The World Cup Has Fooled Me
and my latest sketches
The World Cup has fooled me. It has.
The World Cup has gifted me. I have now a great deal of faith in the world.
Never really followed soccer btw don’t give me shit for not saying football, writing to a U.S. audience here, but I’ve been diligently obsessed since the qualifiers started. By “diligently obsessed” I meant I had made sure to skip through every Fox Sports highlight clip, usually when my Claude is whatchamacalliting.
Ha, guess I’m fooling the World Cup too, then. But hey to be fair, I didn’t even know who Haaland was before, and now I know what video game he likes and what he gets for breakfast so…
When I drew this ^ back in April I wrote
The world’s been a mess lately.
It was a mess before as well, but now I don’t really believe things get better, at least not in the way the new iPhone used to make me feel.
The world’s been a mess lately, but Wi-Fi makes everything feel so…perfectly clean. A world connected to Wi-Fi is just as lovely as the Waymo-scanned world. Simple, endearing, and how much I wish I was still in that world!
I haven’t felt that way in weeks, for I’m certain that Kumbaya is just around the corner. I heard chants that are proud but not chauvinistic, I felt a certain touch of mutual respect or even admiration, and I witnessed rivalries that were somewhat decoupled from geopolitical reality — all of which rendered in aesthetics long gone in my fucked up Twitter timeline.
The World Cup has fooled me, for a single phone call can get a red card retracted. Soccer fields ain’t no real battle fields, and the national team is definitely not the nation. Not to mention the piping-hot perfidious rot churning beneath the fresh, crisp, groomed green grass.
There is, after all, nothing new under the sun.
The Olympics! Why didn’t you fool me? Mostly because you just celebrate too many sports, so the emphasis is not the world but its athletes. Incidentally, soccer itself also has a peculiar kind of charm. On one hand it’s fabulously inspiring—strategy, elegance, speed, power. But at times it’s utterly childish… Every time a player dives after the faintest touch, or plays dumb fully knowing it was a foul, I just hear this yap in my head —
“Hey, I know we’re running our lungs out, I know you’re screaming your lungs out, but it’s not that deep, ok? We are just eleven kids who really wanna get the ball into the net so we can pile on top of each other later. Just a game, mate.”
The World Cup has fooled me. It has…
but I really wouldn’t mind staying fooled, for just a little longer.
This world we live in, it has taken on so very many injuries, so surely one could hope that we’ve bought ourselves more time. The World Cup is but a quadrennial stoppage time that belongs to all of us.
Don’t slit my dream open yet, let the whistle be slow.