Let Them Eat Goals

A bit of Marie Antoinette, a bit of El Hadji Diouf

Do you also have moments when, as you’re shuffling through your day, going about life, a forgotten name suddenly pops into your mind? Not the obvious, highlight reel stuff, not even a superstar whose face was once up on Times Square, but just this random floating object from the deepest vault of your memory.

A couple of days back, Papa Bouba Diop popped into my mind. Out of nowhere, for no reason. I hadn’t thought of him for years. I had to check Perplexity - Google is so 2010s, tch - to check what he’s even up to. But his name sticks, for one very specific incident. A contribution to football history, if you will.

This one time, Papa Bouba Diop walked into football’s most expensive party and decided to flip the entire buffet table. It was 2002, and France showed up to the FIFA Men’s World Cup wearing their World Cup and European Championship medals. They were also world number 1 at the time. This team had enough artillery, even with a half-fit Zinedine Zidane, to navigate an easy group stage and the first couple of knockout rounds.

Back then, World Cups opened with the defending champions taking first aim. So here’s France, probably already planning their knockout stage hotels, facing first-timers Senegal in what was supposed to be a glorified practice session. The question was not if France would win, but by how many.

Then Papa Bouba Diop happened. Thirty minutes in, he bundled the ball into France's net like someone two-foot tackling a wedding cake. Excuse me, what? Yes. But okay, just one-third of the game gone; an entire hour left. Literally everyone trusted Thierry Henry and his band of superstars to get serious. If anything, Senegal had scored too early.

Except the bear never woke up. Senegal held that 1-0 lead until the final whistle, and the 2002 World Cup had got off to a most insane start.

There’s this thing that happens in sports - call it the Leicester City Moment, or the Greece 2004 Phenomenon, or whatever version of the miracle you grew up with - when the universe briefly stops making sense in the best possible way. You know, imagine finding out that your high school math teacher was secretly a punk rocker all along.

These moments are ridiculous and sublime and necessary. Because, without these glitches in the matrix, without Japan beating Germany or Morocco breaking Portuguese hearts, without Kenya inducing some African spice into World Cup cricket, without Roger Milla dancing at corner flags, sports would just be a really expensive way of confirming what we already know. It would be like watching Jeff Bezos count his money - technically impressive but fundamentally unsurprising.

Casabalanca, after Morocco knocked out Portugal at the 2022 FIFA World Cup. Credit: Associated Press

Instead, we get these beautiful disruptions. These moments when some team of randos from somewhere decides “actually, no, today physics and finance and fate can all take a back seat.” I’m writing this as Learner Tien, an unseeded teenager from the USA, is pouring cold water over world number 5 Daniil Medvedev’s Australian Open hopes.

One of my all-time favourite live game experiences came in 2023, when I watched Afghanistan beat Pakistan in a World Cup game in Chennai. Chennai breathes cricket; they hadn’t shown up to pick sides - in fact, there were locals in Babar Azam jerseys peppered across the stands. But as the shadows lengthened and dusk fell like a blanket on the sky, every single person in that ground became a witness to something bigger than the sport. This was a team of nobodies beating full-strength, ex-World Champions.

This is what tournaments should feel like - not just a procession of the powerful, but a place where hierarchies can dissolve in the space of a few overs, where Afghanistan can walk into cricket’s high-stakes poker room with nothing but belief in their pocket and somehow walk out with a bag of goodies.

Ideally, preserving the ethos of competition and jeopardy should be central to a sport’s health. Not the sanitised version packaged for popularity, but the 2 AM variety where you're keeling over in your knockoff jersey, rage-typing in WhatsApp groups about your team's garbage defense while your smartwatch beeps judgmentally at your life choices.

But that kind of naivete is for us junkies. Sport, actual sport, is measured by the kind of ramen partners an organisation can bring on board.

Take Brentford’s Community Stadium - this gloriously cramped 17,250-seat box squeezed into West London like the last sardine in the tin. They charge £10 for kids to watch Premier League football, top out at £65 for adults, and yeah, sometimes they can’t fill every seat when Wolverhampton come to town. Meanwhile, Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium, paced poshly in Islington, London, sits there like some capitalist cathedral, charging £45 minimum for kids to watch a programmed team pass the ball around in neat shapes.¹

So naturally, because this is the timeline where satire writes itself, a bunch of super-clubs got together in some sterile conference room to decide on the future of the sport. From where else do you get to call the shots for the world but the top of a penthouse?

Their ideas were simple and unanimous: why waste time playing against Brentford-esque teams, whose names don’t sell jerseys in Singapore? Why risk losing to clubs whose entire annual budget wouldn’t cover Cristiano Ronaldo’s moisturiser expenses? Let’s just have the big boys, playing each other forever, in an endless loop of guaranteed revenue streams and zero relegation anxiety.

Cue: The European Super League. A Netflix catalogue of only Marvel movies, but make it sports.

It took fans literally storming the Old Trafford - perhaps the most English response possible to corporate overreach - to derail this particular express train to dystopia. The club owners, spooked by the scale of anger, quickly withdrew their participation and rendered their apologies through videos and teleprompter-assisted speeches.

