Letter Thirty-two | 12/21 | Ryan

Berkeley

Dear Russ (and all our guest contributors!),

I despise beginnings. I refuse to rewatch the first episodes of TV series; the first entries in trilogies are so often the worst. When I was a kid, I didn’t ever reread the first books in The Boxcar Children or The Hardy Boys. It’s difficult to explain, but there’s something about everything feeling so nascent, the blurriness of characters and patterns that haven’t yet settled into themselves. It’s a little uncanny: these things are familiar, but not quite.

Usually endings don’t cause the same kinds of problems. Here, though, I don’t really know what to do. That uncanniness is here, hovering. The World Cup is over, and it feels like it never really happened. If this was the first properly postmodern World Cup, hyperreal and electrified, its aftermath is less the end of a narrative than a sudden absence, a jump cut that suggests something has happened but refuses to disclose what it was. The final, that stays with me, but it sits disconnected from everything that (apparently) came before it. Time is distended; did the US play Iran at some point? I guess.

And the project, too, has slipped away before it began, before it registered. We’ve written thirteen letters or so, which really isn’t many: if a letter runs, what, a thousand words, then over the last month we’ve each written a very long short story or the kind of longform essay that no longer gets published anywhere. But at the same time the project has lingered—I’ve always gotten up in the morning to edit a letter, this is how it’s always been, there was no before-time.

We’ve done this twice, now. The letters from the first iteration apparently don’t exist anywhere now, which for my part is probably for the best. That’s the strange things, one of them, about a four-year cycle (this is a point made again and again, it’s hardly novel): enough time passes that you find yourself a wholly different person, but not so much time passes that you cannot feel a link or a strange kind of affinity to the person you used to be. In the summer of 2018, everything was different, or so it seems. I wrote the first thing I ever really published around then, even if I cannot revisit it now. I didn’t know I’d end up here—I didn’t know I’d end up anywhere. (Discomfiting, how closely that line scans like something from Dr. Seuss.) In four more years, the Cup will be here (meaning the US), and I will probably still be here (meaning Berkeley). Other than that, who knows? These letters, though, we’ll keep.

It took me a long time to learn how to give shape to things. I’m still not great at it. What I mean is that I’ve only ever been able to arrange the phenomena of life into a comprehensible pattern with effort, and likewise for years I wrote and wrote like I was unrolling some long spool, rather than attending to how the form of the thing matched (or failed to match, more likely) whatever the thing wanted to be. And I think I’m reliving that problem now. At one scale, I’m not sure what the form of this last letter should be; it’s become, de facto, much talking about myself. At another, how should the experience of the Cup be given conceptual shape, fitted into experiential categories? What does any of this mean?

I have a real horror of cliché, which often serves me poorly. It makes me go well out of my compositional way, perform syntactical gymnastics, to avoid phrases or arrangements that seem to carry even the shadow of the pat, trite, or expected. Sometimes we refer to writing that does this too intensely as strained, and there is, in fact, a sense of straining or grasping at play: the idea is to claim, to set down, some experience or emotion or structure of feeling that’s just out of discursive reach. Another historical problem that feels contemporary, how to fit experience into language: Sally Rooney’s characters (hey, there’s the callback, there’s the setup and payoff) often just give up on trying.

If nothing else, we’ve tried, and at times maybe we’ve succeeded, although I’m not sure at what, exactly. Our guests were far more successful—I hope you all will reappear, rejoin us, when we do this in the summer for the Women’s World Cup. And then in 2026: we can write out letters as we take a hyperlooped Tesla down to the stadium in Santa Clara. And so the monkey’s paw curls; the lathe of heaven begins to spin again.

I feel so old. I mean that, unironically. But things have gotten better: I have a better relationship with the writing on the page than I did four years ago. I love the game we’ve spent so much time writing about in more interesting ways now. I think, maybe, I’m a little better at loving, generally—let’s hope this is the truth. A cliché might make use of love, but love is never a cliché. It’s an event, right? Or a calling to an event, an invitation to respond in kind. I’m glad to take up this invitation every four years.

All my love,

Ryan

Letter Thirty-one | 12/20 | Russ

Grants Pass

Dear Lack, 

Thank you for giving me one more opportunity to write. The last letter felt unsatisfactory as an ending. And, as I already mentioned, I enjoy tidy, satisfying endings.

So—let’s do this.

There are times when, during my 25-minute-long commute to and from work, I have nothing to listen to. Usually I play a podcast (often about sports or movies), but other times I just shuffle a playlist. And occasionally, as I’m making my way down the M3, the lush Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens flanking my left, Table Mountain on my right, I’ll hear the beginning to REO Speedwagon’s “Ridin’ the Storm Out” and think: this song rips.

There is, of course, a shared history: we played this song at Zach’s on Rockband one late night; you first declared that the song does, in fact, rip. But it also became the unofficial anthem of Bad Lads AC. Just a few days ago, as I was driving with Matt and Zach to an indoor match, I made a point of playing it. And what an absolute pleasure it was to play with the Lads again. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about my favorite Bad Lads memory. There is the time that you, Nate, and I all connected to manufacture a goal, which remains the best and most meaningful goal I’ve ever scored. Or the last time I played in an outdoor match, the championship, and so many of my friends came to support us. And there are, of course, the post-match drinks, the kick-arounds, the parties.

But I think my favorite Bad Lads memory is when the team drove 45 minutes to play a match at Snyder Park in Sherwood. The weather was miserable, a combination of rain and hail that forced us to take shelter under some trees close to the field. Shortly before the match was scheduled to begin, we discovered that the league had been unable to secure a referee for the match and that it would have to be rescheduled. The field, however, was still reserved for us. The team we were supposed to play decided to bail, but the Lads chose otherwise. Nineteen of us stayed to play a scrimmage. Why? Because we love the game.

I think about this in the context of this project. We began with some doubt. Should we write about something we have severe moral objections to? Are we hypocrites for deriving pleasure from such a problematic event? Probably. But hopefully the two things—our criticism and our love for the game—can both exist. Hopefully this project—which I will unabashedly call a labor of love—has raised some questions about political commitments, aesthetics, nostalgia, capitalism, globalization, consumerism, and, most importantly, the correct fucking use of “post-modernism.”

I worry that this all sounds like ineloquent, half-baked nonsense. Even after thirty days of doing this, I still don’t have the language to express how I feel about the World Cup. I’ll say this though: It’s been a wonderful time.

Thank you Lack for being willing to do this project with me again. It is one of my greatest blessings to have you as a best friend. 

Thank you to Joe, Miles, Peter, and Zach for contributing to the project. Were it not for you, this project may have derailed. Thank you all for your kindness, generosity, and intelligence. 

And finally, thank you to everyone who took the time to read. In a World Cup filled with exuberance and horror, I hope this project provided some insight—or, maybe, just entertaining commentary. 

Thank you all for riding the storm out.

My best,

Russ

Letter Thirty | 12/19

         Berkeley

         Dear Russ,

         I watched the final at Raleigh’s, a bar on Telegraph with an undergraduate vibe: it’s ostensibly a sports bar, but the aesthetic is all wood-and-steel industrial, and the bathrooms are bad but not in a divey way, and the beer list looks like it was stolen from any brewpub in Portland. We all made plans, a bunch of the folks I play soccer with, and after trying to find a place to watch the USA/Iran match—every place we looked was literally so busy it was impossible enter the door—we heard that Raleigh’s might be more sparsely attended: near campus, in the early morning, lots of space. The earliest arrived at six fifteen; by the time Ash and I showed up at 7, we had to use shoulders and elbows to reach the table in the back, where one half of one table was held valiantly by familiar faces.

         I expected the crowd to lean French; most of the attendees, I figured, would be undergrads, and all the little hypebeasts surely love Mbappe. But I was wrong: everything was Argentina, light blue and gold. Songs were sung. Spanish was shouted. And I, again, found myself wearing the wrong shirt. During the Euro finals, I stood, wearing an Italy shirt, in the middle of a soccer bar (Oakland’s only, and sadly now closed) packed with England fans. On Sunday, because I don’t own an Argentina jersey, I wore a France shirt from a couple of years ago, Kante’s.

         It was strange: I was a France fan, at least visually, and it’s true that Messi excepted I have no strong attachments to the Argentina side (maybe Emi Martinez, too, the former Arsenal keeper, about whom Arsenal fans retain a fondness in the way that Timbers fans love almost all our old keepers, Ricketts and Kwarasey and Attinella and Clark)—whereas France is full of players I like: Kante (though injury kept him from this Cup) and Giroud and Griezmann and Camavinga. But Messi: what an exception! Maybe I should’ve worn nothing; maybe I should’ve worn one of those novelty t-shirts filled with lots of tiny text: “I watched the greatest World Cup final ever at a crowded bar in Berkeley and all I got was this t-shirt which must somehow make legible my general attachment to the French side but my particular attachment to Messi.”

         Skipping to the end: people cried behind me, and in front of me, although no one cried next to me. There were Argentinians nearby, a youngish guy who wanted to wear the Argentinian flag but kept giving it to his friend, because whenever he put it on, France scored. A couple behind me collapsed into each other after penalties and properly, vigorously bawled. There was a hum of thrown identity, a fog in the air made by the little contrails of all the senses of self collectively flung at the television, and thereby at the Argentinian side, especially Messi, by all the people there who were present in the bar but really living in a hyperreal and politically monstrous stadium in Qatar.

         And so this felt almost inappropriate: to be attached lightly, to feel my attachment as aesthetic in a certain way, when other people were living, dying, and living again all around me. This isn’t to say that aesthetics are held more lightly, or that the cycle of life isn’t also aesthetic: it’s to say that I was living at a distance from the aesthetic object, whereas some other people were living inside, alongside, with, as the aesthetic object, which was all of life.

         All I can write about, then, is what I saw and how I saw it: the sweep of the Argentinian opening goal, and then the second, the whole play: France looked tired but this was due in part to the Argentinian wingedness. I have a pet theory that certain swings of rhythm and vibe are inevitable in soccer: I never feel as nervous as when Arsenal are dominating play in the first half but cannot score, because I know everything, soon, will change. But that felt impossible: Argentina were fated, feted, in flight.

