and a head full of dreams that haven’t yet come to fruition. Except, of course, for one.
This Copa América, which has been broadcast (badly) on American TV and played on fields of worse quality than the dirt-riddled ones I grew up playing on in Bayonne, has been surreal. Last month, I wrote about watching the opener in Atlanta with my family. And even though I’ve watched every game, it feels like time hasn’t moved.
Nevertheless, at 8 p.m. on The Lord’s Day, La Selección will line up against a resurgent and dangerous Colombia. I’ll live it the same way I do every important soccer game: muttering under my breath, taking large sips of fernet mixed with Coke Zero, and with my beloved Haley keeping a close eye in case I collapse from a heart attack or cerebral hemorrhage.
For that reason, I’m sharing the book version of the story I wrote the day after Argentina won the 2022 World Cup. Enjoy.
The most incredible thing about miracles is that they happen.
—GK Chesterton
The pits of my eyes were dry by the time Kylian Mbappé stepped up to take the first kick of the penalty shootout for France. It was 12:49 p.m. The rivers I had cried for 120 minutes had dried like creek beds on my cheeks, and my body shook uncontrollably as if I were freezing to death inside an Alaskan school bus. Except I was in the basement, alone, my phone set to Do Not Disturb. The only light emanated from a small lamp in the corner furthest from the television. I was watching the World Cup final—the most important event in the world—inside a cave.
“If you start feeling your arm tingle, call 911,” Haley texted when I told her that I thought I was going to collapse. She had grown used to this. Since September, she had seen me cry at least 16,327 times. In the middle of the day, she would walk into the kitchen, where I’d be weeping in the corner. Instinctively, she would hug me from behind, seeping her warmth and hopefulness into my skin. But it wouldn’t last long. Hours later, I’d wake up gasping for air, my body covered in sweat. “Darling, the children are asleep. Your parents are alive. We’ll be in the new house before Christmas. Everything is OK,” she’d reassure me, caressing my cheek. And I’d moan, “It’s not that. It’s Messi. I’m never going to see him play for Argentina again.”
The morning of the World Cup final, Haley left the house early with the children. After 29 days of watching me suffer through Argentina’s unexpected loss to Saudi Arabia, excruciating wins against Mexico and Australia, and an agonizing penalty kick shootout against the Netherlands, she understood the stakes and decided it would be better for them to watch at her mom’s house. For nearly a month, I had skipped the gym, canceled plans with people I care about, left home early and worked late, had little fun, and endured inextinguishable anguish for 90 minutes at a time. After Argentina’s opening loss, which Haley and I watched together on the couch as the children slept, we made a pact. For the do-or-die matchup against Mexico, I would need to be alone. She’d leave the house for 90 minutes. And if it proved a winning formula, we would not take the risk of breaking the practice until after the final whistle on December 18. I could not be the reason for Argentina’s elimination.
It may not make sense to you unless you’re Argentinian, have watched soccer games in Latin America, or bear the curse of having a superstitious sports fanatic in your life. Every Argentinian understands that when your team wins, you must watch the next game in exactly the same way. You must wear exactly the same thing, sit or stand in exactly the same spot, drink exactly the same drink, scratch exactly the same spot on your inner left thigh at the 53-minute mark—or risk unleashing God’s fury. This is cábala, a tradition that stretches back to the first time a person on Argentine soil kicked a soccer ball that would’ve struck the post if not for a lucky pair of unwashed underwear.
The week of the semifinal against Croatia, Haley and I had taken a tremendous risk: we traveled with the children to New Jersey to visit my parents and grandparents. I had planned to watch the game alone in my parents’ apartment, wearing my Argentina jersey and scarf, a flag draped over my legs—just as I had watched the wins against Mexico, Poland, Australia, and the Netherlands. But then I thought of Nono watching alone downstairs. Before moving away in 2011, I had spent a decade watching CONMEBOL qualifiers, World Cups, Champions Leagues and La Liga, Serie A, and Premier League matches with Nono at his kitchen table. On Saturdays, we would drink fernet and sweet vermouth, eat plates of mortadella, capicola, and other cold cuts we’d picked up from the Egyptian-owned Italian deli four blocks away, and watch matches from 7:30 a.m. till 6 p.m. like it was our full-time job. My friends didn’t understand it. My girlfriends didn’t understand it. But this was our tradition.
