The 2026 World Cup wrapped up yesterday, and I had the chance to learn quite a few things from this tournament. The first World Cup I remember watching was Spain 82. Back then my parents bought me the Panini album and I collected the stickers. The next World Cup was in Mexico, and my grandfather took me to the opening match, Mexico vs. Belgium. I remember it well. I saw the Hand of God make a fool of everyone, and watched the most shameless of Argentines at work. Ever since then, soccer has only existed for me once every 4 years, but every 4 years I try to watch every match I can.
As I've written before, the innate selfishness of human beings grows dimensionally—first through the self, then through the "us." Because of my roots and my upbringing, my "us" is much more diverse and expansive. It's not Mexico, it's not France; oddly enough, I find myself choosing as the tournament progresses, identifying with whichever teams I watch play, and that team I identify with becomes an "us." The interesting part is that if they lose, it doesn't bother me at all, unlike what I've seen in so many other people. It's simply fine—they gave it their best shot.
Since the Qatar World Cup, I've noticed something. I saw that the Argentine national team seemed to benefit from referee decisions, and not only that—I noticed that, even though it's part of the game, the Argentine team actively hunts for fouls, both drawing them and faking them. That took me back to Maradona, to the handball goal, and to the almost-accepted cheating with the "magic water" against Brazil. Then came the match against the Netherlands. I saw rude, disrespectful, mocking, violent behavior, and then the final against France arrived. And I watched a robbery unfold. Yes, the penalties were legal, but how the match got to that point wasn't. Without being able to prove it, I couldn't help but think that everything was being engineered so that Messi—who had hinted at retirement—could lift the one trophy still missing from his cabinet.
Which brings us to 2026. It was fascinating to see that this time it wasn't just me: the whole world noticed that Argentina was indeed being judged by an entirely different set of rules. I'll say it again—there's no hard evidence proving this, beyond comparing officiating across matches and the suspicions people voiced once those comparisons became as glaring as the red card Messi deserved in his very first game. I even saw Argentines saying they were disappointed, that if winning meant cheating, they didn't feel represented by their own team. I saw videos of Argentine fans in the stands hurling insults at others; sure, that kind of thing happens in any rivalry, and there were incidents at every match, but the fury and violence I witnessed in those Argentine stands was something else entirely.
In the end, Argentina didn't make it through, and at least from what I could tell, there wasn't officiating favoring them this time around—and I was genuinely glad they didn't win.
I've already written about the World Cup before, about the commercials and how the whole thing is being degraded by money, by squeezing every last drop of value out of it, but I haven't talked about the good parts. Setting aside what I mentioned about the Argentine stands, there's a broad sense of brotherhood, the celebrations of different fan bases, and how some manage to elevate that "us" into something like: "look, we're not that different, we just root for different teams." I also read something I liked: someone said the FIFA World Cup is like a sleepover with cousins you never see because your parents had a falling out. And I saw images of the Viking oar-clap inviting everyone in, the English celebrations, the Mexican ones, an Iranian team's gratitude toward the community that opened its doors and welcomed them with something they didn't expect. There's plenty of good in this tournament too.
But I also saw people who went into serious debt—who knows how long they'll be paying it off after going to the World Cup—while the whole enterprise focused more on squeezing money out of fans, handing the champion league 44 million euros, with players collecting checks worth hundreds of thousands of euros for a month's work, and the fans who went to watch that final match spent about $9,000 on average just to be there. Something about that isn't right.