         But eventually Mbappe, who isn’t the new Messi but rather the new Ronaldo. I’ve said before that Mbappe is the Mike Trout of soccer: good at everything in an implacable kind of way, like saying that steamrollers are good at flattening things out. I don’t see personality in Mbappe, not even personality as the absence of demonstrative emotion (in the way that Viv Miedema evokes this); he has no glaring faults, which means he also lacks a single transcendent ability, not even his speed (Robben had the inside cut, Walcott had only the speed, Henry had the strength and the long galloping strides). Like Trout, Mbappe is good at everything in a way that’s the opposite of interesting; he is perfection, which means he has no entropy, which means he isn’t even a closed system, but rather not a system at all. It feels silly to point this out, and also there’s an inevitability to his ability to perform, a mechanization. Maybe modernity has finally come to soccer; maybe the scientific revolution begun by Cruyff or maybe before him the Germans or maybe before them the Hungarians, and eventually accelerated by Wenger in service of gorgeous, gorgeous soccer, has found its apex with Pep Guardiola (at the scale of the team) and Ronaldo and Mbappe (at the scale of the individual). These players are designed almost from birth as operative objects, machines; they are built, to twist Walter Benjamin, as works of sport in an age of mechanically reproducible performance. Messi the genius, Ronaldo the robot. Now, Messi the genius, Mbappe the better and more terrifying robot. If Ronaldo was Robocop or a Cyberman, Mbappe is one of those Boston Dynamics robots that’s gonna kill us all.

         Never let a player take two penalties in a match; Mbappe scores three. And his second goal, the non-pen, was so perfect in exactly the aforementioned way: the simplest move in soccer, the one-two, but elevated in its difficulty like an Olympic dive: the chip, Mbappe not so much running as appearing in a different space, and then the volley finish.

         Argentina win at the end of extra time: messy, but also Messi, the ludicrous offside tech tries its best to take it away—but no, that’s it, Argentina in their own kind of perfection.

         But, no, no: France, Mbappe, doesn’t need time, or a clever buildup, or anything, really. They are inevitable. They are, somehow, malicious, or the goal is anyway. Penalties, though, seem to be the last hurdle of the great machine the way, like, CAPTCHA can’t figure out the difference between a rubber duck and a school bus, or the way otherwise brilliant AI scripts, when asked to solve an ethical problem, will declare without irony we must cut the baby in half or something. One thing in favor of penalties: it’s impossible (so far) to perfect them. No one can bang it top corner every time. Even Mbappe sits, ultimately, in the unlined but very muscular hand of Fate.

         We’ll wrap this all up next time, but to have witnessed the greatest game I’ve ever seen is somehow anticlimactic because it, too, was perfect, or felt like it. It carries, like a watch to William Paley, a pungency of the divine, of the planned and ordered. It’s spooky, to find yourself awake in a storybook that, somehow, you’re also reading.

         Still, again, soon,

         Ryan

Letter Twenty-nine | 12/18 | Russ

Grants Pass 

Dear Lack,

What do I even say?

My entire day post-match has been spent both thinking about and avoiding the question. Immediately after Argentina were crowned champions, I left Portland with Kiana and made the four-hour drive down to Grants Pass. After arriving, my parents, Kiana, and I went to see Avatar: The Way of Water, which lasted just short of three-and-a-half hours. We returned home and ate dinner, chatted briefly about our plans for the week ahead, and now everyone, except me, has gone to bed. It is 11:27pm and I am finally putting words down.

I have accepted the fact that nothing I can say about the final will be adequate. Spectacular. Phenomenal. The best match I’ve ever seen. Each of these feels hollow, devoid of any actual meaning. Maybe the final was an event unable to be properly captured in language (for me anyway). In my mind, it is something that needed to be experienced in real time. I’ve just put on the extended highlights of the match and with every snippet comes the sense of disbelief.   

Some chaotic thoughts from a chaotic match in a very chaotic stream-of-conscious like format:

Messi has another penalty. Please score please score please score. HE SCORED! France don’t look like themselves at all, totally stagnant. Argentina are picking them apart. What’s wrong with them? Argentina on the break! DI MARIA!!! He kicked the ball into the turf to make it bounce over a sliding Lloris. I’ve got to practice that. That’s it: Argentina are going to win. I’m so happy.

Wait. Goddamn it Otamendi! What the hell are you doing? There are, like, twelve minutes left in this match. You give up a penalty now? How could you do this? Mbappe scores. Damn it. Keep calm Argentina. Remember what happened against the Dutch. Ten more minutes. No. No no no no no no NO! Ninety seconds? France score again after ninety seconds?! What the fuck is going on? Mbappe is an alien. Brilliant volley. I can’t take this. France have all the momentum. What a difference those subs have made since coming on. How did Argentina let this happen again?

Extra time. Thank God.

Argentina on the break! Ball is played to Martinez! He shoots! Off Lloris! MESSI!!! Goal for Argentina! Was Martinez offside? Come on come on come on come on. ONSIDE!!! Argentina are up again! Hold it this time! Please for the love of God do not send this match to a penalty shootout, I beg you!

Shit.

Another penalty. Mbappe scores again. Damn it again. 

WHAT A FUCKING SAVE BY EMILIANO MARTINEZ!!!

Penalty shootout. Zach is holding me in place. Bastard. I just want to leave.

The inevitable Mbappe. He scores. AGAIN. Unbelievable. Messi is up for Argentina. Please score. It’s in! Wow. So casual. Just passed the fingertips of Lloris. My hands are literally shaking right now.

Martinez saves Coman’s shot!!! Come on Argentina! You can do this! Dybala is up. He made it! Straight down the middle. Tchouaméni is up for France. He’s been so good for France all tournament. He shoots. IT’S WIDE! France are one for three! Paredes for Argentina. IT’S IN! Ohmygodohmygodohmygod! One more save or one more goal! Kolo Muani for France. He scores. Just an absolute rocket. Montiel for Argentina. This is it. Just one more. Please. HE MADE IT! VAMOS VAMOS ARGENTINA!!! 

I’m sure you’ll be able to write about the final in a more organized way. But today, I simply could not.

This will probably be my last letter for this Cup’s iteration of end to end. [Ryan’s note, editing: lol nope, I’m gonna make us do final reflections!] It’s probably already clear from the writing I did over the past few weeks, but I am someone who likes completing the circle. I get a satisfaction when my beginnings tie up nicely with my endings. The first line I wrote four weeks ago was the following:

It’s hard for me to imagine beginning this first letter without turning it into a saccharine piece of remembrance and gratitude. 

Likewise it is hard for me to imagine ending this piece any other way.

Until next time,

Russ

Letter Twenty-eight | 12/17 | Ryan

         Berkeley

         Dear Russ, and also Zach,

         So it’s relatively rare for us to disagree categorically—of course no two aesthetic judgments can ever be perfectly congruent, but usually we, the people we know and like, are vaguely aligned, like iron filings pointing at a magnet. But inside your otherwise elegant and agile letter, Zach, you made a suggestion I cannot leave alone.

         Abolish third-place matches? No! Never! More third place matches! Make every match a third-place match! The group stage shall be a bunch of third-place teams all trying to finish in third place in order to progress into the knockout rounds, which decides the third-place winner (of third place)!

          In all seriousness, I love third-place matches in the way I love all matches—all things, really—that occupy liminal positions, that sit on the borderline between more easily recognizable categories, like “important match” and “meaningless match.” An end-of-year game between two midtable clubs with nothing to play for? Honestly, totally fine. Would watch. A dramatic final between two heavyweights? Obviously excellent. Gonna have one of those tomorrow. But a third-place match is both critical and pointless, pivotal and planar, decisive and deflating. It’s wonderful.

         The commentary for Croatia/Morocco suggested that third-place games are worth watching (they seemed to perform a kind of anxiety about it, actually) because, with nothing to lose, both teams tend to open up, and more goals happen. This wasn’t really true, given that Croatia won 2-1 and neither team was terribly inspired after the first twenty minutes or so, although all three goals were entertaining, either because they were excellent or because they were wacky.

         But I love third-place matches, as I’ve just suggested, because its orthogonal place in relation to the things we (or examples of popular discourse, anyway) usually imagine as the point of a match, of sports—the engine of drama. Things like the desire to win, the urge to reveal the “better team,” the urge to see two sides “give it their all” or “sacrifice themselves for glory.” All this rhetoric is pretty bad in most contexts precisely because it is uncomplicated, and third-place matches help bear this out because they are meant to determine something, and there is something at stake. As the social internet never ceases to remind us, bronze medalists are apparently, according to some psych study whose validity I absolutely cannot corroborate, happier than silver medalists because they’re just happy to be there, up on the podium, holding a semiprecious metal. Third place is, within the logic of the “place,” cooler than fourth place.

         But also it doesn’t really matter—no one remembers the third-place finisher, and there’s a sense (that I feel, anyway) that both teams are, as they say, “playing for pride,” another squishy sportsism. What this feeling actually points to, I think, is the fact that there’s a remarkable alloy of investment and disinterest, of intensity with a blunted edge, of some intermingling of the ruthless achievement of any tournament, especially the World Cup (we’re here to crown a winner!) and the ludic distillate, the play, that makes the sport and thereby the tournament worthwhile in the first place.

         In sporting terms, third-place matches are a little uncanny. They skew its logics; they rearrange familiar blocks of meaning. I really like that, again in the way I like any moment when rules and objectives and the general structure of play are shown to be not not not the boundary between the game and the world but part of the game itself, subject to all its indeterminacies and flexibilities. I like it when things are on the verge of breaking down: the Caribbean Cup match I love talking about when one team needed to defend both goals, or Suarez intentionally handles the ball in a kind of exaggerated critique of the sport’s internal structure of incentives, or when everyone stops play because a cat has run onto the field. It’s a porousness, a forced confrontation with the contingency of the thing, which is also much of the thing’s promise and potential.

         And now, tomorrow, we have exactly the opposite of this.

         Every final is a cliché.

         The narratives are preset. I’m convinced that commentary gets worse during championships because language offers itself up in preconfigured ways that are very, very boring. Messi and Mbappe are not locked in an epic duel; they are not Hector and Achilles. I’m giving the discourse too much credit, maybe: they’ll probably be compared to Superman and Lex Luthor, or the old master and the young apprentice or something. This is just sort of lazy—there are better, because more specific, constructons of language we can use.

         How do we reinvigorate what a final is? How do we treat narratives in their immanent contexts, rather than fitting them into the boxes we’ve always already known? What can be said about tomorrow’s final that suggests real careful looking, and not just the slathering of concepts and language like paint from a fat wet brush?

         My heart says Argentina; my head says France. So it goes.

