Harshwardhan Sir wasn’t a very good coach, but he did advocate a game of more passes than dribbles. His insistence on two-touch movement was near regimental. The ball travels faster than you, he’d tell us. Anyone holding the ball too long had to sit out for a while, or, like I found out, meet his ire. I hope he’s still watching football because I’d like him to feel miserable for his conduct. No, not the cane, but for teaching us the wrong lesson.

***

On the evening of October 26th, a stream of luxury cars will clog up London’s Oxford Street. One by one, they’ll turn left into Argyll St. and stop in front of The London Palladium. From the cars will step out footballers in dazzling tuxedos and dresses, and they’ll walk slowly through a red carpet, stopping briefly for interviews and pictures. Internet influencers will follow the trail, and click a short selfie video from the red carpet to tell “chat” they’re here. Zinedine Zidane and Zlatan Ibrahimovic will be sat in the front rows. Then the doors will shut and a presenter will fashion-walk on stage to commence the 2026 Ballon d’Or ceremony.

The Ballon d’Or is awarded to the best footballer in the world over a twelve-month period, roughly overlapping the European football season. The electorate for the Men’s award is a hundred journalists, one each from the highest-ranked football countries. Voters are given three criteria: first, the player’s individual performances; then what his team accomplished; finally, his class and fair play. We’ll come back to this sequence in a bit.

The award was conceived in 1956, at a time when the French magazines L’Équipe and France Football were trying to dress European football in some pizzazz. Until 1995, only European players playing for European clubs were eligible, which means Pele and Maradona were never considered. Thankfully, the rules changed, and those two were given belated, honorary Ballon d’Ors.

Anyone can win it now. These days, the Ballon d’Or is considered the ultimate individual honour, like a medal on an army jacket. Players who have one are treated as categorically superior to others, permanently, in every argument. Commentators and columnists invoke it every time someone stitches a half-decent season for a top team. And the night is now a jacket and tie event, packaged as football’s answer to The Oscars and the Met Gala in one swoop.

I have two problems with the whole thing. Let’s tackle the smaller one first, the award itself.

So, about that sequence: individual performance, then team achievement, then class and fair play. Cristiano Ronaldo has won five Ballon d’Ors despite being a Grade-A prick to everyone, including and especially his own teammates, for all of his career. There’s also a serious argument (trigger warning) that he shouldn’t be playing competitive football at all. That’s the third category gone. That leaves the first two, and honestly, they are read in order of vibes, like how you’d read the nutritional information on a protein bar.

Lionel Messi won the 2010 Ballon d’Or despite a goalless World Cup, his team getting smacked 4-0 by Germany in the quarter-finals, and Wesley Sneijder winning a treble with Inter Milan and taking Netherlands to the World Cup final. Ronaldo won in 2013 on team achievement—none of his teams achieved anything. Xavi never won it at all, and it took Modric until 2018, when he dragged Croatia to the World Cup final, to finally get his due. You get the drift. The award isn’t rigged, at least I don’t think so. The logic is flawed because you’re asking human beings to forego bias and emotion, and vote, instead, for the coldness of sustained excellence. You’re not awarding the best, as much as the most popular. Which would be fine if you had the, erm, courage to own it up.

I pity the voters this year. For consistency of performance, you can hardly look past the 73 goals scored by Harry Kane. His Bayern Munich won the league title—they always do—but they lost a frantic Champions League semi-final to eventual winners Paris Saint-Germain; and his England surrendered a World Cup semi-final to Argentina. Lamine Yamal, still a teenager, makes you gasp every few minutes. It’s worth staying up through midnight just to watch him at full pelt. He finished the summer with gold medals from the league and World Cup, but his goal-count pales next to Kane’s. Lastly, Erling Haaland and Kylian Mbappe have the goals and the dazzle but no silverware. And, before you ask, no, beauty alone doesn’t stand a chance. We’re not in the 1970s.

So, where do we go? I’d give it to Kane, or perhaps Mbappe, but it would take me hours of shuffling to decide.

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Now, the main issue which keeps me up at night: the Ballon d’Or ceremony is a nothing event. Right now, it’s an amateur fan-art of The Oscars. It tries, with its tuxedos and velvet seats and wood-panelled theatres, to create an operatic atmosphere. Musicians are flown in to supply emotional depth. One year of football is condensed into cut-scene montages, and laid over soaring violins. Hundreds of current and ex-footballers, many of them legends, are gathered under one roof. And then, all we get is a queue of ghostwritten speeches, some hollow speeches by the chiefs, five awards for either gender, and…that’s it.

See, it’s futile arguing about whether it’s right for a team sport to have an entire evening dedicated to cherrypicking individuals. That conversation won’t end in a week. Movies have exactly the same problem. When was the last time a Mission Impossible trailer—or any trailer—flashed the name of its screenwriters? Doesn’t happen, won’t happen, so let’s move forward. Football too, despite being an inarguably collaborative exercise, has always loved the zoom in. For example, the Argentina 1986 team might as well be Coldplay because, barring the nerds, no one knows who played centre-midfield or left-back.

So, now that we’re here, why not have an evening worthy of football in both forms—as produced content and as a sport? Here’s an alternative award list for a Ballon d’Or evening.

We start with football’s suburban universe.

• Best Crowd: Awarded to the club with the best stadium atmosphere. Incentivise percussion, megaphones, flares, and smoke. Some Turkish or South American club will win this, as they should.

  

• Best Chant: The best single chant in all of football. Lawyers might need to be involved to pick up one that’s neither limp nor a contender for hate speech.

• Best Meme: Self-explanatory. Employ the lawyers overtime.

• Best Interview: Reward good journalists for getting players to reveal a part of their lives. Ban journalists who ask professional football players about social media trends.

• Best Video Essay, Best Written Essay, Best Book: Broadcasters and media are undergoing an epidemic where they have confused poor distribution with low attention spans. This is a way to highlight the best longform stories from the past year. The jury should have to be actual writers, not ex-footballers.

• Best Pundit: Because of how much screen time they get, it’s worth rewarding the really good ones. Football doesn’t have a lot of them. And no, it cannot default to Neville or Carragher, or Henry with his exaggerated weight on every opinion, and Ian Wright with his overwrought emotion. Pick someone who brings the fans closer to the game while speaking to them like a fan themselves.

• Best Podcast: No, fuck that. In fact, if FIFA/UEFA can convince the United Nations to levy higher taxes on podcasting equipment across the world, I’d be eternally grateful.

• Best Stadium: Most modern football stadiums are homogenous. Think of how the imposing concrete rings of Madrid’s Santiago Bernabeu have been renovated to a circular fibreglass exterior that looks similar to Munich’s Allianz Arena or London’s Tottenham Hotspurs Stadium. For this prize, reward the stadiums with an identity. Important, too, to impress that the design aspirations should tilt too far the other way.

• Best DJ: A good DJ can lift a game’s atmosphere. Create an award for it and you have, overnight, a competitive market. And, before you know it, a lunatic from Southampton will play Conquest of Paradise as the teams walk out, and it will be so stupid and enormous that the club will become a cult favourite, and the sport will end up permanently better.

• Best Kit Design: Incentivise Nike and Adidas to go beyond the anodyne stripes and come up with custom motifs, similar to what they produced for the World Cup this year.

Half-time. Every year, pick one special musical act, like the headline event at the Superbowl, but keep it classy. Hans Zimmer, John Powell, Yanni, Adele—that kind. Maybe you can also have an ex-footballer who’s friendly with the microphone. Like Eric Cantona.

And then we move into the real stuff.

• Best Coaching Performance: The best tactical performance of the year. One game where one team so thoroughly outsmarted their worthy opponents, that a dissection is the rightful next step. Think: Spain vs France at the recent World Cup. Ask the head coach to line up a presentation and explain how they thought through their tactical choices. Make everyone wiser.

• Best Team: The most consistently exceptional team. A team that built upon an idea and executed it, week after week, to a great degree of versatility. Context should matter here. Paris Saint-Germain, while footing 10x the wage bill as their nearest French rivals, shouldn’t get to walk into the nominations. The prize should cast a net wider than the big clubs with the big trophies; Bournemouth making it to the European spots should count.

• Best Debut Season: This partly exists, with the Kopa Trophy. But change the rules to include only those we’re watching for the first time. They’d have to have played a minimum of 15 matches and/or 1000 minutes this season, so we know there’s a body of work.

• Best Player (in each position): Self-explanatory. Best goalkeeper, best fullback, best centre-back, best midfielder defensive, best midfielder attacking, best winger, best forward. The best defensive midfielder, say Rodri, plays a fundamentally different sport from the best winger, say Vinicius, and they shouldn’t be passed through the same prism. By rewarding excellence from each position, you bring nuance to these prizes.

• Best Goal: Simple, already exists. Reward difficulty of execution, not flair alone.

  

• Best Substitute Performance: A substitution entrant who completely changed an important match. Happy to call it The Ole Gunnar Solskjaer Prize.

• Best Performance (The Ballon d’Or): The current Ballon d’Or rewards a great season; I want this to reward a great performance. This is about one great evening when everything fell into place against a worthy opponent. Rodri against France, Kvaratskhelia against Bayern, Rice against Mexico. This could get very chaotic because a random midfielder from Fulham could have the greatest afternoon of his life and score a hat-trick against Manchester City that turns the title race. Which is great. I think we need a little more chaos.

Once the awards are done, we bring out more natural performers. The evening shouldn’t end with footballers mumbling prepared speeches; or worse, screaming “Siuuu” like a goat discovering cocaine. Wheel in someone who can truly leave the audience feeling they were part of something special. I’m thinking Michael Caine, David Attenborough, or Morgan Freeman.

Finish, obviously, with Eminem. On that, there can be no negotiation.

You have, now, an actual awards night. No royalty necessary, just ban streamers and influencers from all sporting events, and that’s enough.

Pehla Nasha literally translates to “first intoxication,” though in practice it means first love. The first verse starts with a line about floating in the air, the next about fever dreams. The two protagonists in the song are students in the north Indian valley town of Dehradun, experiencing the giddiness of love. The baroque, sensual qualities of the song and Federer’s tennis were maybe destined to meet in some digital form.

I watched the reel, on loop, when it came out. I’ve been watching it again this week, because it has been a week of remembering.

On August 29, at Newport, Rhode Island, Federer was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame. He was inducted, fittingly, by Mirka, his wife and once a professional player herself, who spoke with wit and warmth about the man, the partner, the father, and the tennis player. Roger’s own speech ran to 27 minutes, and he spent most of it talking about other people—Mirka, their children, his team, opponents, court staff, and ball boys. It made me remember Rohit Brijnath’s line, “Federer wears his fame like a lightweight jacket.” Slight tangent: if you want to read about Roger Federer, you won’t find more evocative words than those written by Brijnath.

I smiled through the speech, perhaps misty-eyed at times, but as soon as it got over, I was back on YouTube, sampling another video from Newport.

A day before the ceremony, Federer played an exhibition match alongside other Hall of Fame-rs, John McEnroe et al. The court, obviously, was grass, the clothes all white. Federer turned up in his typical bandana, ankle-height socks, and shoes without a spot of dirt. As he bounced the ball on the court, leaning into his left leg, loading for a serve, a stillness took over the frame. It could’ve been an acrylic painting of Federer at his purest.

The match was semi-serious, but the tennis was stunning anyway. Federer’s backhand came out early. The racquet drew a semicircle around his shoulder and torso, the ball came off his racquet with a soft tap and slid through the far court before anyone could move. Later, McEnroe served him a volley, which he returned with a flick from behind his body. From the baseline he sent crosscourt forehands. The ball drew the familiar curved, cursive lines through the air; the sound did not carry power—just clicks and taps that you hear in a table-tennis room, impossible to translate on a tennis court unless it’s Roger Federer.

The week before that, he had been at Flushing Meadows in New York, playing an exhibition match against Andy Roddick in the lead-up to the US Open. He wore different colours there, less Pehla Nasha and more Careless Whisper, but the ball left the strings the same way. Roddick fed one on his backhand, Federer opened up his torso and smoked a winner down the line.

Federer has been retired four years and away from the regular tennis circuit for five, maybe six. He’s 45 years old. He looks like he’s never left the court.

The clips from Newport and New York took me to the nearby shelves of YouTube, where his career sits distilled in hours of footage. Condensed match highlights, collages of his most awesome shots, zoomed-in compilations of a specific shot—it’s a full collection. Tennis TV has a ten-minute video of just his backhands. On the recommendations pane of that video is another, from the evening when Federer took that backhand to a whole new level and beat Rafael Nadal in the Australian Open final.

YouTube must’ve clocked abnormally heavy traffic for sport highlights this week. Two days after Federer’s induction, completely unrelated, Lionel Messi announced his international retirement. He had been considering leaving since the World Cup final, the handwritten note said, but his father’s passing last month removed any doubts. He was done. After twenty years and six World Cups of carrying a nation’s outsized dreams, there was nothing left to give.

An induction and a retirement are hardly the same thing, but they leave a similar effect on the audience. Both cast an athlete into history—a museum exhibit; an artefact, like Federer said in his speech. So you begin walking around them, looking for angles. Messi still plays club football, which made it easy to go backwards and arrive, eventually, at a gangly boy with floppy hair twisting burly 30-year-old defenders into knots.

The day before his announcement, Messi scored four goals for Inter Miami against a hapless CF Montreal. The goals cover the range from fortuitous to extraordinary, but do you ever listen to music just for the big chord landings? In the 48th minute, Messi ambled through the midfield, leaned right, and threaded a pass through two lines of Montreal’s defence. Nobody on the pitch saw it coming other than Messi and his runner. The visual effect of the play is quite something—Messi, by holding the ball for two extra seconds, draws the entire defence and midfield to him, and they can only watch, off-balance, as the ball goes past them onto an opponent now free in acres of space. The move didn’t end with a goal, but it was so quintessentially Messi.

This summer’s World Cup is still vivid. Argentina, let’s have it straight, rode to the final on Messi’s back. The team had been designed to ease the load on Messi, to let him chill out and play part-time magician. And yet, match after match, Argentina found themselves in a pit and craned upwards at their saviour. Messi pulled them out. He scored, passed, created. He found gaps where others found walls. The quarter-final and semi-final comebacks were almost entirely composed by Messi.

Somewhere in there, maybe as Argentina were clawing back from two goals down against Egypt, it struck me how far this Messi is from the one we grew up with. That Messi zigzagged through whole teams and then chose, at leisure, between passing to a teammate and scoring himself. This one, stripped of some pace and some strength, runs on wizardry alone.

Which is a strange thing to say about either of them. Messi and Federer are amongst the greatest athletes across history, in possession of athletic gifts you will not find in 99% of the world. At their peaks, they covered yards of grass in a blink. Their quadriceps generated power most Olympians would find unfathomable. Pick any collection from Messi’s best goals and you find a tableau of long mazy dribbles with short, staccato touches to change directions, sometimes touching the ball twice with the toe still in the air. In Federer’s highlights you find him gliding across the court, ready for a return while his opponents are still scrambling from their follow-through. Both were able to inject a velocity on a ball that the quickest found too quick.

Slow-motion is a genre now, especially on short-form video platforms, but it does not flatter everyone. Watch, say, Carlos Alcaraz or Kylian Mbappe at half speed and their movement stutters, as though frames are dropping. Watch Cristiano Ronaldo and Rafael Nadal in their primes and your attention goes straight to the physique, to what a human body can be allowed to become. This is, obviously, not a slight. Sport does not get too much more thrilling than Alcaraz or Mbappe, more of a visceral experience than Nadal. But their athletic ability is part of the show. They look incredible sped up—superhuman bodies travelling at superhuman speeds doing superhuman things.

But, Messi and Federer you enjoy a little slower. The effect elevates them. Digital slowing brings you to the beauty of the human form, their liquid movements, the harmony between torso and limbs. Then there’s the real thing—them as themselves, wrinkles and a couple of extra inches around the waist, untouched by editing software. While everyone around them is sprinting into a blur, their movements are shorter and more deliberate. The camera lingers, not having to play catch-up anymore, relaying their genius in full.

Why does their tempo feel just right? Perhaps it’s personal taste. I like art that breathes. I’ve sampled the breathless stuff: I had a metal phase in college, when I wore thick black t-shirts embossed with band names and album art stickers; at college fests, I’ve sweated through afternoons headbanging at basic 4/4 riffs; I played keyboards for a metal band (they were more Prog Rock, but I didn’t have the heart to tell them); and I’ve pretended that Lamb of God is actual music. But, tugging at me all this time was a homesickness for Pink Floyd, Yanni, and Ludovico Einaudi. Often, Bach. I couldn’t help it. One of my favourite songs to play—another candidate, actually, for a Federer background score—is Bach’s Prelude in C Major, where you hear every phrase inhale and exhale.

Or, maybe sport at a tranquil pace feels soothing because so much of it is frantic. Especially football and tennis where, in theory, there should be space for all tempos and styles. Instead, in much of that world, speed and power have become default denominators. Clubs in the best leagues pay a premium for athletic prowess; all top coaches deploy tactics that require hundreds of short high-velocity sprints a match and demand verticality in possession. It’s unlikely that a young footballer, anywhere in the world, is being taught to push and pull at the game’s tempo, or nurture their instincts without worrying about the scoreline. Think of it—how many players did you spot at the World Cup with Messi’s short, slender body-type? Argentina’s number 10 before Messi, Juan Roman Riquelme, a man of jawdropping poetry but limited athleticism, would struggle to find a top gig today.

Tennis is on a similar journey. Courts have slowed down across the world, handing a disproportionate leverage to power. At last year’s Laver’s Cup, Roger Federer confessed to sitting in committees that agreed on uniform speeds across surfaces. The single-handed backhand has nearly disappeared from men’s tennis; it’s a substantially tougher and riskier shot than the double-hander. Scroll through the semi-finals and finals of men’s Grand Slam singles for the last two years, and you’ll find three names everywhere: Alcaraz, Sinner, Zverev. Fantastic tennis players, but also the hardest hitters of a ball and the quickest movers on a court.

Amidst all of this, in a world moving rapidly towards a brutalist future, Messi and Federer remained oases of beauty. In them, you found an endless thirst for creativity and imagination. Writing coaches tell you about using descriptive verbs for better sentences. The verbs coming to mind for Messi and Federer are more crafty than violent. They did not pummel opponents, but sliced them open; they brought wands where others brought guns.

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We were fortunate to watch both careers from beginning to end, and more fortunate to hold, in one palm, the technology for rewinding to any point in either. I have watched Federer’s dismantling of Roddick in 2005 probably a hundred times, Messi against Real Madrid in 2009 ditto.

The induction and retirement, actually, was just an excuse to have such a week; I do these rewinds more frequently than I’d like to admit. The awe and wonder never wears off. Some days, it is ten minutes of backhand winners; other days, a loop of five set to a Bollywood classic.

The year was 2004, the summer still fresh, and Mourinho, only 41, was the Champions League-winning coach from FC Porto. Porto’s route to the trophy had gone through Old Trafford, where they beat Manchester United with a last-minute goal, which Mourinho celebrated by sprinting the entire way from the dugout to the corner flag and diving into his players. I was thirteen, and I don’t remember what rankled me more: my team getting knocked out by these “minnows,” or their manager celebrating wildly in our faces.

Then, he landed up in the Premier League. Chelsea were one of England’s traditional big clubs, but they hadn’t won a league in fifty years and were considered a rung or two below Manchester United, Arsenal, and Liverpool. But, they were newly bought over by Roman Abramovic, a Russian oligarch with yachts moored in Monaco and Sardinia, a passion for football, and a greater passion for success. For Chelsea to succeed, they first had to build a good team, and then topple the duopoly of United and Arsenal—winners of eleven of the previous twelve league titles. Imagine then, a young Portuguese, who looked like he should be auditioning for an MI:6 role in Hollywood, telling them that he was coming for their jugular.

Chelsea is the starting point of Joe Pearlman’s new Netflix docuseries, “Mourinho”—a three-parter that tracks José Mourinho’s life, career, and legacy through his three most unforgettable coaching stints.

The show begins in Setúbal, on the south-western coast of Portugal, where the land turns west and opens to the North Atlantic. It’s a city of pebbled beaches and grassy cliffs, and roads sloping down past tiled houses with pastel-coloured walls. The waves here are soft, the breeze steady but serene. This is where José Mourinho lives.

Present day Mourinho, 63, has wavy grey hair, almost white. His jawline has curved a little, and his torso has the shape of an old-but-somewhat-fit man. The chin is specked with white, unshaved stubble. His voice is much softer than it used to be. He wears loose t-shirts, hoodies, and running shoes. He remains, unapologetically, unflinchingly, the same man as before.

Early in the episode, he takes the camera crew down a corridor into a room, where the first thing you see is a wall-sized solo poster of himself celebrating a title. “Welcome to my little box,” he starts, as the camera picks out full-sized replicas of the Premier League and Champions League trophies. The entire room is taken up by trophies, awards, and medals. It’s a museum he has built to himself. Around these trophies, he has kept pictures of his children, and memorabilia he has collected from his three decades in the sport—amongst them, Diego Maradona’s boots, signed.

Pearlman revealed in an interview that the producers set clear terms to Mourinho about the nature of this series: this wasn’t going to be a hagiography. And yet, you never once doubt who’s running the script.

“We were being manipulated constantly as well, and we knew that. But going into a show with someone like José Mourinho, if you're not being manipulated, then we're not doing our job right,” Pearlman says here.

Mourinho drives around the crew and the narrator in his limited edition Ferrari 612 Scaglietti with “The Special One” written on the right door. Later, he tells them that his success brought them to him, like a magnet describing its physical force. He even saves a jab for the others: “you don’t make a documentary on the guy that won nothing.”

**

José Mourinho, as he likes to say, was born into football. His grandfather was the president of the local club, Vitória de Setubal. His father, Felix, played once for Portugal but had a longer, more successful career as a coach. Young José travelled with his father’s teams, hung around the players, and, over time, began scouting opponents and running drills. He played too, but realised, quickly, that his athletic talent had limits.

So he went to the Instituto Superior de Educação Física, in Lisbon, to study Sports Science. Jonathan Wilson writes here about the influence of Professor Manuel Sérgio, “who believed that football knowledge was not enough, that a coach also had to be a psychologist, a public speaker and have a grasp of the sciences.”

That’s how José Mourinho reached Bobby Robson, the famous English coach, as the connective tissue between him and the dressing room. Robson didn’t speak Portuguese or Spanish, and Mourinho was a polyglot. Mourinho tailed Robson from Sporting Lisbon to Porto, and then to that team in the city of cathedrals, Barcelona, where he went from interpreter to much more. Mourinho stayed on at Barcelona beyond Robson, into the next coaching team.

Following these teams, Mourinho observed a pattern: high profile jobs in football almost exclusively belonged to high-profile football men. All coaches at the top level were ex-footballers of substantial pedigree; the assistant coaches too had played football at the highest level. Even the talking heads in television studios were former players from superclubs. Which is why, at Barcelona, he was known publicly as Bobby Robson’s translator. He didn’t have the career to be thought of as anything more, or have much to contribute to their football.

“It’s bullshit,” Mourinho says in the first episode. “I ran opposition analysis, I ran scouting reports, I ran coaching sessions, I spoke to the players. There were times when I’d be in another city scouting our next opponent, turn in the report at 3 am, drive back to Barcelona just in time for the match, helping the first team out, and just as soon as the match ended, be back on the road for the next scouting assignment.”

Mourinho is a man of great angst, and this bit, of not belonging to football, of feeling like an outsider, gnaws away at him. It’s evident that he carries the extra weight of wanting to be better than the “football men.” He isn’t satisfied by what most would consider success. Throughout the series, Jose keeps repeating, “I want to make history,” like a leitmotif he wants the narrator and viewer to hear.

**

The football that resulted out of this angst is now considered Mourinho’s signature, his personal revenge against the narrative peddled by those football men, that possessing the ball gave you control. He thrived, instead, on provocation and defiance. While most great teams are remembered for how artful they made the sport look, Mourinho’s best stood out for how well-drilled and precise they were.

In the deeply controversial and oft-contested book, The Special One: The Secret World of Jose Mourinho, journalist Diego Torres writes about Mourinho’s ideology for big matches: games are won by the side that commits fewer errors and provokes more; away from home, the aim is not to outplay the opponent but to force them into making mistakes. And the kicker—having the ball makes a team vulnerable; the team without the ball is thereby much stronger.

Torres also recounts an incident from the Real Madrid training ground, when Diego Maradona visited Jose Mourinho. On one side was football’s greatest, the man who treated the ball like a lover; on the other was the anarchist, doing most of the theorising, convinced the ball can pierce your skin.

**

Mourinho’s first managerial job was at FC Porto, where he had once been a translator for Bobby Robson, and he began his new life by promising to win the league title that very season—in public. He kept his promise, winning the league title in his first two seasons, and accompanying domestic success with the highest continental glory, while playing an attritional but disconcertingly efficient style of football.

The size of that achievement—winning the Champions League with Porto—is worth examining. Porto were a big club, with a great history, but they didn’t count amongst European royalty. For that list, take the five Champions League winners before Porto: Manchester United, Real Madrid, Bayern Munich, Real Madrid, and AC Milan. Or the five after: Liverpool, Barcelona, AC Milan, Manchester United, and Barcelona. Before that 2003-04 season, Porto hadn’t reached a Champions League semi-final in ten years. They haven’t reached one since.

Mourinho was the outlier. And, as soon as he lifted that big-eared silver trophy with blue and white ribbons on either side, he was gone, towards bigger targets.

**

His first match in England was a home game against Sir Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United. Injuries had ravaged United, but even so, this was Manchester United. They lined up with Ryan Giggs, Paul Scholes, Roy Keane, and Gary Neville.

My memories from the game are faint and unaffectionate. I remember the searing irritation from watching Chelsea’s players tackle and shove our guys every chance they got. Chelsea, if memory serves me well, didn’t tear United apart—that would’ve been acceptable. They were set up to piss United off, and they managed that to perfection. Sometimes, the camera would pan to the Chelsea dugout, where Mourinho sat leaned back, smirking. The home crowd lapped it up.