A month or two before every World Cup since 2010, Nono would say, “I don’t know that this one’s going to be any good—if I even live to see it.” He turned 85 two weeks before the final in Qatar, so this World Cup reasonably could’ve been his last. Instinct told me that he’d want his eldest grandson beside him for the semifinal, despite the risk of breaking cábala. Haley, who refused to do as the other women in my family and clutch rosary beads or light candles to the saints and sit in darkness away from the TV, turned the game on in my parents’ apartment upstairs. The kids napped, ignorant of their father’s anguish. And after 90 heart-pounding minutes, Nono and I exhaled. Argentina won 3–0.
The night before the final, I fell asleep to a YouTube video of Messi playing soccer as a 12-year-old in Rosario. Hours later, I woke up sweating and nervous, with a strange feeling in my stomach. Haley and the children had smiles on their faces, the day ahead as bright as any other. I started to feel that my insistence on the cábala that would separate us for the next two hours was ridiculous. Maybe I could go and watch the final with Haley and her family, I thought. That way, if we won, we could all celebrate together.
That’s what a proper husband and father would do. They wouldn’t abandon their family to walk into the lion’s den alone. I was still thinking I should go with them as I wrapped an Argentinean flag around my shoulders and watched Haley dress the kids in their matching blue-and-white jerseys and tracksuits. But my wife, as she usually does, knew better. She encouraged me to stay strong. I watched them leave through the basement door a few minutes before 10 a.m. The moment to suffer had come.
Argentina scored in the 23rd minute from the penalty spot. And by the time the ball reset after Ángel Di María scored their second goal in the 36th minute, the burden had started to lighten from my shoulders. A new, totally foreign sensation began to take shape in my body. I think it was . . . happiness. From the opening whistle of every game after the loss to Saudi Arabia, I felt that I was being crushed under the weight of a container ship. Even when Argentina scored a goal, I’d celebrate and then go right back to biting my fingernails and tapping nervously as the dog eyeballed me in bewilderment. During halftime against France, with Argentina up 2–nil, Haley texted to ask how I was doing. I replied, “If this result holds, I’ll go there for the ceremony at the end. I want to be with you and the children.”
I was still barefoot and in sweatpants at that point. So as the TV commentators heaped praise on Argentina and declared that once the trophy was in his hands Lionel Messi would be the undisputed greatest player in history, I grabbed the keys to the Honda Civic, pulled out a pair of jeans, socks, and sneakers, and placed them in a pile beside me on the couch. That way, I was ready to run out the garage door 45 minutes and six seconds later, once the final whistle blew.
Cábalas are nonsense when you’re winning. They open your eyes to how childish and insignificant you are—a grown man practicing witchcraft in the suburbs of East Tennessee. A day before the final, the Argentine-American journalist Lucía Benavides—also following cábala, like tens of millions of Argentines worldwide—tweeted the link to a New York Times story about the army of witches casting spells to protect Messi and the national team from their many enemies. Brian, you’re too smart to believe this, I told myself while reading it. You have a master’s degree and a subscription to The New Yorker. Nothing bad is going to happen because you put your socks on.
For years, my mom cast spells to rid me of indigestion and the evil eye. I manipulated her superstition to get picked up early from school when the nurse could detect nothing physically wrong with me and I wanted to get out of tests I hadn’t studied for. Superstition is for the poor and uneducated, I declared. And yet, in the 81st minute, moments after Mbappé scored a supernatural goal to level the score at 2–2, I tossed my car keys across the room, flung my clothes off the couch, and dropped to my knees, pleading with God to forgive me for ignorantly believing that I couldn’t affect the outcome of the World Cup final.
And He heard me.