         Till tomorrow,

         Ryan

Letter Twenty-seven | 12/16 | Zach

Portland

Dear RLs (but mainly Lack at this point),

I'm writing this late on Friday, sitting at one of our favorite hangs, Low Tide Lounge, because I've been so busy hanging out with Russel these last couple of days that I forgot I was supposed to cover this letter for him. It's been remarkably easy to fall back into our old, joyful routines, despite not having seen each other in a little over five months. Yesterday we saw a movie (Empire of Light, it was aggressively okay), played indoor soccer (a draw; I hurt my ankle), went out with friends. Today we played a long boardgame.

In a way, this project is a diorama of the ways we, all our friends, relate to each other. Certainly soccer is often a central and driving force in many of our scheduled activities—whether we're playing, watching, designing a board game, or writing daily letters. But even with our shared passion for the sport, the depth and breadth of our connections sprawls wildly in all directions and leaves us (as evidenced) unwilling or unable to focus solely on 22 players kicking a ball.

And to me, that is the beauty of what you and Russel have done here. A commentary on the word "authentic" in soccer discourse becomes an essay on how the striving for authenticity in our own expression is an inherently self-centered approach (my words, not technically yours). Soccer isn't the focus here, but it is the entry point. It's the hook, the chalk-outlined framing of a broader discussion about life.

So with that said, I'm going to talk actually specifically about soccer for a bit.

With the final approaching (I don't care about the third place game, it's honestly dumb that it even happens), I can't stop thinking about the role Antoine Griezmann has played for France this cup. Watching his positioning against Morocco was not just fascinating, but, to me, the thing most worth watching in that entire match. If someone offered me a rebroadcast of that match that focused solely on him, I would watch it instantly.

For me, perhaps unlike for those who would discuss things like the authenticity of his play, what’s fascinating isn’t the way he executed his tactical assignments (immaculately), but what those assignments actually were. Quite simply, I've never seen a player asked to play such a varied role: pressing high on the right side in the midfield, then dropping into the middle of the midfield line in the low block (like more of a 6; he had multiple clearances and interceptions from inside the goal box!), plus an attacking role, popping up anywhere on the field.

To expand on your critique of the way in which we talk about soccer, I feel as if the discourse of the casual fan, or certainly the commentator, is overly focused on action. We talk about the passes, goals, or tackles made, but rarely the hundreds or even thousands of off-ball decisions made that allow those actions to be taken in the first place. 

This is how soccer players can, as you say, "contribute to whatever is being constructed in a particular situation,” by synthesizing information and relating it to the plan and organization they're operating under. Sometimes these decisions can be relatively simple, and some roles are more tactically demanding than others. But, to perform at a high level, one really has to not only make their own decisions, but also simulate and predict the decisions of everyone around them. This mental performance, however, is often imperceptible to an observer; it doesn't get the plaudits that a single strike on goal can receive.

So, for me, Griezmann is the player of the tournament, not because of his stats or numbers, but because of how mentally, tactically brilliant he's played. Will it be enough against Argentina? I think so, but I suppose we'll all find out soon enough.

Speaking of soon enough, I'm thrilled to see you very very soon.

Best,

Zach

Letter Twenty-six | 12/15 | Ryan

         Berkeley

         Dear Russ,

         I’m going to take the fact that you mentioned offhand in your last letter that “freedom” stands among the many words, concepts, the phrases that really irk me as an opportunity to talk about yet another cliché that comes up all the time, in soccer discourse specifically and (my god) popular discourse more generally, a cliché that throws me around the clichéd bend every time: authenticity.

         Frequently the term is found, like a remora attached to a shark, stuck to another, related notion: expression, especially self-expression. In the context of soccer this usually takes the form of praise for a player—almost always an attacking player—whose style of play is said to express himself, to be somehow authentically his own. In this way an aesthetic descriptor (and usually a pretty narrow one, at that: even among the attackers, it’s the dribblers, Dembele or Grealish or Hazard, upon whom encomia rain down, not the passers, who are creative rather than expressive, apparently) mimics a personal descriptor, an evocation of a personality. Young Ronaldo doing stepovers in the corner, or Mbappe managing a little heel-to-heel before bursting down the touchline: these techniques, although in no way exclusive or even proper to these players (in a way, maybe, that something like the Cruyff turn is) supposedly claim some tie to who these players are. They are the signfier to their personalities’ signified, the surface to their depth. The line leveled so often against a well-drilled, defensive side: “the players aren’t allowed to express themselves!”

         To confuse these two kinds of judgments doesn’t have real ramifications, except insofar as it serves as further evidence of a general inability to talk carefully and seriously about sports and other things with aesthetic significance. (I’m complaining, but the state of soccer discourse, from the commentator to the commenter, is surely better than, say, the state of American football or baseball, which is a terrible souplike homogenate of fallacy, racism, and dullness.) But we use the same language to describe ourselves in other contexts, in our conversations at large, too. Authentic is an aesthetic judgement with super-portability: a poem is good, apparently, if it authentically expresses the poet’s experience. A movie is good if it authentically illustrates the situation it imagines. A person is good if they remain authentically themselves. Authenticity discourse is just Live, Laugh, Love that went to state school.

         (This is a joke—state schools are good and should be free, and the Ivies should probably be, like, expropriated and turned into public libraries and museums of labor.)

         The Korean-German theorist Byung-chul Han writes that the “cult of authenticity erodes public space, which disintegrates into private spaces. Everyone carries their own private space with them wherever they go,” and in doing so make experiences of art impossible. As soccer players, we have access to an absolutely crystalline example: the Pickup-game Asshole, who combines authenticity as a soccer term and a cultural term at once. The pickup game is, I’d argue, an instantiation of the commons, literally a shared space transformed cooperatively into something totally impossible without the performative evocation of many people in concert. It’s public sociality in motion. But the Pickup-game Asshole destroys the public space in two ways. One, he (it does seem to be, uh, an asymmetrically gendered phenomenon) slows or even obviates the cooperative performance by changing the frame and operation of the performance, turning the goal from the invocation of the game itself into the winning of the game, a key (and bad) difference. Two, he obliterates the social and discursive world that bubbles up to enclose the game: he interjects negative affect, self-consciousness, bad vibes, generalized assholery. The language of the game changes, sometimes literally.

         The Pickup-game Asshole is just being himself. I have few doubts that the Assholes I’ve encountered were, in fact, expressing who they were “deep down” (insofar as that exists, which it doesn’t). They demanded that the material and social space of the game rearrange itself for them; they imposed their private texture onto the public. The personally authentic collapsed the publicly performative.

         So it’s not just that “authenticity” as a judgment refers to nothing, that calling a work of art “authentic” is to say nothing about it except, I guess, that its provenance is proven (ah, an authentic Magritte!). It’s also that “authenticity” does something in the world, something which is not good. To repeat uncritically that everyone ought to “be themselves” is to misunderstand‚ to refuse to even try to understand, both being and self.

         (Obviously, real political victories have been won by way of authenticity discourse, especially for queer folks, and clearly I’m not suggesting that people who experience the hegemonic fist along lines of identity cease to perform identity however they wish; the point in this case is that the reliance on authenticity actually reveals the precariousness of those political victories. Trans people, for example, often must execute a song-and-dance about feeling really like a certain gender deep down since forever in order to get medical treatment, which is bullshit—trans people should have healthcare (everyone should have healthcare!) regardless of their attachment to or ability to perform a particular authorized narrative. See Sara Ahmed, Jasbir Puar, and Lee Edelman for more.)

         Returning to the context of soccer, this emphasis on authenticity limits what we can say and therefore what we can see. If we don’t imagine defending, simple passes, dirty work, or team organization as “worthy expressions of authenticity,” it’s easier to dismiss or vilify them. And so rather than extending authenticity to everyone, to say that Kante authentically covers ground or Busquets authentically regulates the passing game or Kostic authentically whips in crosses, let’s just find better language. Finding better language means thinking in more careful and precise ways about what soccer is for, what it is—which, once again, is the collaborative production of a narrative and aesthetic experience. That experience happens not in spite of a Diego Simeone side arranged to nullify a Barcelona attack; it happens, in part, because of and through that defensive ruggedness.

         The same is true for culture at large. Rather than asking questions about how best to express ourselves, we could ask how best to contribute to whatever is being constructed in a particular situation: this is a kind of sincere solidarity. For some folks, that contribution will look like a stalwart individualism—thank god, for the sake of art and the world and everything, that geniuses of personality like David Bowie and Josephine Baker, that artistic mavericks from Toni Morrison to Andres Serrano, that everyday people with a strong sense of identity like the rioters of Stonewall, insisted upon their own visions of the possible. But that’s the key difference: theirs was an expression in service of something, a solidarity whose shape was still, only, barely, outlined. As Han argues, contemporary authenticity discourse serves little but the neoliberal apparatus only too happy for us to express ourselves by way of recurring monthly payments.

         Okay then—another rant, or rant-adjacent thing, done!

         I will see you remarkably soon!

         Ryan

Letter Twenty-five | 12/14 | Russ

Portland

Dear Lack,

This week I’ve fallen into a routine: I wake up just before 7am, slip out of bed, don something warm, fill a water bottle, lace up my worn-out running shoes, and walk to Wilshire Park, about thirty blocks away. When I get there, I do a little dynamic stretching, and then I start running around the edges of the green space. I do three laps. After I finish, I walk home, and I feel like my day can begin.

Until I moved to Portland at the beginning of 2018, the city felt enveloped in a special aura. Maybe it’s because we made it special. The road trips to soccer matches, basketball games, concerts, 24-hour coffee shops, Zupan’s, and Powell’s hold a feeling that I can only describe as happy. Was I a happier person back then? Certainly not. But I was definitely less critical, less cynical, and also less responsible. And so—like you mentioned in your last letter, my attachments to things in this world have also changed.

You talk about how the changes in your “political commitments” have impacted your identity. For me it’s exactly the same. Who I am, the media I interact with, my profession: all are linked to the change in my own political commitments. I only started to become politically aware in my mid-twenties. Before that, I used the fact I was personally unaffected by certain political shifts or decisions as an excuse to avoid engaging or thinking politically: I wasn’t a citizen of the United States, I couldn’t vote, so why care? Talk about privilege. 

I’ve already spoken a great deal about language, how having the proper words to express how I feel has allowed me to interact with and critique some of the injustices I see in the world, to become more politically aware. For me this is freeing. I enjoy the conversations, the reading. It feels good to know more things. Maybe this is the greatest benefit of aging. To, as you say, be able to put a name to things.