As a freshly-minted teen, I was incapable of hating a stranger properly, but I wanted Mourinho’s team to lose every match till the end of time. Of course, some of the grudge was carried over from the night when his Porto knocked United out, but this game felt like those wounds reopened and scratched anew. And this arrogant prick, instead of getting his team to play football the respectful way, had turned the season-opener into a dirty rugby match. The match finished 1-0 to Chelsea. Mourinho didn’t celebrate like he did for Porto; he just shook hands and walked away, as if this was expected.

Chelsea won a lot that season, mostly that way: 1-0 or 2-0, and done. By the time winter turned to spring, they were en route to the Premier League title. They reached cup finals and semi-finals. Honestly, watching this unfold felt like an insect crawling up my skin. Arsenal, when they won, did it with spellbinding artistry: Henry, Bergkamp, and Pires put on a show worth watching irrespective of your club loyalty. This was barely watchable.

Then, Chelsea won the league again the next year with an even more watertight style of play. Winning, it was evident now, was the be-all-and-end-all of Mourinho’s ideology: do just enough to win, and that’s all there is to the sport.

He smirked through it all. And, in the press conferences and media interviews, he went hunting. Once, to describe his team as better than others, he said, “in the supermarket, you have eggs—class 1, class 2, class 3. Some are more expensive than others. And some give you better omelettes.” He often shot pejoratives at Arsenal and Liverpool coaches, Arsene Wenger and Rafa Benitez. He even called Wenger a “voyeur.” Nothing was too far, no blow too low for him.

Mourinho—the whole package, on and off the pitch—turned English football into a weekly soap opera where the vamp won every episode, and there was nothing anyone could do about it.

During this time, another phenomenon was slowly spreading. Chelsea were a big club in England, like Porto were in Portugal, but they were not globally big. Sportscenter wouldn’t always carry their highlights; no one I knew spoke of Chelsea as a team I should catch over a weekend. But, by the end of Mourinho’s first season, some of my friends in class, in a city on the outskirts of Delhi, had become Chelsea fans. And not fans as in the casual, curious way that most start sport with. They went from not watching football to intensely believing Frank Lampard was better than Paul Scholes. Me and a couple of others had been supporting United and Arsenal for years, and here were these punks, telling us with complete confidence that their team would beat ours and win the title. Worse still, they were right.

I am a fairly non-violent person, even in arguments. I don’t get into fights. You say jackfruit is better than mutton seekh, I will judge you, but I won’t fight you. I got through school life without a single fight about Tendulkar vs Lara or Sampras vs Agassi, but for United vs Chelsea, I had to be pulled away by my friends. We didn’t come to blows—I was (am) a wuss that way—but I don’t think my vocabulary during that tete-a-tete would’ve been too pristine.

**

That was the atmosphere outside the building. Inside, it was feverish.

Zlatan Ibrahimovic, a man whose public position is that he is second only to God, wrote in his autobiography that “Mourinho would become a guy I was basically willing to die for.” Marco Materazzi once said something about jumping into fire for him. Frank Lampard and John Terry chose less extreme metaphors, but they speak with a smile about the lengths they readily traveled for him. Across the three episodes this theme keeps repeating, in different accents.

It’s the effect he had on people. Mourinho always wanted to be more than just a football coach. He says, somewhere in episode two, “my team is a group of human beings playing football.” He often spoke to his players about their families, their parents, their dreams and aspirations, their heartbreaks. He sometimes used love and inspiration during big-match team talks. On Sundays, he would invite players’ families over to training and ask silly questions to their kids. If there was ever a family emergency, a leave was assumed.

There is a famous video of Mourinho, from the gates of Estadio Santiago Bernabeu, on the night Inter Milan won the 2010 Champions League. Mourinho had known that he was going to sign with Real Madrid after the final, whichever way the result went. The news had become public in Italy, and he didn’t bother covering or denying it. The video shows a black car pulling out of the stadium and then suddenly braking. Mourinho alights from the car and walks into a lane where Materazzi—an ex-World Cup and multiple Serie A title winner—is waiting by the team bus. They hold each for a long time, faces buried in each other’s shoulders, bodies shaking. Then Mourinho lifts his head, pats Materazzi’s shoulders, and walks away, still weeping.

To this day, Inter fans speak of Mourinho with a glint in their eye. A decade after he last coached Chelsea, there are banners at Stamford Bridge with Mourinho’s name. In the show, one Chelsea fan, drunk from a title win, says, “There is God, then there is Jose.”

**

Every Mourinho team succeeded beyond expectations. Porto, Chelsea, and Inter won titles they hadn’t won in decades; Real Madrid became coherent and broke, even if briefly, the dominance of Pep Guardiola’s all-conquering Barcelona; Roma won a European title; Tottenham reached a cup final in the middle of a tumultuous season. Driving these teams was a sense of purpose fuelled by Mourinho’s intensity.

But intensity, of course, doesn’t flow just one way. What happens when you don’t get a response that makes you happy, or a response at all? During the show, the same players who spoke about running through brick walls for Mourinho also revealed how he was an expert in pushing their buttons. It was almost a way of life for him. Some, like John Terry, Frank Lampard, and Zlatan, used it as motivation. Zlatan says, in episode two, “Mourinho told me, during half-time of a match, that I should be ashamed of winning the award of the best player in Italy. I went back out angry, to show this fucker how good I can be. That’s why I respected him.”

It’s a bizarre thing to say, but it completely explains Mourinho’s relationship with his most trusted players. “It’s never about the manipulator,” Mourinho says in the show, “but about those who open themselves up to get manipulated.” You had to know, by instinct, how to read him. If you didn’t, or when you didn’t, you perished. This is considering you were on his good side; if you weren’t, he’d find innovative ways to wreck you in public. Besides, even if you did get along with him and read between his words, how long could go on being told you’re worthless in order to make yourself worthwhile?

The answer, empirically, is between two and three years.

Post Porto, whom he quit by choice, Mourinho’s career reveals another pattern: sacked after three seasons at Chelsea, sacked in his third season at Real Madrid, sacked again in his third season at Chelsea, sacked in his third season at Manchester United, sacked in his second season at Tottenham Hotspurs, sacked in his third season at Roma, and sacked early in his second season at Fenerbahce.

Without exception, these sackings came after his players stopped responding to his instructions at the same pitch as before. It’s well documented how defeat made Mourinho burn. Now, rack a series of losses up, as is normal when a team loses form, and you get an already manipulative man going nuclear. Frank Lampard reveals in the first episode how the mood in the Chelsea dressing room changed drastically in the third season, after their form nosedived.

Team owners don’t have long memories, and Mourinho understands this side of football’s business deeply. On Christmas Day in 1984, when Jose was 21, the Mourinho family got a call on their landline. Felix, who was coaching Rio Ave at the time, had been sacked because of a poor run of results. The episode became something of a life lesson: prepare meticulously for a game, give your everything to it, but the recognition of your efforts depends on the result.

Rewinding through his first sacking at Chelsea, which he’s still bitter about, Mourinho gives us the warmest quote of the whole series. He takes a piercing shot at the rich men who buy football clubs and then overreach: “Football belongs to the people like me,” he says, “football belongs to the players, belongs to the coaches, belongs to the fans. The other ones are intruders.”

**

Mourinho has a room to himself in football’s memory. He is an undeniable tactical genius, with a body of work most would die for. He has made a career out of making teams overachieve. Players and fans respond to him. He understands people and society.

And yet, he is the same person who poked an opponent coach in the eye, who ostracised Spain and Real Madrid captain Iker Casillas for hugging a Spanish team mate, who made it a daily routine to mess with Paul Pogba, who mocked his own players in press conferences, who has, without doubt, mocked the coach and player of your team if they’ve ever ran up against him. The man capable of incredible humanity is also capable of incredible toxicity.

The evidence of Mourinho’s mental gymnastics is visible, like a trail of breadcrumbs, in his narration of himself through the show. He says I don’t like talking about myself but maintains a mini museum to himself in his own house. He says, “I want to be loved everywhere I go,” in the same breath as, “I am not nice, and I say that with pride.” He says his players are human beings first but hates when the injured ones take a breath. He calls Barcelona a great club, he wanted to become their head coach, but his entire career has been a long journey of proving them and their kind wrong.

Maybe it is this—the several voices, the ease of moving between them, the turn to the camera and winking at the audience—that makes him irresistible as a dramatic experience.

My only sadness about the show is that it tries to condense in three hours what some of us witnessed over a decade and a half. It was an impossible task to tell the story at a pace that does justice to the character, but it’s a worthy watch, if for nothing then just to understand the level of gaslighting that was once part of mainstream football discourse.

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The show ends as José Mourinho is announced as the new manager of Real Madrid. The timing of the release couldn’t have been better. Pre-season is over, and club football is back with its breathless rhythm of matches and media and more matches and more media. So is Mourinho.

Real Madrid need some rescuing. Their dressing room was a knot of clashing egos last season, evident in the way the team came apart under new coach Xabi Alonso. They’ve now gone two seasons without winning anything substantial. Mourinho has been brought, primarily, to restore order into a group of superstars who could all be alphas in different teams but have to play somewhat diminished roles in this environment.

He has been brought, then, to win. Mourinho always wins—or used to, until about a decade back. Across the country, arch rivals Barcelona are strengthening every week. They now have the best player from the World Cup and the most dazzling teenager in the world. They also have a group of elite homegrown talent. Mourinho has been hired to break that spell. He has done it once before, but it has been fourteen years since.

There is no guarantee that he’ll be able to do this again. But, either way, the most watchable coach in football is at the helm of the biggest football team in the world. It will be spectacular television, even with this older, calmer, grey-and-white haired Mourinho. He’s coiled, ready to jab; he always is.

In his first pre-match press conference back at Real Madrid, José Mourinho was asked if he could share some team news. “My players know,” he said. “Now we’ll wait to see which of you [journalists] has the best contact with the players.”

Murali Sreeshankar was perhaps at the breakfast table, his qualification event a few hours after Gurindervir’s. His singlet was pastel coloured, without lines or patterns, but blue nonetheless. Blue also was Sachin Siwach’s vest, lined like Gurindervir’s, a JSW sticker on the right chest and the India emblem on his left. His bout was late in the day.

Around all this, at 1:05 pm India time, Hockey India uploaded an 84-second video onto their social media channels. The video starts with a title slate, some text in bold orange font, which transitions out to CGI spotlights angling at a grey placeholder shirt. The grey turns saffron, and a tile appears to its right with the subtext: “Symbolises courage, sacrifice & victory. Inspired by the Indian national flag and the rising sun, it reflects new beginnings.”

New beginnings is an interesting phrase to use here, because this is neither a change of direction nor the crossing of a milestone, but a repaint. Indian hockey teams had worn different combinations of blue and white for more than a hundred years, through their six consecutive Olympic golds between 1928 and 1956, three World Cup medals, the crushing drought between 1984 and 2016, up to the consecutive bronze medals at Tokyo and Paris.

Hockey, in fact, gives us the earliest documented record of an Indian team wearing blue. Historian Diljit Singh Bahra recounts here that in 1925, at the founding of the Indian Hockey Federation, the colours were settled as blue shirts with white sleeves and the Star of India on the chest pocket.

Cricket followed soon. On June 25, 1932, when Col. CK Nayudu and his troops walked out at Lord’s for India’s first ever Test match, they wore white flannels with dark-blue caps bearing the Star of India.

Independent India’s first flag, the only one we’ve used thus far, had a navy blue Ashoka Chakra in the middle of the three horizontal stripes, giving us a blue we could call our own. And with every game, every tournament, the blue accumulated meaning and history, becoming a symbol unto itself.

Every Indian athlete, whatever their discipline, pines to wear blue. For them, the national blue is no less than a ceremonial badge, conferring onto them the status of being one amongst a chosen few, worthy of wearing the colour all the greats before them have.

For the fan, this jersey is a continuation of the Indian sporting story, the marker of movement and evolution. It’s the colour that binds Dhyan Chand and KD Jadhav to Gurindervir, Sreeshankar, and Vaibhav Sooryavanshi.

**

A jersey is a complex creation. An artist first designs its visual character—the lines, the patterns, the artwork; then comes the distribution of secondary and sometimes tertiary colours on collars and sleeves; then the crest and the sponsor stickers; then names and numbers; then easter egg inscriptions underneath the collar or on the hem of a sleeve. The whole exercise is repeated every year—for national teams every second or third—so that the team may have a new look. The only constant amidst all of this, year after year, decade after decade, is the primary colour. Manchester United wear red, Brazil wear yellow, India wear blue.

“It’s like a three-year-old learning A, B, C,” Swaroop Swaminathan tells me. “The colour is the first thing you learn about a team.”

Joey D’Urso, author of the wonderful book More Than A Shirt, has been watching Aston Villa for thirty years now. He tells me about a claret-and-blue blanket, knitted by his grandmother from when he was a child, that he still keeps. “Teddy bears, scarfs, replica shirts—there are all sorts from my childhood,” he says. “So much of football is incomprehensible to a four, five, six year old—the history, players etc. Colours are something extremely simple. Even if someone doesn’t really follow football at all, they’ll know Manchester United wear red. The colour of a team is just the most fundamental thing.”

Colour, in fact, is a key encoding property for memory. Francis Galton was the first to study our tendency to attach colour to memory, all the way back in 1880. A century later, this study at the Max-Planck Institute tested colour’s ability to aid recognition.

Then there is the aspect of colour triggering associated memory, which Mary Whiton Calkins first studied about in 1896.

Ruhin Chatterjee, an advertising strategist, says, “Colour turns to memory through association and frequency. When a brand shows up in your life wearing the same colours over and over again, your brain rewards their consistency with a memory structure tied back to the brand.”

Sporting colours are the same, except that the association is accumulated not through advertising alone but through years of victories, defeats, joy and heartbreak.

**

Blue can mean very different things, depending on who you ask. For one generation, it triggers memories of Gavaskar’s cap and Ajit Pal Singh’s shirt; for mine, Tendulkar, curly-haired and baby-faced pomp, cutting the yellow-wearing behemoths from down south to size; for another, maybe MS Dhoni’s six that confirmed India’s ascendance and supremacy at the turn of the decade. Hopefully, today’s teenagers see the bright gemstone blue of recent kits and think of Harmanpreet Kaur’s catch and Sunil Chhetri’s goals before remembering the deafening silence of November 19, 2023.

Beneath all this shared history is the foundation of strong private memories. One of mine is of a match I watched on the television, on an evening that went from normal to celebratory—the famous Tendulkar innings at Sharjah, the first one. I was seven and some months, Tendulkar had become Tendulkar, and cricket couldn’t get any more thrilling than a night of sixes and sandstorms. I remember vividly the audacity of the innings, the disbelief around me and in Tony Greig’s voice, as Tendulkar unfurled shot after shot to take India from certain defeat to qualification for the final to the possibility of an outright victory.

The final, two days later, we watched with family and friends. We got an encore. I have a decent recall of jerseys and general sporting equipment, but even so, India’s jersey in that tournament stood out, because they wore multiple shades of blue: a light blue shirt and navy blue trousers. Nobody else was merging shades, and the navy blue looked amazing. There was something electric and futuristic about it, compared to the dull projection of the sky blue.

That love for navy blue has stayed with me. I was too young to have watched the 1992 World Cup, but many years later, when the Men’s World Cup returned to Australia and ICC released replica kits, I ordered my copy.

For a brief spell in the middle, India adopted a jersey of a similar shade. It was a period of many great wins and one heartbreaking loss. Tendulkar, wearing that navy blue, smoked Australia for 175 runs within three hours in soul-sapping Hyderabad heat. He got out with 30 left to get—or something similar—and India crumbled. This was a match in 2009 running off a script from 1999.

“Jerseys are markers of time,” Ahmer Naqvi tells me. “The first World Cup I saw was ‘92, where Pakistan won wearing the iconic fluorescent green. And I grew up loving that colour. In the ‘96 World Cup, we wore the dark green, and then lost to India in Bangalore. So, ever since, I’ve not been a huge fan of dark green.”

**

I have a ritual whenever I watch Indian play live. I like to reach the stadium about an hour before the start—no earlier—and then walk a couple of hundred metres to the gates. The crowd starts a little thin, but eventually thickens into a coagulated mass of blue moving towards the halogen lights. And in that crowd one finds a great range of interactions. Children yank their parents towards the hawker painting India flags on cheeks and arms; young men crouch to shuffle through hats and counterfeit jerseys; the hardcore fans come fully prepared, not needing the hawkers here for they’re already wearing their retros or store-bought replicas.

On the Jawaharlal Nehru Marg in Central Delhi, as you turn right into a narrow lane ending at the Ferozeshah Kotla Stadium, you will be sandwiched between a Virat 18 and a Rohit 45; at the Victoria Hostel Road in Chennai, you’ll inevitably bump into a Dhoni 7, that grand old name and number embossed on the latest designs.

Inside, the stadium fills slowly, lines flowing in like tributaries to a sea, until the individual shirts dissolve and what emerges is a single expanse of colour.

The Dutch understand what it means for a country to become synonymous with a colour. Their orange goes back nearly half a millennia, to their fight for independence. Their royal house is called the House of Orange-Nassau. On April 27 every year, the entire country turns orange to celebrate the birth anniversary of King Willem-Alexander. They travel to international tournaments in thousands, and turn streets and stands into a singing, swaying wave of orange.

**

It’s funny how colours come to people: the Dutch orange came from royalty and the India blue, its imperial history. ACF Fiorentina, from Florence, got their famous purple because of a laundry mishap. Brazil got their yellow because they wanted to break free from the national trauma of white.

But the new India orange—saffron, rather—did not come from an arbitrary collision of circumstances. Saffron represents the flag of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)—the majoritarian, hypernationalistic party that has governed India for the past twelve years—and of its spiritual parent, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Through these twelve years the BJP has tried everything in its power to saffronise and sanskritise Indian institutions.

Sport, with its reach, becomes an obvious canvas. Consider these two recent examples: this year the All India Football Federation filed a proposal to rename itself the Football Federation of Bharat; in 2023, there was a serious attempt to put the cricket team into orange for the World Cup game against Pakistan, at Ahmedabad, in the home patch of the Prime Minister and the Home Minister.

There is no concrete proof, yet, of saffron being pushed onto Indian hockey by someone within BJP, but the symbolism of the colour is beyond doubt. The timing itself was hard to miss—mere weeks before a World Cup, and just two days after a nationwide student protest forced the BJP government to bend for the first time in their tenure and sack the education minister.

Hockey India offered two flimsy explanations: one, the World Cup would be played on blue turf, they said, and blue shirts could make it harder for players to distinguish their teammates; and two, the change had been made only after consultation with the players.

The consultation claim quickly fell apart: the federation’s own president, Dilip Tirkey, admitted that he had learned of the change some four hours before the video went up. The Indian Express, meanwhile, spoke to five people in and around the national teams, and every one of them said that they had not been consulted. The blue jersey-on-blue turf logic doesn’t stand either because India have been wearing blue all this while and not once has a player complained of the turf camouflaging their teammate.

That leaves the faint justification that saffron is, after all, only a colour lifted from the national flag. It does not hold. There are three non-blue colours on the Indian flag, if a change was at all required. The hockey team has worn white before, so it could’ve been chosen as a neutral colour with blue details, like at the Paris Olympics. And let’s face it, no national body will willingly wear green in 2026 India, for the same reason that some will happily wear saffron. In contemporary India, saffron has been made to stand for a particular imagination of the country: Hindu, muscular, majoritarian, insistent upon a singular idea of belonging. The final slate of the jersey announcement video reads: “Ek Bharat, Shreshta Bharat. One India, Supreme India.”

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And this is only the jersey at the level of the idea. The more consequential change will take longer to spread and longer still to notice.

Sporting teams adopt new jerseys all the time. Over the last thirty years, Manchester United have worn black, white, blue, even grey away jerseys. David Beckham scored many, many memorable goals wearing those jerseys. But ask a painter to make a Beckham portrait for London’s National Museum, and he will clothe his subject in red.

Had saffron been introduced as India’s away jersey, it would’ve still carried its symbolism but could have potentially become another object in the cupboard. As a primary shirt, it threatens to become the colour palette of the future.

“By changing the colour of a jersey, you’re trying to change memory,” says Swaroop.

One of my favourite sporting memories is watching India play Pakistan at the 2010 Commonwealth Games. The 16000-seater Dhyan Chand Stadium was packed to its brim. Many wore cricket jerseys because Indian sports shops don’t readily stock hockey jerseys. India scored four times in the first half, and each goal was accompanied by the stadium DJ playing a riff from Iron Maiden, Metallica, or Wolfmother’s unforgettable intro from Joker and the Thief. Sometimes, he played Fear of The Dark to cue-in a penalty corner. Over the evening, I must’ve high-fived and hugged at least twenty strangers, all in blue.

Now think of a child at this month’s World Cup, and think of what she takes in. India haven’t won the men’s hockey World Cup since 1971. The women haven’t finished in the top seven since 1978. Harmanpreet Singh and Salima Tete will walk out in orange. If India somehow win a medal, the podium photographs will have a spread of orange. Tournament by tournament, if hockey charms the child enough, she’ll accumulate more memories, more goals, more crushing losses. In four years time, the Commonwealth Games will come to Ahmedabad. And that child will be watching an Indian hockey team—or perhaps many other Indian teams—walk out in orange, surrounded by a sheet of orange, the blue by then relegated to scattered dots.

Years later, when that child is asked what Indian sport looked like when she was falling in love, she’ll see her memories in orange. And her idea of Indian sport will have broken away from the thread that binds it to history.

When a jersey is changed so radically, it does not merely change how a team looks; it changes, entirely, how a team is remembered.

Madonna was the first act of the half-time show, sponsored by Topps, a collectible-manufacturing company. Each act was given a minute of stage time. Gustavo Dudamel conducted “Seven Nation Army” with the New York Philharmonic and the Muppets; BTS sang the chorus of “Dynamite”; Jason Sudeikis and Brendan Hunt walked out as Ted Lasso and Coach Beard and substituted Justin Bieber onto the pitch, and Bieber sang a verse about heartbreak or something; Chris Martin, who had curated all of it, played a new song with Kermit and Miss Piggy and a chorus of schoolchildren from Staten Island; Shakira came on barefoot with Burna Boy and sang “Dai Dai,” the tournament’s official song.

The interval took twenty-seven minutes, breaking the fifteen-minute norm standardised fifty years ago. The half-time show itself was the second musical act of the evening. Ninety minutes before kickoff, iShowSpeed—a streamer with 59 million subscribers on YouTube, famous for jumping over cars and fastening an electric dog collar on his neck—became the first performer of the final, singing a self-composed song called “Champions.” A bit later, Tom Cruise stood in the centre circle and told a crowd that had paid upwards of $10000 a ticket that football belongs to the world, in the voice he uses to explain the grand heist in a Mission: Impossible film.

The final itself—the football, that is—was but one part of the evening’s programme, and the evening was the headline show of the 39-day event that has earned FIFA close to 15 billion dollars.

**

FIFA has not released the viewership numbers yet, but its video platforms recorded close to 29 billion views. Given the last World Cup drew an audience greater than 5 billion across linear TV and streaming platforms, this edition is expected to touch nearly 6 billion combined.

The numbers, whatever they are, will exceed expectations. Much of the World Cup was played under smoke. Tickets were overpriced, visas were rejected, referees from countries Trump doesn’t like were sent back, and fans from the Global South were altogether absent. All of that stayed true from the opening ceremony to Madonna’s music. To more football-adjacent matters, the enlarged, 48-team World Cup drew its own scepticism: Were there too many small countries? Will there be too many dead rubbers? Won’t the minnows get bashed silly by the big teams? The answer was a resounding, repeated “No.” Every one of these “small” nations pulled their weight and some more.

The football was stupendous. The group stage ran from Cape Verde’s blanking of Spain to France dismantling everyone in their way. The knockout stages produced one thriller after another. By the quarter-finals we were asking ourselves if, football-wise, this was the most exciting World Cup in recent history.

But that’s not how Gianni Infantino, FIFA’s president, measures success. Last year, he had told a room of American and football dignitaries that the World Cup will produce “104 Super Bowls.” The day before the final, while garlanding Trump with his words, Infantino claimed that he had overseen the greatest cultural event in human history. This was his Woodstock, his Tomorrowland.

So, on the day of the final, after 48 teams had played 103 matches over 38 days, Infantino did not think football was enough; the day could hold more content.

**

Content began as a modest word. It came from the Latin word continēre—to hold together, to contain—and described the material inside a container. Over time, the word became an entity unto itself. A newspaper report, a television programme, the text and pictures on a website gradually coalesced under the umbrella of “content.” Today, content is also a photograph of someone’s breakfast, a twelve-second video of a dog chasing its tail, or a podcast in which two men discuss rich men.

The word makes no distinction between information and entertainment; it is simply a mass of substance to be uploaded, distributed, monetised, and profited off.

Consider the opportunities that a football match can offer: pre-match, mid-match and post-match shows; tunnel footage; warm-ups; player arrivals; fifteen, or now, thirty minutes of half-time; commentary feeds; fan cams; streamed reactions; dressing room footage; behind-the-scenes footage; pitch-side footage; VIP footage. As we came to realise this World Cup, football’s rhythm itself can be broken to include a three-minute ad-break. The match remains the central event for the broader definition of football, but it is, in fact, a generator of content.

It explains, to a large extent, the two moves from Infantino and FIFA over the last few weeks. Once the success of this World Cup was indisputable, Infantino announced a plan to expand the next one to 64 teams. Then, on July 28, he revealed his real endgame: to sell off parts of FIFA, a not-for-profit organisation that governs global football, to private investors. The first investor lined up is Thrive Eternal—the venture capital firm founded by Joshua Kushner, the brother of Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.

The thing about greed is that there’s no finish line, only milestones beyond which there’s the prospect of more.

To FIFA’s member associations, Infantino attached a sweetener: each country signing their approval would be eligible for an immediate payment of up to $20 million, followed by another $20 million in development funding between 2027 and 2030. Refuse and that payment stays at $8 million per the existing plan. Deciding between matcha and sangria for a Friday evening starter can be called a choice; a decision on a $32 million windfall, not quite.

