Even by the arcane standards of soccer songs and chants, the Argentine team’s locker room number required some explanation. “Thirty-two years later,” it proposes “Scaloni will avenge / the Cup stolen from number ten! . . . for Las Malvinas! / For El Diego! / For the last one with Leo! / Argentina wants to see a repeat champion!” Investigating these lyrics, you might find thirty-two-year-old highlights of Argentina’s exit from the 1994 World Cup, the last in North America: a 3–2 loss to Romania in the Round of 16. But the footage hardly explains a three-decade-old grudge—in it, Argentina benefits from a dubious penalty, only to lose anyway to a counterattacking clinic by Romania’s Gheorghe Hagi.
The song, instead, refers to a prior injustice. Before that match, Diego Maradona was suspended after testing positive for not one but five ephedrine chemicals, leaving Argentina to play Romania without him. Injustice! The song, however, elides a year or three: By 1994, Maradona was far from the height of his talents. He’d already been banned in 1991 after a positive cocaine test, and was never great or even very good afterward, scoring just five goals in the 1992–93 La Liga season and none at all in 1993–94, a year he spent promising to get fit, missing practice, and shooting an air rifle at reporters. He did get himself into shape for the World Cup and might have helped against Romania—but he hardly would have made a difference in the harder matches to come.
But motivation is not obliged to cohere—for the defending champions, any grievance would do. “Soy hincha de la selección,” the song continues—“I am a fan of the national team!”—a critical explanation, for the whole confused urgency is gathered and bound by fan logic. Sure! Why not avenge the World Cup stolen from Maradona? Why not beat England and avenge the Malvinas—the Argentinean name for the Falkland Islands, over which the crumbling junta started and lost a war against the United Kingdom in 1982, years before any of Argentina’s current players were born? Why not, after England imploded in the last half-hour of the semifinal, drag out a paint-on-bedsheet banner reading Las Malvinas son Argentinas? The sun never sets on the fan’s empire of insult.
The stadiums were full of fans, and the television broadcasts too. Producers’ favorites were the garish, the emotive, and the simply pretty. In the early matches, especially after goals, we often saw an overcostumed celebrant, bellowing proudly in a whimsical national getup. Games without goals were punctuated with faces of tense hope—see this worried Cabo Verdean? How her lips are pursed, how her hands have reflexed to her temples? See how gripping this is? A 9-year-old near tears, face painted with the flag of a losing team, could reliably illustrate the late-game vibes. And, at the hydration break, the cameras would turn thirsty too, finding the people in the crowd with the best cheekbones.
There were plenty of fans on the field too: No player would be playing in the World Cup if they hadn’t become obsessed with soccer early in life. In the club game, where players frequently transfer among dozens of teams, those who grew up rooting for their temporary employers are beloved curios—but there are fewer nations than clubs, the patriotic prestige of the national team is considerable, and the World Cup’s quadrennial scarcity lends it emotional gravity. These players are living their dream in a way that is probably unfathomable for the rest of us. Imagine a software developer who had grown up putting on blue facepaint for new Facebook feature launches, or a banker who pretended to be Warren Buffet every day at recess.
Fan is from the latin fanatic. The fanatic is a person-of-the-fanum, the shrine or temple, as in from the antiquated fane or more familiar pro-fane—that which is outside the temple. Samuel Johnson’s 1773 dictionary glosses the fanatick as “an enthusiast; a man mad with wild notions of religion”; the first usages of “fan” in sportswriting, describing American baseball spectators in the 1850s, directly reference religious fanaticism. It is easy to feel the etymological legacy at the World Cup, among the chants, painted faces, and icons of the saints. But the diminutive form, fan, also softens, losing intensity as it gains breadth. No surprise, then, that more and more fan-studies scholars describe fandom as not just a preference but an activity. The fan doesn’t stop at liking their object, they co-create it in both social and artisanal modes. In soccer we might say: You don’t become a fan when you think “soy hincha de la seleccíon,” but when you sing it. Playing for the national team, for many, is the pinnacle—the perfection—of fandom. Like most perfections, it makes itself absurd.
World Cup fans were here to observe—they were humbled by matches and fried chicken franchises. But they also offered themselves up for observation, conducting a festival of earnest cultural exchange that encompassed bagpipe lessons and rowing in public, and was maybe best conveyed by the city of Lawrence, Kansas, which enthusiastically adopted the Algerian national team who was staying at their local DoubleTree. Through the early tournament, dressed as the team, they carried themselves with a prepared delightability, as ready to learn someone else’s national chant as to leap into the match, cleatless and unperfected, and reinforce the midfield.
