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