What could possibly be a better way to spend a sunny summer Sunday than watching a World Cup Final? Why, watching two World Cup Finals of course!
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By either coincidence or design, the two major regional quadrennial football tournaments, the Euros and Copa América, scheduled their opening games and knock-out matches to take place over exactly the same time-frame through June and July 2024. The result? Ever since we got down to the last eight teams in each tournament, fans worldwide, but particularly those like me who are European expats living in the Americas (or, of course, vice-versa), have been exposed to a daily double-dose of the Beautiful Game1 meriting the occasional decision that, the unpacking of moving boxes be damned, I’m gonna watch Colombia-Uruguay live.
Colombia, for any of my English friends who have been too distracted to pay attention, won that Semi-Final 1-0, and later tonight will face off against reigning World Cup champions Argentina in Lionel Messi’s adoptive home city of Miami. My English friends may appreciate this very late-night distraction (actually, a 1am Monday morning kick-off distraction) should England lose against Spain in the final of the Euros, which will have kicked off five hours earlier in Berlin.
Given that Spain have been by far the best team in this year’s otherwise underwhelming tournament, having won all six games thus far, and having suffered only one defeat in their last sixteen matches, it should come as no surprise that neutral bookmakers have them down as odds-on favourites. Then again, we watch sport in large part to be surprised – such as when England, who labored through the group stages and their subsequent knock-out matches with a series of lackadaisical performances, suddenly woke up in the Semi-Final against the Netherlands. It was a refreshingly quality performance capped off with a last-second winning goal by late substitute Ollie Watkins as assisted by late substitute Cole Palmer, one of those late substitution decisions that made manager Gareth Southgate look like a tactical genius in hindsight. This view is deserved if only because England fans threw their cups of luke-warm beer at him earlier in the tournament - being loyal loving supporters who support their team through thick and thin. Presumably the lads below won’t be in Berlin tonight but rather, eating crow pie back at a Wetherspoon’s.
England’s performances were none so poor, however, as reigning Euro champions and World Cup runners-up France, who failed to score a goal of their own through open play in the first five games of the tournament. In fact, the only time they managed to do so, in the Semi-Finals, they ended up losing, which presents a worrying moral conundrum for everyone else debating how to win games without actually showing up. England’s own seeming progression-in-the-face-of-ineptitude was all the more disheartening given that they entered the tournament as one of the favourites, having been runners up last time around (due to Covid, the Euros 2020 were played in 2021), and having qualified for the World Cup Semi-Finals in 2018 and the Quarter-finals in 2022. By such measure of consistent almosts, the current coach Gareth Southgate (a former Crystal Palace player/captain) is the most almost successful in English history.
Almost. For while Spain has won the Euros twice and the World Cup once in the 21st Century (during a mad stretch of supremacy between 2008 and 2012), England’s last – sorry, England’s only – major international trophy is, as if undiscovered tribes on Mars need reminding, the World Cup back in 1966, a tournament held in England at the height of the Swinging Sixties, not that you’d have dated it such by watching the players with their comb-overs and the fans with their rattles.2 For the last 28 of this 58-year trophy drought, the fans and the country at large has celebrated this lack of victory by engaging in an increasingly annoying revival of the Baddiel, Skinner and Lightning Seeds song ‘Three Lions.’ It’s a great tune – let’s be honest, Ian Broudie can score a hit from the beach in February - and the refrain, “football’s coming home,” seemed somewhat quaint during the Cool Britannia summer of 1996 into which it was released, when England hosted a tournament for the first time since they last won one. Living in London as I was at the time, I got to attend Wembley for one of the matches, a quarter-final between England and… Spain, which England won on penalties, going on to lose, also on penalties of course, against the arch rivals Germany in the Semi-Final. It had been a beautiful sunny summer. The following, Monday morning, it rained all over London, a return to drab and dreary English normality that surely confirmed, a la Depeche Mode, that God has a sick sense of humour.