Of course, they could not. Definitionally, the fan hopes for something beyond their power to control or achieve. They want their team to win, over opponents or at least—in this competition, so absolutely structured by the inequality of talent and resources—over expectations. In the group stages everything was possible—Germany won 7–1, Cape Verde drew with Spain, millions of possibilities bloomed. On behalf of these hopes, fans worked hard: Painting their faces, bargaining with God from Row EE, rowing their hardest; they invented a charismatic economy in which caring was control, in which their own rituals of support nudged their team a little further ahead.
But the competition’s ultimate purpose is elimination, and as the tournament went on, both hopes and works were met with mixed fulfillment. French fans were devastated not to win the whole thing; Norwegian fans were happy to play a close quarterfinal; Jordanians were proud of how they played before a group-stage exit; Uruguayans were furious with the same result.
As teams and hopes departed, fans adapted. Some became neutral, some good-game aesthetes. Some formed conclusive theories of the sport—many who had known before the France–Spain semifinal that soccer was all about talent discovered by the sixtieth minute, with France struggling to complete a forward pass, that it was really all about systems and geometry. Fans are retroactive prophets—they knew it all along, whatever it turns out to be. Other fans became punitive and moralistic. Grim historicizers, they read in every team and player an obscure concordance of past transgressions and hoped that each game would mete out a punishment precisely calibrated to their own well-nourished scorn.
I, too, am a fan, and of the vindictive variety. Outside of some hipster-ass affinity for long-shot contenders—Norway and Japan, some African teams who came to heartbreaking ends—I watched most of the World Cup as a sadist, hoping above all to see my enemies suffer. I wanted Portugal to lose for indulging Ronaldo, Paraguay to lose for being huge jerks, Switzerland to lose for being a little boring. I wanted Ecuador to do well, but Moises Caicedo specifically to look foolish and limited, because he had offended me months ago while playing for Chelsea. I wanted the United States to win joyously, up until the president got involved, at which point I wanted them to lose mostly in order to not have to talk about it anymore. I hoped with every moment that Enzo Fernández would suffer the deepest of humiliations. These prejudices, unrigorous but deep in feeling, nevertheless brought me great joy throughout the summer—many people I despise, in and out of soccer, have thrived in the last decade or so, and I loved the World Cup for punishing a few of them in mostly symbolic ways.
Like many fans, I came over the course of the tournament to detest Argentina specifically. It was not all Enzo’s fault: In 2022, like so many others, I supported Argentina for the sake of historical harmony. Messi, already and correctly recognized as soccer’s greatest-ever player, had never won the sport’s most famous competition. He deserved to win it, and we fans deserved to not have to explain away this discrepancy—everyone was better off after Argentina won.
This year’s Argentina was harder to love. Messi remained the team’s talisman, with the rest of the squad forming an odd, concentric fandom: Fans of themselves, they were also fans of Messi, so in love with his beauty they could only prove it by making the game grotesque. Argentina tended to play indifferently until very late in each game, often falling behind before Messi saved them with a sublimity or two. While they waited, the team tried to prevent any actual soccer from occurring, preferring kicks, complaints, and cinematic appeals. Overmotivated by Leo and Diego and the Malvinas, needing to win more than legal play could allow, the Argentine squad achieved a violent and cynical post-soccer state, making a sport out of manipulating the laws and limits of the more naive game their opponents were playing. For these reasons, and because they often did benefit from inconsistent refereeing, we hated them. We hated them so much! We hated them for being snide, kicky, and sometimes racist—and, I think, we hated how we recognized fandom in them too, a mirror of our uncompromising desperation, our willingness to excuse everything on behalf of previous injustices.
Isn’t it just soccer, though? Aren’t these narrations too much? French great-man theory losing to the Spanish ideological collective in one semifinal, Argentina’s brawling savior complex outlasting an English obsession with plucky rear-guardism in the other?1 Forget it all—that’s the advice Messi gave his team before the final, anyway. “Estemos tranquilos, muchachos,” he reminded them—“Let’s stay calm, boys.” “Olvidémonos de todos, solo juguemos”—“Let’s forget everything, just play.”
But how could they? Forget everything? They had spent the whole tournament being asked to remember everything. The Malvinas, El Diego, their aging Messi-ah—a concordance of apocalyptic import. In the final, desperate for an outcome their skills could not ensure, they played like the fans they were—Spain had all the ball, and Argentina all the angry excess. Rodri completed 101 passes; Tagliafico climbed Yamal like a bouldering puzzle; Fernández made me very happy by getting sent off. By the ninetieth minute, Argentina had accumulated more attempts to have the Spanish players red-carded on technicalities (one) than shots on goal (zero). Spain won one of the most one-sided 1–0 games in history in extra time.