And yet, within three days, confederations representing well over half of FIFA’s 211 members had rejected the proposal loudly and angrily. Some of the outrage stemmed from Infantino blindsiding everyone, including his own senior advisors within FIFA, while drafting this plan and taking it public. The rest of the anger was territorial battle dressed as principled stance: UEFA, European football’s governing body, administers an expanded Champions League designed to produce more games between Europe’s richest clubs, and was now appalled to discover FIFA applying a similar logic.

The proposal will probably die a swift death, but its significance does not depend on whether FIFA eventually sells the subsidiary. The idea itself is worth unpacking, as is the enlarged Champions League, the 64-team World Cup, and even the sponsored halftime show. They all germinate from the same thought, that a sporting competition is an asset whose value rises with every additional match, market, sponsor, screen and minute it can occupy.

Matt Hughes, writing in The Guardian, points to JP Morgan’s pitch with the new FIFA subsidiary—a growing portfolio of tournaments, third-party capital and debt financing, partnerships and events selected for yield. One line proposes raising the number of global tournaments each year from 200 to 450.

Infantino has been laying the groundwork for years. In 2021, he proposed a biennial World Cup cycle, down from four year gaps; last year, FIFA turned the Club World Cup from a random one-week affair in the middle of the season to a full-fledged 32-team event in the summer, eating further into the precious little time players get in the off-season.

Every proposal and plan, you’ll notice, is discussed through the extra revenue it will bring FIFA, not the sport, not the players, and most definitely not the fans.

**

It’s not just a football problem; every rich sport is trying to scale for revenue.

Between June 2021 and March 2026, there were four Men’s T20 World Cups, three World Test Championship (WTC) finals, one Men’s ODI World Cup, and one Champions Trophy. Between now and the end of 2031, there will be two Men’s ODI World Cups, two Men’s T20 World Cups, three WTC finals, and another Champions Trophy. Seventeen world championships in a decade—and this is only the men.

In tennis, the four Grand Slams have 128-player draws—for men and women—played as straight knockouts. Scaling vertically is not simple: the next possible field is 256, requiring an extra round and 128 additional first-round matches. So the sport has expanded from the sides. The Australian Open now sells an “Opening Week” of qualifying, practice sessions, exhibition matches, live music and family entertainment before the main draw. Seven of the nine Masters 1000 tournaments now run in an expanded twelve-day format.

Formula One has stretched its 2026 championship to include 24 races. The Summer Olympics and Commonwealth Games can only resist for so long. LA28’s five additions—cricket, flag football, baseball/softball, lacrosse, squash—blend US domestic ratings and massive global markets.

Niccolo Campriani, former Olympic champion and the director of the LA2028 Organising Committee, straight up cited Instagram followers as a measure: “We all recognise the critical importance of a strong digital presence in order to keep the games relevant for the youth. And cricket is offering a unique platform to do so. Take my friend here Virat. He's the third-most followed athlete in the world on social media with 314 million followers.”

The anomaly within all this has been the Men’s ODI World Cup, historically cricket’s most lucrative global property. It expanded from 12 teams in 1999 to 14 in 2003 and 16 in 2007, before retreating to 14 in 2011 and 2015 and only ten in 2019 and 2023. The contraction came after the 2007 edition exposed a terrifying commercial possibility: India could get knocked out early and take the sport’s largest television audience with it. The advertising risk was in hundreds of millions.

Ten-team World Cups removed that financial jeopardy. Everyone played everyone once, guaranteeing India nine matches before the knockouts—nine broadcasts lasting eight or nine hours, many placed on weekends, each carrying hundreds of advertising slots. In 2023, broadcasters reportedly sought as much as INR 30 lakh for ten seconds during India matches and the knockouts. The format announced most recently, for next year’s tournament, moves back to 14 teams but keeps multiple league stages, again, to make more space for big teams.

Every sport with a substantial audience is trying to maximise yield.

Consider, then, what happens to those playing. Players become subjects of a never-ending movie; teams get gegenpressed by streaming platforms to open their locker rooms and training grounds and let a camera crew in. The story of Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhanney buying Wrexham FC after watching Sunderland Till I Die on Netflix is well known. But, browse through the top streaming platforms, and you’ll find at least twenty major football clubs turned into documentary subjects. Count regional platforms, club-produced films and one-off historical documentaries, and the number comfortably exceeds thirty.

**

There will soon be more matches, more tournaments, more sponsored shows, and more announcements that all of this has been done for the supporters. Some of it might even be good. We’ve been on this ride for decades, since television networks started paying in millions for the rights to show sport. The deal values have multiplied with broadcast technology, as have the ways to dress up sport.

The suits have just one problem, which their myopia doesn’t let them spot: once the referee blows his whistle, they lose control—not entirely, but enough. They can’t account for a third-minute red card, or the world’s most revered footballer headbutting his opponent in a World Cup final, or a team losing by three goals in the year’s biggest match scores thrice in six minutes. They want to engineer sport into a spectacle, and yet, the version of sport that becomes a true spectacle is chaotic and uncontrollable.

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After the World Cup final half-time show, the platforms were swiftly dismantled and carried away, the pop stars disappeared into the tunnel, and the players returned to the field that had been borrowed from them. Then the final resumed in its beautiful, unreel-able form. Spain just held onto the ball, while Argentina chased shadows and sometimes barged into them. It took 120 minutes to decide a winner, and the goal was neither scored by Lionel Messi nor Lamine Yamal, the two superstars on the posters, nor by any of the other faces selected for the broadcast’s lingering hero shots. It was scored by a player often mocked by supporters of his own club team, and who, in the first match of the World Cup, was praying to the almighty to let a contentious goal stand.

The most shared footage after the final whistle was of Donald Trump insisting on standing next to the Spanish players as they lifted the trophy. Infantino’s feeble attempts to pull him aside produced no relent. It was an amazing sight—the two most corrupt, power-hungry men in the stadium clapping sheepishly at the edge of the frame, while the most collaborative, unselfish team in the tournament reached their sporting zenith.

Now, that’s good content.

The grown up version of the idiom is, ‘don’t sweat the small details,’ and adulthood is also where you discover the saying cuts both ways across the table. The sinner uses it to excuse the sin in service of the larger picture. For the sinned, it is often a pass to drape themselves in a robe of willing ignorance. On June 11th, around 10:30pm, I felt the weight of that robe as I sat down in front of my television. The FIFA Men’s World Cup 2026 was less than an hour away.

For close to a year, perhaps longer, I had been writing about the noxious smoke enveloping this World Cup. It was follow-through from the previous edition in Qatar, an enterprise that had left behind trapped workers, airless quarters, and dead bodies. And yet, somehow, this one felt worse.

There was first the long courtship between Gianni Infantino, president of FIFA, and Donald Trump. Infantino spent weekends at Mar-a-Lago, inaugurated a new FIFA office at Trump Towers—which, by the way, lies empty—and awarded Trump a Peace Prize in the same week the man spoke about reducing an Iranian city to rubble. Ticket prices started exorbitant and soared to a stratospheric realm. FIFA cited fanatical demand while manufacturing the scarcity themselves, by hoarding tickets and dumping them on their official resale website. By April, a group-stage ticket cost four figures, a knockout five. Public transport and hotel tariffs shot up alongside. The Trump administration, meanwhile, rolled out one dehumanising immigration policy after another, several of them concerning participating nations, and Infantino just nodded along with a clap and a smile that stretched to his cheekbones.

I recorded all of this in an essay and gave it a working title of, ‘Football Behind Paywalls.’

Just a few days after filing the piece, here I was, in front of a television, waiting for Infantino’s buffet. When the broadcast cut to Mexico City’s Azteca Stadium—its elliptical concrete bowl, so tight and steep that the collective sound of eighty thousand pours down to the grass, the sheet of emerald green jerseys, the flags on the rim of the roof, the Ajusco volcano rising above it—the World Cup had sucked me in.

You first read about the Azteca in one of those pre-tournament centrefolds that walk you through the history of the World Cup. You saw the name next to Pelé and Maradona, both holding aloft a golden trophy. Tintin, you remembered, had visited the Aztecs once; maybe this had something to do with them. Later in life, you watched broadcast footage and official films from when your parents were children—the balloons rising to the sky, the bleached shade of grass, Pele and Rivelino’s slow dance, Maradona’s theft and magic separated by four minutes. You understood the reason so many writers called it a cathedral.

The Mexico team walked out to a tremendous noise, and I felt a shooting jealousy for those experiencing the sound and sight of the Azteca in person. The opening match, Mexico vs South Africa, was a replay of the opener from Johannesburg in 2010, now immortalised by Siphiwe Tshabalala’s thunderous strike and Peter Drury’s voice. This one was as dramatic, though the captions belonged to the referees. South Africa received two red cards, one of them very hard to understand.

Officiating interference would become a counterpoint ostinato through the tournament, a new layer of mockery on football’s intended tempo, which the “hydration breaks” had already dented by breaking two long, breathless passages to four short movements. The Video Assistant Referee—VAR, for shorthand—became part of our daily lexicon.

“The supposed precision of V.A.R., which purportedly can tell when a Croatian player’s hair has touched a ball (but apparently not when a ball hits a camera wire suspended in the air) or when half a kneecap pokes itself offside, makes everything worse, because these tiny infractions feel like violations of the spirit of the world’s beautiful game.” - Jay Kaspian Kang, here.

VAR, inadvertently, gave us 4K footage of the tournament’s internal machinations when pushed to stress. In the first knockout round—the Round of 32—USA’s Folarin Balogun was sent off, harshly, against Bosnia and Herzegovina. Now, FIFA don’t have an appeals mechanism for World Cups, so the red card had to stand and Balogun had to miss USA’s next match against Belgium. The appeal—push, rather—came from Donald Trump, who called Infantino personally, with the White House’s World Cup task force and Howard Lutnick, the Commerce Secretary, holding parallel lines. FIFA flipped out Article 27 of its disciplinary code—a rule never invoked before at a World Cup—and suspended the ban for a year, freeing Balogun to face Belgium. Belgium, enraged, beat the USA 4-1 and captioned their social media post, “Overturn this.”

The Round of 32 as a knockout stage was itself a novelty. Since 1998, the World Cup has meant thirty-two teams: eight groups of four, the top two advancing to the knockouts. Now the tournament had swollen to forty-eight teams: twelve groups of four, two automatic qualifiers from each and then eight of the best third-placed sides stacked up to make an even knockout tree.

You welcomed it, of course; more teams meant newer faces and newer stories. There was, however, a lingering fear that some of these newer teams might get trampled.

These teams were a revelation. Cape Verde, Curacao, and Congo went punch for punch with the heavyweights. It was as thrilling as it was humbling, as we rediscovered the shallowness of our general football gaze. Congo and Cape Verde reached the knockouts. Cape Verde, by then, had become the neutral’s favourite, the universal second team. Their 40-year-old goalkeeper Vozinha thwarted Spain almost single-handedly in a 0-0 draw in Atlanta, then stood amongst his celebrating teammates at the final whistle, in tears. First, for the occasion, then for his mother, who had to watch from home, her visa having never come through. She was one of millions kept away by rejections and the cost of a bond.

The USA’s immigration department was having a busy World Cup. Iran’s group matches were in Los Angeles and Seattle, but they were not allowed to stay within USA’s borders. So the team was stationed in Tijuana in Mexico. On the day before each match they were permitted to fly in; on the night of the match, they were required to fly out again. It was an inhumane expectation of a professional sports team—to play deep into the night and then, still in their kit, be bundled back across an international border. Their request to arrive merely two days early was refused every time. Head coach Amir Ghalenoei called his the “most oppressed” team at the tournament.

You looked for Iranian jerseys in the stands and found small pockets of diaspora, barely registering on the naked eye. Theirs was the only shade entirely missing from the great wash of colour spreading through the USA.

The scale of the crowd was, at least initially, a bit surprising. The ticket prices hadn’t drastically dropped, the immigration policies stood steadfast, so who, really, was attending?

Albert Samaha’s report found an engineer from Norway, a delivery driver from the Netherlands, and a data scientist from France—all paying in four digits per ticket. The matches confirmed what they were saying: there were hundreds of thousands of takers for this “once in a lifetime experience.” Alongside them, there was the local diaspora who could avail domestic subsidies, and the federation parties, accredited and flown in as a body, their ticket prices too substantially lowered.

The travelling support from the Global South was missing, but that’s the kind of detail FIFA would love for you to gloss over. “At three matches in the U.S. that featured either Côte d’Ivoire or Senegal,” Samaha writes, “I spoke with dozens of those teams’ fans, and couldn’t find a single person visiting from those countries.”

And yet the crowd, whatever their composition, behaved like a crowd. They streamed in with jerseys and hats and drums, and spilled out of the grounds into the neighbourhoods. The Norwegians took over Times Square and rowed their imaginary viking boat, the Brazilians danced to Scottish folk tunes, and the Scottish drank Boston dry. It was, even from within the bubble of the fortunate and the well-connected, a glimpse of the thing we had hoped the World Cup might be. And it occurred to me, watching, that this was likely the very picture Gianni Infantino kept in his head too. That overlap made my stomach burn.

The football, thankfully, was stupendous. If the group stage was a mixtape of the good and the middling, the knockout rounds delivered one classic after another. Canada pipped South Africa in the last minute; Brazil, too, needed a last minute-winner against Japan; Germany and the Netherlands were sent out on penalties by Paraguay and Morocco; and Norway left it until the final five minutes against Ivory Coast. Senegal led Belgium two-nil with four minutes to play, which in this tournament was not a lead so much as a dare; Belgium levelled the score, then took the game in extra time. All of this was just from the first two days of the knockouts.

England vs Mexico at the Azteca was an all-time classic—a game of tremendous push and pull, a heaving crowd, goals and red cards, wave upon wave of attack meeting a resolute wall of defence. You couldn’t take your eyes off it. At the end, the England players, red-faced and wrung out, walked to their corner of the ground and stood shoulder-to-shoulder while some twenty thousand travelling fans sang Wonderwall down at them. It became a ritual, repeated at every game, a touching sight of a team and its fans serenading each other in public.

And so, twisting and turning, we arrived at the semi-finals: France vs Spain, Argentina vs England. The four highest-ranked teams in the world, carrying four or five of the outstanding performers from this tournament.

Kylian Mbappe and Lionel Messi, light years apart in their career arcs, had practically made the World Cup their own. Their teams, though, took different routes. France had bludgeoned through their field. Argentina nearly lost to Cape Verde, then Egypt, and were held late by Switzerland. It had taken some divine intervention, a bit of refereeing generosity, and a generous serving of Messi’s genius to drag them this far. On the morning of the first semi-final, a France vs Argentina final, a repeat from four years back, felt inevitable. Until it wasn’t.

In the semi-finals, we got the best football of the World Cup, and both matches peaked when their scoreline read 1-0.

In Dallas, Spain went ahead and tightened the noose on France. Amidst the overwhelming current of France’s attacking prowess, we had forgotten that Spain were reigning European Champions and unbeaten for nearly forty games. In the semi, they moved the ball as if they were drawing lines on the ground, as if they wanted the pass-map from the game kept in a glass box at the Guggenheim Museum. The players glided up and down, left to right, barely letting their heels touch the ground, the whole thing from above looking like a synchronised ballet. Spain’s second goal of the night was a delicious 55-second move that started deep inside their half and ended with Pedro Porro—the defender tasked with marking Kylian Mbappe—scoring at the other end of the pitch.

After the game, Thierry Henry, who spent three years at Barcelona, supplied the context: “It doesn’t matter who is touching the ball. You can take one player out and put another in. This is what they’re taught since they’re 8 or 9 years old.”

In Atlanta, England took the lead against Argentina. Forty years back, at the Azteca, they never got the chance. Diego Maradona had won that afternoon. This evening, with thirty and some minutes left on the clock, England were the dominators. And then, amazingly, bizarrely, they shrunk—like they had against Croatia in the 2018 semi-final and Italy in the 2021 European Championships final. Their coach, Thomas Tuchel, replaced the two creators of the goal with tall, muscular defenders. They signposted their nerves to their opponents, which, in a list of bad ideas against Argentina, lies pretty close to the top. Between the 66th and 84th minute, England completed three passes; Argentina, 122—most originating from, or landing at, the feet of Lionel Messi.

The minutes ticked by, and Messi kept whipping crosses into the England box, like an archer finding his range. By the eighty-fifth minute, all ten England outfield players had crept deep inside their box, guarding the goal. So, Messi passed it outside, to Enzo Fernández, with acres of space to take a shot. 1-1.

Seven minutes later, with the dread of the inevitable descending on the English, with ball after ball finding Messi and Messi finding space, another play led to another cross—this time, with his right foot, as if the 92nd minute of a semi-final would be a good time to show off. The cross was surgically perfect, floating beyond a line of craned English necks, curving to exactly where Lautaro Martínez was waiting. 2-1.

Two different genres of magic, then: one, a triumph of football as a collective, choreographed show; the other, a more chaotic creation, no less thrilling, a tireless team willing it into existence, and a genius timing his flourish to perfection. In the highest-pressure game, these two great teams had found their way to individual expression and identity. Come to think of it, Spain’s show was extremely Spanish, Argentina’s typically Argentine.

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Which brings us to tonight, and to New Jersey, where the final of the World Cup will be played on a ground the Azteca was passed over for. This is the biggest match in football since December 2022, and will remain so until July 2030.

Spain and Argentina have met exactly once at a men’s World Cup, sixty years ago. They haven’t met at all since March 2018. Yet, they aren’t strangers. Seven from the Argentina squad play their club football in Spain. Lionel Messi spent twenty-one years at Barcelona, where, in 2007, he bathed an infant in a bathtub for a charity photoshoot. He was a nineteen-year-old right winger then. The infant, Lamine, grew up in Barcelona, plays for Barcelona, and will start on the right wing for Spain tonight.

FIFA have planned a grand evening. The show will open with an assortment of Hollywood and the internet—Tom Cruise, iShowSpeed, and the like. Then, in one final blow to football traditions, the half time break has been extended from fifteen minutes to thirty to include a Superbowl-style event. Eight artists will play, amongst them Shakira, Justin Bieber, and BTS. Donald Trump will watch from the stands. At the presentation ceremony he will descend to distribute the medals, and it is safe to assume that he will not leave without a speech, a medal of his own, and possibly the trophy itself held aloft. Infantino will only be happy to oblige.

Many times through the evening we will wonder what it is we’re watching. Somewhere between the fourth and fifth artists during the half-time break, we’ll wonder if this sport is now a different being from what we fell in love with, and whether football itself is the half-time show to a billionaire event.

And yet. If there was ever a night to eat the mangoes without bothering about the pits, it’s this one. Because the alternative would be to cede ground to Trump and Infantino. Tonight, they are irrelevant, no matter how much they hijack the broadcast frame. BTS and Bieber will come and sing, and their words will not matter. Tonight belongs to Spain and Argentina. Tonight, I hope football can rescue us one more time.

Sarma was speaking to a gathering of reporters at Indian Express’ Idea Exchange, last week, when questions about hygiene and safety were posed to him. This January, at the India Open in Delhi’s Indira Gandhi Indoor Stadium, monkeys were spotted moving between spectator galleries. Then, a pre-quarter final match between HS Prannoy and Singapore’s Loh Kean Yew had to be paused because of pigeon droppings. Several visiting shuttlers, far from home and unaccustomed to sharing a court with the local wildlife, let their displeasure be known.

Sarma couldn’t understand the displeasure or the post-mortem questions. “What’s the problem? We get monkeys at my house too,” he said, with an earthy, sing-song lilt to his speech, as if breaking down the obvious to a naughty classroom. “Pause the play for a couple of minutes and move on.”

Himanta Biswa Sarma is an influential member of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the sitting Chief Minister of Assam. His stint at the top of BAI started in 2017, first as an interim president, and then flourished with consecutive unopposed election wins for the presidential post. In January, his BAI brushed off all criticism—including the world number 3 skipping the tournament, officially citing Delhi’s AQI as the reason—as foreign players acting too precious.

His clip from last week’s Idea Exchange surfaced and sank almost as quickly, carried off on the great tide of the FIFA World Cup. Against the noise from a hundred football matches, the fanfare and the filth, there’s been little attention to divert anywhere else, least of all an Indian administrator saying the bizarre. So we giggled and moved on, back to the stories taking off from the USA and travelling around the world.

The most stirring of them all was Cabo Verde, an archipelago of volcanic islands in the central Atlantic Ocean, populated by 525,000. They arrived as cardboard targets for the big teams to pummel and knock over on the way to the latter rounds. Instead, they qualified from their group into the knockouts, and there they held the defending champions Argentina by the throat until the very last minute of open play. The face of that spirit was Vozinha, their 40-year-old goalkeeper, who, during the World Cup, went from fifty thousand to 28 million Instagram followers and—of all the honours a life in sport might bring—had a new species of marine mollusk named after him.

And, it was somewhere during that Argentina match that I noticed India’s favourite sporting question touching its quadrennial fever pitch: “If this tiny group of islands can hold Messi and co., why can’t India have a World Cup-worthy team?” You must’ve heard this question too—in drawing rooms and casual WhatsApp conversations, from observers much older and many years younger. The other version of this, asked when the summer Olympics rolls around, goes: “Why does India not win more medals?”

Both are good questions. It must be stupefying that the world’s most populous country, youthful and ambitious, cannot make a 48-team football World Cup, or has an unblemished record of finishing bottom of the Olympics medal table when factored for economy.

The football question nags a little more, because we play it and watch it lovingly. It’s an oft-told, convenient lie that football only exists in the metropolitan cities, amongst the nouveau-riche, where weekends bring the Premier League and weekday nights the Champions League.

It was in India that Asia’s oldest, and the world’s fifth-oldest football competition, was born. The Durand Cup, played to this day, goes back to 1888. The Calcutta Derby packs out stadiums of sixty-seventy thousand. And, away from the top-flight, visiting Malappuram for the Sevens competition or Mizoram for the Inter Village tournament, or while reading Sandeep Menon’s wonderful book, Sacred Grounds, you are reminded that in much of this country the game grows outwards from sand and swamp to Manchester United, not the other way around. There are many reasons India is not at football’s biggest gathering; communal indifference and a shortage of grassroots talent are not among them.

During this World Cup daydream comes another punch to the gut: India will not be sending a football team to the Asian Games this September. Despite qualifying for both the men and women’s draws, a sports ministry rule—mandating a team to be amongst the top eight in Asia for clearance—has closed the door on their faces. This rule, the seasoned journalist Marcus Mergulhao tells me, was in place for the last edition of the Asian Games too, but was waived on judgement, making this year’s enforcement even more bizarre.

“The Asian Games is not an exposure tour,” says India’s sports minister, Mansukh Mandaviya. “It is a platform to win medals. We only want athletes who will deliver the medals.”

What perhaps counts as exposure, evidently, is a sudden trip to New Zealand—at the time they should’ve been preparing for the Asian Games—to play a couple of friendly matches while two heads of state clap from the presidential box. The India vs New Zealand “series” will be part of ‘100 Years of Unity’—a celebration of the long friendship between the two nations. And, as such matters go, only the men’s team have been called over.

The women’s team will be left to marinade in the irony. If anything, they deserve the away tours and outsized support. Just last month, they won the 2026 South Asian Football Federation (SAFF) Women’s Championships in Goa. They are ranked 69th in the world. Their qualification credentials are indisputable, as is their star power. In 2022, Manisha Kalyan became the first Indian to play in the UEFA Champions League. Over the years, she has travelled through Europe, club to club, accumulating precious experience and validation of her ability. Similarly, Dangmei Grace has won leagues and cups in Uzbekistan.

Years later, when we look back at these careers and find a missing Asian Games at the peak of their powers, maybe even an outside possibility of medalling, how many lines do you reckon we will find about the men who stood in the doorway?

The domestic game, too, is in a stormy place. India’s primary domestic league—the Indian Super League (ISL)—is still recovering from the commercial breakdown that left last season in limbo before it eventually resumed in a compressed format. Clubs kept bleeding money; some were almost pushed to a precipice. The commerce of Indian football, we’re often told, is a tricky business.

In the middle of all this, in December 2025, came Lionel Messi, for a “GOAT Tour” that wound through Kolkata, Mumbai, Hyderabad and New Delhi. Kolkata, where the pilgrimage began, promptly turned into a riot. Thousands who had paid dearly for a glimpse found themselves staring instead at a scrum of politicians, VIPs, and security personnel. Messi was in the stadium for barely twenty-five minutes and left amidst security concerns, after being pushed, shoved, and yanked around like an actual goat. In Mumbai, he was handed cricket jerseys at the Wankhede Stadium, then taken to the Ambani residence and then their totally-legal wildlife facility.

The tour became, almost effortlessly, a metaphor for Indian football: the whole apparatus tripping over itself to summon the world’s brightest star, pouring lakhs of private rupees on shaking hands with him, without making a single minute about football. They even dressed Sunil Chhetri in a Messi t-shirt and set him amongst a line of salivating dignitaries.

The organisers spent close to ₹100 crore, of which roughly ₹89 crore reportedly went towards Messi’s appearance fee alone. That’s enough to keep a dozen elite residential academies running for a year; or to cover the central revenue losses for half a dozen ISL clubs. But it won’t get you a selfie with the GOAT.

And that selfie, effectively, is the distillation of an Indian administrator’s relationship with sport. They queue up after Olympic and Commonwealth medals, after World Cups, promising land and cash rewards, when they’re never found in the same pincode during the years of toil and preparation. If India sweep the badminton medals at this summer’s Commonwealth Games, watch Himanta Biswa Sarma organise an elaborate evening of photographs and speeches.

An Indian administrator is the most vivid illustration of a moth drawn to the flame of money and fame. Sometimes, like this incredible report by Mihir Vasavda reveals, the money you make—or rather, siphon out of dedicated sports funds—gets you swanky residential complexes with pristine swimming pools and wooden-floor badminton courts.

Sometimes, the post itself carries you by private jets to global events, on taxpayer money of course.