With the weight of 100 million Argentinians and Bangladeshis on his shoulders and an entire universe propelling him to the one trophy that had evaded him over his 19-year professional career, Messi was finally a World Cup champion. The tears that had dried as Mbappé stepped up to take his penalty erupted like lava, burning my eyelids and turning my cheeks red. After Haley FaceTimed me with Alba and Enzo, the first call I made was to Nono. He didn’t answer, so I called my mom, begging her to give him the phone. When she got to him, Nono was in the backyard—he had walked away from the game at 2–2, fearing he would have a heart attack. I told him over tears, “Nono, lo hicimos. Argentina ganó el Mundial. Somos campeones del mundo. No lo puedo creer. SOMOS CAMPEONES DEL MUNDO.” And he and I cried together, 700 miles apart but closer than we’d ever been before.
I’ve repeated those same words—We are world champions—10,000 times since December 18, 2022.
The 2022 World Cup final in Qatar is hailed as the best, or the most dramatic, in history. It was a clash of titans: Messi vs. Mbappé, two of the greatest soccer players alive today, swinging back and forth like prizefighters. This was precisely what Qatar paid an eye-popping $220 billion for—at least $200 billion more than the next most expensive World Cup, Brazil’s in 2014. Beyond anything that happened on the field, the final was a spectacle, with elaborate processions and ceremonies, songs and costumes, politicians and celebrities that the cameras scanned for unendingly, just as they do during the Super Bowl and Wimbledon and every important final of every important sport in the world.
In the midst of my elation, I couldn’t help thinking about those things: Who was this event really for? Who does this game really belong to? I thought of the thousands of Argentinians who sold their cars and emptied their life savings to travel to Qatar and somehow, through witchcraft or bribery, got tickets to the game. Nosebleed seats at the Super Bowl start at $6,800. Seats behind the goal for the final in Qatar were $33,000. You and I are not supposed to be inside these modern coliseums. They’re a billionaire’s playground. It’s baffling that they even let in the 22 players who over 120 minutes emptied themselves and sacrificed their bodies—as if the spectacle were forced to make way for the inconvenience of the game itself.
And yet, despite everything that I know about the Qatari World Cup—the bloodshed, the graves dug by orphaned sons who gave their fathers so wealthier men could make their statement to the world—I am still overcome with emotion. Every time I recall Gonzalo Montiel scoring the winning penalty kick and Messi finally kissing the golden trophy, I dissolve into a sea of tears. When Enzo woke us up crying for milk at 2:30 that night, Haley told me I turned to her, my eyes still shut, and whispered softly in her ear, “Campeones del mundo.”
I cannot unlink the joy I feel today from the sorrow of not being in Argentina, with my aunts and uncles, cousins and friends, to make memories of the celebration. I watched the videos of Buenos Aires and Rosario they sent me over WhatsApp; the Instagram algorithm, picking up on my obsession, feeds me new videos, even months later, every time I log on. I view them enviously. Because I know this joy will not last forever. The morning after the final, Juan, a friend from Entre Rios, reminded me in a WhatsApp message that the men’s World Cup has been played 22 times, nearly every four years since 1930. Argentina has made six finals, including the first and the most recent, and won three times. It’s very possible that, like Nono, I will not see the country of my ancestors triumphant ever again. This may have been the last wild celebration from the podium of illusion—the last footballing dream turned to reality before I die. I’ve prayed that God would send me bursting forward in time so I could immediately begin to feel nostalgia for that moment. I long to tell my grandchildren the story of the 2022 World Cup final, just as Nono told me of the finals of 1950,1962, 1978, and 1986.
I imagine they will gather around my feet before the 2058 tournament, held on a lunar colony or in North Korea, and beg me to tell them about Messi, Di María, and the other gray-haired men with bushy mustaches they’ve seen reminiscing about that December in Qatar when they were immortal. And this is what I’ll say:
I watched alone from the basement. After 90 minutes, I was on death’s doorstep, moments from leaving your grandmother a widow and your parents orphans. But by a miracle, God saved me. I drove to be with them, as fast as I could. I hugged them tight and cried with them in my arms. Because there were no other Argentinians around, instead of recounting the final over mate or drinking bottles of Malbec late into the night, we went to eat at a Mexican restaurant on Clinton Highway where the owner gifted us raspberry tequila shots to toast the victory. But I didn’t care. Because my suffering had finally been rewarded. My nightmare was over. I saw Argentina champion of the world. And I will never forget it.
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