Stutter Steppers
With the knockout rounds well underway, it’s time to contemplate one of soccer’s great perennial mysteries: Why do the best players alive miss so many World Cup penalty kicks?
The kicker is an elite player with a clear shot at the net (twenty-four-feet wide and eight-feet tall) from dead center, twelve yards away. A goalie is standing there, also world class, but his movements are restricted (his feet can’t completely leave the goal line until the ball is struck), giving him just a fraction of a second to act. His best hope is to guess where the shot is going to go ahead of time, and throw himself blindly in that direction as soon as the shooter’s foot connects with the ball. Goalies are often wrong, and even when they’re right a ball hit hard enough will beat them to the corners nearly every time. A ball hit slowly down the middle might also beat them more often than not—it’s called a “Panenka,” after the Czech player who helped his team win the European Championship in 1976 by gently chipping the ball into the middle of the net, giving the poor West German goalie just enough time to leap stupidly out of the way. In other words, it’s hard to overstate the kicker’s advantage here.
And yet Lionel Messi has already failed to score two in-game penalties so far this tournament. Both Germany and the Netherlands, top-ranked teams, went out in the Round of 32 after losing tie-breaking penalty shootouts. Germany’s loss to Paraguay was especially pathetic: After five penalties each, the score was still tied 3–3 and the shootout went to sudden death, but when it was time for Germany to send out its sixth kicker nobody wanted to die. German captain Joshua Kimmich looked, then asked, then begged for volunteers. At least four athletes, reportedly including the veteran Leon Goretzka, said no before center-back Jonathan Tah, who has never taken a penalty kick in his professional career, did what somebody had to: He stepped up to the spot and put the ball a mile over the cross bar to lose the game.
The pressure of a penalty must be immense. The thing you have to do is so simple it’s basically a joke, but the way you have to do it is brutal: in front of tens of thousands of people, watching you with either outright malice or awful, tentative hope; before television cameras, and by extension billions of remote viewers, who will be able to watch the clipped, slow motion version an unlimited number of times. You have to do it in front of your team, who patted you on the back and clapped as you made the ritualistically long and lonely walk to the penalty spot from half-field; you have to face a keeper who has absolutely nothing to lose and is giving you crazy eyes; and you have to ignore the LED perimeter board playing an animated Kalshi ad right behind the goal.
Is it any wonder they miss? If a single one of these wretched conditions enters the player’s consciousness as they prepare to take their shot, they have two options: pray to God, or make kicking a stationary ball into a net twelve yards away look much, much harder than it is. You’ll see them take extraordinary care while placing the ball, like they’re doing some arcane aerodynamical work with the seams. Then they’ll back up farther than they have to, so they have space to perform a weird stutter-step run-up, as if it takes subtlety and guile to beat the keeper from this distance. Can you blame them? As I write, I’m listening to the announcers criticize Swiss center-back Manuel Akanji, who seconds ago tangoed his way to the ball just to send the shot skyward and is now doubled over with his hands on his knees like he’s about to throw up. “Just kick the ball hard into the goal,” the announcers say. “Keep it simple.”
Crowd Work
It is tempting to feel, as a television viewer, that you are an integral part of this thing. FIFA, FOX Sports, and all of the many advertisers, from Aramco to Coca Cola work hard to include you. Dorky moving headshots of every starting player roll by before kickoff, a televisual playbill. Commentators continuously update you on the action, narrate every play, summarize general strategy, tell you which players to watch, which players have injuries, new babies, inspiring backstories, famous parents. The broadcast uses nearly fifty cameras—pole cameras, big cine-style cameras, and ultramotion cameras spaced along all four sides of the field, plus fly-by-wire cameras catching action in the middle. There is also a GoPro-type camera clipped to the referee’s ear, so you can witness the play from his precise vantage and make informed judgments about his calls. On corner kicks, keep an eye out for the friendly, hirsute directional microphone pointed at the kicker’s feet, which allows you to enjoy the satisfying whump a soccer ball makes when it’s struck. (In the US’s Round of 32 match against Bosnia and Herzegovina, the corner mic got too friendly with teenaged Bosnian player Kerim Alajbegović, who was forced to grab the thing and shove it back before taking the kick). Watch every play happen, then watch the important plays happen again in slow motion from three different angles, plus once more in super-slow motion from the best, most instructive angle. Then watch an incredibly distracting ad for McDonald’s in which the purple monster “Grimace” appears to crawl up from the earth, peer out at you through the perimeter boards, and wave like a sicko.