And sometimes, as with Himanta Biswa Sarma, sport becomes another page on an already expansive political portfolio. Sarma is no outlier. The presidents of India’s national federations for football, archery, hockey, shooting, tennis, cycling, fencing and volleyball are all current or former politicians, or have well-established political affiliations. When the BJP MP Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh had to step down as Wrestling Federation of India (WFI) president after India’s leading wrestlers accused him of rampant sexual misconduct, the post went gently to his close associate Sanjay Singh, ensuring seamless continuity in affairs.

What standards, really, can one expect? It is impossible to build sporting institutions when sport itself is almost an afterthought. India’s national federations are led by people inexperienced and unaware with coaching pathways, talent development, and competition structures. Their core competence, and focus, lies entirely elsewhere.

Himanta Biswa Sarma’s interview was poetically timed. One year back, almost to the day, an Indian delegation landed in Lausanne, Switzerland, to lay before the International Olympic Committee (IOC) their official bid for hosting the 2036 summer Olympics. The IOC’s response was to suggest, sternly, a deep clean of our house—every room, from governance to infrastructure—before inviting guests. How amazing and perfectly on-brand, then, that one year on, we’re doubling down on dirt and excreta as interior design.

In the time since the bid, India’s handling of sport makes for quite a painting: qualified football teams left at home; athletics programme placed under enhanced international anti-doping scrutiny after it emerged as one of the world’s worst offenders; at the World University Games, six selected badminton players barred from competing because Indian officials failed to file the paperwork correctly; and, even after sports governance was rewritten into a new law, multiple national federations remained paralysed by disputes, forcing government intervention while athletes waited for green lights at every step. It takes a mind of steel to chose the life of an athlete in this country.

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Know this while watching the replays of Egypt and Cabo Verde at the World Cup, or the next time you see an Estonian runner, or an athlete from the Philippines: talent exists everywhere. The nourishment, development, honing—that’s where the difference begins to show.

Good football countries do not stumble into World Cups. Their success is an accumulated sum of thousands of calculated, farsighted decisions. Administrators sketch the flow of money with care, build pitches, hire coaches, and pump support towards domestic leagues of all scales. Their travel budgets are dictated by what a team needs, instead of their returns. Japan spent years studying how to build a proper football ecosystem. After collecting all the knowledge, they built a 100-year plan for winning the World Cup. That’s right. Every architect of that dream will probably be dead before it turns into reality, and yet, they’ve stood by it for the last thirty-five years. The target for a men’s World Cup title has now been brought forward from 2092 to 2050.

A sporting nation is, almost always, a structural achievement.

The FIFA Men’s World Cup will likely expand from 48 teams to 64 soon. Maybe that might help India qualify. If it happens, every politician and administrator you know of, and everyone you don’t, will line up to take a bite of the credit for making it happen. Messiahs will emerge from every gully. Maybe the Prime Minister will get a few speeches of thanks—he always does.

But, until we fix the foundations, we will not be a good sporting nation, just a populous, perhaps lucky, one. We will keep building 100,00-seater stadiums because, in this country, we mistake scale for quality, and those stadiums will still have narrow exits and seats with a three-digit AQI. The pigeons, too, will keep flying in, leaving behind a reminder of who runs our sport and how they run it.

This was supposed to be Stokes’ comeback after serving a one-match suspension, along with Gus Atkinson, for a long night out in London. Rumours had swirled in the days since that he was shuffling between giving up captaincy and giving up cricket altogether. So there was relief when he turned up for the mandatory press conference and said the right words. England needed him, as a leader and a cricketer, in a summer they hoped would bring success and restore respect into their cricket team. Three days and one soft dismissal later, he was done.

The England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) didn’t announce the retirement publicly just yet. They and Stokes wanted to land it on the right beat. So they waited till the afternoon, ten overs into one of his typical back-breaking bowling spells, exactly fifteen minutes from the tea break. The announcement went via radio and broadcast commentary, then social media, and soon rippled through the crowd at Trent Bridge.

Stokes came back to bowl the next over to a standing ovation and, because it was him, took a wicket off his first ball. English cricket grounds rarely throb like English football grounds, but Trent Bridge, for a few minutes, was as close as one could get. New Zealand were all out soon. Stokes ran to the boundary as England walked off, then hopped up the pavilion stairs. He usually bats in the middle-order; on recent form, he should be at lower-middle order. But, with 373 to chase, he decided to open the innings. Stokes said afterward that he opened in order to “cause a little bit of chaos.”

And so he came, to even more raucous noise, swinging his Gunn & Moore bat. New Zealand gave him a guard of honour. He immediately stepped out to Nathan Smith. Next ball, he tried a reverse sweep. A few balls later, he stepped out again, and smacked Zak Foulkes for a six into the white cloaking behind the sight screen. Then a flicked six, a dabbed four, a crisp square drive. Then, on 30 from 19, he found the lower edge of the bat, and that was that.

England’s innings went up in flames that evening itself, batting in a manner Stokes and coach Brendon McCullum had championed for four years: attack when logic suggests defence or pragmatism, and then keep attacking. This genre was given the loving moniker of Bazball. Within months, it transcended from style to gospel (read: cult), inspiring literature from seasoned journalists.

After the 1-4 drubbing last winter in Australia, and a longer period of no real success against the best teams, the powers that be in England cricket had vowed to re-evaluate Bazball’s cavalier methods and make room for intelligence. On their first series back, what we got instead was some cricket, a drinking incident, two weeks of tabloid, and an utterly lunatic afternoon that all but guaranteed another loss.

Vithushan Ehantharajah, who has followed the England cricket team closely for many years, described the final afternoon as Stokes burning the church he built. It might be true, but I think he wanted to put on one last show for his captive audience. It was clear that the match situation had become irrelevant for him—he said as much in his retirement speech.

It wouldn’t be Stokes if he went out with a whimper. There had to be fire. His two memoirs are titled “Firestarter” and “On Fire.” An authorised movie on his life is titled “Phoenix From the Ashes.” He wears a phoenix tattoo on his right arm. This, I guess, was Stokes leaving as he wanted to be remembered.

**

Retirement allows us to draw the outline on how we’ll remember a cricketer. An active cricketer exists in fragments—this innings, that spell, the relentless argument about form. The moment he stops, the fragments settle into a shape, and we get to discuss the whole. Ask any English cricket fan, and they’ll tell you, without pausing for breath, that Ben Stokes should be in the conversation about the greatest all-rounders of all time. On talent alone the point is worth consideration. But talent alone has never been how we settle these things. So we choose other, seemingly bullet-proof but utterly arbitrary, methods.

Great cricketers can be broadly classified into three archetypes. First and easiest come the obvious all-timers: Tendulkar, Lara, Warne, Sobers, Bradman, Murali, McGrath etc. So heavy is their body of work, so prolific their production, they escape all partisan filters, tick every box. No right thinking person would begrudge their position on cricket’s pedestal. If cricket could be thought of as a problem-solving endeavour, they are its most meritorious respondents.

Stokes leaves as one of only two cricketers to have scored more than 7000 Test runs and taken more than 250 Test wickets, which is a remarkable place to stand. But those numbers need an asterisk: his career spanned an era in which England played more Tests than anyone, more than most teams ever before. He played 122 Tests; Imran Khan, Garfield Sobers, Ian Botham, Richard Hadlee, Keith Miller—none of them enjoyed a similar buffet of opportunity. Stokes’ career batting and bowling averages, laid next to theirs, puncture the argument of him being an all-time great.

After the all-timers sit the aesthetes: Laxman, Mark Waugh, Saeed Anwar. You’ll find fewer bowlers here because bowlers who are lovely to watch but short of wickets don’t last long. Which leaves us the batters.

Batting, you see, is a largely capitalistic exercise. The most successful ones know how to accumulate in bulk. The aesthete is therefore a rebel, an artist in that market, who wants the dough but isn’t ready to sacrifice his soul for it. In his meditation on batting beauty, Samanth Subramanian speaks to ex-Australia captain and certified great, Steve Waugh, who offers the perfect throughline: “They’re relaxed and loose, and it all seems to come easy to them.”

That is the tell. From the artist, the art must look effortless. For the cricketer, art comes from the limbs. Elegance necessitates limbs moving in extension of one another, with a feline softness, as if strung by a thread, the torso as the puppeteer. Think Azharuddin’s flick off his pads or Aravinda’s front-foot pull. Rahul Bhattacharya once wrote of VVS Laxman, “VVS does not charm so much as woo. Inevitably, we fall.” The artist may not always succeed, but he makes you appreciate the fluidity of the human body. Out of all the archetypes, the artist is, by far, the most sensual.

There’s, of course, a wide overlap between greatness and beauty. Warne and Lara were artists worth crossing oceans for. Joe Root, on the other hand, proves that accumulation can happen in slow jazz.

Beauty was not one of Ben Stokes’ many attributes, and I doubt it troubled him. The dirt on the shirt was the point, symbolising a day spent slugging it out against the weather.

The third archetype of cricketer is harder to find and harder still to file. They’re the ones blessed with flair and freedom, rawness and skill. Their statistical profiles are often ordinary, but when the mood strikes, they win games and tournaments. Glenn Maxwell averages a lowly 33 in ODI cricket, 26 in Tests, and yet, only he could’ve scored that unbeaten 201 on a humid, draining Mumbai evening, his body beaten by cramps and spasms, dragging Australia to victory all by himself.

No cricketer or fan in the world has an idea when Maxwell might click, but they live in fear: if he does, he’ll take the game. Shahid Afridi, albeit substantially more accomplished, was made of similar fabric. Shoaib Akhtar too, to an extent.

Then, within the showmen, there’s a smaller subset: the ones with an uncanny feel for the moment a match turns into theatre. Put them in a dead rubber and they’ll sleepwalk through it. But when the match tightens, as the crowd leans in, as the broadcast director starts cutting to tense faces, something in them wakes up.

They are, in a way, ideological opposites to the artist. The artist can exist without the context of a match; this breed exists for the context. They don’t chase the spotlight so much as arrive, repeatedly, at the exact coordinates where it’s about to switch on.

England holds this archetype close. Perhaps a country that invented the game and then spent a century watching others perfect it kept a soft spot for the redeemer. The founding text is written by Ian Botham. Every English cricket fan of a certain vintage can describe the photograph: Botham in the Headingley dressing room, 1981, lit cigar in his mouth, beard like a hedge, pads still on because taking them off would’ve closed the innings. He’d just made 149 not out, swinging his bat like an axe in the Yorkshire wind, and turned a series that already had England’s obituary written into one they’d name after him.

Ask any English fan who watched and they’ll tell you where they watched it. But ask them Botham’s average against the West Indies—the best team of his era—and they’ll change the subject. That’s the deal with these players: you don’t judge their careers by averages, but by the giddy morning-afters in school. Botham gave many. Andrew “Freddie” Flintoff was the same. His career numbers were middling; the summer of 2005, and what it did for English cricket, immortal.

Around fourteen minutes into Phoenix From the Ashes, there is footage of a teenage Stokes and his mates in Cumbria, scrambling up a ridge and sliding back down, his narration voice speaking over it: “You want to be known as that person who’d go above and beyond to do something on the field that some other people might not.”

In his second Test match, Stokes, just twenty-two, walked out to a Perth pitch scratched with craters wide enough for a mobile phone to slip through. England needed about 400 more to save the Ashes. Mitchell Johnson, with a Dennis Lillee-moustache, was sending the red ball at 90 miles an hour slowest. Stokes scored 120 off 195 balls, pulling and cutting anyone who tried to bounce him, driving when they went quick and fast, chopping every Australian bowler, Mitch Johnson included, to size. England lost anyway, as they always do in Australia, but we got to know something about Ben Stokes that afternoon. Some years on, when South Africa had England in trouble at Cape Town, Stokes scored 258 in five hours.

As a batter, Stokes was hugely gifted—on technique alone, perhaps one of the five best England have had in thirty years. On the field, he was amongst the best in the world. He’d cover ground like a sprinter and holding catches he had no business reaching. Stokes the bowler nobody enjoyed facing: quick without being express, swinging it like a banana, forever leaving you playing the wrong line. And that was only the shape of it. He could bowl for hours without shedding pace or zip, and turn a passage of play into a dogfight.

A couple of months after that Cape Town knock, England needed to defend 19 in the last over of a World Cup final against the West Indies. Stokes took the ball and Carlos Brathwaite hit him for four consecutive sixes. As the last of the hits disappeared over the field, Stokes sank to his haunches, covering his eyes with palms. He played two more World Cup finals after that evening; he was England’s saviour and Player of The Match in both. You can make a movie from his bowling spells that brought England back into a contest.

I think of Stokes the all-rounder like this: if I’m building an all-time XI, I wouldn’t have him; but if I’m building a team to play a World Cup final, or a Test match on which hangs my life, Stokes would be one of the first names on the team sheet.

Like Botham, Stokes too had a Headingley scene, almost a reprint for the impossibility of the situation. I could start with the final day, the most unforgettable of all, but I want to talk about the previous afternoon. England were 1-0 down in the Ashes, and midway through the third Test, found themselves about 200 or so runs behind Australia. The series was fading from the horizon with every Australian run. Stokes then bowled for nearly two unbroken hours, just one man raging against the dying light. That rage brought him wickets, and England the semblance of a reachable target.

359 was still too much. Australia had them reeling at 159-4, when Stokes walked in. At one point, Stokes was on 3 off 81 balls, running out of partners. It was over-my-dead-body defiance turned into a style. One ball hit the back of his helmet and burst the temple-guard, scattering black debris all over the pitch. Stokes just tapped his bat and moved on. One after another, everyone fell. Stokes crossed his half-century, the runs barely registering over the prospect of the impending 0-2 series deficit. England still needed 72 when Australia got their penultimate wicket.

And yet, there was a weird magnetic tension to the situation. Stokes was still there. He hit a six down the ground, a crunching pull, a cut, a scoop, a reverse sweep for six. He pulled and flicked his way from 96 to 112, prompting Ricky Ponting—the most competitive Aussie you’d find—to go, “Wowie!” in the commentary box. On the other side, Jack Leach defended obdurately. Stokes kept hitting, at that point operating on a cocktail of gritted teeth, blind faith, and the thing elite athletes call “the zone.”

Jack Leach’s single, the most popular single in English cricket history, tied the scores. Then, in one motion, a thumping cut off Pat Cummins, the right hand coming off the bat, into a fist, and a cathartic air punch. Only Ben Stokes.

Four years later, he almost, almost, pulled off an encore at Lord’s. He was England captain then.

And Stokes as a captain was a wild ride. Under his leadership, England vowed to break away from the pressure of failure and play, purely, for the vibes. They kept pushing the line between bravery and recklessness. Scores that had never been chased were smoked down; scores that should’ve been chased were wilted against. They lost a lot more than they won, but they were spectacular either way.

None of it came quietly. The mic was their outbound marketing arm. Stokes claimed that his England were saving Test cricket, that fans watching them were lucky to have experienced this. His teammates joined in, each saying stupider things than the last. Ben Duckett once said every team in the world owed England gratitude for showing what brave cricket looks like.

There was also a near admirable resistance to accepting defeat or absorbing accountability. It was post-truth English exceptionalism adopted as a dress code. The 1-4 scoreline in an Ashes series that they had talked up for three years was, apparently, an illusion of numbers, a function of results that went one way but could’ve easily gone the other. The coach said they actually prepared a bit too well.

Even on their last afternoon with him as leader, there was no reckoning with the state of the game. New Zealand showed the merit of playing tough, attritional cricket; England and Stokes said, “no, thanks.” Stokes took English cricket through a hurricane, because he liked running into hurricanes, and left behind a bunch of dizzy men in tattered clothes.

**

From the New Zealand dugout also came an exhibit of how to exit the stage gracefully. Kane Williamson, an indisputable legend, left between games, in relative silence. In his retirement presser, he said that all his runs belonged to the team, not himself. He spoke with his charming soft voice, the whole speech a thank you-note towards his teammates, opponents, and employers. And then he was gone. We don’t know what he said to his teammates.

Stokes couldn’t be more different to Williamson. But even so, that choreography at Trent Bridge, set against the match situation, was farcical and self-indulgent. It imitated the chatter from across the Atlantic, where every Portuguese is suggesting that a World Cup campaign be turned into a farewell-cum-tribute roadshow for Cristiano Ronaldo. Perhaps, when a cult grows large enough, everything else—the result, the collective aspiration, the point of the exercise—falls away behind it. So it was with Stokes, in his last few years, the pageantry an accompanying act in the experience.

And everyone, clearly, was charmed. England had just been taken apart, and still the cameras would not move their gaze. Nor would the crowd, though, I think, for very different reasons. To them, Stokesy is a true neighbourhood hero—unapologetically imperfect and rough around the edges, but blessed with otherworldly tenacity and a way with people.

There’s a story from 2022 I think of every time I think of him. Stokes, while playing for Durham, hit Josh Baker, an 18-year-old off-spinner from Worcestershire, for 34 runs in one over. Later that evening, a message lit up Josh’s phone: “Hey Josh, Ben Stokes here.. Please don’t let today define the rest of your season. You’ve got serious potential and I think you will go a long way. Most important opinion is from the lads in your changing room and they will always have your back. This coming from someone who got meeeeeeelted in a T20 World Cup final.”

Stokes understands despair. Between a court case for violence, the loss of his father, a crippling depression, and lost World Cup finals, he has emerged from a lifetime’s worth of experiences that would’ve broken many. And he walked out with chest up, hand locked into a fist, ready to run into the wind again.

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“Legacy is something you leave behind, not something you take with you,” Gideon Haigh writes here. Stokes’ career poses an interesting question about legacy: how will we remember him? As the cricketer who, zooming out, did well sometimes? As the captain who promised chocolate and often delivered chalk?

I think, in time, we will probably forget parts of this last afternoon, even though the Bazball years would be hard to forget or always rationalise. We might even forget his career averages—they’re unremarkable anyway. I think we’ll start looking past a lot of that with age. I think we’ll remember, most fondly, Stokes the talisman, gutsing it out, wearing white, wearing blue, occasionally a funky red, and dragging his mates across the line when nobody gave him a chance. And then doing it again.

Cricket will be 150 years old next March. In all this time, few have made it feel as cinematic as Ben Stokes. That ought to count for something.

He has been everywhere at this World Cup. In the VIP boxes, yes, but also on every screen, every break, every segue, and the long commercial hours between games. Sometimes, he’s making coffee on a Nespresso machine; then he’s flipping pancakes for Ninja Flex Flame; showering in a black Boss underwear, one appreciative shot of his butt included; then, driving to McDonald’s, drinking Pepsi, munching on Lay’s, and lacing up Adidas trainers. Sometimes he even walks you through the aisles of Home Depot, and counsels you on the loan options at the Bank of America. He’s almost working as hard at this World Cup as a French midfielder.

Beckham has chosen this illustration of him as football’s high-society import to showbiz. That’s his life these days, World Cup or not. He has a honey brand, appears in documentaries about his life, hobnobs with oligarchs and sheikhs, and generally lives the life of the world’s most famous influencer.

The chyron under his face at matches sometimes reads “ex-England captain,” which, if you ever saw him play, feels like a ludicrous reduction, like calling Pavarotti a singer. For about a decade, between 1996 and 2006, Beckham was the best of England. Until last week, he was the only English male to have scored in three different World Cups; he led England in two of them.

And he was in the centre of the frame for England’s two most famous World Cup moments in the last forty years.

**

On June 7, 2002, England played Argentina in their first group match of the World Cup. Beckham had drawn the flashlights and the headlines from the moment England landed in Japan. He was the team captain, Manchester United’s talisman, husband to a Spice Girl, and suddenly, the wearer of a blonde, punk-rock mohawk. The cameras tailed him everywhere; he’d long since learnt to live with the flash as his shadow.

The game was stiff and cagey, moving this way and the other but never quite releasing its handbrakes. Then, in the 43rd minute, England forward Michael Owen was fouled in the penalty box by Argentina defender Mauricio Pochettino. The referee pointed to the penalty spot. And it was as if the rest of the field paused and spread out for David Beckham to take the ball and the occasion.

Beckham was known for a wand of a right foot. He could make the ball curl, dip, and swerve over long distances. If he played cricket, he’d open the bowling with his swing. His passes had a beatific quality, a sense of artistry. So when he took penalties, he hit them similarly, with the inside of his right foot, and the shot often traced a small curve.

This one he bludgeoned. He ran his right foot through the ball as if he wanted to tear through the leather. The ball went low, hard, and straight into the centre of the net—one of the most ungainly of his 146 career goals. But it was amongst his most significant.

England 1-0 Argentina. Beckham ran off to the left corner flag clutching his shirt, pulling at it, kissing the crest, screaming into the void. It was hard to tell whether he had a tear in his eye, because they were crunched tight. That moment gave us this picture.

This picture was twenty years in the making.

**

The Falkland Islands, Las Malvinas in Spanish, is an archipelago of 778 small, windswept dots of land in the South Atlantic ocean, around 300 miles east of Patagonia in southern Argentina. It had been a British territory since 1833; Argentina, however, always felt they owned the land instead. In April 1982, Argentina’s military invaded the islands. Margaret Thatcher’s Britain responded with a hundred war ships. On June 14, 1982, seventy-four days after the invasion, Argentina’s military surrendered. 649 Argentines were killed, many of them young conscripts who had been sent to the islands without proper food, clothing, or shelter. The survivors returned to a country, already suffocated under the debris of economic and social rubble, in complete mourning.

Thatcher, meanwhile, gave victory speeches and organised parades, asking the British public to “rejoice.”

**

The next time England faced Argentina in a major game, it was the quarter final of the 1986 World Cup, under an upright and unrelenting Mexico City sun. A lot had changed in the four years. Democracy had arrived in Argentina. The world’s greatest footballer was a proud, outspoken Argentine.

In Mexico, the Argentines maintained that football had nothing to do with the war. It was necessary fiction. Members of the 1982 squad had unfurled Las Malvinas son Argentinas banners before friendlies in the run-up to that tournament, wrapping themselves in the cause. By 1986 the banners were gone. There was silence instead, which was its own kind of statement. Diego Maradona, who understood theatre better than most, admitted later that it was all a facade. They thought of nothing else.

Argentina were the superior team, but couldn’t break through the dogged English defence in the first half. Six minutes into the second half, a mishit clearance lobbed up the ball in the England penalty box. Maradona ran towards it. The English goalkeeper, Peter Shilton, ran towards it too. Shilton was six foot tall, Maradona five-five. And yet, Maradona seemed to rise above Shilton and head the ball into the goal. Nine blue shirts converged around Maradona near the sideline while the replay was broadcast to the watching audience: Maradona had locked his left hand into a fist and raised it above his head, and the ball had bounced off it. Too late; 1-0.

Four minutes later, Maradona—now the centre of every play—received the ball in his own half. He pirouetted past two defenders, turning on the ball almost, then ran twenty yards along the right edge of the pitch, cut inward past one defender, then shimmied past one more, then around the goalkeeper, and dinked the ball into the net.

On Uruguayan radio, journalist Victor Hugo Morales held the mic.

“Maradona on the ball now. Two closing him down. Maradona rolls his foot over the ball and breaks away down the right, the genius of world football. He goes past a third, looks for Burruchaga. Maradona forever! Genius! Genius! Genius! He’s still going… Gooooal! Sorry, I want to cry! Good God! Long live football! What a goal! A memorable run from Maradona. The greatest solo goal of all time. Cosmic Kite, which planet did you come from?”

Within eleven seconds and eleven touches of the ball, Diego Maradona had pierced through the entire English defence, and, evidently, their spirit. The match finished 2-1 to Argentina. At the post-game press conference, when asked whether he had handled the ball, Maradona said the goal was scored “a little with the head of Maradona and a little with the hand of God.” Forty years on, the English still froth with rage if you mention this match.

“It was like beating a country, not a football team,” Maradona wrote in his autobiography. “Although we said before the game that football had nothing to do with the Malvinas War, we knew that a lot of Argentine kids had died there, that they had mowed us down like little birds. And this was revenge.”

**

Four years later, England went to the World Cup in Italy. They had, this time, a genius of theirs: Paul Gascoigne, Gazza to the English—twenty-three years old, bulky and brilliant, capable of doing things with a football that no Englishman had managed in a generation. Carried by Gazza and Gary Lineker, England reached the semi-final. They played West Germany, runners-up to Maradona’s Argentina last time around. In the other semi-final, Maradona’s Argentina faced the hosts. England were one game away from delicious, beautiful revenge.

Argentina beat Italy; England lost to West Germany in a penalty shoot-out. And if this wasn’t deep enough a cut, they failed to qualify for 1994, which turned out to be Maradona’s last sighting as a major, prime-time footballer. The moment had passed.

**

While the world prepared for the World Cup, England were welcoming a new order in their football. Manchester United, coached by the iron-fisted, granite-faced Scot, Alex Ferguson, had just won their second successive Premier League title, after waiting for twenty-six years for one. Ferguson’s eyes, though, weren’t set on the senior team alone. Working alongside youth coach Eric Harrison, he had turned United’s age-group sides into a production line. The batch that came through in 1992 won the FA Youth Cup. Among them: David Beckham, Ryan Giggs, Gary Neville, Phil Neville, Paul Scholes, Nicky Butt.

By 1995, Alex Ferguson was jettisoning experienced first team players into the transfer market to make room for the teenagers. The football establishment, which in England was both conservative and sentimental, was appalled. Alan Hansen, who had won everything worth winning as a player at Liverpool and now dispensed wisdom from a television studio, delivered his verdict: “You can’t win anything with kids.” Ferguson, ever the rebel against convention, brought them all in.

Beckham made his debut in April 1995. Fresh faced with a crew-cut, a London boy growing up in Manchester, he looked like any other young footballer trying to find his feet. He was not like any other young footballer. Technically, he operated on a different frequency to everyone around him. Soon, he was beginning to stand out even amongst the big boys. By the start of the 1996-97 season, he was a starting lineup fixture. The crew cut was replaced by a blonde middle-parting that curved over his forehead and fell to the sides. He looked like a young Hollywood star. In a football culture that prized grime and distrusted flair, abhorred it even, Beckham was a lavish art gallery exhibit. He was beautiful and brilliant and he didn’t seem to think the two were incompatible. United handed him the number 10 shirt.