That same refrain, however, “football’s coming home,” feels increasingly pathetic and ludicrously nationalistic with every biennial revival, despite a recent rewrite to celebrate the Lionesses winning their own Euros a damn sight quicker than the lads have ever managed. Still, over these last 28 years, as the country has grown ever more multi-cultural, so the national team has hued with it, and under Southgate’s excellent stewardship of the inevitable culture wars, have come to represent something that I would like to at least feign my pride in. To win a major trophy just 10 days after kicking the Tories out of office would, in fact, certainly crown this July as pitcher-perfect for those who prefer playing up the left wing than the right. God, presumably, would demonstrate further his sense of honour and reward the English with a postcard-perfect Monday morning and the King, in his beneficence, would grant the English a Bank Holiday allowing that nobody would be sober enough to work anyway.
It probably won’t happen. Spain are, frankly, several La Ligas better than England’s Premier Players. But more to the point, I’m not sure England should win. They wouldn’t know what to do with themselves. I don’t mean that from a literal, in-the-moment point of view, because I’ve already noted what they’ll do with themselves in the moment: they’ll get blind drunk, which is the Englsh default reaction to every day of the week that ends with a Y, and they’ll dance naked in Trafalgar Square’s fountains and around the mulberry bush if they have one. But from a national psyche perspective, the English won’t know how to cope. (I am not alone in this thought; it was at the centre of the Guardian’s Football Weekly podcast yesterday, which otherwise descended into a “see-you-outside” debate between a Barney and a Barry about how “quite good” a manager Southgate really is.)
You see, the English don’t do victory very well. That’s because we – they, us? - are simply not used to winning. Not in the last 60 years at any rate. What we – they, us? – do excellently is glorify in defeat instead. The English are, frankly, the world’s best losers. They’ve had almost least eight decades of practice. An England that wins the European tournament just a few years after deciding that Europe isn’t good enough for it to belong to the Continent anymore? An England whose appalling history of colonialism and racism finds itself in 2024 winning a tournament thanks primarily to the contributions of its Black players? The next we know, the Prime Minister will turn out to have been a keen five-a-side footballer all along, someone who took violin lessons with Fatboy Slim and doesn’t have to feign his love of The Wedding Present (per David Cameron with The Smiths and the Jam and Boris Johnson with The Clash) because it’s already been documented, but only has to explain away why as the leading representative of the working-class he allowed Royalty to make him a fucking Knight of the Realm.
Where were we? Ah yes, the Copa América. For Americans raised in the Americas and living in the Americas, this is the tournament to watch (not least because for those of us who keep roughly normal working hours, the majority of matches don’t take place during those hours but rather, civilized mid-late evening hours when you don’t have to make excuses for opening a beer and plonking yourself in front of the gogglebox for two hours of dribbling and punching and professional athletes playing possum). For American-European dual citizens who live in the Americas, which more accurately describes my good self, any suggestion I might make as to why this tournament is somehow inferior to the Euros would come down primarily to lingering ethnocentrism – “the tendency to view one’s own culture as most important and correct and as the yardstick by which to measure all other cultures.”
Sure, the best leagues in the world are all in Europe – that one is hard to argue objectively – but it’s got the best leagues in part because it keeps poaching the best players that the Americas have to offer. Two-thirds of the Colombian squad and all but three of the 26-man Argentinian squad ply their wares in these European leagues – and of those two Argentinian exceptions, the current Inter Miami players Lionel Messi (you may have heard of him) played his entire professional career there until just last year.
At 37 years of age, Messi is no spring chicken. But he’s a few months behind his Inter Miami teammate, the Uruguayan Luis Suarez, who became the oldest player ever to score in the Copa América, when he netted a late equalizer for Uruguay against surprise upstarts Canada in the otherwise wooden spoon playoff for 3rd place last night (Or Saturday July 13th for those of you in the future). The famous Mike Tyson-style biter Suarez is also not too old to engage in some good old argy-bargy, as at the end of the hostile Semi-Final against Colombia, when he was seen instigating a lot of the aggro between opposing players on the pitch at the final whistle before a group of Uruguayan player realized they’d be better served rescuing their families from genuine hostility by Colombian fans who inexplicably had been sat alongside these wives and babies.