All the elaborate catering to our viewing experience makes it easy to forget that, once the whistle blows and play is live, nothing any of those athletes do is for us, out here in television land. Not primarily. The players’ main concern has to be the bellicose mob of live spectators surrounding the field, who, when they aren’t unified like starlings in unnerving displays of large-group cohesion, are making a noise like a jet engine and throwing garbage at the referee. The player diving to ground after some glancing contact may look unconvincing on TV. He may look flat out ridiculous in close-up slow-motion, screaming silently and grabbing at either or both of his shins after being bodied in the hip. But like stage makeup and hammy theater, dives are meant to be appreciated from a distance. If a player connects with the crowd, his fans in the stadium will fucking erupt when he goes to ground, forcing the referee to check his own sense of reality against this thunderous atmospheric suggestion that an atrocity has been committed. It might work! Even if it doesn’t, it’s a chance for a very fatigued person to lie down on the ground and rest for a second. Ask any theater kid, and they’ll tell you it’s about survival.
The line I hear most often from casual or would-be soccer fans is that the amount of diving and rolling in the men’s game is excessive. “I actually prefer women’s soccer for this reason,” people tell me, munificently. To me, the relative absence of operatic dives in women’s soccer is an unfortunate symptom of inhibiting social forces. Like male soccer players in the US (where, until relatively recently, soccer has been seen as a sport for sensitive freaks in bandanas), the women feel outsized pressure to be brave. Tough and impassive—earthy, homespun jocks. But imagine what women could do with the expressive freedom men of advanced soccer cultures enjoy. Think of the untapped potential! Those images everybody groans at—of adult men crying in apparent agony as their compatriots mosey past unmoved? A spectacle of implied violence that’s still somehow intensely boring to watch? That’s art, pure and simple. France, Brazil, and Mexico should all have their games from this World Cup playing on loop at MoMA.
Tech Weak
The real problem with soccer these days is the power-tripping Video Assistant Referee, who is actually a team of referees sitting in a control room in Dallas, watching the game on multiple screens from multiple camera angles, and handing down rulings to the refs on the field. You may have heard about Folarin Balogun’s red card in in the US’s first knockout game against Bosnia. Live, it looked like two players’ feet getting tangled in the ordinary course of play; no call from the on-field ref. But then VAR got in the official’s ear; slowed down, Balogun’s contact looked like a foul, and as a freeze frame it looked like he was maiming the guy (Bosnia’s Tarik Muharemović is in the process of losing a cleat, and so his ankle appears to bend sideways at a right angle). In the video-reviewed moment, I thought a red card was harsh—nobody was hurt, and none of it was on purpose. I also suspected Balogun was being duly punished for what I’d call poor referee management (there’s only so much complaining you can do at the ref before he starts to find you annoying). Anyway, “FIFA Peace Prize” recipient and US President Donald Trump called FIFA President Gianni Infantino, Balogun’s next-game suspension was summarily canceled, and the US went on to get trounced 4–1 by Belgium in the subsequent Round of 16.
Here are some questionable VAR decisions that did not get reviewed at the behest of a head of state: A Colombian goal against Paraguay was called back because Davinson Sánchez was ruled offside by a literal toe. Croatia’s extraordinary, late game-tying goal in the Round of 32 against Portugal was revoked because sensors in the ball determined a Croatian player’s hair had brushed against the ball as it sailed over the box. The VAR called this a “touch,” resetting the offside phase moments before the ball landed at another Croatian player’s feet. If a player’s position doesn’t give them any actual advantage over the last defender, it seems wrong to call it offside; if a player doesn’t change the direction or rotation of the ball or make contact with it in any way visible to the naked eye, it seems strange to call it a “touch.” And no amount of forensic evidence is going to stop an unhappy crowd from filling the field with trash, so I don’t see the upside of those martinets in the booth.
At the very least, I don’t see why they should have the power to intervene on the center ref’s perspective whenever they want. Egypt’s goal against Argentina was called back after the VAR spied a foul committed at the opposite end of the field, several passes before the shot. It was not a serious foul; Argentina’s defense was not affected in any way by it (it’s not like they were distracted or complaining as the attack came in). Most importantly, it hadn’t looked like a foul to the ref, until the VAR strapped him to a chair and made him watch it over and over again in slow motion. Forget the impact all of this is having on the game of soccer—I worry about the psychological impacts on the field officials. The center ref in France’s quarter-final win against Morocco was persnickety to the point of obsession about ball placement on set pieces. You could find him compulsively checking whether the ball was sitting exactly on the line on corner kicks, while players in the background were two-hand shoving each other in the box.
