Before Messi arrived, Reddit’s favorite sporting moment of the first week of the World Cup was a seventeen-second loop of Nestory Irankunda’s twenty-seventh-minute goal for Australia against Türkiye. The clip starts with Irankunda receiving a lofted pass in the left channel, about thirty-five yards from the Turkish goal. A lonely, unpromising position: Turkish defender Demiral is approaching from infield; midfielder Yüksek is recovering nearby; Irankunda’s only support is Touré, at an awkward angle. Wingers in these situations are usually happy to retain possession—win a throw-in or free kick, or pass it back to an advancing midfielder.
On the other hand, you are watching a clip. Something unusual is going to happen. It starts with Irankunda not touching the ball; rather than slowing to control it, he lets it bounce across him, turning to race it toward the Turkish goal. Demiral, reading this, turns deep but keeps his inside leverage—principled positional defending, hoping to force Irankunda away from the goal, into the sideline, where he’ll have to slow down and likely pass back. But Irankunda, as the ball drops toward its second bounce, extends his right toe to nudge the ball back inside: right in front of Demiral, still sprinting toward the corner. Irankunda, continuing the same inward step that guided the ball, passes behind Demiral.
He enters the box moving laterally, left to right, with Turkish defenders closing from left, right, and behind. Çakir, in the Turkish goal, steps out to challenge. He too thinks he knows where Irankunda’s going—momentum and convention both would guide the shot across the face of goal, inside the far post. So Çakir, advancing, kicks an anticipatory leg in that direction. But Irankunda fools him too, with a calm straight pass inside the near post—saveable enough, if Çakir’s weight weren’t already moving the opposite direction. A goal! Irankunda continues his sprint to the far corner, where he slides on his knees before rising to throw five punches at the corner flag. Australia goes on to win 2–0.
Why this goal, specifically? The clip shows some of it: the unlikeliness, a true solo goal against pretty good defenders in pretty good positions. Then there is the economy of Irankunda’s two touches, each simultaneously direct and imaginative. Finally there is the symmetry in how he fools his opponents. He convinces Demiral he’ll stay left and then cuts right, convinces Çakir he’ll shoot right before tucking left. The same trick, mirrored, twice in a row, in four seconds, while sprinting—the best goals can have the economy and resonance of poems. Like poems, too, you catch things on the severalth loop: the slight backspin on the pass, slowing it for Irankunda’s touch; the somewhat slow arrival of the third defender, Bardakçi; how Irankunda’s first punch knocks the spring-mounted corner flag out of reach, how he looks a little uncertain how to continue before it rebounds for the fifth.
Other things, the clip will never show: the punching celebration a callback to Tim Cahill, Australia’s greatest-ever player. Or the prevailing expectations, Türkiye favored in this match for its generation of scintillating young creative talent, Australia assumed to lose pluckily. Or the player biographies—that Irankunda is just 20 and Demiral a seasoned 28; that Irankunda was born in a Tanzanian refugee camp and Demiral is an apparent supporter of Turkish ultranationalists. In this instance, you wouldn’t even know the name of the goal scorer. The uploader, Moose4KU, misattributed to the goal to “Nystrom Irankunda,” a player who doesn’t exist.
For most non-professionals, the clip—on social media, or in a licensed highlight package—is something like the primary episteme of the World Cup, for the simple reason that there is too much soccer. The group stage, which concluded on June 27, featured 72 games, or around 120 hours of game-clock runtime. And international soccer can be a lurching, sputtering sport. All the best players are here, but even the best teams—composed by accident of passport, hurriedly familiarized in training camps stolen from the club season, not always well-coached1—are lumpy, semi-coherent. Argentina have Messi and scintillating passing, but need a couple more guys who run fast; Portugal have the tournament’s best midfield supporting Cristiano Ronaldo’s pouting, ambling husk at center forward;2 Spain have the tournament’s other best midfield but are almost completely reliant on an exhausted 18-year-old to create attacking chances; England’s best talents are hobbling after a grueling club season; France have so many superstars they often get in one another’s way. And these are the favorites, the teams whose exceptional qualities might yet outweigh their comic limitations.
Do the games even matter? This tournament, to support small nations’ dreams of qualifying and FIFA’s dreams of profiting on a tournament with 60 percent more matches, has been expanded to forty-eight teams from the usual thirty-two. But thirty-two teams will qualify for the first knockout round—two thirds of the tournament, the best two teams from each group of four and most of the third-place teams. Only the very worst, happy-to-be-here teams will fail to make the knockouts; in the group stage, everyone else is only playing for a slightly easier path through a tournament they too will almost certainly not win. And the goals are all that really count, in the end—maybe they are all we need to watch. Watching the clips, we have gotten away with something: We have watched the World Cup without having had to watch any soccer.