But with this freedom (apologies, I know you hate the word) comes an exhaustion. I constantly need to stave off self-doubt, the feeling that I haven’t made the right decisions in life (people will say that you don’t need to figure things out at our age, but that doesn’t really offer any relief). During my mornings outdoors, I can’t help but look at the houses in NE Portland, houses I’ll never be able to afford, and think: Man, it would be nice to have something like that. But why do I feel that way? Is it because my entire life has been spent living under capitalist hegemony that has made me think property ownership is good? Probably. Do I recognize that this is wrong? Yes. Then why does it remain so difficult to exorcise the desires? I don’t have the answer to that question. 

I hope we continue to work on this project together for the rest of our lives. More than anything, this Cup’s iteration of end to end has made me think more. The hours I’ve spent writing have been difficult and frustrating and even painful. But I also think facing those challenges and thinking critically is what’s made this experience wonderful. (I’ve spent the last thirty minutes typing and deleting that last paragraph over and over again. It feels unsatisfactory. But I’m going to leave it as is and move on.)

Before I sign off, I suppose it’s important to mention the semi-final match between France/Morocco. I watched with Zach, which was, of course, delightful. The match itself, however, was somewhat of a disappointment. It was choppy. There were too many fouls, too many stoppages of play. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I think the match would’ve been better had the referee issued more cards. Maybe then players wouldn’t have felt they had license to stall any attack and play would’ve been smoother? I don’t know.

France were dominant. Morocco created a few exciting moments with lackluster results (the attempted bicycle kick was audacious, but I could’ve done without the hundreds of stepovers in the buildup when a pass across the face of goal was so clearly the better option). Regardless, I’m still so pleased that they made it as far as they did. I also think the forthcoming Croatia/Morocco third-place match on Saturday will be excellent. Go Morocco!

What more can be said about France/Argentina? The focus will, of course, be on Mbappe and Messi. I think both of our allegiances lie with the latter.

I can’t wait.

Much love, 

Russ

Letter Twenty-four | 12/13 | Ryan

         Berkeley

         Dear Russ,

         Was the Argentina/Croatia match an anticlimax? This project is—for me, at least, shockingly—approaching its end. Just two matches left: tomorrow’s semifinal, and then what will surely, surely be an Argentina/France final (although if Morocco pull out a victory this World Cup will suddenly, speaking here strictly about the on-pitch developments, offer a kind of narrative drama I’ve never seen before in world soccer, except maybe, maybe when Leicester won the Premier League—but even then, this is a different order of magnitude).

         The last three weeks have zipped by. I’ve been on strike the whole time, and so there’s been organizing work to do, and also a couple of writing projects to finish—one big dense scary deadline and a bunch of little orbiting responsibilities. But those are done. The strike goes on, but the energy has drifted into the cold wind of winter break (not to mention the internal politics, which absorb energy the way concrete resists an electric charge). My mornings have been slow, sluggish: coffee, email, and then the Cup. I’ve only watched two or three matches anywhere but my living room or my desk. While there have been moments of brilliance, little events like jewels, the Cup proper has been a pleasant background hum. For all the political complexity, the violence folded into the Cup like butter into laminated dough, the matches themselves have slid away. Do you feel this? It’s been hugely pleasant, like sitting on a train and letting whatever’s outside proceed past you, the pleasure rooted in the blur. But also: the blur.

         Some people say we begin to hold things less tightly as we age, that our attachments take on different shapes, arrange themselves in different ways. In one sense I think this is true, or has been for me: my emotional peaks and valleys have flattened. Maybe part of this is age, maybe part of this is some kind of weird manifestation of self-consciousness, the way an object is irrevocably changed when we learn how to name it, or what its possible functions are. Being eighteen or nineteen and navigating an emotional topography without a map—feeling things without understanding why—adds a kind of terror, an uncanny disorientation, to the first-order feeling. But then, a decade on, being able to name things, to say, oh, yes, I have a diagnosable illness, I walk around with sets of three letters, GAD, OCD—look, I am just as suspicious of contemporary mental healthcare as anyone (including our novelists! There’s a healthy suspicion of talk therapy in David Foster Wallace, in Rooney, in Hanya Yanagihara.). But there is, within that suspicion, a kind of reassurance in the firmness of objects. A problematic answer is better (in one sense) than the answerless wilderness.

         But at the same time some of my attachments have only sharpened. Or, if they have flattened, taken on new spatial distributions, then these changes don’t constitute a weakening but merely a change—as if the perimeter of the object is the style of attachment and the area of the object is its intensity. I’ve had preferences during this Cup: I wanted to see the US, Korea, Germany, Japan proceed. But never did I feel precarious in the way I once did, say, tracking a Cardinals game inning-by-inning in high school, over automated text messages because this was a time before smartphones, or now watching Arsenal. In fact, Arsenal are a good example: the men’s team causes me more anxiety, but the women’s team offers me more joy. Similar intensities, but distributed in incongruous ways.

         Maybe this comes to mind because we see Messi in his twilight, we’re watching a crepuscular hero, and age registers differently in particular contexts. Messi’s in his late thirties and grizzled; I’m just barely in my late twenties still and in certain ways very young and other ways very old. There’s a line in a Zadie Smith essay: “I find myself radically discontinuous with myself.” I’ve changed; the political context of this Cup absolutely bears on my experience of the matches, which speaks in part to the fact that my own political commitments have changed and that my political commitments as a category, as a type of commitment, occupy a different and more important position in the constellation of my identity. And, concomitantly, the way I enjoy sports has changed, too—I no longer need a strong personal investment. As my attachment to soccer has grown, my disinterest in the literal sense has grown, too: I’ve moved towards a kind of almost Kantian position of aesthetic reflection, an ability to look at the game (not always, but sometimes) formally, immanently. Maybe this sounds paradoxical, even dialectical, to say that soccer is both more political and more, like, autotelically structural. Maybe this is what it means to write about what something means while the meaning of that something is in motion (which, of course, is always).

         Does this make sense? I’m trying to write around a feeling, a slight slippage, not a transparency but a translucency, a little buzz around the edges of the thing. Whatever the nature of the change in my attachment to the Cup this time around, it’s linked to all these other changes, too, changes that only become legible when viewed at scale—the scale that a quadrennial event like the World Cup, or this writing project, generates.

         This Cup stands in strange relation to the last Cup; I stand in strange relation to myself at twenty-five, four years ago. I feel differently in every sense of both (all three?) of those words. I haven’t lost interest; my interest has metamorphosed. I’m not old, but I am older. It’s not a slipping away but an unspooling.

         I’m very much looking forward to seeing you and everyone else in person. There lie attachments that, yes, have changed, but in excellent and noble ways.

         Talk soon!

         Ryan

Letter Twenty-three | 12/12 | Russ

Portland

Dear Lack,

When I wrote my last letter I was sitting at a restaurant in the Cape Town International Airport (I didn’t mention this to you then, because I wanted to surprise Kiana). Now I’m in Portland. It’s cold. I’ve been wearing the same clothes for three days. I had to run through Schiphol to make my connecting flight, and was, quite literally, the last person they allowed on the plane. I made it (barely), but sadly my luggage did not. I have to go back to PDX in a few hours to collect my bags. 

Matt and Nat picked me up from the airport. When I saw them I sprinted down through the terminal, leapt toward them, and gave each a strong, affectionate hug and kiss on the head. A few folks made some kind remarks about our greeting. You can expect something similar when I see you in a few weeks.

Kiana was surprised, of course. It’s amazing how good it feels to be back together in person despite speaking every single day. We know all about each other’s day-to-day experiences, understand the rhythms and dramas of our working and social lives. But physical presence is something altogether different. It’s nice. I’m happy to be back. 

I read your last letter shortly after waking up this morning. Postmodern is a term I’m familiar with, but, as you explain so passionately in your previous letter, its meaning has become murky. If you asked me before reading your last letter what the term postmodern meant I might have said something like: I’m not sure, new maybe. That’s probably because of its overuse. I’m constantly impressed and thankful for you and your ability to make these things digestible and understandable. So—thank you, my friend. 

Tomorrow I’m going to watch Argentina/Croatia with Matt and Zach. It’s amazing to me that we could see a repeat of the final of four years ago. The term “Golden Generation” is overused, but for a country like Croatia (which has a smaller population than Oregon) to make it this far in the Cup again is astonishing. Nevertheless, I think it’s safe to say that we’ll both be cheering for Argentina. 

I apologize for the short letter after you just sent something so wonderful and robust. But I’m still tired and have a lot of people to catch up with, even today. 

The next one will almost certainly be longer, I promise! 

With love, 

Russ

Letter Twenty-two | 12/11 | Ryan

         Berkeley

         Dear Russ,

         Tifo Football, the YouTube channel now owned by The Athletic that produces short-form soccer content—think, like, Crash Course or Kurtzgesagt, but instead of the French Revolution or black holes they talk about total football and the history of club soccer in Palestine—posted today on social media to promote their new travelogue series, “A Postmodern World Cup.” It seems like they’ve sent a journalist on a kind of European walking tour (except, you know, they’re driving) to visit the major soccer nations and conduct a continent-wide vibe check re: Qatar, the Cup, and the state of the fandom.

         [Ryan here, in my own letter, editing: because I accidentally clicked “Save as Draft” rather than “Publish” last night, I can, now, this morning, add the link to the first episode of “A Postmodern World Cup here.]

         As the whole scope of this project has made clear, the fact that the Cup is in Qatar is a multivalent symptom, capable of generating both frisson (it’s in Qatar? Really?) and resignation (of course FIFA gave the Cup to Qatar!). It declares unambiguously a set of facts about the contemporary soccer world—and the contemporary world in general—that hasn’t been hidden, exactly (indeed, everyone knows these things, or at least everyone who shares our political-historical orientation), but which have remained tacit, unspoken, vouchsafed on the far, silent half of our negative capability. Is corruption still corruption if it’s done in the daylight? Does shadiness, in that illuminated context, just become business as usual?

         It’s not like anyone wasn’t aware that FIFA is unusually corrupt. The MLB, NBA, NFL—these are malicious organizations, but their corruption strikes me as the everyday corruption of self-interest. Of course the NFL covered up the facts of concussions and CTE: evil, but not at all out of character. Of course the MLB spent years operating as a de facto cabal, engaged in price-fixing that was also, because players are employees and product both, wage-fixing. FIFA is more like the Olympic committee—multinational in scope, possessed of uncertain ambitions, operative at a level difficult and perhaps impossible to comprehend without being embedded in it, which embedding would necessarily skew your vision, destroy your perspective.

         In other words: investigating the MLB or NFL would be the plot of a thriller. Investigating the Olympics or FIFA would be the plot of a Pynchon novel—less an investigation than a baptism, an immersion in a close but markedly different universe, an experience not of discovery, not of epistemological heroism, but of disorientation, overwhelm, and political absurdity.