The subsequent punch-up between leading Premier League players like Liverpool’s Darwin Núñez and some beered-up Colombians in the lower stands made for entertaining viewing on a par with the infamous kung fu kick from the Valentine’s Day massacre when our lowly Crystal Paace knocked Chelsea out of the FA Cup in 1976, an event for which fans every London team that wasn’t playing at home that day (which was most of them) descended on Chelsea’s north stand to have a ruck to end all rucks, and the late Jimmy Hill kindly analyzed the fighting for us on Match Of The Day afterwards. (The clip below is not with Jimmy Hill, but I watched that Match of the Day clip recently on YouTube so know we didn’t misremember it. I watched the terrace action myself from the seats; my mother wisely preferred to take her little boy somewhere safer than the north stand that day.)
If such behavior seemed unseemly of Núñez, who has a face like an angel, that’s what playing for your country can do for you, especially in South America, where the “dark arts” – a catch-all phase for the combined tactics of aggression, acting, gamesmanship and the so-called ‘professional’ foul – is a vital and much celebrated part of the sport. (Should any North Americans have a problem with this, they might want to rewatch an ice hockey match before commenting.) Indeed, earlier in the same Semi-Final, the Crystal Palace right-back Daniel Muñoz got himself sent off for a stupid elbow in the chest of a Uruguayan, right in front of the referee, and while already on a yellow card. At Palace, we have seen nothing like this from him all season. And we won’t until next season now – because getting sent off gets you automatically suspended from the next match and Muñoz will have to watch tonight’s action from the stands. (Presumably, he won’t be one of those Colombian fans who assault opposing teams’ families because they can’t handle their beer; see Uruguayan Gimenez passionately go off script below.) As a result, Colombia will be represented by only one Crystal Palace player tonight: midfielder Jefferson Lerma who, like Muñoz, has scored twice in this tournament for his country despite the two players netting only once for Palace all year. I guess that’s something else that playing for your country can do for you.
Over on the Euros side of the equation, Spain one-upped Uruguay earlier in the week by having the youngest player ever to score in any major international tournament - Lamine Yamal, whose goal against France in the semi-finals last week was achieved at the age of just 16 years, 362 days, almost an entire year younger than that scored by the otherwise inimitable Pele as a 17-year old at the World Cup in 1958, whose record had looked like being held in perpetuity. Just as impressively, Yamal’s goal was of the sort that even Lionel Messi would shake his head at in wonderment. (Cristiano Ronaldo would probably have stormed off the pitch in a huff that Yamal hadn’t passed the ball to him instead.) Back when Spain had its four-year reigning run as Champions of everything football could throw at them, its players were largely Latino through and through, but as with all national teams in our ever-shrinking world, their side now more accurately represents the nation’s shift in demographics. Yamal’s parents are both African – and on that note, I will acknowledge the African Cup of Nations is a fast-rising challenger to the excitement of the Euros and Copa América, if not for the fact that it takes place every two years, somewhat diminishing the excitement factor. (The clip of Yamal’s wonder goal will probably only be available to US viewers; search it out for yourself otherwise.)
Where do I stand on today’s games? Frankly, I can’t lose. I would love England to win for all sorts of reasons, not least that there are four Crystal Palace players in the English squad, the most of any club, which is insane considering the drab performances by the team only a few months back before our change of coach. The fact that the only one of those players certain to play today (Marc Guehí) could well be leaving Palace later this summer will not negate any pride at seeing him take part in a winning side – nor that of Ebereche Eze coming on to score a late winner, which is what I would really love to see happen, because Eze glides around the pitch like he’s on rollerblades and plays with a sparkle in his eye as if he too can’t believe you actually get paid millions to play football for a living.