On August 17th, 1996, the opening day of the Premier League season, Beckham, too, received the ball in his own half with his team in the lead. And, like Maradona, he did what he did best. He planted his left leg, took his left arm around his torso, as if he was drawing the rings of Saturn, and with his body leaning to the left, hit the ball with the inside of his right foot. The ball rose and floated, cutting a parabola across 57 yards, over Wimbledon goalkeeper Neil Sullivan, and dipped into the net.

David Beckham became an overnight superstar. England—the football nation, the public, the television media, the songmakers, the theatre artists, the tabloid editors—were obsessed. By the time the 1998 World Cup came around, he was twenty-three, a first-pick for the national team, and already the most famous young man in the country.

**

In France, for their third group game, England faced Colombia. In the 29th minute, Beckham stood over the ball about thirty yards away from the Colombia goal, centre-aligned. Free-kick specialists like an angle to work with. From straight on, the goalkeeper can plant himself in the middle of the goal and wait, and the ball has to do something extraordinary to beat him. Beckham created the angle by approaching the dead ball from the side, curved it over and above the Colombian wall, swerving leftwards and dropping into the bottom corner. For England supporters who had spent years grieving the lost Gazza opportunity, this was evidence that a new genius had arrived.

England finished second in their group, and reached the first knockout round, the pre-quarter finals, where the draw coughed up their old foes, Argentina.

The match was a taut, nervous affair, missed passes turned over to attacks turned over to counter-attacks and tackles and fortuitous saves. In the 47th minute, the score 2-2, Beckham was shoulder-barged to the floor by Diego Simeone. Several seconds later, lying on his chest, Beckham kicked back out at Simeone. The ball wasn’t in play anymore, which meant the referee didn’t have a decision to make. Red card, in possibly the biggest match of his life.

England held on, somehow, and reached the penalty shoot-out, which proved a challenge too asphyxiating. Beckham, one of England’s best penalty-takers, watched from the dressing room.

The first blow came from an exasperated Glenn Hoddle, then the England coach; the red card, he said, “cost us dearly.” At home, fans burned effigies and protested with posters. The Mirror ran “10 Heroic Lions, One Stupid Boy” on their front page. The television media, too, stuck their fork in: fame had ruined him; he was too soft, too pretty, too distracted by his pop-star wife to handle the demands of international football. Beckham would reveal later that, after the match, he broke down in his parents’ arms.

The next morning, Alex Ferguson called him up. “Don't worry, go away for a few weeks ... come back to the club, and you've got us.”

**

Back at United, Beckham was surrounded by a team that functioned simultaneously as a brotherhood and a machine. He rediscovered the joy of football, and the ball kept tracing beautiful shapes off his right foot. From the right flank, he sent in cross after cross, pass after pass, and they all lined up to feast. This was the strongest United had been in a bit; they just wouldn’t lose. And when the ball was dead, either on a corner or just outside the penalty box, no one in England could match up to David Beckham. He scored a typical long-distance curler, albeit from open play, against Arsenal in the FA Cup semi-final.

In the last ten days of the season, United faced three finals: Tottenham Hotspur at home to secure the league title, Newcastle at Wembley in the FA Cup final, Bayern Munich in Barcelona in the Champions League final. If they won all three, they’d become the first team in English history to complete the “treble” of league, cup, and continental titles in the same season.

Tottenham at home, first. As the clock ticked towards half time, with Tottenham leading 1-0 and a nervousness setting around Old Trafford, Beckham found the ball just outside the right side of the penalty box. He curled the ball into the far corner. Andy Cole scored in the second half. 2-1 Manchester United; league champions.

The FA Cup final, next. With one eye on the Champions League final, Alex Ferguson rotated his team. He kept Beckham, though, who turned in a near-flawless ninety-minute shift. United strolled home 2-0.

A few sleeps later, Manchester United arrived in sunny Barcelona with a gaping hole: Paul Scholes and Roy Keane, their first-choice centre-midfielders, were suspended. Scholes and Keane were United’s engine—Keane the bruiser and the midfield general; Scholes the metronome who brought control and precision. Beckham’s shoulder was tapped again, to fill in.

All great football teams are eventually judged for their continental success, like how tennis players are judged for their Wimbledon titles. United had won the Champions League only once in their history, thirty one years prior. It was more than just another final.

Bayern Munich went ahead in the sixth minute. United were competitive, but only in spurts. Bayern were better, physically stronger, and like a typical German team, innately knew how to handle the big game. For ninety minutes, United hustled and pushed, threw everything they had, but couldn’t break through. When they did, standing in the Bayern goal was the imposing wall called Oliver Kahn.

Ferguson threw all his forwards onto the pitch. In the 91st minute, less than two hundred seconds left on the clock, United received a corner on the left hand side. On commentary, Clive Tyldesley asked, “Can United score? They always score.”

Beckham stood over the ball in the narrow corner of the Camp Nou pitch and whipped the cross in. The ball rebounded off one player and another, hit a Bayern shin and a United head, and fell onto Teddy Sherringham’s path. 1-1. On the next play, United went again. There was no turning back now. Corner, again. Beckham, again. Pitch perfect cross, again. Sherringham flicked it behind, “AND SOLSKJAER HAS WON IT!”

Twelve months. That was all it took. Twelve months from burned effigies and front-page abuse to an open-top bus parade through Manchester, tens of thousands lining the streets, singing the name of the boy they had wanted to destroy. Manchester United won the league again the next season, then again the season after. At the centre of it all, orchestrating, delivering, bending the ball to his will, David Beckham.

England made him national team captain.

**

The luscious hair was gone by now, replaced by a Tyler Durden buzzcut—a lot less showbiz, a lot more rugged. The footballer was the same, jaw-dropping aesthete, but the leader had acquired an edge.

England, meanwhile, good ol’ England, ran head-first into a problem: they reached the brink of missing their second World Cup in three. When Greece came over for the final qualifying game in October 2001, England needed a draw, if not a win, for automatic qualification. Defeat would mean the indignity of a two-legged playoff, and a metaphorical knife-fight on the edge of a cliff.

The match was played at Old Trafford—Manchester United and Beckham’s home patch. He led the team out to seventy thousand singing throats. And, obviously, Greece took the lead within half an hour. England were their usual selves, the dissonance between their technical ability and collective cohesion stark as ever. And yet, around those fumbling white shirts, Beckham was extraordinary. He wasn’t running so much as pounding grass on behalf of everyone else. We often use the term, “captain’s performance” to describe a captain clinching the decisive moment. This was the purest distillation of a captain’s performance: one man trying to drag a talented-yet-clumsy team to the World Cup by sheer force of will.

In the second half, England equalised, then Greece scored again. Beckham took about half a dozen free kicks, many of them earned through his forceful dribbling, but couldn’t find the target. The regulation time ended, and the fourth official signalled for injury time.

In the 93rd minute, England won another free kick. Central to the goal, about thirty yards out—the hardest angle there is. It was, in all possibility, the last chance of the match. The digital scoreboard read England 1-2 Greece. David Beckham stood over the ball, facing the famous Stretford End, which had seen him go from boy to wunderkind to genius to villain to genius to leader. Here he was, England’s World Cup tickets, his reputation, his captaincy—all on the line.

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And so we arrive at Sapporo, Japan, on a sweaty, balmy evening. Another World Cup, another match against Argentina.

The ball, dead and still. Over it, David Beckham, England’s David Beckham, surrounded by the shirt that had given him and his country so much agony.

I shouldn’t be awake either. I had gone to bed four hours ago, right after watching France be France against Senegal. This is the first World Cup in my living memory that I am keeping at an arm’s length. I have been questioning if I love Brazil enough to wake up at 3:30 am to watch them struggle to stitch four passes against Morocco. But, it is still a World Cup. For all its garish clothing, abrasive behaviour, and water breaks arriving like planned power cuts, there remain things worth the alarm. One of them is called Lionel Messi.

Argentina are a good team, and like any good tournament team, they’re built for endurance more than thrill. When Lionel Scaloni was handed over the coaching duties in 2018, he was given one diktat: win us the World Cup. Messi, thirty-one years old then, ran a very real risk of finishing his career without one. So Scaloni built a team around Messi, with one tweak: the maximalist robe Messi had worn for Argentina, almost by compulsion, was folded away. This Argentina needed Messi the minimalist, the touch player, the magician who could vanish and reappear. Sometimes, like in the second goal of the 2022 World Cup final, all the team needed was a turn and a touch. Sometimes, a piercing pass, threaded through a gap of inches. For the rest, Messi would know when to wear his cape, from two decades of muscle memory. Scaloni spread the creative responsibilities across his attack, and built a wall of midfield and defence that wouldn’t yield an inch. So, waking up for Argentina’s Messi was a gamble worth taking, but a gamble nonetheless.

The Arrowhead Stadium, in Kansas City, is tall, wide, and roofless, like a wok without a lid. I notice Messi as he leads his team out. The sun is dipping behind the giant rugby ball-shaped electronic screen perched on the far side, and he’s taking the sight in. There was an intensity to Messi’s face in 2018 and 2022, a tightness in his jaw and eyes, perhaps from the tension of not knowing if he was on his last chance for a World Cup. That burden has been lifted. This is a World Cup and multiple Copa America-winner Messi. His shoulders are loose; his face, carrying the puff of age, is a lot more soft around the edges. I didn’t think Messi would play this World Cup. Last September, when the Buenos Aires crowd serenaded him, carrying posters of “Gracias por todo,” I took that for an ending. With his life’s objective fulfilled, I thought he would unlace his shoes. I am glad he didn’t.

Here, then, is a full World Cup of Messi ahead of us. There’s a quirk about watching a genius: for 85-87 minutes of a 90-minute game, you don’t watch them at all. Professional footballers, a widely-accepted theory goes, are in possession of the ball for two minutes a game, at best. The rest of the time is spent covering ground, shadowing runners, waiting to sprint, sprinting without a pass, pressing, jostling—you get the drift.

Messi may be football’s greatest ever walker. He wafts in and out of spaces, like air, a faint outline behind the hyperactive movement of others. He isn’t lazy—he works diligently in defence when his team needs it. Most of his walking happens as his team patiently builds up its moves. Messi waits, several beats ahead. And then, as the ball moves into his quarter, you feel the wind change direction. Your back straightens. Something snaps into motion within him. Your eyes leave the ball and start searching for him. Often, the move won’t complete and the possession would be recycled, but there is a thrill to the anticipation, a sensation that magic might be a five-yard pass away.

The first such moment of this game comes around the fifth minute, as Argentina move the play high on their left wing. Messi, almost stationary, suddenly springs to life and sprints into the penalty box. The pass to him never materialises, but the attempt brings the crowd to their feet. They have their first “ooooh” of the night.

The ball eventually finds him around minute seven. Argentina move forward in a wave. Messi receives the ball, pirouettes on his left leg, turns to see Algerian defenders standing in a double-layered wall, and passes the ball behind. He understands tempo, this guy. Maybe, in a previous life, he was a musician or a poet. So he just moves the play along, lowers the heartbeat. Not now. With every little touch and turn, the heart pumps a little faster, but he’s asking you to settle in. Ninety minutes is a long time.

This passage, still, highlights a couple of truths about the play we’re a captive audience to: one, Messi is 39. There was a version of him, not too many years gone, that would’ve seen two blocks of defenders and taken them on. It used to be his thing. He would slip past defenders, a ribbon snake on a swamp, the ball glued to his shoe. The mind inevitably wanders to all the goals he’s scored like this: his first great goal, against Getafe; the semi-final goal against Real Madrid; then, the one against Athletic Bilbao, so incredible in dexterity, so fluid in motion, it was sent to a lab to analyse. Those days are long past us. Even Messi, it turns out, has to reconcile with time.

The second truth is that Messi understands this. Which is incredible. Athletes who touch sustained greatness get there by believing nothing is beyond their reach. Sachin Tendulkar did not retire because he ran out of belief; his body just caught up with his spirit. Rafael Nadal deeply understands fear and insecurity, as the documentary Rafa shows us vividly, but he never thought that a tennis match could not be won. Most who reach the very top of a sport carry a version of this sickness. For Messi to be Messi and still be alive to the erosion within him is a gift almost as rare as his football skills.

Around the tenth minute, Lautaro Martínez dinks the ball towards Messi, setting him one-on-one with the Algerian goalkeeper, Luca Zidane, son of Zinedine. Messi takes two deft touches towards the goal, and, in the same motion, dummies a shot, swinging his foot in a hitting arc and breaking—the arc, not his stride—at the last moment. The goalkeeper, already crouching low, has lost balance, his legs buckling under him. My throat has belted out “Messi!” or some such. With his next touch, Messi scoops the ball over the goalkeeper, into the net. The American commentator screams like he would for a home run. The linesman raises his flag to signal offside. Messi nods, knowingly. It’ll come.

In the seventeenth minute, the ball is played to Messi again, who’s standing halfway between the centre circle and Algeria’s penalty box. The pass is quick and vertical, cutting past a line of defence, signalling aggression. Messi turns while receiving the ball, cushioning it on his inside leg as he sets off towards the goal. The heart pumps again. There are two passes available to him on either side, or a longer dribble if he chooses so. I’m up from my chair. The defenders, two-thirds his age, are backing off. It’s logically a wise decision; to apply pressure on Messi is to douse fire with your hands. But it’s also a perilous decision. He takes one step, two steps, and then thwack! About twenty-five yards away from the goal, Messi has let rip. The ball curls between two defenders, over and sideways from the goalkeeper, touches his outstretched fingers, and sploshes into the white mesh of the goal.

It’s a superb shot, but only by the standards applicable to everyone else. If you have watched enough of Messi, this is a goal you’ve seen a hundred times over. I doubt Messi thought much about the shot himself—it was too close to the ‘keeper, too many inches away from the top corner for his liking. The moment, regardless, was incredible. He stretched his hands wide, like the wings of a bird, and went on a long celebratory run before letting himself be wrapped in Argentine hands and bodies. Messi is playing his sixth World Cup, and perhaps, for the first time, with true freedom.

Twenty years back, a few weeks after Messi’s thrilling World Cup debut against Serbia and Montenegro, David Foster-Wallace published an essay on Roger Federer. Titled ‘Roger Federer as a Religious Experience’, the essay has become something like a Messi highlight—timeless, a reference for its craft, and quoted at every opportunity, not least by this writer. It starts thus: “Almost anyone who loves tennis and follows the men’s tour on television has, over the last few years, had what might be termed Federer Moments. These are times, as you watch the young Swiss play, when the jaw drops and eyes protrude and sounds are made that bring spouses in from other rooms to see if you’re O.K. The Moments are more intense if you’ve played enough tennis to understand the impossibility of what you just saw him do. We’ve all got our examples.”

Replace Federer with Messi, Swiss with Argentine, and the paragraph sits just as neatly for The Messi Experience™ in the last couple of decades. I have given up, over the years, trying to be civil while watching him. The sounds, whatever they are, are involuntary; it’s my body reacting to him. I’m sure a sound was made when the ball turned right, mid air, and hit the Algerian net. Other sounds were made too, in spurts, throughout the first half, even if there weren’t any other goals. There was a body feint here, a little dribble there, the anticipation of sorcery enough to set off a spark.

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The faces of the Algerian defenders tell a story. They know they are at one man’s mercy. They start the second half better. Argentina respond, with their gang of muscular tyros moving into attacking zones and taking their shots. Messi is fairly peripheral. He’s around, floating in the vicinity of the action, but outside the frame. Then, in the sixtieth minute, another midfielder takes his shot from long range. The ball flies low into the goalkeeper’s hand, and pops right back out. Oh. Messi has taken off for the rebound. Behind him, the Algerian defender takes one step drops. Easy, 2-0.

Rewind the footage to the moment the goalkeeper spills the ball, and you’ll notice Messi uncoiled, already sprinting. A lot of football, sport even, happens between events. You’ll hear top-level pros talking about visualisation and anticipation. This, is what they mean. Messi, like all good forwards, has reacted to the possibility, not the play.

Just a few moments later, another ball from the midfield is sent towards Messi—fully switched on now, playing near the last defensive line. His first touch takes him beyond the nearest defender, as if his body is moving in union with the ball. Oh yes. Second touch, further. Only the keeper and eighteen yards between him and the goal. Oh yes! The left foot uncoils, loads, and snaps. The shot’s good, the goalkeeper equal to it. Messi slows down, smiling. Oooh, it’s coming.

There is an air of inevitability to Messi in this mode. You cannot always reason logically that the next one is coming; you just know it is, like how you know it will rain from looking at the sky and smelling the air. Algeria’s defenders seem to know it too. They are a half-yard deeper than they were five minutes ago. I wonder if, all those years ago, Jerome Boateng, one of the best defenders in the world, playing for one of the best teams in the world, saw it coming too.

Argentina are in fifth gear now. Passes fly forward with real speed, slicing through defensive lines. Algeria, already fragile, are getting opened up. The ball is moved to the left flank, and passed back across the penalty box, just outside, on the edge of the ‘D’. There stands Messi. One touch, another touch, both sideways, and that left foot drawn back again.

An archer’s range of motion, in sequence, can be described as: nock, draw, anchor, aim, release, follow through. Messi doesn’t need to anchor, neither does he need time to aim. He lets his muscle memory take over. The destination is certain from the moment the ball leaves his foot. It moves low, hovering over the ground, swerving outside then inside, sneaking in near the post, almost kissing it. It’s impossible to stop for a goalkeeper who had been standing, reasonably, near the centre of the goal. My flatmate must be a deep sleeper because I have no clue how my shriek hasn’t woken him up. 3-0, hat-trick. Messi is on his follow-through, smiling, waiting for his friends to join him.

I am a frequent borrower of words, and the words I’m thinking of in this moment belong to an Uruguayan man, born on the other side of River Plate from Messi.

“One fine day the goddess of the wind kisses the foot of man, that mistreated, scorned foot, and from that kiss the soccer idol is born. He is born in a straw crib in a tin-roofed shack and he enters the world clinging to a ball. The ball seeks him out, knows him, needs him. She rests and rocks on the top of his foot. He caresses her and makes her speak, and in that tête-à-tête millions of mutes converse.”

We have been watching Messi for twenty years now—he first wore the Argentina shirt at a World Cup as an eighteen-year-old substitute, gangly, sharp and slippery, while his current coach played right of defence. His longevity is a marvel in itself. Football is a young athlete’s sport. It’s ruthless, ready to discard you the moment your hamstrings start moaning. Besides, playing centre-forward is serious work. And yet here he is, thirty-nine in three days, still the most decisive man on a pitch occupied by players at least a decade younger and quicker.

There was a little bit of poetry in the placement of this hat-trick too. In the six hours preceding this game, Kylian Mbappé and Erling Haaland, 27 and 26, from France and Norway, had scored two goals each. They are the present and future, exhibits of elite talent meeting unimaginable confidence and superhuman, almost lab-created, physicality. They don’t beat so much as pummell opponents into submission. For illustration, check out Mbappé’s second goal from the night, a thirty-five yard rocket that left the Senegal goalkeeper tapping at thin air. Messi is playing his sixth World Cup and sits with sixteen World Cup goals. Mbappé has fourteen and he has only begun his third.

Messi is nothing like them, never was. For him, the goal happens when it has to. The journey there, the passes, the dribbles, the magic that sometimes pays off, sometimes doesn’t—that has always been his raison d’etre. The play isn’t a means to an end, but the end itself.

While everything around him evolves, gathering pace and muscle, accumulating bricks for football as a more frantic, more dramatic spectacle than ever before, Messi wafts in and out of space, like air, waiting for the moment when he can play with the ball. Even in his minimalist avatar, there’s a boyish joy to what he does. Maybe that’s why we love him with a tender, heartfelt warmth. Maybe that’s why he transcends the petty discourse of team fandom. And maybe that’s what makes Messi eternal, worth waking up red-eyed for, even if he’s 39 and puffy-faced.

Mexico 1970, IX Campeonato Mundial de Futbol. The ninth men’s World Cup, the first broadcasted in colour.

The footage from Mexico 1970 is mesmerising. The pale, sun-bleached grass, the heat one can sense from the brightness of the pictures, the royal blue of Italy a cooling shade against the ground, the Brazilian yellow vivid, forming an association of colour with weight when worn by Pelé and Rivelino. Rivelino even rocked a proper ‘70s ‘stache! Pelé leaping over an English marker; Gordon Banks moving through air, birdlike almost, somehow getting enough palm and power to thwart the ball.

Then the final. I’ve watched that game in full, many times over. It’s an exhibition—no, a demonstration—of what it means to truly play football. Many consider it, rightly, the most artistic football ever produced. I think it was the most relaxed that sport ever got. Play the footage, open another tab with a street capoeira beat, and you’ll know what I mean.

And, of course, Carlos Alberto’s goal. The final goal of the tournament, possibly the greatest team goal ever scored, given context and beauty—a sequence of short, deliberate passes, a cheeky stepover, more unhurried passing, players moving around each other as if they were in a synchronised dance, Pelé’s pause, just for a breath, his right foot going over the ball and holding its arc, and, while walking, a casual pass rightwards, as Carlos Alberto roared in like a bullet train and took his shot without breaking stride.

Italy, at the time, had a reputation of being defensive gods— the two Milan clubs had won four of the last eight European Cups. And yet, Brazil made them chase ghosts for ninety minutes in the oppressive Mexico City noon.

I was born in a World Cup year, about three months after Lothar Matthäus neutralised Diego Maradona in Milan, and West Germany—runners up at the previous two World Cups—finally got their gold. The first football tournament I properly watched was also a World Cup: France 1998. I remember that we had moved the television to the bedroom, because some matches would start at 9:30, and some after midnight. The World Cup, back then, was the most important and prestigious trophy in the sport. Club football was intense, deeply entrenched into local community and rivalry, but the World Cup was the big deal. Pele and Maradona’s legacies were cemented after their heroics in national colours; Ronaldo, and I, would have to endure heartbreak before catharsis four years later.

The World Cup announces itself some months before the actual tournament, as teams start qualifying and missing out. This time, Italy dominated the headlines after missing their third consecutive World Cup. Italy won the World Cup in 2006. Since that time, their men’s football team has won as many World Cup matches as their men’s cricket team: one. For me, who grew up on Maldini and Del Piero and Totti, there was an initial shock, but over the years, seeing how insular the Serie A has become, how distant it is to other major European Leagues, their absence isn’t a surprise anymore. Italian football has developed a knack for a nosedive.

It was good to see Norway qualify for the first time after ’98, when they beat Brazil in the group stages. I have faint memories of Tore Andre Flo bustling past the Brazil defenders for the equalising goal. My heart, though, was made up by Haiti and Curacao qualifying. This is a 48-team World Cup and three American countries co-hosting and qualifying by default meant more spots for the continent, but there’s something to be said about Haiti playing against Brazil, Curacao against Germany, that makes the tournament richer.

Aside from the qualification process, there is also the pre-gaming, which starts as the regular domestic season enters its final laps. Back in the day, ESPN would treat us to special documentaries on every World Cup in a chronological order. You didn’t want to miss Hungary in 1954 and Pele in ’58. By the lead-up weeks, you’d reach 1982 and Socrates—how Brazil messed that Italy game up, only they’d know. Maradona in ’86, Maradona in ’90. Baggio, good lord. These days, I use YouTube for that kind of footage.

And there’s, of course, the written word. Until 2018, Brian Glanville would publish an updated edition of The Story of the World Cup every four years. Somewhere back home, I have about five different editions. Glanville has since left us, and Simon Kuper and Jonathan Wilson have written wonderful books for this summer. Kuper and Wilson have decades of experience reporting and covering World Cups, and their new books are genuinely rich in detail, worthy of your desk or coffee table.

There’s also a new series, a three-parter on the history of World Cups, written by Jonathan O’Brien. Last month, I was very kindly given access to a review copy. An essay on World Cups, and the book, was published on Scroll today.

Some excerpts:

“The World Cup, by design, is simultaneously heavy and weightless. Weightless because name counts for nothing. You could be Cameroon, in just your second ever World Cup, facing defending champions Argentina, and you have an equal chance at victory. Heavy because its quadrennial cycle brings tension and anxiety. Four years is a generation in football; lives change in that time.

And the best way to experience a World Cup is to ditch the abstract and watch it through the 3D glasses of history and context, the past breathing under the surface, the stakes of the future. For example, apply just one layer of context to Cameroon’s victory against Argentina in 1990: Argentina were led by the world’s greatest player of the time, or perhaps ever, Diego Maradona; the World Cup was happening in Italy, where Maradona played his club football; and Cameroon, African champions but a motley crew to the global eye, beat them 1-0 on the opening day.”

Maradona’s Argentina would recover and reach the final, where they’d face the same opponents they’d beaten four years prior: West Germany. The man asked to mark Maradona in Mexico City was now West Germany’s captain, and perhaps the best midfielder in the world. By the end of the night, he’d lift the World Cup—the last for a team called West Germany.

Then, there’s the story of another number 10.

“It is day two of the 1998 World Cup, and Italy are losing to Chile. The Bordeaux sky is faint white, awaiting dusk. With seven minutes left in the game, the referee points to the penalty spot and gives Italy a lifeline. Baggio, 31 years old, wearing number 18, places the ball on the penalty spot and takes four steps back. Both sections of the crowd are on their feet, hooting at him. Behind his restrained face lies a raging storm.

The significance of this penalty has nothing to do with the score. Neither does it have much to do with Roberto Baggio potentially becoming the first Italian to score in three World Cups. All its weight comes from another penalty, four years prior.

Baggio then wore jersey number 10, the number reserved for artists and maestros. He was the best player in the world. He stood above the penalty spot in Pasadena, California, with the 1994 World Cup on the line. And then he hit his penalty over the bar, into the crowd behind the goal, sealing the fate of the game and his life. Many in Italy still consider Baggio one of the greatest to have ever worn their blue, but the defining image of his career was that ball sailing into the Californian sky. He would later say it was the one episode he would erase if he had a magic wand.

So when, four years on, in Italy’s first World Cup match since that wretched afternoon, the referee blew for a penalty, everyone looked at Baggio. Did he have the heart to go again?

He scored; Italy salvaged a draw.”