If the goals are poems, the sport itself is stubbornly prosaic. The ball is knocked calmly between center backs, midfield rebounds rebound out of bounds, wingers turn infield to conserve possession, another shot flies into the stands. The players in general are alive with a national passion they are bound—cruelly!—to express by operating on a sixty-nine-centimeter ball, advancing it or preventing its advance. Most of them—even your favorites, even the announcers’ favorites—will have the ball for only two or three of the ninety minutes.
Soccer is a hard sport! You are not allowed to use your hands! The legs are pressed into an awkward double use, running and kicking at once. How are you going to score? There are so many defenders, and the last one is allowed, unfairly, to use his hands. There is no way through. And the business side is equally dispiriting—contemporary club soccer, more and more a petrostate sportswashing project, has become the great philanthropic endeavor of the fossil-fuel industry, while the international game is among the world’s preeminent scenes of entrepreneurial corruption—a place where any ambitious young football association administrator can imagine himself receiving manila envelopes full of cash, or implementing a “hydration break,” ostensibly for player welfare but really so that broadcast partners can show—and pay to show—another minute or two of ads right in the middle of the game.
But back on the field, the prose advances purposefully—themes are assembled, contradictions unburdened and reburdened, a lead-footed midfielder or inattentive right back forced again to turn, decide, recover. Usually, it doesn’t work. Usually, Demiral does charge across and make the tackle, usually Irankunda’s daring first touch runs just too far, or his finish misses the goal by a degree or two. Yet there is an optimism of the will. Just one more ball into that channel bro, I promise: it is this action, the exhausting valiant constancy, the refining and hindering of designs, that the clips omit. In a way they excuse us from soccer itself, from the clenched anxious hope of not having what you want in the fortieth or seventieth minute—or having it, and worrying it will disappear in a moment of someone else’s genius.
Yet the clips are soccer too—the moments of electric possibility. For hours and hours, the fullbacks cover, the keepers gather, the through-balls run too far, the preventing systems hold. But then there is a moment, miraculous or revolutionary. Something breaks through: possibility, joy, farce, even perfection, despite all the weight assembled against it. Maybe the sport’s real genre is neither poetry nor prose but Basho’s haibun—a long, arduous walk that now and then shivers into the beauty of a moment.
Soccer relies on its antimonies—the joy and the difficulty, seemingly opposed, depend on one another. A game with no goals is mostly thwarted running; a game with no thwarting is closer to basketball. In this account, the clips are liars. Like other short videos, the life hack or minute craft, they elide mere toil to show a carnival of triumph. And the game is less if we forget the dignity of its systems and preventors, the Salibas and Caicedos and Courtoises, paid millions every year precisely to stop clips from occurring.
But might the world not deserve a carnival? Maybe the clip, like the Cup itself, can steward a scrap of possibility, something live or integral through failure and failure toward an impossible success—the game keeps proving that it can occur. Irankunda’s parents can flee Burundi, give birth in a camp in Tanzania, move to Perth and Adelaide, drive their son to practice after practice. He in turn can thrive in Australia, wash out from Bayern, not quite settle into the English second tier—and then score that goal at the World Cup. The clip, as many times as you watch it, will always stage a microcosm of this triumph, this profound unlikelihood. And then what can still occur elsewhere, too. Looking back to Reddit for more clips, one finds that the most beloved moments of the group stages haven’t been goals at all: a lone South Korean fan hurled joyously into the air by a crowd of Mexicans; a pet duck wearing a Mexico jersey; Australian fans in Vancouver chanting “Aussie boys are on a bender, Donald Trump is a sex offender.” It is the world, after all—there’s some life in it yet.
International coaching is less intense and less lucrative than club-game coaching, with the result that international coaches tend to be aging luminaries like Brazil’s Carlo Ancelotti or career internationalists like Tunisia’s Hervé Renard. At this tournament a few teams—England and the US among them—are experimenting with a novel approach of hiring elite club-game coaches, with promising early results. ↩
A coaching case-in-point: almost every neutral observer agrees that Ronaldo is actively hurting an otherwise excellent Portuguese team, but Ronaldo is an icon of the game, likely Portugal’s best-ever player, and wields substantial influence in both Portuguese and world soccer. A confident and job-secure coach might bench Ronaldo, or not have brought him to the tournament at all—Roberto Martinez seems to instead envision his role as making excuses for Ronaldo. ↩
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