         And so, is the Qatar World Cup properly postmodern? Look, you know how frustrated I get with the popular deployment of postmodern. Not only the obviously bad-faith use from folks (assholes) like everyone’s favorite opiate-and-raw-meat addict Jordan Peterson, or what-if-a-Hutt-went-to-prep-school-dude Ben Shapiro, but more vernacular (here’s a lovely word taken from Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin: skaz) situations: postmodern as “weird,” as “meta,” as “composed of juxtaposed or incommensurate objects,” as “suggestive of big systems,” as “paradoxical,” as “total ethical relativism,” as “perspectival identity politics,” as “nothing is true, man.” Modernist just never really appears in popular discourse, but postmodern absolutely does. Is that, actually, a postmodern fact? (No! No! Stop it!)

         I’ve just compared FIFA’s corruption to a Pynchon novel, admittedly. Except I haven’t: I’ve suggested that the plot of the corruption would lend itself well to a certain kind of narrative form. And that’s the thing: postmodern as a description of a narrative form, an aesthetic and political context, is not the same thing as postmodern as description of a contemporary global-cultural arrangement. These things are related, of course, but they are not precisely congruent. That’s why criticism, theory, writing exist: that’s why the very best study of postmodern culture alongside postmodern economics and politics—Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism: or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism—runs 450 pages. And so if we want to say this World Cup is “postmodern,” we need to be more specific.

         What I think people mean when they call this World Cup postmodern is twofold. One, that there exists an unusually active tension between what the Cup claims to mean, what we feel the Cup to mean, and what we think or observe that the Cup means. This collision of marketing speak (The Cup brings people togetherI), of personal and emotionally oriented language (The Cup still does mean something to me!), and of political criticism in a rhetoric of exhaustion (Hundreds dead, queer folk attacked, what the fuck is the point?) feels postmodern not because it’s a rare collision (indeed, it’s everywhere) but because the Cup intensifies these feelings, demands we confront them, and exaggerates their effects. And this combination of intensification and deflation, the adjacency of facts, our feelings about facts, and our feelings about those feelings—these strikes us as postmodern in its paratactic logic and recursive or self-conscious series of framings. Two, that the political situation the Cup makes evident is simultaneously pellucid and totally opaque. The journalism’s been done; we know, well, not everything, but enough. But also, we know that we don’t know everything—the unknown unknowns proliferate. The Cup is both a flat surface and an immense depth. As a political-cultural shape, it’s some kind of terrible non-Euclidean thing. It’s hard to understand, which is both an understatement and precisely true.

         But is it postmodern? To twist a line from Ben Lerner (lol), yes, but not how you mean that. It’s postmodern only insofar as one dominant characterizing fact of the contemporary world is the way postmodern aesthetics and their historical grounds (the 60s, new politics, individual expression, spectacle, and on and on) link up with more recent political arrangements, specifically post-Cold War neoliberalism, to become our cultural dominant. That is, the contemporary world is postmodern insofar as its texture is postmodern, insofar as postmodernism is something immanent to the world rather than an object discrete and locatable within it. There’s one very good line in The Art of Fielding where Guert thinks that postmodernism properly began when modernist self-consciousness trickled down to popular culture, to sports, became not a rarefied aesthetic technique but a widespread structure of feeling. Something similar has happened to postmodernism, whose logics and politics fit neatly into the project of neoliberalism, into finance capital, into the post-2008 world at large.

         It’s the same with the Trump administration. It’s not that the curtain has been pulled back, the veil torn, not that he says the quiet part out loud, that conservatism no longer needs the humane face of a Reagan or Romney. This is all true, but the performance of openness, of filterlessness, by an individual draws our attention away from what has always been there and always required analysis, careful examination, a little digging: structure, power, ideology, discourse.

         The Qatar Cup is unabashed in its cruelty, but the obviousness of that cruelty makes it easy to localize that cruelty, to imagine that cruelty as originating from that place because visible in that place. And to be sure, I’m not suggesting in a kind of dismissive and ostensibly leftist gesture that because other countries, especially European countries, participate and have participated in the long machinations of imperial capitalism that we shouldn’t worry about Qatar, that homophobia is a liberal distraction from the “real problems.” The point is that calling this Cup postmodern should be our signal, our lightbulb: that this complex operation of surface and depth, visibility and invisibility, local power and global system, is at play and taking on new forms all the time. If we call it postmodern, we should recognize that system, understand its particularities. The Cup isn’t postmodern because it feels weird or because its politics are unusually visible. It’s postmodern because people call it postmodern. It’s postmodern because calling it postmodern obscures the way it’s actually postmodern, which is to say, political—a political object in the contemporary world.

         I hope you enjoyed this essay. I’ve been putting off doing the very last bit of work needed on my prospectus draft, and all that energy has gone here.

         All my best,

         Ryan

Letter Twenty-one | 12/10 | Russ

Cape Town

Dear Lack,

When I look back at this project over the next few years, what will I think about first? The matches? The guest letters? The attempt to balance exuberance and tragedy (as in the case of Grant Wahl’s death)?

I’m not familiar with Wahl’s work. But, from what I’ve read online and the discourse I’ve seen on Discord, he was a prominent journalist in the US soccer space. I too am upset about his passing. As you’ve mentioned, it brings up the sickening memory of Christian Eriksen’s collapse at the Euros. That remains the worst thing I’ve seen on live television. I’ll never forget sitting in Zach’s living room wondering if I’d just seen someone die. The image of his limp body and blank stare is burned into my mind. Even now, I find it difficult to type these words. 

Eriksen ended up being ok. That won’t be the case with Wahl. It’s tragic. I have nothing more to say about it. 

It feels strange to discuss the matches from today and yesterday in this context. I guess that’s the trickiness of the balancing act we’re trying to achieve.  

Getting straight to it: I think the Argentina/Netherlands match from yesterday was the best match of soccer I’ve ever seen. We’ve talked a lot about language; only fragments seem to suffice here. That pass. Argentina’s lead. Wout Weghorst. Otamendi’s blunder. That set piece. Wout Weghorst again. Argentina’s relentless attack in extra time. Penalties (I was hosting five people, one of whom has familial ties to Argentina, in my one-bedroom apartment, and so I realized that hiding would’ve been pointless. You’ll be happy to know I was forced to watch). Argentina win (congrats Mia!). 

I cannot wait for their match against Croatia. Can you imagine being a Croatian supporter? Advancing through to the semi-finals on two penalty shootouts! No one needs that. Brazil’s exit is tricky. They are brilliant to watch. Neymar’s goal yesterday was spectacular. His ability to control his body and the ball in tight spaces is astounding. It’s a shame his politics are so horrendous (this is the case for much of the Brazilian men’s team—except for former Evertonian and universal good boy Richarlison). I heard someone say on a podcast that “Everything bad for Neymar is good for the world.” Which is hilarious and also probably true.  Anyway—pleased that Croatia is able to make another deep run through the World Cup.

How about that Moroccan team though? The absolute top dogs of the Iberian Peninsula! Thank you for declaring for them. You were brilliant. But seriously—the first African team to qualify for the semi-finals of a World Cup! What a story! 

Portugal were relentless in attack and controlled much of the possession. Spain were the same. But Morocco’s play is a testament to organization and one of my soccer tenets: getting the fuck back on defense. Did you know that Morocco haven’t let an opponent score all tournament? In fact, the last player to score against Morocco was South African Lyle Foster on June 9th. They’ve played nine matches since then. Amazing. I am so happy.

France/England kick off in less than an hour. Like you, I don’t really mind who wins. It’s all Morocco right now. People are singing in the streets outside a restaurant called French Tacos. It’s surreal.

My best,

Russ

Letter Twenty | 12/9 | Ryan

Berkeley

Dear Russ,

When I was living in Forest Grove and working at the newspaper, you came to visit a few times, but I don’t think you ever came into the office, saw me hard at work. You’ll remember that I published some hard-hitting stuff over the stellar four months of my journalism career: the Oregon Cornhole Championships, the gerbil show at the state fair, the controversies and intrigues of the city parks board.

I was never a great journalist—I’m basically a writer, not an investigator, and I lacked the particular kind of ambition that I think is required. Air the dirtiest laundry! Uncover the nastiest secrets! Break a story so shocking Mark Ruffalo plays you in the movie! Also, as today has made evidently clear, while I can generate takes as quickly as they’re required, my thinking has become pretty thoroughly academic: I want to sit, think, reflect, unroll. And just too much has happened today for me to synthesize in eight hundred or a thousand words. I could never roll this out, every day, on deadline.

The two matches were—well, what were they? Remarkable, tense, poised with a downright geometric narrative precision. Both Croatia/Brazil and Netherlands/Argentina went to penalties; both produced the moments of radical reorientation, singularities, that in any other context—that is, in anything but real life—are totally cliché. In Netherlands/Argentina, the very last kick in regulation was a set piece, given away by Argentina defender and former Man Citizen Nicolas Otamendi in a poor moment, taken by the Dutch with a low hard pass under the wall, one-touch-two-touch from the wonderfully named Wout Weghorst, his second goal, 2-2, into extra time we go. Neymar scored for Brazil in the 106th minute after some downright Byzantine defending from Croatia, who sail after Petkovic’s 117th minute equalizer and some penalty heroics into the quarterfinals much like they did four years ago: on the leaden wings of some quality but unflashy defense and the much more feathery wings of Luka Modric.

Language really does begin to fail—at least, language that’s been simmering for only a few hours. Both penalty shootouts were (fantastic? extra? urgent?) in ways only quick, five-shot shootouts can be. Nothing, I think, will ever beat the Timbers’ 11-round showstopper with Sporting Kansas City, the double-post, which I followed on my phone outside of George Fox University’s performing arts center, having just watched a student production I remember literally nothing about. But these were prime examples of their own kind, dense and quick, a slugfest, a slap fight, square-jawed mind-games. Brazil are out (unforgivable!). Argentina are through (inevitable!). I have no idea where Messi’s capabilities stop. Twitter exploded after his pass to set up Molina’s goal, which I would humbly suggest reinforces my notion of Messi occupying a different distribution of spacetime.

But then, hours ago, the news that longtime soccer journalist Grant Wahl passed away during the Argentina match at his seat in the stadium. His brother, it seems, is adamant that something fishy is afoot; earlier in the tournament Wahl was detained for refusing to discard his rainbow shirt. This has upset me, his death, in ways difficult to explain and absolutely impossible to anticipate. I liked Wahl well enough but was never anything like a devotee, but—maybe in the way we were all unsettled with Christian Eriksen collapsed during the Euros, to see the absent center of all sports and all aesthetic projects (death as irruption-end-void-event) made suddenly visible and present; it’s not just a “bad reminder” but a violation of rules that were so solid and perfect they no longer registered as rules at all.