There’s much more in the essay—on Brazil’s heartbreak, Pele’s arrival, Maradona vs England, a World Cup in Qatar, and Donald Trump.

The 2026 Men’s World Cup starts in four days. The book is genuinely excellent. Pick it up!

We’d heard of Kylian Mbappé. We’d heard that he had broken into AS Monaco’s first team when he was sixteen. Sixteen year olds don’t play senior football, but Mbappé, the word went, was nothing like anything we’d known before. We’d then seen him twist Manchester City and Juventus in the Champions League. Paris Saint-Germain shelled out 180 million of their crispiest Qatar-kissed euros, making an eighteen-year-old the subject of the second-most expensive transfer in football history. That he was special was not up for debate, but how special remained to be seen.

And now, in the compressed heat of a World Cup knockout game, opposite Lionel Messi and Angel di Maria, Mbappe was leaving some of the world’s most experienced defenders flailing, grasping at thin air. There are moments when you know you’re watching someone ascend between planes. This was not another winger blessed with a lean body and fast-twitch fibres, or a forward with a thunderous shot. Mbappe had both those gifts, which he’d reveal generously over the following weeks, but he had that other, intangible quality that separates the elite from the rest: everyone was always catching up to him.

This crack of lightning, piercing through the Argentine defence, was an announcement of arrival.

**

Kylian Mbappe was born five months and eight days after the greatest night in French football history. Under an inky Paris sky and the shimmering floodlights of State de France, France beat Brazil 3-0 to win their first Men’s World Cup. One of thirteen participants of the inaugural World Cup in 1930, hosts in 1938, France had waited an eternity for this moment.

French football was considered European royalty in the mid-eighties. Carried by Michel Platini’s genius, France won the European Championships in 1984 and reached the semi-final of the 1986 World Cup. They also won gold at the Los Angeles Olympics. And just when they should’ve taken the next leap towards greatness, they fell on a series of trapdoors, failing to qualify for the next European Championship and the next two World Cups.

The home World Cup came as respite and an opportunity to reclaim some of the lost lustre. Still, success meant quarter-finals, or, at best, the semi-finals. France weren’t yet ready to take on the heavyweights. They crossed all those hurdles, but the elation from reaching the final was broken by fear: they’d have to face Brazil—the defending champions; a lineup of Ronaldo and Rivaldo and Roberto Carlos and Cafu and Bebeto; the country that produced Pele, Garrincha, and Rivelino; the country where football went mud-caked and came out looking resplendent.

France did not let Brazil enter the match. The 3-0 final score was fitting for France’s dominance, and equally charitable to Brazil. Later that evening, the limestone beams of the Arc de Triomphe were lit up with the face of a new national hero: Zinedine Zidane. Usually the creative pulse of the side, Zidane had scored twice in the final and put the game past Brazil’s reach.

To have watched Zidane play is to have seen football turn into ballet. He glided through grass, whether running towards or with the ball. He was loose, able to stop, turn, or slide through spaces. Defenders running full speed into a tackle were forced to apply emergency brakes, and then change directions and chase him at full speed. But, for all that languidity, he was never late to a ball or a tackle. The ball, whenever it came to him, stopped dead at his feet, like a stress ball landing on velvet. Everyone else sought to control the ball; the ball, itself, came to Zidane’s feet to be loved. He’d do with a touch—a pat from the back of his heel, a gentle caress from his sidestep—what most needed a kick for.

Football had many players with rare gifts, but Zidane was the one you watched even when he did not have the ball. He was so mesmerising a creation that two movie directors set up seventeen cameras to follow him for an entire game, and then turned the footage into a feature film. On sensory experience, Zidane was the successor to Mark Knopfler and the precursor to Roger Federer.

Zidane represented something else France had long wanted to claim. He was born to Algerian parents in La Castellane, a residential suburb along the northern edge of Marseille. His father had moved from Algeria in 1953—the year before the war of independence.

France was flourishing at the time. The prosperity of the post-war years brought industry, which brought factories and construction sites. And that brought with it a problem: labour. So France opened their ports. The immigrants came, en masse, from Algeria and Morocco, Senegal and Mali. The state built housing for them on the outskirts of the major cities, and gave those districts a collective noun: banlieues.

The 1998 World Cup-winning team was called Black, Blanc, Beur—black, white, Arab—a wordplay on the tricolour’s Bleu, Blanc, Rouge. Zidane, the son of Algerian immigrants, had won France the final; Lilian Thuram, born in Guadeloupe, had scored both goals in the semi-final. Around them were Patrick Vieira, Theirry Henry, Marcel Desailly. The team was visibly, undeniably, a product of the banlieues.

The French received them with a long, warm embrace. But the story, manifesting over one glorious summer, had a tension simmering underneath. A significant chunk of the republic wanted the immigrants to shed their language, culture, and faith, and wear traditional French garb. Jean-Marie Le Pen, a politician who had previously called the national team a collection of players from foreign countries, reached the second round of the presidential election in 2002.

Three years after that, in October 2005, two teenagers—Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré—were electrocuted in a power substation in Seine-Saint-Denis, while hiding from a police check. Twenty-one days of riots followed. Nearly nine thousand cars were burned across France. The government declared a state of emergency. Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, surveying the burning suburbs, called the rioters racaille—scum. When France imploded, in shameful flames, at the 2010 World Cup, Minister Roselyne Bachelot referred to players of colour as “immature banlieue criminals.”1

Seine-Saint-Denis was and is the poorest department in metropolitan France. More than a quarter of its residents live below the poverty line. Youth unemployment in some of its communes runs past thirty percent. It is eleven miles from the centre of Paris; in some parts, you cannot reach it by metro at all.

**

Bondy is in Seine-Saint-Denis. It was here that Kylian Mbappé was born, to Wilfried and Fayza—Cameroonian and Algerian. Wilfried was the coach and director at AS Bondy, the local football team; Fayza was a professional handball player. Kylian was six years old during the 2005 riots.

He wanted only football. He’d watch hours without break and sleep with a ball for a pillow. By the time he was six, he was enrolled at AS Bondy. Antonio Ricardi, the under-13s coach at AS Bondy, told the BBC, “Kylian would always think about football, always talk about football, always watch football - and if he wasn’t doing that he’d be playing football games on the PlayStation.”

Ricardi also understood, quickly, that he had stumbled onto something rare. “Kylian could do much more than the other children,” he said. “His dribbling was already fantastic and he was much faster than the others.” When Kylian was eleven, his talent and reputation quickly outgrowing Bondy, he was taken to Institut National du Football de Clairefontaine—an academy nestled inside the lush woods of the Rambouillet forest.2

Every year, Clairefontaine trials the best young players in the Greater Paris region, and from there, about two dozen make it through. Then comes their point of difference. Unlike most academies in Europe, even the best ones—in Barcelona, Amsterdam, or Munich—Clairefontaine doesn’t mould young footballers for archetypical football roles. Its purpose, almost ideological, is to produce a complete, versatile footballer. The trainees are subject to two years of the most rigorous and methodical coaching, at the end of which they’re ready for any football, anywhere.

At Clairefontaine, Kylian learnt how to use his feet and body, how to move without the ball, and how to use the gift of speed he was born with.3 He was in his final year, a few hours away from turning fourteen, when his family got a call from Real Madrid. The club wanted to give Kylian a trial. So, the family flew down to Spain. Receiving young Kylian and crew at the airport, according to this report, was Zinedine Zidane—the past shaking hands with the future.

Wilfried and Fayza were impressed, but they believed it was too soon. In France, they reasoned, he would develop faster, the pathway from academy to a first team unencumbered by a royal team’s ambitions. They were right. At just sixteen, Kylian was walking out for AS Monaco.

**

By 2018, by the end of that quarter-final against Argentina, Kylian Mbappé had arrived. He scored twice that afternoon. Then he scored in the final—only the second teenager, the first since Pelé, to do so. He returned to Paris Saint-Germain colours and continued piling on the goals.

Four years later, he met Argentina again. Mbappé, by now, had become a phenom, technically and physically on a different plane to everyone else in the tournament. He had outgrown the club that had paid €180 million for him, and was now in a courtship with the sparkling white royalty of Real Madrid.

In the final, though, Mbappé was the forced antagonist. The match, and so much of the tournament, had been largely seen through Lionel Messi. This was perhaps Messi’s final shot at glory, one last chance to bury the accumulated heartbreaks of the previous decade. Argentina were 2-0 up at half-time.

In the French dressing room, Didier Deschamps—captain of the ‘98 World Cup winning side, coach now—was tearing into his team. The France team were listening, despondent, when Kylian rose: “It’s a World Cup final! We’re down by two goals. We can come back. Guys, this is every four years!”

The second half started, and more minutes went by. Argentina’s defence, built with muscle and trademark South American grit, smothered everything France could offer. They didn’t let Mbappé come near the goal. Then, with just over ten minutes remaining, France were awarded a penalty. Mbappé converted and entered the rare group of players to have scored in two World Cup finals—Zidane was one, Pelé another.

A couple of minutes later, as the average global heart-rate was rising into the 130s, Mbappé saw a lobbed pass on the left side of the box. Most would let it bounce, then either shoot or take a forward touch. Mbappé flung himself sideways, and while parallel to the ground, lashed his right leg at the ball—all in a blink. It was a perfectly-struck volley, and yet, utterly inexplicable in form and the speed of its execution. 2-2.

This is the moment where Mbappé’s stature became clear. Messi had spent sixteen years in an Argentine shirt pursuing that elusive, golden World Cup trophy. He was thirty-five, and this was almost certainly his last chance. And yet, watching Mbappé in those minutes, it felt wholly probable that a twenty-three-year-old was about to take it from him single-handedly. There are very few players in the history of football about whom such a thing could credibly be said.

The match went into extra time. Messi scored, Mbappé scored. With seconds to go, and both benches preparing for a penalty shoot-out, Mbappé found a loose ball in the penalty box, like the one he had found four years back, but this time within a shot’s distance from the goal. He twisted past one defender, wriggled past another, and uncoiled his right leg. If one were to extract the collective sound emanating from Argentina in that moment, it would be the Spanish version of, “Oh, fuck.” Somehow, perhaps by divine intervention, an Argentine leg came flying, and Mbappé’s shot was blocked.

The penalty shoot-out went Messi’s way and football’s most enduring romance of the 21st century finally got its just ending. Mbappé was the tournament’s highest scorer, and for long stretches, including the final, its most dominant player.

**

In the summer of 2024, Kylian Mbappé left Paris Saint-Germain on a free transfer and joined Real Madrid. His journey at PSG had been left unresolved. The club was renovated on the idea that assembling the most expensive players would produce the most successful team, with Mbappé as the centrepiece. There were seasons when the PSG frontline read: Mbappé, Messi, Neymar. The Champions League, the one trophy all that Qatari expenditure was underwritten for, never arrived.

Luis Enrique joined as coach in 2023, and immediately declared his ideology. Football, as he conceived it, was a collective enterprise, a system of interlocking commitments. Messi and Neymar had left by then. Mbappé, whose gifts were of the kind that bends systems toward itself, found himself, perhaps for the first time in his professional life, at the margins of a coach’s vision.

The year after he left, PSG won the Champions League, dismantling Internazionale 5-0 in the final. It was the most emphatic victory in the history of a major European final. Meanwhile, in Madrid, Mbappé scored 44 goals in his first season—more than any debutant in the club’s history. Real Madrid ended the season trophyless. Last night, in Budapest, PSG won their second consecutive Champions League title. Mbappé, for his part, scored 42 goals in 44 games in another barren season for Real Madrid.

There is a popular theory, now supported by evidence, that PSG have become a better team without the overarching shadow of Mbappé. And that Real Madrid, for all the individual production, are suffering from it.

The questions tailing him from Paris—about tension, discomfort, and misalignment—have become audible again. Mbappé wasn’t solely responsible, of course, but had a part to play in the strained relationship between Real Madrid and their new coach, Xabi Alonso, in the first few months of this season.

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Football had been waiting, for some years, for the generation after Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo to produce a worthy successor. It’s no ordinary task. The mountains those two men built, through a combination of individual and collective glory, through a dominance so relentless every other player in the sport became a supporting character, cannot be scaled by just about anyone. Mbappé is the closest thing to either of them.

The World Cup comes at an apt moment. Kylian Mbappé will arrive in the United States this summer 27 years old, fully formed. He’ll be just about the same age as Zidane was in 1998. He’ll lead a French unit happy to orbit around his atmospheric talents. He’ll wear the captain’s armband on jersey number 10—Zidane’s number—and carry French pluralism and excellence along with him. Twelve of his teammates grew up in the banlieues; twelve play for Europe’s elite clubs, like Bayern Munich, Barcelona, and Real Madrid. The players France left out of their squad could probably finish third in this tournament.

If I were to stick my neck out for a prediction: Kylian Mbappé will receive the World Cup trophy on July 19th from, in all likelihood, Donald Trump. There are other great teams at the tournament, but none as stacked as France, none with a spearhead as sharp as Kylian Mbappé.

The story goes something like this: in the winter of 1998, or thereabouts, a young writer from Jalandhar named Kumar Gill received a melody to write lyrics to. The verse was warm, very ballad-y, with rising two-note phrases; the chorus, long and heavy, carrying a sense of desolation and melancholia, as if composed for a solo violin. To that tune Gill wrote his words. He wrote about longing for his lover through the night, the incessant downpour of sadness from his eyes, the dense gloom of loss.

The song was recorded and released. When Kumar heard the finished product, he swore never to work with the singer again. The singer was another young, strapping lad from Jalandhar named Sukhbir; the song, Ishq Tera Tadpave.

The song descended on India like a ball of fire. Within six months, it was playing on loop on every radio station and music channel in the north. Within twelve, Sukhbir was a national celebrity. Every party anthem cassette and CD in the early 2000s had Ishq Tera Tadpave as the last song on Side A.

The song occupies a singular, unique space in Indian consciousness. It’s not an exaggeration to say that no party, no gathering or celebration is truly over until Ishq has played and everyone has sung the hook—“Oh ho ho ho, Ooh ho ho ho”—as a makeshift choir. There is no dancefloor across the country that goes empty when this song plays. Give or take, and this is complete speculation, I’d say around seven out of every ten above-thirty adults in India will be able to hum the hook and the chorus. DJs have learnt the trick: cue the hook in, maybe the first four notes, and the crowd fills in the rest. Most find it impossible to not move their bodies. I have seen Oxford scholars, hopped up on Bengali literature chauvinism, lose their robe of poise once Sukhbir’s voice thunders through the speakers.

India produces a few hundred thousand songs every year, many of them good. And yet, Ishq Tera Tadpave endures. I’ve always wondered why.

This is, in fact, anthem season. Every four years, between April and May, FIFA commissions a famous musician to write a song for the World Cup. The brief is quite demanding: the song must have a hopeful, inspirational tone; it should nudge people off their seats; it should carry some cultural essence—vanilla pop numbers rarely fly; it should have enough push and pull to sit neatly behind montages and highlights. And ideally, a World Cup anthem should have enough recall value to be remembered and associated with the World Cup long after the tournament is over.

The theme song for this summer’s World Cup, Dai Dai, comes via Shakira and Burna Boy. It feels like a song suited for beach shacks, those late-afternoon pulsers that play in the background as visitors lean back on cane chairs with margaritas to watch the sunset. The lyrics and the music do nothing, just one loop blurring into another. About two minutes into the song, Shakira goes, “Pele, Maradona, Maldini, Romario. Cristiano. Ronaldo.” Burna Boy responds with some footballers of his own, to which Shakira, incredibly, starts reciting names of participating countries. The more I hear the song—I found I only have the patience for a couple of runs—the more it feels completely airless.

World Cup theme songs have become a global, cross-sport phenomenon. Even cricket does those now. One can understand the pressure on the artists, who are given broad-stroked prompts and asked to engineer a cult hit. Not all of them succeed.

So, what makes a good anthem?

The Groove

Rhythm can be loosely defined as a depiction of events happening over time. You brush twice a day and eat thrice—that’s a rhythm. You wake up in the morning and sleep around midnight, you drink coffee within a few minutes of waking up, you workout every evening, you curse your trainer every third pushup. We live in rhythms.

Rhythm is also how we meet music. When sound enters the ear as a pattern of waves, our brain extracts the pulse before registering the melody. It then starts predicting where the next beat will fall. Finding the beat to fall approximately close to where it expects is a form of pleasure. A song meant for a wide audience must give them a steady rhythm to hold onto.

A groove is the manifestation of rhythm into music. A rhythm is numerical, a groove is sentient. And groove is what makes a song.

The first World Cup theme song I heard was Ricky Martin’s The Cup of Life, rewritten in English from the Spanish original, La Copa de la Vida. It begins with four shots of fireworks, like a drummer tapping his sticks to cue in the band, and then dives straight into a steady batucada groove often heard on the streets of Brazil. In a batucada groove, multiple instruments play in conversation with each other, often in different rhythms but always locked in. In The Cup of Life, that groove is the song’s heartbeat. Even as heavier percussion and a full band dips in and out, the groove stays.

The song’s tempo—120 beats per minute—sits in the perfect spot for its function. Over the last few decades, as our neural relationship to music has been dissected through brain activity research, scientists have found the range of 110-120 BPM (beats per minute) as the optimal tempo at which listeners like to dance. Afro-Brazilian rhythms, like batucada, can span a wide tempo range, as they travel between streets and carnivals, but their sweet spot overlaps significantly with the dance tempo range. Notice how, through the song, your body feels locked in with the tempo.

But tempo, by itself, is not enough. For example: a kick drum loop at 120 BPM becomes stale after a few seconds. Sustaining interest needs surprise. Researchers studying the brain’s reaction to rhythm and tempo also found clues about syncopation—basically, variance. There is a small pocket of just enough syncopation, but not too much, which forms the brain’s ultimate pleasure zone. For this, The Cup of Life goes traditional, with tamborim accents that land just off the expected beat and a montuno piano riff that repeats beneath the surface.

Martin wrote in his autobiography, Me, that his team had approached the album “with the sole mission of getting the entire globe to dance and sing in Spanish.” On the evening of 24th February, 1999, Ricky Martin performed La Copa de la Vida at the 41st Grammy Awards, backed by a full conga and percussion band, a horn section, and dancers on towering stilts. The room, as any Grammy night room, was packed with the brightest showbiz talent in the USA. As Ricky Martin moved from the elegant first verse and asked, “Do you really want it?” Madonna and Celine Dion were on their feet. The rest of the room was up with, “Go, go, go! Allez, allez, allez!”

Percussion is, of course, one way to project rhythm. You can use melodic instruments, the way Hans Zimmer uses cellos and violas to create propulsion in He’s a Pirate. Or, if you want to go really earthy, you bring out the most naturally available instrument in the world: voice.

During the Second World War, Cameroonian soldiers used to sing to each other through long marches. Some phrases carried pain and helplessness, some others carried defiance. One of those phrases, sung as call-and-response to boost morale, was “Tsamina mina zangalewa”. It roughly translates to, “Where do you come from?”

In 1986, a band called Golden Sounds recorded these chants in their Makossa song, “Zangalewa.” Makossa means dance. The song crossed the Atlantic and DJs in coastal Colombia were soon playing it on repeat. And when a Colombian superstar was asked to make the theme song for the 2010 FIFA World Cup—the first football World Cup in Africa—she dipped into her childhood.

“I decided to bring a little bit of my culture too, which is attached to Africa with an umbilical cord,” Shakira said in an interview. “I was raised listening to music that was heavily inspired by African music.”

Waka Waka, like The Cup of Life, leans heavily on energetic African—Latin percussion, topped generously with digital, club-music beats. But its driving force, its rhythmic engine, comes from its vocal lines.

The Melody

There is one common quality amongst all the songs we remember well: we can sing the melody. You could be woken up at 3 am, and you’ll nail the chorus of Country Roads. Similarly, rare is the person who hasn’t hummed “Wise men say, only fools rush in…” at least a few hundred times. A memorable melody is, almost by rule, easy to hum.

Ease comes from repeatability and small vocal movements. Waka Waka feels fun to sing because of its cycle of two syllables: tsa mi-na mi-na eh-eh wa-ka wa-ka eh-eh. The pattern repeats so quickly and frequently, it catches on before we realise. In The Cup of Life, the chorus—“Go, go, go! Allez, allez, allez!”—holds little melodic resemblance to the rest of the song. But, like Waka Waka, it’s easy and repeatable—three single-syllable hits followed by three two-syllable hits.

And notice how, in both choruses, the notes in the cyclical patterns feel adjacent. These patterns—called conjunct melodies in music theory—are easier to sing because the vocal cords have to make smaller physical adjustments between notes. They’re also easier to remember because the brain can encode a smooth, continuous shape more readily; it naturally recognises scales in linear progression. For e.g. Twinkle Twinkle Little Star spans a range of six notes, first ascending then descending in adjacent intervals.

Shape is an important signal for remembering a melody. A 1978 study by psychologist Jay Dowling found that most brains store melodies through two axes: the shape—the pattern of ups and downs; and the tonal framework—the functioning of scales that we’re subconsciously familiar with. In his book, This is Your Brain on Music, Daniel Levitin says, “a melody is an auditory object that maintains its identity in spite of transformations, just as a chair maintains its identity when you move it to the other side of the room, turn it upside down, or paint it red.”

This has a direct consequence for how anthems function. A song that will be sung by sixty thousand people in a stadium—or by the millions watching on television—cannot depend on precision. The melody must be robust enough to survive being reproduced badly, in the wrong key or at the wrong pitch. It must be memorable, and it must sound good for a listener to even be interested.

The Arrangement

Much of the latter is a function of orchestration, or as is commonly known, arrangement. A slightly broader term, inclusive of mixing and mastering, is production. Most musicians are sticklers for this. In fact, playing the same melody on, say, an oboe and then the trombone, and playing it with the rest of the song to check which one sounds better, is very much part of the songwriting process.

The horns in The Cup of Life come in short bursts, like fireworks. And when the song begins to take off, the horns give it momentum. The choice seems conscious. Brass instruments work excellently as sources of energy because of their natural depth and our deep association with them with fanfare and celebration. The intro melody of Shakira’s Hips Don’t Lie, immediately transporting you to a party, is played on a trumpet. Similarly, consider what the keyboard riff is doing for Ishq.

The stomp-stomp-clap rhythm of We Will Rock You is perhaps the greatest living example of a simple idea, driven through a conscious musical choice, turning a song into an anthem.

Cultural Significance

Composing and producing a song aside, does an anthem necessarily have to convey something grand? Does cultural rooting matter to its success? One can argue otherwise and make a strong case: you don’t ever think of a song’s roots while singing or dancing. As Ishq Tera Tadpave is proof, you often don’t think of the lyrics either. Our entire generation danced to Barbie Girl without ever, unfortunately, looking at the lyrics.

But, zooming in, a World Cup anthem needs to have a cultural grounding. It needs to be rooted to a place, ideally the host country. La Copa de la Vida might be the only exception because it’s written in Spanish, by a Puerto Rican artist, as a complete homage to Brazilian music. The World Cup it was written for was held in France and “Allez, allez, allez!” is the extent of French influence in the song.

Waka Waka is a more textbook example because it carries genuine African music into a significantly African tournament. But, I want to talk about another song. It wasn’t written for a World Cup, but licensed and repurposed for one.

Wavin’ Flag was written as a song about Somalia. Keinan Abdi Warsame—K’Naan—was born in 1978 in Mogadishu. His name means traveller in Somali. His grandfather was a famous Somali poet, and his aunt a renowned singer. In his book, K’Naan recalls how whenever he was frightened, whether during violence in Somalia or being bullied by classmates in Canada, his grandfather would comfort him with the words, “When I get older, I will be stronger. They’ll call me freedom, just like a waving flag.”

Wavin’ Flag’s lyrics address war, displacement, poverty, and the agony of losing your home to violence. When Coca Cola selected it as their promotional anthem for the 2010 World Cup, the lyrics were rewritten, with a more hopeful tenor, for a version called, “The Celebration Mix.” You couldn’t speak about war and displacement in a theme song for a tournament played in a continent most affected by war and displacement, now, could you? K’Naan kept the chorus; he wouldn’t have it any other way. The song became a global sensation, with the chorus as its emotional anchor. You hear the lyrics as you sing them.

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Four songs, then. One written to “make people dance”; another born out of military chants; one, a poem about a painful childhood; and one, the result of exuberance, of not letting heartbreak come in the way of a dance beat.

They share many of the same foundations. The tempo is right, the melodies are simple and easy to hum, the rhythms compelling, pressing the right buttons within us. But foundations do not make an anthem, and Shakira and Burna Boy are about to learn this soon. You can lay every beam and pour every footing and the thing can still stand there, perfectly structured, with no life inside.

The true magic—the uncomplicated freedom of La Copa de la Vida, the choral percussion of Waka Waka—is born from human ingenuity. If it were so easy to engineer an anthem, Ishq Tera Tadpave wouldn’t be the most awaited song at every party, twenty-six years after its release.

The last of his sixes took his team, Punjab Kings, to within two runs of victory with nine deliveries left. They got there with a single and a wide. In the dugout, players and staff exchanged high fives and hugs. On the pitch, Shreyas tapped fists with his partner, Shashank Singh, pulled off his helmet, blew out some air, and that was that.

Nothing in the pictures told you that Punjab Kings had just completed the highest ever chase in T20 cricket. They didn’t tell you the significance of getting there with eight deliveries to spare. It’s one thing to execute a record chase, completely another to stroll and hop your way there.

On the receiving end of this, the Delhi Capitals, their faces drained and empty. At the halfway mark, with 264 on the board, they must’ve believed the match was half won. No batting lineup, however deep, chases that down. Not after fielding for two hours in Delhi’s brutal afternoon heat.

Evidently, it was not enough even for a tight finish.

Between them, the two sides faced 234 balls and hit 82 to the boundary—a four or a six every three minutes, for close to four hours. It was extraordinary viewing, equivalent in sensation to eating an entire bar of Toblerone after every meal for a week.