Credits: Getty Images

But they didn’t put all the papers into the shredder. This execution may have failed, but the idea is far from dead. In the last couple of years, there has been noise about some of the richest clubs still adding to the plans with bullish confidence. And they will be encouraged by what’s happening just outside their pod.

As 2024 wound down to its final hours, the Melbourne Cricket Ground was hoisting a proud number. A total of 373,691 people had attended the Boxing Day Test between Australia and India, making it the most attended Test match in history. It is wild, this victorian product succeeding in the Reels era.

And just a week later, the International Cricket Council, drunk on champagne and success like a startup founder after their first funding round, decided to livestream their villain origin story on Instagram.

On 6th January, 2024, Dan Brettig from the Sydney Morning Herald reported that a meeting had been scheduled between the ICC and representatives from the Australian, Indian, and English cricket boards to split Test cricket into two-tiers. One for the best, the other for the rest. By best, I don’t necessarily mean the best-performing. If pure merit could decide sports administration, I wouldn’t have half the articles on this Substack. By best, I mean the most financially lucrative, which is a function of the most financially stacked, which is basically a virtuous cycle that begins and ends with how many KFC kiosks you can place at your stadium on a matchday.

In this plan, the bottom tier of Test cricket will have, obviously, the “others.”²

Their pitch is that nobody cares unless it’s India vs Australia or The Ashes (Australia vs England). In a few weeks, Australia will land in Sri Lanka for a two-match Test series. The Galle International Stadium be lucky to get a live attendance of 5000 per day of cricket. Sri Lanka have also been struggling to sell broadcast rights to Australian television, and the deal got finalised just this week. So, yes, why bother?

If this feels like a mirror image of the European Super League argument, it is. Why subject our beautiful audience to watching Kamindu Mendis - whose hands, by the way, you absolutely should be watching - when they could be watching Pat Cummins bowl to Virat Kohli literally every week?

These tendencies aren’t new of course. They just rear their head up every few years, hoping to find greater kinetic energy until they reach escape velocity.

Until the summer of 1998, England refused to host Sri Lanka for a tour of more than one Test match, as if they were throwing morsels at street strays. This summer, England’s hosting Zimbabwe for the first time since George W. Bush was fumbling pronunciations in the White House and our idea of social media was asking “A/S/L?” on MSN Messenger. Australia don’t even play Zimbabwe or Afghanistan, and they refuse to tour the West Indies.

The gut punch, however, comes from elsewhere. Many ex-cricketers from the world’s most prestigious cricket nations - you know, the people you’d expect to defend cricket’s soul - are cheerleading this segregation like it’s the next crypto boom.

“The top teams play against each other more often, so there is a contest. You want contests,” Ravi Shastri told SEN radio during India’s fifth Test against Australia this January.

He said this within weeks of New Zealand spanking India 3-0 in India and Pakistan beating England. That’s some Olympic-level cognitive dissonance right there, like preaching about fitness while eating your third Big Mac.

And then there’s Clive Lloyd, cricket’s original emperor, bringing the wisdom that only comes from actually building something great. The West Indies under Lloyd were like the Chicago Bulls of cricket, except they reached Everest earlier. Here he is, at 80, warning us about how cricket’s on the path of self-destruction.

“I think it will be terrible for all those countries who worked so hard to get the Test status. Now they’ll be playing among themselves in the lower section. How are they going to make it to the top? When you play against better teams.”

Clive Lloyd’s point has more layers than just the prospect of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. Test cricket loses out when teams like the West Indies can’t play against an Australia or England.

Around this time last year, when Shamar Joseph sprinted into cricket legend at Brisbane - broken toe, unbroken spirit, bowling like someone who’d stolen Thor’s hammer - he didn’t just win a cricket match. He made Brian Lara and Carl Hooper cry on live television. Think about that for a second: Lara and Hooper, these guys who’ve inhaled cricket's thinnest air, who’ve danced on its highest peaks, who’ve probably seen everything the sport could possibly show them, reduced to tears by a kid from Guyana bowling through pain like it was just a minor inconvenience.

The last of his seven wickets was 2024’s greatest cricket moment - and precisely the kind that wouldn’t exist in this brave new world of spreadsheet-approved matchups.

But hey, it didn’t move Cricket Australia’s revenue-needle, so clearly it doesn’t count.

As the calendar flipped to 2025, the Premier League table looked a bit odd. Liverpool were top - ugh - but right below them, in 2nd, were Nottingham Forest. Forest haven't finished above 15th (out of 20) in the two seasons since returning to the top flight of English football. On New Year’s Day, Forest were marginally above Arsenal, well above Chelsea, and miles above Manchester City, that club literally bankrolled by a sovereign wealth fund, built as a monolith that will never fail.

If Manchester United, my team, were to visit Nottingham Forest this weekend, I wouldn’t bet too highly on United coming back with any points. I hate it, but I think it’s beautiful. And I wouldn’t even bother watching if United play Liverpool every week.

1. In 2021, Brentford played their first top-flight game in 75 years, and beat Arsenal 2-0 at The Community Stadium. Football, eh?

2. Rarely has a segue into culture and society presented itself with shinier wrapping and a resplendent bow.