The World Cup means too much. This is by design: The tournament condenses four years of yearning into one or two games a day, manifesting absurd desires through an absurd contest. The games themselves are then distilled down to three or four moments—a few inches of distance, microseconds of timing, mere newtons added or withheld. The players know it too, most of them there for either their first time or their last. Whatever sends them home will be among the major moments of their lives, and they probably will not even be personally involved. They’ll be on the bench, defending on the other side, jogging for an angle on the counter, covering an irrelevant llegada—watching, hoping, reduced to fandom for an instant that will last forever.
That it could have happened otherwise is always a possibility, and it is that very possibility that leads the fan to explain—the fan wants meaning after all. The fan at heart is a manager of excess: too much feeling, too much weight on too little incident. This is a kind of madness after all, the madness of meaning-making under a few too many constraints. The universal must be found in the particulars, must always support our team, certain and glorious today—but tomorrow, when we lose, we will have always seen it coming. Thinking this way, I am at my cleverest and my least responsible, generous to my friends and spiteful to all others. I have thought of this space—the fan zone, where my thinking is liberated from order and pushed into wickedness—as shameful and disordered. But maybe it is a zone in the sense of a quarantine as well—a container for a certain kind of excess, a carnival where antipathies bleed out of a society. There, in the rubber room of posts and jibes and replays, fandom has had a social function—it is a place where fans can loathe each other safely, without much risk to the rest of us. If so, what scares me is not the content of fandom but its failure as a container—people live their whole lives this way, the moods and manners of fandom not siphoned off to sport but hemorrhaging into art, gender, politics. I am not a fan of that!
The Falklands War started in March 1982, after a scrap-hauling crew raised the Argentine flag on a barely inhabited South Georgia Island. The UK, sovereign since confused colonial maneuvers in 1833, sent the arctic patrol ship Endurance to reassert control. Argentina escalated with an amphibious invasion and occupation of the (relatively) nearby Falklands, or Malvinas; the UK with a substantial naval force and counter-invasion. A British submarine sank the cruiser General Belgrano; an Argentine missile sunk the destroyer Sheffield. After Belgrano the Argentine navy went home, and the British commenced a ground operation that retook the islands by June. At least 907 people died, mostly Argentines (many crew members on the General Belgrano).
This was an unusual conflict partly because neither side cared very much about the Falklands as islands. The UK through the 1970s was almost trying to get rid of the Falklands—a project frustrated by lingering imperial pride and by the islanders themselves, who kept stubbornly using their right of self-determination to determine that they would remain British. For Argentina, the Malvinas’ urgency was less strategic or material than narrative: The right-wing junta, unpopular after years of failed economic policies and disappearances by secret-police, hoped to unite the nation with the conquest of a territory claimed since independence from Spain but never consistently held. Once Argentina invaded, Margaret Thatcher, herself increasingly unpopular in early 1982, was glad for the chance to win a war. “Today has put the Great back into Britain,” she told the press in June, and won the next election in a landslide. It was, in other words, a war legible through fandom: the junta seeking a win, the islanders preferring one flag over another. Thatcher’s victory won her many fans, who continued cheering as she privatized industry and broke down organized labor; the junta, humiliated, finally allowed elections in 1983.
But fandom is ineradicable. After the World Cup final, Argentine fullback Nahuel Molina threw a sneaky punch at Spain’s Rodri. Midfielder Leandro Paredes joined an evolving quasi-brawl, shoving Garcia and Gavi to the ground. Paredes was later filmed disconsolate, clutching his knees to his chest as he rocked back and forth on the ground. Paredes was a villain of the tournament for me, constantly offending and rarely punished, but I came to love him then, in the frankness of his heartbreak. At 32, in the autumn of his career, Paredes had given everything, more than the rules of the game allowed him to give, and still had been brought to this moment, the absolute clarity of loss. But his sister, Barbara, interviewed separately, found a silver lining. “Getting this far and beating England meant everything to us,” she said. “We might not have the fourth star, but we have the Falklands for ourselves.” In a literal sense, she was utterly wrong—the Falklands remain a British territory today. She was, however—undaunted, spiteful, honest in her ardency, more combative than correct—an absolute fan.
For the first hour of the semifinal, both sides staged a festival of shoving and complaining. England, better overall, scored in the fifty-fifth minute before abandoning soccer altogether to attempt a performance of gendered national virtue, throwing on defenders from the bench and huddling in their own box with only a single, waddling striker for an outlet. England seemed set on reenacting their win over Mexico in the Round of 16—and maybe other heroic holdings-out as well, Ypres and Dunkirk and the Blitz—but only ended up handing Messi the ball and inviting him to beat them, which he did. Constructed as a team around the intelligence of Kane and Saka, they instead went out depending on the big-lad brainstem stubbornness of Dan Burn. ↩
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