A record chase should leave you on your feet, adrenaline coursing through your body. This one left numbness. Shreyas played several gorgeous strokes that evening; KL Rahul’s innings was an exhibition of neat lines drawn into the Delhi air. I cannot recall a single shot from either knock. Compare this to, say, the near-photographic clarity with which I remember Sachin Tendulkar’s six off Andrew Caddick at the 2003 World Cup—a match I haven’t watched in years. I could draw the line of Caddick’s delivery, point to where it pitched, trace how Sachin swivelled onto his back foot, the arc of his downswing, the exact roof of the Kingsmead Cricket Ground the ball sailed over. This isn’t nostalgia talking, because I remember, just as vividly, Harmanpreet Kaur’s six over covers in last year’s semi-final against Australia.

These shots left a mark because the game around them had texture, richness, many different skillsets colliding. The sixes came as release. For most of this IPL season, teams have compulsively operated with the volume knob turned hard right, leaving no time for breath, nevermind release.

Recently, Muttiah Muralitharan—coach these days at Sunrisers Hyderabad, but holder of 1347 international wickets in his youth—was asked about this incessant flood of boundaries, the soaring team totals in the IPL, and how to not make bowlers feel like props at a batters’ play.

He said, “If we give fair wickets, the spectators will say it’s become boring because the T20 followers want entertainment, so they want to see the fours and sixes. That’s why the tournament is built like that. It is a big business at the moment, sponsors and everything, so you will lose the sponsors and interest of the people if you change it.”

Most others would’ve phrased that answer differently. They would’ve perhaps leaned into the technical and physical skill required to hit so many boundaries, how good their own batters are, or how power-hitting is the nucleus of T20 cricket in the 2020s. Murali, to his great credit, did not muffle the bowler underneath the IPL employee. He smiled through his answer—he always smiles—but read those words again, and you’ll notice a tone of resignation.

**

The Indian Premier League was born with a mishit.

It was the evening of April 18th, 2008. The M. Chinnaswamy Stadium in Central Bangalore, resplendent under floodlights and fireworks, was decked up for a carnival night. At the inaugural match of cricket’s new, glittering show, out walked two new teams. The Kolkata Knight Riders, owned by Shah Rukh Khan, wore a jet black jersey with gold details and gold helmets—Shah Rukh wanted his team to look like medieval knights. Opposite them, the Royal Challengers Bangalore. Owned by a liquor baron, named after a whisky brand, a lineup of 35-year-old Test cricket specialists dipping into a discotheque.

T20 cricket, just four and a bit years old at the time, was still a child. A tournament like the IPL was a solo trip to Disneyland. Nobody knew what to expect.

And so, the first evening. Sourav Ganguly and Brendon McCullum, two firebrands at opposite ends of their careers, pushing and prodding but unsure what tempo to assert. McCullum was on 8 runs off 8 balls—slow by every measure. He needed to hit or go, so he hit. A couple of thrashed fours loosened his limbs and perhaps the mind. But something, you could tell, was still simmering. He swung again. The next ball kissed the outer edge of his bat and flew over the boundary behind him.

Mishit it might’ve been, but it landed with a crack. A Bollywood dance number blared through the speakers, the crowd were up on their feet, even the VVIPs rose up. We were away.

This shot set off a chain reaction whose impact neither McCullum, nor Shah Rukh, nor the league’s creator Lalit Modi could’ve anticipated. Before the match, the International Cricket Council (ICC) President, Ray Mali, had said to Modi, “Congratulations, you have taken cricket to the next level.” They turned out to be prophetic words.

McCullum went into a trance, flaying every bowler coming his way, most into the low-hanging second tier of the Chinnaswamy Stadium. The home crowd, yet to form true loyalty to a franchise team, danced with him anyway. McCullum finished that evening with 158 unbeaten runs off 75 deliveries. Kolkata Knight Riders racked up 222 in their 20 overs. And the collective breath of those present, presenting, in the dugout or watching from home, was taken away.

The next afternoon, Chennai Super Kings put up 240 in their 20 against Kings XI Punjab, who responded with 207.

And just like that, a new order of cricket was written. This old sport hadn’t known a cocktail of drama, glitz, and fireworks as potent as this. From here, it was going to be sixes in bulk. Bats would get fatter and boundary ropes would be pulled in. Teams would get to hoard the world’s best talent. The scariest hitter in the world would bat alongside a technical genius and the most prolific batter in the world. The hitter will score 175 in one afternoon; the prolific guy, soon becoming the face of the sport, will touch nearly one thousand runs over one sweltering summer. Some years later, teams would be allowed a substitute, changing the game’s tenor and rhythm, empowering batters with even more freedom. And all these logs of lean muscle would make hitting boundaries their entire personality.

The audience, long thirsty for something fresh and punchy, would lap this up. They’d be fed so much they’d stop tasting what they’re eating, but they’ll come back for more every evening. At the ground, there will be a DJ dedicated to raising the decibel level and your blood pressure. He’d scream into the mic every thirty or so seconds. On commentary, ex-cricketers will shuffle between selling you cars and asking you to stop what you’re doing and watch a man obliterate bowlers.

**

T20 was invented to fix a few problems. One, most other cricket—Tests and ODIs—happened during work hours. And two, Test and ODI cricket took up hours, often without adequate bang for buck. It was niche and inaccessible for those on the outside looking in. Much market-research later, the answer was a shortened format, played under dark skies and floodlights.

But you’ve got to be careful while compressing a complex, moving entity. Traditional cricket, for all its visible sluggishness, holds tremendous nuance. Bowling requires putting your ankles through many times your body weight—six times an over, over after over. Batting requires facing projectiles at highway speeds, hurled from twenty-two yards, often moving sideways off the surface or through the air. Both skills are extremely difficult—they’re supposed to be, that’s the point.

Cricket at its best places a batter in conversation against a bowler. A seamer finds the right length on a moist pitch and the ball holds its line till the last moment before darting away. The batter plays and misses, plays and misses. The slip cordon walks in three yards. The bowler, ravenous, goes fuller and quicker. Every ball is a question. The batter, if he’s any good, listens. He shoulders arms to one, defends another with soft hands, then punches the next through cover, rebalancing the tone of the argument. This is where cricket breathes. The sport accumulates meaning through pressure, and it is in resistance to pressure that character is revealed.

Take Virat Kohli. Amongst a garland of great innings, some of his finest T20 outings came when the bat was made to work hard. His unbeaten 82 against Pakistan, on Diwali 2022, came against three Pakistani seamers making the ball bounce and swerve on a spicy Melbourne track. The game had almost slipped out of India’s hands. There’s another 82 not out, against Australia in Mohali—Kohli the batter, beginning to enter stratosphere; and India, still playing an archaic version of T20 cricket, on the precipice of getting knocked out of a home World Cup before the knockout rounds. You have many others—the 72 in the 2014 semi-final against South Africa, the 89 in the 2016 semi-final against West Indies. Fine knocks all. But slightly obscured by their volume, you’ll find his 49 and 55 against unyielding Pakistan bowling attacks on abrasive pitches. Played between a few weeks of each other, those two innings turned Kohli from good to great. Pressure knocks make a batter, and it’s doubly true in Test and ODI cricket. None of his nine IPL centuries would’ve given him remotely comparable satisfaction.

Ask Sachin Tendulkar about his favourites, and he will not default to Sharjah ‘98, but Chennai ‘99; Lara will speak of Barbados, not Antigua. Good batting, like good boxing, is an act of resistance and dominance both.

**

I was at the Wankhede Stadium, on March 5th, watching India play England in the semi-final of the T20 World Cup. I will remember that night for how special inhabiting Wankhede felt: the chants rolling across the stands, every other minute; the boy in the next seat venting to me, a complete stranger, about Varun’s bowling; the uncle to his right, a man weary from India losses, sitting with crossed fingers till the final ball; bhel distributed in the row below us; boxes of aamchi in the row above; the yelps, the groans, and the roar from Bumrah’s yorkers at the end.

Writing this two months after that evening, my remaining memory of the cricket is fairly broad-stroked. India batted first and scored 253 in 20 overs. 253 should be an insurmountable total, the kind which deflates the opposition. England nearly chased it down, falling seven runs short, the match on a wire until the penultimate over.

But, even at its final turn, when thirty thousand of us sat with clenched bums, the contest hinged on one question: could the English batters clear the boundary a couple of more times? Not what the bowlers might do, the ways they could own the night, perhaps the pitch playing tricks. Nothing, just the distance the batters were capable of covering.

In the final at Ahmedabad, three days later, India batted first and scored 255. Given the wide boundaries of Ahmedabad’s fishbowl, New Zealand stood no chance. It turned out to be a boring, colourless World Cup final that, looking back, was decided within the first half an hour.

Eight days later, on the first day of this season’s IPL, Sunrisers Hyderabad scored 201, which the Royal Challengers Bengaluru chased down with five full overs to spare, as if to confirm that T20 cricket, in all forms, was a loop, the same melody moving between instruments without change in register or tempo.

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In school, during computer lab periods, while the teacher made her rounds checking if we’d finished our C++ assignments, we played a browser game called Stick Cricket. It was cricket reduced to its barest bones—a stick figure at the crease, a thinner stick-figure bowler delivering the ball, and two or three shots to choose from. You picked a direction, pressed your arrow key, and the ball flew. It was incredible fun: I once scored some 400 in 10 overs playing with Bradman and Sobers. You could finish an entire match in the time it took the teacher to walk from one end of the lab to another. It was too ludicrous a caricature to venture beyond browsers and mobile phones.

By making cricket a mirror image of this, by pushing the conditions so far in favour of the batters that bowlers become secondary citizens, you deny the sport its central tension. And without tension, without a strong pull to a push, there is no story. You lay the road for fewer matches that test every skillset of the sport. You arrive, eventually, at scores above 250 in World Cup semi-finals and finals, and 264 getting chased in two hours flat, without sweat. You arrive at a version of the sport where the highlights reel and the full match feel roughly the same, and every frame has the same species in the centre. No amount of shrieking hyperbole from the commentary box can conceal the foundational hollowness of such a thing.

T20 cricket, this format so full of possibility, has been reduced to an inert television programme. It’s weak sport. And everyone is worse off, even the batters.

The pictures show an easy afternoon. Not the best thing to see as you sit down to work.

Now in its third year, the contest is South Korea’s eccentric response to a chronic-insomnia crisis that is, by all clinical measures, global. According to this Economist report from 2022, “The average American adult snoozes almost two hours less than their great grandparents did. More than a third of Americans get less than seven hours of kip a night.” For help, we’re turning to technology.

The worldwide market for sleep-tech devices—Oura rings, Eight Sleep mattresses, Whoop bands—is valued at nearly $30 billion, expected to soar to north of $100 billion by the next decade.1 Matteo Franceschetti, co-founder of Eight Sleep, thinks the addressable market for his company is “literally everyone in the world”.

The same Whoop band worn by a Bengaluru jogger to gamify her morning routine yields, on the wrist of a fast bowler, a data stream that can determine whether he starts the weekend’s match. And the first thing checked every morning is the recovery score—a measure of sleep.

Professional sport was the first industry to treat sleep as a performance input.

During the mid-to-late 1990s, Manchester United Football Club devoured English football. Their league title in 1993 was their first in 26 years, and it opened a dam that no team in England could hold back. Between 1993 and 2001, they won seven league titles, three domestic cups, and a European title. Their coach, Alex Ferguson, became Sir Alex Ferguson for his contribution to English football. Concealed behind his public persona as a red-fisted disciplinarian was a man fascinated by innovation and experiments.

It was around the first surge of titles that Ferguson met Nick Littlehales, a mattress industry executive who had become the marketing director for Slumberland. Littlehales approached Ferguson with a fundamental question: had the club ever considered how sleep affected performance on the pitch? The question was obviously rhetorical. No one was measuring sleep, anywhere in the world. Ferguson, intrigued, invited Littlehales to United’s Carrington training ground to speak with the players and medical staff.

The first practical application of Littlehales’ theories involved star defender Gary Pallister, who was plagued by chronic back problems. Littlehales evaluated Pallister’s sleeping environment and discovered that his bedding was contributing to his spinal issues. By providing personalised mattresses and pillows—and educating the player on spinal alignment during rest—Littlehales helped produce an immediate and identifiable improvement in Pallister’s condition. The experiment evolved into to a regular consultancy where Littlehales worked with the entire United team.

Under Littlehales’ guidance, Ferguson implemented radical changes to the club’s training schedule. Traditionally, pre-season involved gruelling morning sessions. Ferguson, however, decided to double up on training, instituting both morning and afternoon sessions, but with a critical caveat: players were required to sleep or nap in specifically designed recovery rooms between sessions. This was an early implementation of multiphasic sleep—the idea that recovery should not be limited to a single nocturnal block but should be distributed across the 24-hour cycle to meet the elevated metabolic and neurological demands of elite training.

Littlehales also introduced sleep kits for away matches and international travel. These kits ensured that players had personalised bedding and environmental controls (such as light-blocking tools) regardless of the hotel they were staying in, thereby minimising the “first-night effect” and other disruptions to the circadian rhythm. By 1998, the England men’s national team were commissioning personalised sleep kits.

Westwards, the NBA and NFL coaches took note, although they were slower to integrate sleep scientists into their conversations. In the 2009-2010 NBA season, the San Antonio Spurs, under Gregg Popovich, invited a specialist from Stanford University to help optimise rest. Simultaneously, the Portland Trail Blazers began a partnership with Dr. Charles Czeisler, the director of Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School.2

The NFL centralised sleep initiatives in 2018 when it announced a multi-year league-wide partnership with Sleep Number, providing every active player in the league with a 360 smart bed. These beds utilised SleepIQ—a non-wearable biometric sensor system built into the mattress that tracks heart rate, breathing patterns, and movement.

And while Manchester United and NBA franchises have the resources to innovate, the reach of sleep into professional sport became most starkly evident when, in 2016, Brentford Football Club, then in the second tier of English football, started working with Danish sleep expert Anna West, the founder of Sleep2perform.

In this interview with Training Ground Guru, West said, “At Brentford, we divided the players into a traffic light of profiles after doing the screening. Reds had a racing mind, problems falling asleep, nights when they never even went to sleep. This had a big impact on their performance and injury risk. Even if a player was a green, which meant they were sleeping well, there were still improvements that could be made.”

Today, almost all elite teams in the Premier League, NBA, and NFL have formal sleep protocols. They dedicate millions of dollars to sleep every year.

In Seoul, the man who won this May’s edition told a local newspaper he had no particular technique. He simply lay down on the grass, closed his eyes, and stopped trying to be awake. I wonder if he’s interested in becoming a sleep coach and making a couple of cool millions.

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Before I go, here’s Max Richter’s eight-hour album, Sleep. “It's a piece that is meant to be listened to at night,” he says. “I hope that people will fall asleep listening to it, because the project is also a personal exploration into how music interacts with consciousness.”

Around the time Hinge was reaching rarefied air, I had the chance to speak to Jordan Himelfarb—managing editor at Toronto Star—about his new book, Interregnum. A short review was published in today’s Deccan Herald. Himelfarb and I spoke for nearly an hour, and most of it circled the question of storytelling within chess.

First, a scene.

On the afternoon of 12th December, 2024, the Habitat Comedy Club in Mumbai was buzzing. Three panelists sat behind a table on stage with microphones. To their right stood a giant projector screen, almost stretching between floor and wall. The audience was not the usual comedy crowd. They were young men and women, and some in early middle age, who had gathered on a weekday afternoon to watch a chess match.

A few thousand miles eastwards, in the banquet hall of a luxury resort in Singapore, eighteen-year-old Gukesh Dommaraju sat across from the defending world champion, Ding Liren. At stake, the world championship title. The hours went by, and the crowd at Habitat cheered Gukesh’s moves with full throats, as if they were shots in a football match between Manchester United and Arsenal.

After four hours of push and pull, will-he-won’t-he tension, the match heading towards a draw, Ding moved his white rook to f2.

Interregnum begins with Ding’s world championship triumph in 2023. “Ding is slight and wan,” Himelfarb tells us. “Eye contact is not his forte. Ding likes to watch the rain, read poetry and philosophy. He detests leather shoes because they remind him of businessmen, of people with power over others.”

When Ding reached Singapore to defend his title against Gukesh, he had not won a game in over three hundred days. He had been hospitalised for depression. Magnus Carlsen, never one to hold his words, declared him “permanently broken.” And yet, Ding showed up, crediting coffee for pushing him through the pain.

White rook to f2, in that situation, was a blunder. Ding knew it the instant the piece landed on the board. At Habitat, the panelists—professional chess players, among them Tania Sachdev, who represents India—rose from their chairs, recognising what the move had done to the game. On the projector screen, two faces told the whole story: Ding’s dazed eyes darting across the board, Gukesh’s narrowing on the pieces, confirming to himself that what he was seeing was real. The crowd released a thunderous “YESS!”

Gukesh put his hands over his mouth and got up from the chair. He moved his king to e5. He was going to be World Champion—the youngest ever, four years quicker to the summit than Garry Kasparov.

“Interregnum,” according to the Oxford Dictionary, means “a period of time during which a country, an organization, etc. does not have a leader and is waiting for a new one.” To that end, Himelfarb traces a timeline in sync with the book’s name—from Ding Liren’s World Championship title in 2023 to Gukesh’s in 2024. But the book reveals itself, quickly, as a fix to a different problem.

And chess has a couple. The first is the simplest: it is nearly impossible to enjoy casually. Learning the game properly feels like enrolling in a semester of applied mathematics. Knowing the rules will win you games against your three-year-old nephew, but your empire’s influence effectively stops there. To watch the professionals, to understand what they’re thinking, to feel the tension in a position, demands a wealth of knowledge that most people will never acquire.

At least, that’s the impression the game gives off. And it’s a forbidding one, thick enough to act as a barricade against ever considering chess as a hobby pick-up. If you’re winding down after a hectic day, the last thing you want is to rev your brain back into an overdrive of positional calculations. A quick game of FIFA, an episode of Seinfeld—these ask nothing of you, which is precisely the point.

This feeds into its second problem: the absence of a colour palette to dress its characters in. To play chess professionally, one must live the life of a monk or an addict; nothing else would suffice.

If I were to ask you to describe a chess player, how would you go about it? You’d think of short hair, a tad unkempt. You’d think of crisp shirts and analog watches, maybe a suit and spectacles. They’d have the gaze of a mathematics professor. They’d be the kind of person who enters a party late, eats their dinner quietly in the corner, and leaves at 10pm. The kind you’d have to explain every joke to.

“Chess has long had a communication problem,” Himelfarb told me. “It’s an abstract, technical game. But it’s also a beautiful, dramatic game, full of interesting characters and profound emotions. I wanted to capture all that in a way that resonated for chess fans and newcomers alike.”

Himelfarb’s own interest in chess spiked with The Queen’s Gambit. The Netflix show appeared in the first year of the Covid pandemic, that suffocating summer when we had too little social interaction and too much time on our hands. Episode by episode, as the lead protagonist Beth Harmon moved through those ornate, tense American rooms, her life a breathless loop of preparation and performance, Himelfarb found himself drawn into her life. Beth, contoured in drab shades, held within her all the obsession, anxieties, and insecurities as one finds in athletes of more glamourous sports.

The truest portrait of a place is found in the lives of the people who live there. Interregnum is their story.

Ian Nepomniachtchi—affectionately called Nepo—was born as the Soviet Union was crumbling. He was raised on Chekhov and Pushkin and the hop of the knight. Of all his brilliant rivals, Magnus Carlsen once said, Nepo might be the only “genius.” But genius in chess is a fleeting tag. In the 2021 World Championship match in Dubai, Carlsen administered such a thumping that Nepo, mid-tournament, “apologised to his chess-obsessed country and cut off his topknot like a disgraced samurai.”

Magnus Carlsen himself is rendered not as just another character but a force of nature. He completed fifty-piece jigsaw puzzles at two; by five, he could name the capital and population of every country on earth. Carlsen knows he’s the best. During the World Cup in Baku, Carlsen asked his social media manager to draft a tweet, to be posted only if he won the tournament. It read: “Chess? Completed.”

Carlsen’s arc presented Himelfarb with a temptation of diving head-first into the technical side of chess. After all, it’s impossible to find a player with a larger vocabulary than Carlsen.

And yet, Himelfarb resists. He sprinkles technical detail the way a good travel writer sprinkles local vocabulary—just enough to ground you in the place without losing you in it. We learn that the Queen’s Gambit Declined was used as a positional weapon, that the Reti Opening places bishops on the flanks to gaze “sentry-like” across the board, that a knight on the rim is dim.

But, every move is narrated as a glimpse into the psyche of the player who played it. For example, Gukesh Dommaraju insists on playing a version of the Queen’s Gambit Declined against the advice of his entire team because he has sensed a fragility in Ding Liren.

Interregnum brings the reader close to the board, but gazing at the players. That’s where, Himelfarb insists, true drama lies.

Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit was a transformative show for chess. It did for chess for Drive To Survive did for Formula One: bringing a legion of fans who were previously uninterested, and opened their eyes to the stories that hover over the board. The effect was immediate: Chess.com’s membership more than tripled to over 150 million users. Chess sets sold like IHOP pancakes.

Players began streaming, and the game spread, nearly overnight, to corners of the world where it previously had little profile. Consider Hikaru Nakamura, who thinks of himself as a streamer first and a chess grandmaster second. He gets cranky when he has to break his streaming schedule for a tournament. His Twitch channel surpassed one million followers even as his tournament results declined.

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But, all these characters, Nakamura and Gukesh and Carlsen and Ding Liren, are men. What about the women?

Chapter five of Interregnum dives into the most jarring loose thread within chess’ fabric: the gender disparity. Thirty years after Judit Polgar breached the world top 10, drawing to a close all doubts about the ceiling for women in the sport, there exists an unmistakable institutional apathy.

“It is social residue from a previous century,” Himelfarb told me. “The most important barrier to parity is a history of sexism in the sport - from derogatory comments to sexual harassment and abuse. In recent years, the chess world has finally begun to reckon with this, which is crucial. To see women at the very top of the sport requires bringing more girls to the game and encouraging them to stick with it. That begins with showing girls that the chess world is welcoming and safe.”

In Interregnum, Himelfarb dedicates generous space to India—the birthplace of chess at shatranj. India is home to more grandmasters than any other country. Today, it gives chess.com its highest share of membership. The office of an organisation I once worked at kept a chess board on a small round table, two plastic chairs on either side, for employees to sit down for a quick game. I don’t remember finding the spot empty too often.

Viswanathan Anand, one of the sport’s all-time greats, has overseen India’s recent chess dominance with the care of a parent. It’s hard to find a chess grandmaster in India who hasn’t trained with Anand, either at an academy or at his Chennai home. Chess is part of Chennai’s cultural fabric. You’ll find schools dedicating extra-curricular classes and coaching centres where hundreds gather to learn the sport as an exercise in cartography. Take a flight to Chennai during a major chess event, and as you descend, you’ll spot a bridge painted in the chess monochrome.

Sometime this year, Gukesh will defend his title against the precocious twenty-year-old Javokhir Sindarov. Vaishali Rameshbabu will play for the women’s championship against defending champion Ju Wenjun.

In the paragraphs leading up to the 2024 championship match, Himelfarb illustrates Gukesh’s anxiety and fears in patient lines. At break on the first day, Gukesh confessed to feeling the championship slip from his grasp. That evening, he went to a beach and spent hours watching people bungee-jump from a bridge.

On the next afternoon, after all was played and done, Gukesh, his hands trembling, eyes watering, arranged the pieces in correct order, as he had done after every game since childhood. One chapter of his life ended there, drenched in tears and gold, and another began.

After Gukesh landed in Chennai, soldiers escorted him through a crush of cameras and screaming schoolchildren. He was showered with flower petals. A shy, 18-year-old boy from Chennai was, briefly, the centre of India’s attention, a position many had only seen cricket heroes take.

We experience sport through stories. Stories make us stay up nights and crowd into clubs, screaming at a screen. Jordan Himelfarb’s Interregnum argues that chess produces them in every genre. One just needs to look.

The South Summit Ridge is a narrow straight opening to the peak of Mount Everest. Every May, it fills up with climbers in bright, puffed up nylon jackets, looking like the Michelin Man, thick sunglasses, oxygen masks, and layer upon layer of insulated clothing.

More than 800 climbers reached the summit in 2025 alone. Amongst them was Sherpa Kami Rita, on his 31st visit. In the 21st century, more than 12,000 have reached the top of Everest. It has now become a thing people do.

These are insane numbers. They, of course, come with an asterisk of accompanying sherpas often made to carry the climbers’ luggage, but reaching the top of Everest, with its fat dossier of fatal warnings, is staggering nonetheless.

Tenzing Norgay tried five times and failed. On one attempt, he reached within 400 metres of the summit and had to turn back. Then, Edmund Hillary arrived from Auckland, a beekeeper with years of Himalayan climbing experience, and together they left basecamp in early April of 1953. For seven weeks, they climbed and paused, with primitive equipment and oxygen systems. On 29th May, they reached the top of Everest and clicked a few pictures.

It’s a bit different today. The route is known, the camps are planned months in advance, sherpa teams do most of the grunt work. Climbers acclimatise for weeks at Basecamp and wait for the weather to turn kind. Once the window opens, they can go from camp to summit and back in less than a week. Climbing the highest mountain in the world is now a sliced project.

I have been thinking about Norgay and Hillary recently, especially while watching, on loop, the winning lap of the 2026 London Marathon. Sabastian Sawe, from Kenya, and then, eleven seconds later, Yomif Kejelcha, from Ethiopia, running past the finish arch while the first digit on the clock was still 1, sprinting 21kmph through the tape, and then through the idea that a human being cannot run 42.2 kilometres in less than two hours.

Running is hard work. Distance running, harder still. In the incredible book Born to Run, author Christopher McDougall recalls a Sports Injury Bulletin article about long distance running. “Athletes whose sport involves running put enormous strain on their legs. Each footfall hits one of their legs with a force equal to more than twice their body weight. Just as repeated hammering on an apparently impenetrable rock will eventually reduce the stone to dust, the impact loads associated with running can ultimately break down your bones, cartilage, muscles, tendons, and ligaments.”

