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