I hope to have more on this soon.

For now, England/France and Morocco/Portugal tomorrow. I have no strong opinions about the former; for the latter, I declare for Morocco.

Stay well,

Ryan

Letter Nineteen | 12/8 | Russ

Cape Town

Dear Lack, 

As you mentioned already in your previous letter, it feels strange to not have any matches on. And by that I mean right now, in this exact moment as I write this. South Africa is one time zone behind Qatar, so during the group stages (when there were, absurdly, four matches squeezed into each day) I could, if I wanted, watch a match at noon, 3pm, 6pm, and 9pm. That’s a lot of soccer. 

But it is nice to have a short break. It also gives me a chance to recover from the Round of 16. Let me restate something you already know: I loathe penalty shootouts. This has nothing to do with the system. It’s fine. A match, I suppose, can’t go on forever (although seeing a match end via golden goal intrigues me).

My disdain for shootouts has to do with feeling. Physical feeling. I tense up and feel nauseated. In short: I can’t stand it. 

You’ve experienced this in person. There was the time you forced me off your porch (where I was hiding) to watch the Portland Timbers face the Seattle Sounders in penalties in 2018 (I think). [Ryan here, from my editorial perch: yes! The conference finals. Asprilla took the last penalty and hit the ball as hard as I’ve ever seen from anyone. Podolski-level stuff]. They ended up winning, but I can’t help but feel like it would’ve been a better experience if you just left me outside. 

I didn’t watch either of the penalty shootouts in the round of 16. In both cases, I followed the match all the way through stoppage time. And then, when the referee blew the final whistle and penalties began, I turned the match off. I waited for twenty minutes or so, until I thought the match would be over, then I checked the result. Japan lost to Croatia. Morocco beat Spain. 

(I realize that some people might think this behavior falls somewhere in the spectrum between weird and psychotic. I genuinely don’t know why I feel this way.) 

When the penalties between Spain and Morocco began, I decided to leave my apartment to get dinner from a poke restaurant nearby. The restaurant is a little less than a mile away from my place on Kloof Street, a vibey stretch with coffee shops, restaurants, bars. I don’t know why I thought that all these bars and restaurants wouldn’t be showing exactly what I was trying to avoid. But, well, I wasn’t really thinking. 

So there I was, walking down Kloof, wincing every time a pocket of people rose up and cheered. Something was happening. I didn’t know. I was stressed. I just wanted my poke bowl. 

I was very glad to see (eventually) that Morocco had beaten Spain. As you know, I have a soft spot for African teams. Plus, you know, Spain colonized part of Morocco, and we love a good belated moral victory. 

Looking forward to both Croatia/Brazil and Netherlands/Argentina tomorrow. Hopefully neither match goes to penalty kicks. 

Best,

Russ

P.S. Thank you, Zach. Love you, my friend.

Letter Eighteen | 12/7 | Ryan

Berkeley

Dear Russ,

         There’s nothing to say alongside Zach’s letter; it can only be acknowledged and saluted. As a gesture of respect, then, here’s something totally otherwise.

For the first time in, what, seventeen or eighteen days, there were no Cup games today, and so we’ve arrived at a kind of halfway point. What this means is that I have a structural excuse to return the conversation, at least for a moment, to Sally Rooney (surpriiiiiiise!).

         In 2017, between the publication of Conversations with Friends and Normal People, a Rooney story appeared in The New Statesman with a title that makes its appeal for this project pretty clear: “Robbie Brady’s astonishing late goal takes its place in our personal histories.” While this isn’t, uh, a great title—it sounds like it describes a weird art installation, like a huge palimpsestic sculpture of Irish midfielder Robbie Brady constructed entirely of the artist’s teenage diary pages, or something—it does make the quote I used to begin the project another valence, another node of significance. I’ve stashed a copy of the story here.

         Clearly, the story represents Rooney working through some of the thematic slosh that Normal People eventually took up. Conor and Helen (that is, Connell and Marianne, although Rooney reuses Helen’s name in the novel, and neither character in this version is quite as sharply characterized as their novelistic counterparts) do what Rooney characters do: they have a conversation, mostly about themselves and the way they feel and the way they feel about the way they feel, that seems somehow intimate and reticent at once. And Brady’s goal, scored at the 2016 Euros against Italy to send the Irish into the knockouts, isn’t actually mentioned much after the first couple of paragraphs.

         But as the title makes clear, there’s something about Brady’s goal that lingers cloudlike over the story. At the very least the goal inaugurates the narrative, makes it possible for the story to unfold, and in this way becomes its ground or teleological origin, at once necessary for the story and not quite assimilable in the story’s own terms. Brady’s goal is an emotional, affective excitation; it’s a social catalyst; it’s a singularity of attention that, by pulling Conor and Helen both into its orbit, places them in relation to each other.

         There hasn’t been an excellent American soccer novel. The English, by which I mean just David Peace, has produced a couple: The Damned United, which is a find psychological portrait, and Red or Dead, which is a seriously bold formal experiment in the everydayness of soccer, the compression of time, and the application of a Biblical register to the experience of sports. It’s also, for anybody but people very much like you and I, absolutely unreadable. There’s Peter Handke, a Nobel laureate and possessor of very bad politics, who wrote The goalkeeper’s anxiety at the penalty kick, which isn’t really about soccer at all. Ross Raisin’s A Natural came out a couple of years ago and was fine. There’s more nonfiction: the whole subgenre of “global politics but soccer,” and the sub-subgenre of “books that soccer fans own,” like Inverting the Pyramid and Soccernomics. Nick Hornby, of course, whose Fever Pitch is legitimately quite good.

         Baseball rules the novel, and one reason, I think, is that baseball is slow, iterative, paratactical, and segmented—which is to say it lends itself well to the novel form. It resembles the patterns of everyday life the novel is supposedly rooted in. There’s room for rumination in the speed of play. Progress proceeds by actions—pitches, innings—and so are easily narratable. Not to mention, of course, how thoroughly baseball is bound up with the American mythos; there’s a reason Don DeLillo used Yankee Stadium as the objective correlative for Americanness in the opening scene to Mao II. Whitman talks about baseball; I’m not sure if Twain does.

         Baseball is also self-mythologizing, which means it carries an immanent narrativity, a charge and a set of stakes, the novel can build upon. Soccer, especially in an American context, does not, which means it will have to perform a different kind of narrative role when the soccer novel finally finds its feet, so to speak. Maybe whatever novel arrives will look sort of like Rooney’s work—that is, soccer will be an object of shared attention, a cultural hotspot. If so, I think it’ll look more specifically like Normal People, Rooney’s least interior novel, because (and here's the big claim) soccer is an externalized sport, whereas baseball is an internalized one.

         I only half-believe this, right now, but there’s potential here. Soccer has geniuses, baseball has philosophers (again, at least in the popular imaginary). But, contrariwise, soccer has politics, whereas baseball has performances. The sharpest soccer players (and managers) are political agents—Socrates, Shankly, Rashford—and this is just among the men; the women and enbys don’t often have the choice to be political because their very presence means political hypersignification. Soccer is about sociality, organization, concerted choreography (that is, politics!), whereas baseball is about psychologization, individualized matchups—it’s epic, in the narratological sense, in that way.

         What this means, I guess, is that a soccer novel will have to adopt a form that reflects this externalization, this political sensibility. Maybe something like Red or Dead moves in this direction. Maybe we’ll need the kind of anti-character novel that Rachel Cusk and David Markson and W.G. Sebald and Teju Cole made famous. Maybe, probably, it’ll look like something else entirely.

         There was soccer on today: the women’s Champions League! Arsenal beat Juve 1-0 on a cool half-volley from Vivianne Miedema, my absolute hero, who never celebrates her goals. There’s a kind of coolness about her that makes her, would make her, an excellent character. It’s not Ronaldo’s mechanistic coolness, but rather evidence of something lightly held, a supreme self-holding, something not identical but maybe akin to the flippancy of a Kyrgios or a Boris Diaw. Unlike Kyrgios, it’s not that Miedema can’t be bothered; unlike Diaw, Miedema is not just world-class but world-class among the world-class. It’s something else, a basically mysterious arrangement of affective orientations. It’s absolutely fascinating.

         Anyway, another off day tomorrow!

         All best,

         Ryan

Letter Seventeen | 12/6 | Zach

Grants Pass

Dear RLs,

This is my second draft at a guest spot on your fine blog. The first one talked about guilt and joy and mainly who should feel guilty at this World Cup and who shouldn’t, but ultimately the conclusions were obvious and the prose was overwrought and I’d much rather say this:

As you both know, I didn’t watch a single game of the first two matchdays. I had a lot going on in my life: lots of work to do, the social engagements, and I tend to wake up later in the morning anyway. Further, I tend to avoid things that feel like a bummer, and the circumstances of this WC certainly felt (feel?) like a bummer to me. My engagement with the Cup was purely through reading these letters, conversations with the Lads at our own games, and texts from my dad as he watched the matches from his home in Portugal.

But then, Monday night, I received an unexpected and unpleasant text message, and the next morning I found myself pulling up a stream of the US/Iran match on my laptop as I sat next to my grandma’s hospital bed.

As you may have noticed from the location italicized above the greeting, I’m still here in Grants Pass, and I probably will be for at least another week, maybe more. All of a sudden, a soccer tournament taking place halfway around the world (by which we always mean as far away as possible, even though it never really is) became my strongest link to the world outside of this house. It became my strongest distraction from an unpleasant circumstance. Something to watch, something to think about, something to predict, and, most importantly, something to talk about. 

(By the way, Lack, your perfect 4/4 on day one of the knockouts was truly impressive. I hope you maintain your streak just as much as I hope Russ somehow binks twenty thousand points and comes back to win it all.)

[Lack here, editing: I very much have not kept my streak, and you sit now with a comfortable lead in our little wager pool—excellent work.]

So while there’s been a lot said (eloquently and with gusto) in these letters about passion and beauty and joy in sports, I want to contribute that sometimes it’s just something to fucking hold on to.

With love and care,

Zach

Letter Sixteen | 12/5 | Ryan

Berkeley

Dear Russ,

I cannot recall a beautiful goal scored by the USMNT at the World Cup, which is an embarrassment. I mean that descriptively; another term beloved by online discourse, embarrassment is an aesthetic judgment disguised as a moral judgment. I saw it today, scrolling doomedly through Twitter after the Japan/Croatia match, which ended heartbreakingly with a Croatian victory in penalties. At least two, and maybe all three, of the saved Japanese penalties were relatively tame, especially Minamino’s, the first, which he shunted to the keeper’s left as if he’d seen the keeper leaning right—or maybe he was just gambling.