Worst of all, the VAR is upsetting the talent. French star Kylian Mbappé had to wait around for three full minutes before his penalty kick in that same game, while the VAR conducted some kind of detailed investigation into the foul. The French superstar performed his ball set up routine four times before the official finally gave him the go ahead, and then, of course, he flubbed the shot.
Star Quality
Of the top contenders for this World Cup’s Golden Boot award, presented to the highest-scoring player of the tournament, Mbappé is by far the most thespian. Like Brazil’s Neymar and Portugal’s Cristiano Ronaldo (both eliminated in the Round of 16), his haters will call him a “diva.” Inward-looking, self-focused soccer players are either divas (obnoxious but undeniable talents) or Tinkerbells (capable of making magic happen only if they feel people believe in them). Poor, sweet Christian Pulisic, whose World Cup run ended when he broke his leg kicking a Belgian defender in the foot too hard, is a Tinkerbell. Next time, Christian.
Erling Haaland, the Norwegian striker, looks like scientists with hairdryers freed him from a block of ice, and plays with the unvarnished joie de vivre of an innocent. But Haaland was not always six foot five; he attributes his impressive stature to his appropriately prehistoric diet of whole milk and cow’s hearts. After Norway’s 2–1 win over Brazil in the Round of 16 (in which Haaland scored two extraordinarily telegenic goals late in the second half, both of which he celebrated with a calm, unbroken stride to the sideline, not seeming to feel the weight of several teammates who scrambled gleefully up his back to hang like children from his tree-trunk neck), Haaland led the Norwegian fans in a terrifying celebration called the “Viking Row.” Standing before an eerily silent crowd, the Norwegian striker beat a large drum, slow at first, then faster. After each strike, the crowd grunted in perfect unison and pulled back on imaginary oars. By the end of the demonstration, Haaland was beating the drum as if to death, veins popping and tendons straining, while the whole crowd roared as one. Norway’s next opponent was England, who had celebrated their own Round of 16 win over Mexico by joining hands and running in a dainty little line toward the stands as the stadium played “Wonderwall.” (The bucolic English style, it turns out, fares better in the heat—led by Jude Bellingham, England edged out Norway 2–1 in extra time in the sweltering Miami quarter-final.)
Finally, Lionel Messi. Messi plays with a mellowness so profound defenders seem to feel it in their mirror neurons, relaxing when they mean to stay vigilant. The opposite of a physical specimen (he’s five foot seven and hates to run) Messi’s game relies heavily on his ability to go incognito before a late sprint into the pocket, where his exceptionally quick feet do the rest. At the start of an offensive transition, you’ll often see him ambling to the far sideline with his back to the play, as if confused or lost. Or he’ll be standing in Argentina’s back line, practically wearing a false mustache—don’t mind him, he’s a defender now. As fun as it is to watch Messi score goals, there’s nothing I like better than watching him warm up. While his teammates perform all kinds of specialized athletic prep, the Argentinian icon seems to spend most of his pre-game time doing a move I call “the Uncle Messi”: Walking casually, he hunches his arms into chicken wings and rotates his shoulders a little, first left and then right. That’s it. I’ve taken to doing it on my walks around the neighborhood; it feels great.
As France, Spain, England, and Argentina’s talent-stacked teams compete this week for a spot in the World Cup final, keep all of the summer’s would-be Cinderella stories in your thoughts. Most of all, think of Cape Verde’s Sidny Lopes Cabral, whose star rose miraculously for eight magical minutes in their Round of 32 game against Argentina. At minute 103, Cabral scored a goal to tie the game that was so beautiful I became momentarily convinced that Cape Verde was the only team on Earth capable of beating France. After curling a shot from twenty-five yards away into the far upper corner of the net, Cabral, insane with happiness, ran toward the Cape Verde fans in the stands, whose elated expressions changed to looks of dread and concern as Cabral jumped the perimeter boards and began to climb the stadium steps. “No, no,” they seemed to say—Cabral was risking ejection from the game—but the 23-year-old defender refused to turn around until he’d given a hug to his girlfriend. Argentina regained their lead in the 111th minute, but the dream was nice while it lasted.
If you like this article, please subscribe or leave a tax-deductible tip below to support n+1.