I’d also like England to get that always-the-bridesmaid monkey off its back just so they can stop singing “58 years of hurt” and realise that while you can claim football “came home” if you really believe it, but you actually have to give the trophy back four years later and it’s unlikely to have your name on it for a while once you do. And of course it would be great to rub the Tories’ noses in it. (I suspect the clip below will ALSO be available only to US readers/viewers; sorry, it’s the nature of coyrights.)
But that’s as far as I go with nationalism, for reasons to do with the aforementioned colonialism and racism, and the championing of both over the years from the white working class football fans who have embarrassed the English by representing our less savoury aspects over decades of hooliganism and violence. As a voluntary expat, I keep my distance from all the jingoism. No flag of St George for me.
Besides, I love Spain, and understand only too well why so many English people choose to live there. I have just moved into a home with a Spanish teacher, I have taken Spanish I and Spanish II college courses this last two years, will take Spanish III before I finish my degree and have a soft spot for much about the country and its culture (Spain’s own history of colonialism, racism and Franco’s fascism notwithstanding). If Spain play as well today as in the rest of the tournament, I could hardly begrudge them the right to get their hands on the trophy ahead of my birth country.
I’m similarly in a win-win position with the Copa América final. I have a vested interest in Colombia. As noted, there are those two Palace players in that squad as well, and I have been to Colombia twice in the last few years, and you are always bound to have an affinity with a country you visited and loved. Indeed, I will testify, on my copy of 100 Years of Solitude, the greatest novel ever written if necessary, that it is a much-maligned and mis-understood nation. To call it football mad might seem superfluous given that it’s in South America, but it also has one of the most horribly violent histories in the entire world, very little of which was of the peoples’ own choosing, and as it emerges from decades of civil war, drug wars, oppression, juntas and death squads, with what my friend down there Ric Dragon accurately observed (on this episode of my One Step beyond podcast) as collective PTSD, its citizens have so much more reason and right to need that trophy (again) than do the English on the other side of the Atlantic. Besides, Colombia hasn’t lost in its last 25 matches, handing Spain its last defeat in the process. They are insanely good, which explains how they were able to hold on to that 1-0 lead against Uruguay despite playing with only 10 men for half the match.
Then again, Colombia is up against Argentina, three-time World Cup winners, current World Champions and… y’know, Messi. The English are meant to hate Argentina, but I don’t truck with any of that, and while I haven’t visited Argentina, I did allow a beautiful Argentinean girl to tattoo my leg on my last trip to Colombia – I assure you Paula that’s the closest physical contact we had! – so I guess there will always be a part of Buenos Aires on my calf. If the US host city/stadium tonight, Miami, does a better job of fan segregation than other venues have managed leading up to this final, and assuming that CONMEBOL has appointed a referee who knows how to handle the inherently inflamed temperaments in the Florida heat, it should be a great match to cap a great day of football.
And if you noticed that I got this far without mentioning the Copa América’s host nation, the USA – which will also be co-hosting the 2026 World Cup Finals – well yes, there is always something to be embarrassed about. Despite coming into the tournament ranked 11th best nation in the world by the sport’s governing body, FIFA, the USA team managed to lose a group match against Panama (there was a Palace player in that team as well, we can’t win them all). To put this defeat into perspective, the USA has a population of around 350,000,000, plenty of whom are soccer-crazed. Panama’s population of 4,000,000 could have ably replaced that of Atlanta, where the match was held, and still had about 50% more space to move around in. The shock result saw Panama make it to the last eight in the USA’s anticipated place. But hey the current Euro champions Italy didn’t make it out of their group stages this time round either. Sport. We watch it to be surprised. And to be entertained. And we prefer to watch football because of all the sports, there is only one Beautiful Game. May today’s games be beautiful and the best teams win.
Drab 0-0 draws and referee-lost-his-shit disasters aside of course.
Sorry, Brighton fans, they’re not very fashionable. Though you do have Argentineans on your team which is cool.
I can’t wait! Both games should be fantastic. Wish the U.S. was still on, but what can you do?