Regardless, the takes rolled in hot like diner flapjacks. Minamino should be embarrassed! The Japanese side should be embarrassed! Any professional should be embarrassed to lose their nerve like that!

So obviously these takes are bad. Becoming a professional doesn’t mean ceasing to be human, and if it did, professional sports would no longer be sports. And, as I suggested in my last letter, we—sports people—are so, so bad at accounting for luck. Maybe our hesitation in confronting luck as an aesthetic and narrative principle of sports reflects our general dislike for luck, fate, uncertainty. In the US especially, perhaps, where luck cannot be reconciled with the meritocratic Calvinism that is our cultural and political metanarrative—you get what you deserve.

But what I mean about embarrassment being an aesthetic judgment packaged in a moral judgment is that the term usually arrives when someone has made a certain category of error: when a player hasn’t shown sufficient effort, or failed not to pull off the spectacular but the routine, or (especially!) erred while under especial pressure. These kind of failures we attribute to a personal, interior problem or lack—as if the failure, the embarrassment, is a manifestation of some basic way the person ins, their moral orientation or makeup. In an Aristotelian sense, their character. And while in the case of effort maybe this is occasionally true (there are players who have slow days, and players who refuse to do the hard work out of arrogance or spite, although even here I’m assuming I can read their intentions, their deep personalities), usually it is not. Missing a penalty or a sitter is not a moral failure. A goalkeeping blunder is not a moral failure. These are aesthetic failures—failures to assist in bringing about the narrative and spectacle and choreography the way one is expected to. And, absolutely crucially, aesthetic failures are part of aesthetic structures generally.

To call these failures embarrassments, though, suggests that these players ought to feel shame, which is a strange and noteworthy affect. According to the theorists Eve Sedgwick and Adam Frank, themselves drawing on the work of Sylvan Tompkins, shame is weirdly double-directional: shame is both an interior feeling (everyone is looking at me! my stomach is turning!) and a social feeling (shame cannot happen without the thought of other people; a solipsist is incapable of shame). To me, this suggests that shame sits right at the intersection of our attachments to the world and our interior feelings of inadequacy. Shame is an oscillator; it pivots between what we do and what we love, on one hand, and our anxieties and self-consciousness, on the other.

So here’s the big reveal: I think these failures are embarrassments, in a certain way. They’re embarrassments insofar as they, by returning us to feelings of shame (which, again, aren’t exactly “negative” but something more complicated) remind us of the negativity, the thanatotic, the anxiety that spins around inside anything we do, but especially what we most love. Any attachment of love is always an attachment of vulnerability. Any projection of sincerity is always a wobbly bridge. Any declaration—this is who I am, and this is what I stand for—always invites critique, or worse, patronization (oh, how nice for you).

I feel this embarrassment acutely. As you mention in your last letter, I am a person of strong attachments and (as much as I try to deny it) strong opinions. Because of something, my childhood or my academic arc or my psychospiritual orientation, I am thoroughgoingly sincere. I can be ironic, droll, cutting, all these things, yes—but deep down (even though I do not believe we have deep downs) I am a yes-and man.

What this means is that, when I took to soccer ten years ago after an adolescence spent playing baseball and American football, obsessively, I developed a congruently obsessive attachment to soccer. I love it, and I tend to be a maximalist about these sorts of things—and so I watch matches, I collect shirts, and I play (these days five or six times weekly).

And this is where the embarrassment comes in. I have worked very hard, although work is an inaccurate term in several ways, to become, I think, a useful player. But I will never have the technique or access to the sport’s unconscious that folks who grew up playing do, and here’s the embarrassing rub: it’s a particularly serrated, toothed embarrassment, an unusually nauseating shame, to feel like you’re performing badly at something you care very much about. To try something new, or to do something you possess no real interest in, and do badly—this isn’t just comprehensible, it’s expected, it’s sort of right. But to care about something so much, and then to show the world, or at least the people just around you, that your passion and your ability are misaligned—this feels like a laying-bare of yourself. It feels, indeed, almost like a moral failure, like it reveals something about the arrangement of yourself.

There are other things that complicate this—the hedonic treadmill, for example, by which playing performances that once would’ve been triumphs become failures, as you gain experience and improve. But the real point is that embarrassment and its sister shame illuminate the complexity of all our attachments: the emotional blender spinning always inside them. This isn’t a bad thing, necessarily. Not all negativity is negative. But—and I’m not sure if this is true for you—sometimes my own little emotional engine boils over, and something unhealthy is produced. (Perhaps this is how academics reveal they take things too seriously, which I guess is sort of our jobs?)

In any case, this is what I hope for myself and for The Discourse generally: to be vulnerable but not self-cruel, to hold strong and serious attachments without confusing my attachments with my identity, to feel shame as what connects me to the world rather than something that severs me from it.

A rather reflexive letter, this one. I’ll talk about something outside my little tight affective bubble next time.

Poor Korea! Gone too soon to the beautiful Brazilian steamroller.

Your term is nearly complete—well wishes for the concluding chaos.

All my best,

Ryan

Letter Fifteen | 12/4 | Russ

Cape Town

Dear Lack,

When I was in East London last week I watched a handful of matches with my grandfather. As you know, he is not a fan of soccer. But, because he has taken an interest in this project, and because there was little else on, I managed to get him to watch a few of the matches (I will forever have a lasting memory of the two of us lying side-by-side on his bed watching Saudi Arabia/Senegal and eating biltong, the iconic South African dried meat that I know you despise). 

Anyway—at various points of us watching the matches together, my grandfather would turn to me and ask for clarification on specific rules. How does one take a throw in? What constitutes a foul? And, of course, how does offsides work? For as long as I’ve been a fan of soccer, this particular rule has been a sticking point for many of my family members. Which is something I understand. Offsides can be confusing. 

It is therefore funny to me that the institution of VAR, a technology meant to make offsides more understandable, more accurate, more “scientific,” has in fact made the concept far more confusing. You wrote about this so well in your last letter. For anyone who has spent time with you long enough to hear you go on one of your delightfully entertaining rants about [insert anything Ryan Lackey gets angry about here], reading your last piece reminded me of those moments of vitriol. I look forward to hearing them in person later this month when we see each other in Portland.

In your last letter you wrote the following: This is the best USMNT I’ve ever witnessed, but they lack both the subtlety and the mercilessness of the top sides. 

As I was watching the US/Netherlands match, I couldn’t help but notice the difference in composure. You’re right: The USMNT played better than I can ever remember. They’re also a young side, so the prospect of greater success moving forward is exciting. I’m inclined to attribute this youth to the lack of composure, the chaotic, frenetic style of play we witnessed in each of the USMNT’s matches. But then I think of players like Pedri or Jamal Musiala, who are twenty and nineteen respectively, and suddenly that claim becomes pretty weak.

(I realize I just compared a team to two individuals…OK, maybe disregard that last point). 

So—what is it? The three goals that the US let in against the Dutch were all due to poor man-marking (the first two goals were almost exactly the same: a low, diagonal cross to the top of the box from the right side met by an incoming Dutch player). But this, I think, is fixable. What is a greater concern for me is the lack of creativity moving forward. For all the talent that the USMNT possesses on the attacking side of the ball, very rarely did it feel like they were on the verge of scoring. In short: Their play in the final third needs work. The problem is that I’m not sure how one goes about fixing that. 

After the match I was chatting with Joe. He asked me if I could remember the USMNT ever scoring a beautiful goal. We went back and forth: Weah’s goal against Wales was nice, his finishing touch deft. It wasn’t beautiful. Landon Donovan’s goal against Algeria in 2010 was iconic. It wasn’t beautiful. Jermaine Jones’ strike against Portugal in 2014 came after Portugal failed to properly clear a US corner kick. It was opportunistic and electrifying. It wasn’t beautiful. Is there one you can think of? 

I’m also keen to see Argentina continue in the tournament. I’m not sure how they’ll fair against a stolid Dutch side, but it’ll no doubt be entertaining.

I just got home from watching France/Poland that finished 3-1 in favor of France. France were dominant in their dismantling of a Polish side that created one exciting moment in the first half (I’m also happy for Lewandowski that he added a couple of World Cup goals to his list of accolades this tournament). But the major talking point coming out of the match has to be the indescribable brilliance of Kylian Mbappé. He is freakish, alien. Watching him reminds me of watching Giannis Antetokounmpo play basketball. Seeing Messi play is still somehow relatable. It’s sublime and I could, of course, never replicate it, but I can understand it. Mbappé is just unfathomable. His combination of speed, power, and skill remind me of a video game avatar with maxed out stats. Unreal. 

As I write this there are about ten minutes left in the England/Senegal match. England are winning 3-0 and I’m sure you’ll understand that I’m disappointed. Senegal play with such joy. The positivity of their fans brings a smile to my face. They will be sorely missed.

I don’t dislike England. Maybe it’s because I spent a significant part of the last decade following the English Premier League, but there’s a closeness I feel for some of these English players that I don’t feel for, say, an Italian player from Serie A or a German player from The Bundesliga. I suppose when you watch certain players weekly and those weeks turn into seasons, it’s natural that you’ll get accustomed to their presence and the rhythms of their play. 

Before I go, I wanted to share this piece from The Athletic by Chloe Morgan, English lawyer and goalkeeper for Crystal Palace. In the piece, Morgan highlights how teams, by refusing to wear the One Love armband, have failed their LGBT+ fans. Morgan writes: 

Not wearing it was a missed opportunity to partake in a small gesture which would have shown solidarity and support. The gesture itself; one player wearing one armband in one game and incurring one yellow card was not going to create huge waves or mark the welcoming of a new era of football’s relationship with the LGBT+ community, but it was something. It was an incredibly small price to pay, a defiant stance. 

Just a reminder for myself that there are more important things than beautiful play. 

Apologies if this letter seemed truncated and untidy. I am waist deep in grading and writing report card comments for over a hundred students. Tomorrow we have Japan/Croatia and Brazil/South Korea. I’m pulling for the two Asian teams. 

My best, 

Russ

Letter Fourteen | 12/3 | Ryan

Berkeley

Dear Russ,

It’s good to be back after a weeklong hiatus. I’ve been doing so much “serious” writing that the chance to write a little more casually is such a relief. I’ve also been sick. Thankfully, we’ve had such wonderful guest contributors—I’ve been looking forward to bringing in these other voices, our friends, all week. Even if our stakes are relatively low, there’s something robustly satisfying about seeing something you care about, something you’ve helped develop, extend its network to include other people you care about, too.