To finish a marathon in less than two hours, one needs to endure this demolition while maintaining an average pace of 21.1 kmph. Most of us wouldn’t dare try this on a treadmill, even for 10 seconds, even with an ambulance service on speed dial. The nutrition, in the lead-up and on race day, must be precise—sufficient fuel without a gram of excess weight. Oxygen uptake must be exact. The weather must be mild, the course flat with long straights. This sort of feat exists more on paper than in reality.

There is an odd cruelty in sport. When someone does something incredible, we celebrate it, and then immediately cast our eyes forward, waiting for someone else to do it better. It also strangely illustrates the point of sport: the idea of pushing past limits, often internal, sometimes collective.

This wait, for someone to breach the sub-two barrier, had been our preoccupation for 128 years, since the first ever marathon at the London Olympics and Johnny Hayes’ finish time of 2:55:18. For the first few decades, the minutes dropped rapidly on the world record, like an overweight man losing kilos after regularly hitting the weights. Then it moved it fractions: ten seconds here, one minute there. Between 1968 and 1998, there was a reduction of two minutes in the record time. A 1991 research paper suggested sub-two hour marathon could happen, but don’t hold your breath.

Generations of the greatest runners we’ve known tried and came back with personal bests of 2 hours and sundry. Even Haile Gebrselassie took 239 seconds too many. Long distance running matured and became a million-dollar industry. Runners wore perforated vests and shoes with engineered foam. Entire departments at medical colleges dedicated themselves into calculating the combination of physics and biology that might get us there. Nike poured a few million dollars into Breaking2.

In 2017, Ross Tucker, a sports scientist at the University of Cape Town, showed us the numbers. Marathon times had improved by two per cent in fifteen years. The record then was 2:02:57. To break two hours meant shaving off another three minutes from a time that had already been shaved and shaved. “We want to do a double Usain Bolt on the marathon record?” he asked.

Our Roger Bannister moment just wouldn’t come. It has now arrived, thanks to Sabastian Sawe and Yomif Kejelcha, who, by the way, was running his first ever marathon. One of the first to offer congratulations was Eliud Kipchoge.

Two years after Tucker conveyed his concerns, Eliud Kipchoge went to Vienna and ran 42.2 kilometres in 1:59:40. Twenty seconds to the good, the ultimate barrier broken. But—and this is a pretty significant detail—the event was an exhibition, not a race. Kipchoge ran alone, behind pacemakers arranged in an arrowhead formation, parting the air so he could move through a pocket of reduced drag. His nutrition and hydration were calculated to the last granule. His shoes were prototypes too advanced for official racing. The entire thing was a proof of concept funded by Nike and INEOS, and performed by a champion runner. Kipchoge’s finish made it a pathbreaking day for sport, but it was still a mundane, slow Saturday for the bookkeepers.

Come to think of it. One of the greatest runners of all time, holder of two Olympic gold medals, effectively spent the two fastest hours of his life showing others what could be done.

At the halfway point of this year’s London Marathon, six runners had formed a pack behind a set of pacers. The projected finish time was 2 hours and 1 minute. The last pacer dropped out after 25 kilometres. Running nearly 10 miles without a pacer to block the wind should’ve pushed Sawe back. Instead, he sped up. He broke the record for the fastest mile in a marathon somewhere around his 24th or 25th. Alongside him, step by step, was Yomif Kejelcha. Sawe surged past Buckingham Palace and down The Mall, past the thousands lined up on both sides, and crossed the finish line at 1:59:30. He did not know his time before finishing. Eleven seconds later, Kejelcha came through.

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Records are celebrations of singular achievement, but their real life begins after, in what they made possible. A record says: here is where the boundary stood, and here is a human being standing beyond it, and now the rest of you know that the ground over there is reachable. Kipchoge’s two hours in Vienna did not count in any official register, but it counted in the minds of every elite marathoner alive.

Similarly, when Bolt finishes 100 metres in less than 10 seconds, when Nadia Comăneci lands a perfect 10, when Phelps wins eight gold medals in one Olympic Games, the achievement is collective, at a species level. It’s a dot on the timeline of human progress, like astronauts circling past the dark side of the moon and splashing back on Earth.

The Roger Bannister Effect refers to the notion that once an impossible barrier falls, others follow quickly. Within two and a half years of Roger Bannister breaking the four-minute mile, ten more runners did the same. Ten thousand Test runs was once considered an unimaginable achievement, just like twenty Grand Slam singles titles. Both have been passed, many times over. The magnificently-named Gout Gout from Australia will one day finish a 100 metres race quicker than Bolt’s 9:58, if not by LA2028 then by Brisbane 2032.

Sometime this month, a traffic jam will happen again at the South Summit Ridge. May, after all, is peak climbing season. Five hundred climbers, give or take, will reach the top of Everest, walking through the pass that Hillary and Norgay opened seventy-three years ago.

Sawe and Kejelcha have opened a comparable pass, though theirs is on flat ground, at sea level, measured not in altitude but in seconds. A sub-two marathon, inconceivable just a couple of decades back, is now part of our folklore. Somewhere in the world, a young runner will wake up with the first ray of sunlight, and chase their dream. And that dream will not start with the digit 2 anymore.

Short, with brute upper-body strength and the hand-eye coordination of the gifted, Pant could hit the ball a mile. He reminded us of, yes, that guy. And we’d been obsessed with that guy since we first laid eyes on him at an Australian summer, and then in Mumbai, and then, brutally, in Johannesburg. We had always wanted our own version. In Pant, we saw those shades. There was a bit of Gilchrist in Pant’s square cuts and bottom-handed flicks.

There was also, in Pant, a bit of the old Dhoni. The Dhoni who would play the most audacious shots in the most seemingly unlikely situations; the Dhoni who had the entire subcontinent in awe, a Pakistani army chief included; the Dhoni who was a biker turned cricketer. Captain Dhoni, the calmer, more calculated avatar, had given us many great afternoons and evenings, but he was impossible to emulate. No one can balance serenity and genius like that. But in that process of Marauder Dhoni turning into Captain Dhoni, we had lost a bit of his rawness we had loved so dearly. Pant brought that back.

The timing was worth noting. Dhoni had begun his home stretch—albeit without a definitive finish line—for India, having relinquished his captaincy to Virat Kohli. In a couple of years, if not earlier, the pathway to India colours would be clear.

And so, Trent Bridge and that six off Adil Rashid to announce himself. That century at The Oval. Sydney, twice. By that golden afternoon in Brisbane, he was a national hero. Ahmedabad and Cape Town were affirmations of something we knew well.

You can make a serious case that Rishabh Pant is India’s greatest ever wicketkeeper-batter in Test cricket. And he’s just 28.

But what of limited-overs cricket, its pace and zest, the things Pant seemed made for when we first saw him? The other two guys were naturals. Eight years of sparks later, Pant isn’t within an earshot of India’s ODI and T20 teams.

There are plausible explanations. In Test cricket, teams keep attacking fields, which allow Pant’s natural audacity to flourish through regular boundaries. That is Pant’s oxygen. Deprive him of boundaries for too long, and you’ll see him itching. The defensive fields of limited overs cricket cut off the supply for long periods. So, all we get is the occasional night of fireworks. But this is also a simplistic explanation. Pant is far too talented a player to not have worked out routes to quick runs.

Maybe he will, in time. But what we have, right now, is this player who is one of the first names on the team sheet in Test cricket, and a neither-here-nor-there player in limited overs. And yet, auction after auction, IPL teams splurge on him as if he somehow might find light. Zilch. It has been eight seasons since Pant racked up more than three 50+ scores in a single IPL season.

In the 2025 auction, Pant was bought by Lucknow SuperGiants for a whopping 27 crore, making him the most expensive player ever in the league’s history. LSG made him captain, possibly bending to his aspirations over more accomplished CVs, like Aiden Markram, who leads the South Africa T20 team. So far, Pant hasn’t generated the runs or the tactical nous. Last night’s outing against the Kolkata Knight Riders was an illustration of Pant’s frustrating returns with the bat and the lack of a captain’s instinct. He batted poorly, almost scared to take the kind of risks that would’ve pushed his team forward, and then selected LSG’s most out of form batter to start their one over shootout.

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You will have to travel long and hard to find an Indian cricket fan who doesn’t adore Rishabh Pant. In fact, you might find many who once fought for him with their friends and families, convinced that the boy will one day become a great.

I think all of us, including the Lucknow SuperGiants owners and coaching staff, seek in today’s Rishabh Pant the Rishabh Pant we saw when he came as a spike-haired, broad-shouldered teenager from West Delhi, who took the IPL and Indian cricket by storm, who reminded us of Gilchrist and a young Dhoni. It’s hard to resist that impulse, and it becomes harder every time he does well in Test cricket, which is often.

The next auction is in roughly eighteen months. It will be fascinating to see if the scent from Pant’s youth can last that long. It’s either that, or Rishabh Pant finally figures out a way to platform his extraordinary gifts in more than one format.

Sometime that afternoon, I wandered over to the ticketing website, just a passerby peering through windows. FIFA served me three scrolls of available matches. Second from the top, incredibly, was USA vs Paraguay—the host nation’s curtain-raiser and most anticipated football match in thirty-two years. About a third of the tickets were up for grabs. The cheapest ticket for the game, far up in the nosebleed section of the 70,000-seater SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles, cost $1940. That’s nine times the ticket price my friend Arjun paid to watch Lionel Messi-led Argentina play Netherlands in a quarter-final at the last World Cup.

One day after USA’s opener, Haiti play Scotland in Boston. The Category 1 seats for that match cost $1250—almost enough to have bought you a pitchside seat to watch Messi lift the World Cup in Qatar.

**

Every FIFA World Cup montage begins with a scene from Mexico City and one from Pasadena, California. Maradona at Mexico City, eyes closed, arms raised, is a tableau of ecstasy and deliverance, genius turning into God. Baggio at Pasadena is a picture of pain. You see a ponytailed man in a brilliant blue shirt, number 10 on his chest, shoulders caved in, while, in the blurred background, canary yellow shirts flutter like confetti.

Baggio, the best footballer in the world, has just sent the decisive penalty over the crossbar. The 1994 final is over. Everything about him, his life, his career, is collapsing.

But look at that picture again. Not at Baggio; at the light. World Cup finals happen under floodlights, under the theatre and shimmer of night. Baggio’s devastation is lit by the afternoon sun. The sky is clean and blue, the crowd in pastels and beach hats and sunglasses. This is what football looked like in America.

The 1994 Men’s World Cup was the tournament’s first trip beyond its childhood homes in Europe, South America, and Mexico. Football had tried to break into America a couple of decades before, when Pele, Beckenbauer, and Johann Cruyff wore strange jerseys and played to half-full crowds. That experiment was shelved, but not for long. The world’s most popular sport had to find a way into its most powerful country.

Hence, 1994. The Cold War was won, rivals had dissolved, and American corporations were stamping neon logos onto every corner of the planet. The United States were unrivalled leaders of the present and future. Over 94,000 attended the final in Pasadena, where Baggio felt his right foot shatter his lifelong dream.

This was, still, an extended and elaborate trial run. So much about the tournament was late-1980’s-coded: baggy shirts, glossy prints, sunglasses that covered half the face, bald men with mild protrusions playing centre-midfield. All that would soon change. The next time football came to America, it would be a slick, 21st-century product.

**

And so, here we are, back to the land of milk and honey, Cruise and Kendrick, Trump and Tate. Here, David Beckham owns a team from a beach city and Lionel Messi wears its pink jersey. If you’re travelling from another country, you will likely meet an immigration agent in a kevlar vest, carrying an M4 rifle, before you see your luggage.1

The World Cup starts in seven weeks. The war in Iran and Lebanon has now stretched beyond fifty days. Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s dehumanising visa blacklist has swelled to 72 countries, amongst them Haiti, Egypt, and Cape Verde, participants at the World Cup. Fans from these countries may be required to pay a bond of $5000 to $15,000 to simply enter the USA.2

The bonds are technically refundable, but for residents of the many countries it is applicable to, it could cost months, if not years, of earnings. While some countries—like Tunisia and Algeria—have a couple of games in Canada and Mexico, where no such bonds exist, most, like Iran, don’t.

As of publication of this essay, Iran are scheduled to play their group matches in Los Angeles and Seattle. You will not see an Iranian fan at the World Cup, even if, through exceptional circumstances, you see their team.

Offside, a 2006-film made by Jafar Panahi, is a story of Iranian girls disguising themselves as boys to watch Iran play Bahrain in a World Cup qualifier at the Azadi Stadium in Tehran. The film is banned in Iran, lest it influence others to commit sacrilege. Since 1979, Iranian women have been forbidden from entering football stadiums. And yet, like water pushing at boulders, they’ve found a way. In 1997, they broke police barricades and entered the Azadi; in 2014, they wore thick veils to cafes and watched Iran play at the World Cup.

In March 2019, a twenty-nine-year-old woman named Sahar Khodayari put on a blue wig and tried to enter the Azadi Stadium to watch her team Esteghlal FC play in the AFC Champions League. She was arrested, and charged with appearing in public without a hijab. She spent three nights in a detention centre and was later summoned to the Revolutionary Court. After leaving the courthouse, Khodayari poured petrol over herself and lit a match, burning ninety percent of her body. She died a week later. Iranians called her the Blue Girl.

A month after her passing, under tremendous pressure from FIFA, Iran allowed women into the Azadi for the first time in four decades. The occasion was a World Cup qualifier against Cambodia. The initial allocation of 3,500 tickets sold out within minutes. Inside, the women who made it chanted Blue Girl, Blue Girl. Iran won 14–0.

**

World Cups are sundials one tracks life with. I was a boy in ‘98, and I remember the World Cup because the TV was new, the colours were bright, Ronaldo was rapid, and Zidane played like he had more time than others. The 2002 edition passed through my aunt’s wedding—a fortnight-long event that started with railway station pickups and ended with teary farewells. By the final, the house was empty, just the couple of us in front of a television watching Ronaldo bury his ghosts from ‘98. I was in college in 2010, pulling nights at a shady startup in 2014, and covering the tournament in 2018. The ball stayed round while the life around it changed.

The 2026 edition comes to us when we desperately need something to hold onto. The air outside, and behind our screens, is grey with ash. International and domestic laws apply only to the marginalised. Resistance feels both imperative and futile. I have never thought of a World Cup as a global sanctuary, but I have also never felt so depleted of hope about the world.

The football bits will happen, inevitably. Some underdog team will reach the quarter-finals, some teenager will carve his name into our consciousness, and a genius will make the impossible look pedestrian.

A World Cup, though, is made by the vibrant backdrop to athletic excellence. The sound of fifty beating drums in a tall stand, bodies painted in national colours, eyes red from all-nighters spent travelling between cities, fathers lifting children in the stands, a beardless twenty-year-old on his first World Cup, a seventy-five-year-old clutching a replica trophy. Stories of a city taking to the streets with brass and drums, and another, far away, seeking refuge in alcohol. This is the heartbeat of tournament sport, the light we carry home.

**

On paper, the decision to give the USA hosting rights was sound. The World Cups of this century—Japan/Korea, Germany, South Africa, Brazil, Russia, Qatar—were held in countries that had to build from scratch or improvise. The United States were ready with the stadiums, the airports, the hotel rooms, the highways, and the dollars. They hadn’t hosted the Men’s World Cup or the Olympics in three decades. This was the moment.

Predictably, the suits in FIFA and the USA were waiting for this moment too.

The first tranche of tickets for this World Cup was released in October. FIFA had promised accessible pricing like at previous World Cups. They arrived, instead, with ‘Dynamic Pricing’—a term borrowed from airlines and taxi-platforms, in which the cost of a ticket rises and falls depending on demand and availability. It was a thin, transparent smokescreen.

By April 2026, ticket prices had gone up exponentially. The most expensive tickets for the final are currently going at $10,900—nine times the amount fans paid for the same ticket in Qatar.3

Even that sum doesn't guarantee you what you paid for. Fans who bought Category 1 tickets—the most expensive section—found their seats shifted without consent or intimation, to accommodate new VIP sections. They logged in on the ticketing portal to see a different seating map from what they had been provided during earlier sale windows. The Athletic spoke to Kiara Gilmore, who bought Category 1 tickets to a match in Arlington and found her seats moved to Category 2. “It’s just frustrating when you think you’re paying for one thing, and you get another, and then they change [the map] on you.”

Then, there’s the travel. A round-trip train from New York City to New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium costs $150—nearly twelve times the regular $12.90 fare for the roughly 15-minute, 9-mile ride. A parking spot across the highway will cost $225 per match.4

Dan Corry, an English economist who has attended the last eleven World Cups, told The New Yorker, “At other World Cups, the focus seems to be on making sure the fans have a good time. The ticket prices are reasonable, there are fan fests, and the host cities work out how to get fans to the grounds for free. It just doesn’t feel like this World Cup has the idea of making sure the fans have a good time at its center. There are all sorts of other agendas going on.”

Pannalal and Chaitali Chatterjee, from Kiddirpore, Kolkata, attended ten consecutive World Cups, from 1982 to 2018. They lived lives of attrition, rationing every purchase, whether rice or cloth, with one eye on their World Cup fund. “We don’t have kids,” Pannalal had once said. “Football is our only child and whatever we spend, we spend on something we love.” Pannalal passed away in 2019, aged 90, before he could raise ten to eleven.

Maybe Corry will travel to the World Cup this time, but Chaitali won’t. It’s unlikely FIFA will care for either.

More than a million fans travelled to Qatar between November and December 2022. The final, between Argentina and France, recorded nearly 1.5 billion views and an average live audience of 571 million. No sport, no spectacle, comes close. For FIFA, this is the money spinner, and they love money; no one who has watched FIFA operate for any length of time would pretend otherwise. But there used to be an unwritten law that the World Cup existed, at least in part, as an open-doors celebration of the sport. For the Dan Corrys and Pannalal Chatterjees of the world, for the Iranian women and Haitian men trying to escape their lives for one fleeting week, for a backpacker from Athens to share fries with a banker from London. That pact has not just been broken but mocked and spat on. What remains is a tournament designed, with great sophistication, to extract the maximum possible amount of money from those who give the tournament its life.

Every once in a while, you wonder who the sport serves. And then you open Twitter and get the answer. And, to think, the Los Angeles Olympics is two short years away.

My breath was already heavy, my strides uneven. It wasn’t meant to be like this. I had been running medium distance—between 5 and 10 kilometres—for years. A tall, muscular man tapped on my shoulder, saying something to the effect of, “chin up, smaller strides.” It was kind, timely, and the right running advice. The run got easier, but only for a fleeting moment before I looked up and across from the road and saw the Thiruvanmiyur MRTS station, and next to it the left turn towards home. Then it started to hurt.

It was 5:30am on a Sunday morning. My bed was a 15-20 minute light walk away. No one would know if I snuck out. To my friends, I could cherrypick any excuse: wasn’t feeling well, hurt myself, overslept etc etc. I could get myself some nice ginger lemon tea in the morning, watch football later.

At this point, I wish I had an inspirational moment to share. Like, the playlist serving up Europe’s The Final Countdown, and when the intro synths hit, I felt like Sylvester Stallone in a boxing gym. Or some generic Kobe Bryant quote about quitters being losers. Nah. All I got was the milestone board for 5 kilometres. There were sixteen agonising kilometres still ahead of me. But that board gave my video game-conditioned brain a slightly more hopeful signal: 25% completed.

I took out my phone. On the night before, while strategising for the race, I broke the distance into four full passes of Shine On You Crazy Diamond (both tracks), with two-minute walks to recuperate in between. Give or take another 5-10 minutes for exhaustion, and I’d still finish within my 2:15 target.

So, huffing and panting, I gave myself one more pass of Shine On. If the run went south, I’d take the next left home. If not, I would be halfway through the race anyway.

Thing is, I kept tricking myself to find an excuse to stay on track because I had trained bloody hard for this race. I hadn’t missed a day of strength or cardio in weeks. I played intense five-a-side football twice a week. In the week leading up, I had abstained from kebabs and chocolates.1 Part of me didn’t want all of that to result to an abandoned race. That would suck.

I then ran the best half hour lap of my life. It wasn’t all that quick; I stuck to my race pace of ~10kmph. But my form, breath, energy levels were exactly where I had wanted them to be. Heart rate was at a nice 140ish. The sky wasn’t dark anymore, but a faint shade of white with little specks of orange. The easy chill of dawn was mixing with sweat to form a balm on the body. And, by the final saxophone solo of the song, I had crossed the 10km milestone.

The rest of the race was not nearly as floaty. It was painful and exhausting, often making me question the life decisions I had taken to end up here, miserable on a weekend morning. But the progress bar kept moving rightwards, so I clung on.

The medal collection booth was inside a resort on the East Coast Road. Next to it, heaving bodies laid strewn across a lawn like breathless grasshoppers. I found myself a spot and sat down. And this sensation of great relief and pride washed over me. Relief because I didn’t have to run again for many hours and days, or maybe ever; pride because I had emerged on the other side of something I didn’t think I was capable of.2 At different points of later runs—most memorably, through a forest incline in Yercaud—remembering that small stretch between the Kasturbha Nagar and Thiruvanmiyur stations helped me push through.

Why am I telling you all this? Because, lately, many have questioned whether that was me posing for camera or truly feeling those feelings. I mean, not me specifically, but people.

This past week, our Twitter and Instagram timelines have been flooded with pictures from Hyrox Bengaluru. I read through a lot of captions, to get a sense of the people attending this monstrosity of a fitness event. Many were first timers, many others pushed for personal bests. Some finished it all alone, some with partners. And, without exception, the expression on their faces at the finishing arc was pure joy and gratification. That beaming smile, with or without a phone camera staring at you, is a 24-carat organic emotion.

Am I happy for them? God, no. I am jealous. For the uninitiated, let me quickly run you through Hyrox’s format. Hyrox is a “hybrid” race, broken up as eight repetitions of 1 km runs and a workout station.

The first workout station is the SkiErg, where you pull two cables for 1000 metres. Then you run a kilometre and walk into the sled push—shoving a weighted sled across a synthetic floor for fifty metres. Another kilometre of running, followed by the sled pull. Another kilometre of running. Then eighty metres of burpee broad jumps—the most diabolical exercise known to humanity, the result of a cocaine addict finishing a push up and saying, “this ain’t enough, brev.” Another kilometre of running, if your legs are still working, that is. Then comes the rowing machine where you have to pull one kilometre. If done well, this is your recovery station. One kilometre of running. Then you lift two kettlebells, 24kgs each, and walk for two hundred metres. You place them down and join the runners for yet another kilometre. By this time, start evaluating your life insurance payouts. Because, awaiting you, at the end of this run, are sandbag lunges. Lunges toast your quadriceps anyway. Imagine lunging with weights after your quads are basically thin strips of lactic acid. Anyhow, endure you will. Beyond the lunges is another kilometre of turf. The final station is called wall balls—appropriately named, a hundred repetitions of squatting with a medicine ball and hurling it at a target a metre or so above your head.

Over the last couple of days, since the conclusion of the event, there’s been a tangential discourse about Hyrox. Some have called it a performative event, done only for Instagram dope.

Firstly, WHO THE FUCK ENDURES THIS FOR INSTAGRAM, MAN?

Okay, deep breath taken, let’s dig. What is performative behaviour? A loose definition would be to perform something for external validation. Yes? For instance, attending a concert with your camera out, just to show people you were there, instead of losing yourself to the music. A truly pathetic way to live, but hey, it’s apparently popular.3

Similarly, AI art is performative because there is no rigour of studying the subject you’re claiming to own. You just want an artist’s tag without the work. An authoritarian head of state claiming to be pro-women when his party used the bill as a fig leaf on a more harmful bill? Performative.

But, book clubs and fitness events are... a good thing? Because—and I say this without partaking in either—even if you’re doing it for the serotonin hit of social validation, there is a net positive impact on your life. Reading and fitness will never be harmful. Sure, if you aren’t careful, you might end up reading self-help nonsense and vomiting your bile on LinkedIn, but you’re still sitting through a full book! Maybe, one day, you’ll choose Amitava Kumar over Ankur Warikoo.

Yesterday, I saw pictures of a lady, clearly fifty-plus, who battled anxiety and social stigma to show up for Hyrox. She reached the finish line running. Someone did those burpees while bound to a wheelchair. There were middle-aged cancer survivors and septuagenarians at the podium. A friend, who now owns two Hyrox medals, has been training at a specialised gym for the last year.

The landing page of Hyrox says it’s for everyone. It is good copy. Truth is—getting to the starting lines of these events takes months of work. That path goes through long-term fitness and nutrition discipline. Rare are the nacho-munchers who can just wake up and nail a long run.4

And boy, does India need some good habits. According to the 2024 WHO Physical Activity Factsheet for India, nearly half of the adult population (49.4%) is physically inactive, failing to meet the global recommended levels of at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity or 75 minutes of vigorous activity per week. Nearly 50% of at-home protein intake in India is derived from cereals, such as rice and wheat. These grains are considered low-quality protein sources due to their incomplete amino acid profiles and poor digestibility.5

A population that moves too little and eats too little of what it should desperately requires fitness to be packaged as fashionable.

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The bandwagon effect is a psychological pattern where people do something simply because others are doing so, often driven by the desire to conform. How often do we do this, with food, travel, and movies? Hell, I watched Gangs of Wasseypur after everyone around me started raving about it. Goa’s entire tourism industry today is funded by the bandwagon effect triggered by Dil Chahta Hai.

Not all of it ends well, of course. I recently ate at a popular pizza place and needed palette cleansers after. Hyrox, too, has its critics, amongst them some learned fitness coaches. But the critique is about the intensity of the exercises, not the idea of the event itself. Most, if not all, will egg you on to develop the strength and then give it a proper shot. Screw abs, the post-run sweat is what it’s about, they all say.

At the half marathon in Chennai, all those years back, someone with a prosthetic leg crossed me. And, I’ll admit, I’m a horrible person and it was a bit of an ego-blow, but it was also truly, very inspiring. I wondered how much he must’ve trained to even get here. I tried finding him after the race for a high-five, but to no avail. Maybe this was his first such run too, maybe not. But, we both had wrecked our Sunday morning to chase a stupid, enormous feeling.