Also, Peter and Joe and Miles all had, like, throughlines to their letters. Structure, thematizations, callbacks. Maybe it’s obvious, but I’m absolutely over here just vibing.

There was one excellent result and one very poor result today. The US outshot the Dutch but lost 3-1; after the match van Gaal or somebody said that the Americans were technically talented but tactically naïve, which I mostly agree with. This is the best USMNT I’ve ever witnessed, but they lack both the subtlety and the mercilessness of the top sides. Pulisic and McKennie and Dest and Weah all seem of a type to me: more than technically competent, young and fast and strong, but somehow limited in, like, spatiotemporal imagination, if that makes sense. Sometimes it seems like Brazil or France play three-and-a-half-dimensional soccer, like there’s another plane, just slightly askew to the field, that exerts a small but unmistakable effect on play—some players are sensitive to this plane, and others are not. This is what I mean by subtlety. Mercilessness is that collective stoniness that I see in the very best teams, too—the old tiki-taka Spain and Germany when they last won the Cup epitomize this for me. It’s an automatism, an ability to exert pressure grounded not even in confidence but some kind of preconscious pre-confidence: not the belief that your touch will be perfect, but the ability to keep the question from ever arising at all.

Anyway, this is what the US still lacks—and, to be fair, most other teams do too. It’s not even always an aesthetic positive, but even when it’s not beautiful that stony mercilessness is mesmerizing, in the way a huge industrial machine can be. When mercilessness and subtlety combine, the absolutely new can occur, although it appears in other contexts and arrangements, too. The USWNT will carry a more complex narrative into the Women’s World Cup this summer—we’ll write about them, too, I’m sure.

Speaking of the USMNT, I suppose now is the right time to talk about the big but also microscopic virtual elephant: the semi-automatic VAR and the offside call against Tim Weah in the US’s final group stage match against Iran.

Here’s the photo: https://twitter.com/JTansey90/status/1597680850350792704

People online will say that offside is an objective concept. It’s binary, Boolean, one or zero, on or off. And if we’re talking strictly in an analytic sense, that’s true: the concepts and definitions that we use to define offside are arranged in such a way that any case must produce either a situation of onside or offside. It’s an absolute and exclusive apparatus.

The problem is that soccer is not played with analytic concepts, but rather bodies and objects in real space and time, and attaching analytic concepts to bodies and objects in any actually “objective” way has proven impossible. This isn’t bad postmodern legerdemain: it’s the conclusion of a bunch of analytic philosophy’s heavy hitters. If Ben Shapiro wants to call W.V.O. Quine, like, an ontological snowflake, let him. That would be actually very funny.

The point of language is the games we play with it, the kinds of things it makes possible in the world, what our goals are. And soccer happens at the scale of the human. Even forgetting the fact that, as we narrow our vision, it becomes increasingly difficult to determine the facts of an offside situation (when has a pass been played? where on the arm does the legal zone begin?), we have to remember the goal of the language game we play with the word “offside” and its explanation in the rule book: to prevent the game from, you know, getting aesthetically worse. It’s there to prevent cherry-picking, to stop soccer from adopting American football’s obsession with verticality (just, you know, with feet). Does this micro-analysis of offside help achieve that goal? No, obviously not.

(Also it’s not even more objective. No one scale of vision is more objective than another. Scales are like spatio-temporal reference frames. The millimeter does not produce a “more correct” offside call than the foot or yard. Zoom out far enough, the players converge. Zoom in far enough, and the players become probabilistic distributions. We’re trading one partial vision at one arbitrary scale for another, but we’re calling it more objective.)

VAR is fine. Just keep it at the scale of the human.

The VAR-automation-offside conversation is linked directly to other conversations, which are also bad, made by other people, who are also wrong. See, for example, the Dudes Whomst Are Mad about the USMNT splitting their $13m prize for escaping the group stage with the USWNT by contractual obligation. The Dudes argue that the women ought to be compensated based on how much revenue they bring in, which suggests their inability to (among other things) distinguish the USWNT from its players, wages from the money that circulates in international sport, and also (my god) the point of sports from all the stupid bullshit that’s not the point of sports. Never mind the fact that they’re obviously wrong (the USWNT carried soccer as a cultural object in the US for years, which was obviously good for the whole pyramid, the men included), what’s more concerning are their noodle imaginations, their weird contradictory jumble of the Protestant work ethic, neoliberal meritocracy, and MBA-consultancy thinking (plus also the misogyny, of course).

Another of these conversations circles what I have named the Sportscaster’s Fallacy, which is a fundamental misunderstanding of how causality works. If only, the fallacy goes, Player X had done Action Y half an hour ago (scored a goal, saved the penalty, whatever), then Situation Z, happening right now, would mean something totally different! What they miss is that Situation Z depends on Player X doing Action Y—if Player X doesn’t, then the assemblage of objects and potentialities that allowed Situation Z to manifest as it did would be impossible. It’s just a lack of imagination. Likewise the total disregard for luck, which baseball talks about in ways much better than soccer. If, say, Messi takes a good penalty but the keeper guesses right and makes a great save, people will say, well, Messi just lost focus. He couldn’t deliver. He choked. As if the only obstacle to the material realization of Messi’s will is the strength of his will. As if luck isn’t just a real but often the dominant element in the unfolding of things.  

Anyway, you’re right: I do have feelings about Ted Lasso, but I’m going to hold off because I want to write about it later. In the meantime, let me say how good Zidane: A Portrait of the 21st Century is: a weird, obsessive deliberation of Zidane, yes, but also the technology of the image, celebrity, and entropy.

Glad Argentina are through because I want more Messi, as sad as I am for the Australians, who availed themselves well.

Looking forward to seeing how our little knockout-round wagers turn out. I look forward to your last-minute win after you bet all your points on, like, a 7-6 scoreline in the final.

Back and better than ever,

Ryan

Letter Thirteen | 12/2 | Russ

Cape Town

Dear Lack,

Firstly, I want to thank Peter, Miles, and Joe for contributing three wonderful pieces of writing. Peter, for your excellent piece on just how “crazy” soccer is (and the reasons we love it). Miles, for your thoroughly entertaining breakdown of the US/Iran match. I very much related to your disdain of Alexi Lalas and Henry Kissinger, although it remains unclear who has been a more despicable figure (Just kidding, it’s obviously Lalas). And Joe, my dear friend and colleague. I was touched by your recollections of previous World Cups, where you were and how much they meant to you. You’re right: The World Cup does remain special.

Let me say something that will be unpopular: I’ve never really cared for the United States’ national teams. By now I’ve spent the majority of my life on American soil. But I can’t fully get behind them. I’ve felt, at best, apathetic. My happiest memory involving the United States at a men’s World Cup came in 2010 when Ghanaian striker Asamoah Gyan scored the match winner against the United States in the Round of 16. An African team beat the United States in South Africa. There was something magical about that.

(Also, yesterday Morocco beat Canada 2-1, winning their group and making them the second African team to qualify for the knockout stages! I am overjoyed!) 

Stars and Stripes. Red, White, and Blue. There have been countless American flags and American apparel, as it were, in the stands when the U.S. have played. This is, of course, normal behavior. But there is something different about seeing the American flag on display like this. Miles has already touched upon the political and historical points of this discomfort, so I won’t repeat them. However, in one word, it’s arrogance. There’s an inherent belief that the United States is the greatest at everything, that losing is unimaginable. And this, for all its political flaws, is also just really annoying.

But this World Cup has also seen U.S. supporters adopt another emblem: a yellow rectangle with the word BELIEVE scrawled inside. It’s from the hit Apple TV+ show Ted Lasso: the eponymous American-football coach (played by Jason Sudeikis) becomes the manager of a side—the fictionalized AFC Richmond—in the English Premier League.

When the show premiered in late 2020, I was highly skeptical. Ted Lasso was originally a character from an NBC Sports commercial that was meant to encourage Americans to follow the English Premier League. Does an entire television show based off of a commercial sound gross? Yes, it very much does.

(I’d be very curious to see if the show’s popularity has led to an increased interest in soccer. If so, that would be, considering that soccer is a sport I love, good! But that was also the goal of the commercial in the first place. Damn!)   

But, incredibly, I think the first season of Ted Lasso was good. For many people the show into their lives at the right time. We were living in the height of COVID, isolated and scared. Along comes Ted Lasso, a character who is joyful, comforting, kind. It’s a show about forgiveness and the recognition of others’ pain.

When Rebecca (Hannah Waddingham) comes clean to Ted about the true intentions behind his hiring—she had planned for him to fail because it was, in her mind, the only way to hurt her ex-husband—he isn’t outraged. Rather, as someone who has recently gone through a divorce himself, he offers compassion.

Of course, the show also follows AFC Richmond as they fight to avoid relegation. As the end of the season looms, AFC Richmond need to secure one point from their final match against real-world villains Manchester City. As the final whistle nears, Richmond are down 1-0. Relegation looks imminent. But then, in dramatic fashion, AFC Richmond scores in added time. The season is saved. Compassion and forgiveness are rewarded. 

Except, this doesn’t happen. Manchester City score at the death thanks to a late, uncharacteristically unselfish play by former AFC Richmond striker Jamie Tartt (Phil Dunster). The team is relegated. 

What I love about this moment is that it contradicts the American sports narrative we’ve become accustomed to: winning is the point. It’s black and white. Nothing else matters. But I would contest that failure is not a bad thing, and that, in the case of Ted Lasso, the impact of the story is totally separated from whether the team wins or loses. It was such a refreshing conclusion.  

But, of course, because the show was a massive success, a second season was greenlit. And it sucks. It’s so bad. And we’ll probably get more bad seasons. Because we know where the show is going. AFC Richmond are going to fictionalize Leicester City’s success. Losing is unimaginable. 

Lack, I know that you want to write about Ted Lasso yourself. If you feel up for it, I’d love to hear what you have to say!

Lastly, because it means so much to my closest friends, I will be very pleased if the US continue to do well in the World Cup. Maybe it’s because of this project. Maybe the team has grown on me. I genuinely think they have a good chance against the Netherlands—a team that has underwhelmed—and tomorrow I will shed my apathy and support our team, no matter how arrogant they may be.

To quote the great Nigel Powers: There are only two things I can't stand in this world: People who are intolerant of other people's cultures, and the Dutch. 

With belief,

Russ