Opening the Post-World Cup Mailbag

For the better part of six weeks, the number has been ticking inexorably higher, the angry red of the icon on the corner of my inbox indicating the urgency of the situation. There was a flood of messages after the end of the World Cup, a steady flow as the holidays started, even a trickle on Christmas Eve, dashed off as gifts were being wrapped and stockings hung.

Many of the notes were generous, touching messages of thanks and support, but others contained thoughts and ideas and comments and questions, and though they were all appreciated, they weighed heavy, too: all of those emails left unattended, unanswered, howling at me in their void.

Well, New Year, New Me: at last, a chance to sit down and catch up on all of the passionate, intelligent, funny and occasionally downright outraged correspondence that has drifted into my inbox in the last few weeks. Thanks for every single one of them. Even the ones that are, as outlined below, wrong.

Let’s start with the subject that seems to have animated more of you than any other: the assertion that December’s World Cup final might have been not just the greatest final of all time, but the greatest game.

Perhaps, many of you suggested, that was written in the heat of the moment. It had been a long month in the dissembling unreality of Qatar’s, and FIFA’s, Snow Crash vision of the future. The lights had been so bright and the music so loud that it had, at times, been impossible to think clearly. Maybe that effect lingered?

“Your judgment and perspective are usually spot on, but ‘Greatest World Cup final’? Really?” exclaimed Richard Fursland. Just as baffled was Greg Zlotnick: “The first 80 minutes were fairly dreary, and France barely made it into the Argentine half. Extra time was intense and exciting, but does the best game ever start with 80 of the first 90 minutes being lopsided and end in penalty kicks?”

Stuart Forbes, on the other hand, was straight to the point. “You are drinking the FIFA Kool-Aid,” he suggested, inadvertently offering for free the sort of sponsorship suggestion FIFA would happily pay a consultant a six-figure fee to make.

“It was very entertaining, but surely Argentina dominated the first 75 minutes against a distinctly off-color France? Was it really the greatest World Cup final ever? And was the move for Ángel Di María’s goal better than that for Carlos Alberto in 1970?”

With the benefit of a couple of weeks of perspective, looking at all of this in the cold light of reality — and there is no colder light of reality than Yorkshire in December — I would say: yes, to both.

As the novelist Christopher Priest has put it, there are three parts to a magic trick. The first is the Pledge: something fundamentally routine, unremarkable, such as the first 80 minutes of the final. The second is the Turn: Kylian Mbappé’s devastating two-minute intervention.

But both of those are building to the Prestige, the denouement that brings the audience to its feet. What happened in those final 40 minutes at Lusail is not separate from, or in some way diminished by, the relative ordinariness of what preceded it. The slow burn and the sudden ignition are all part of the same trick.

Indeed, only one thing might have improved this year’s final: the swift, ruthless judgment of penalties should not count against the majesty of the game, but either Randal Kolo Muani or Lautaro Martínez scoring in the final minute of injury time in extra time would, admittedly, have proved more satisfactory, somehow.

Still, though, it is hard to think of a compelling way to answer Robert Lanza’s question. “What other finals would be contenders as the greatest?” he asked, before pitching Uruguay’s victory against Brazil in 1950 as perhaps the most convincing.

That was not quite a final, though: The tournament was not a pure knockout then; Brazil would have won the World Cup simply by avoiding defeat. A case can be made for England’s extra-time win against Germany in 1966 — a last-minute equalizer to take the game to extra time, a controversial, match-defining goal — and Argentina’s win in Mexico in 1986.

Just as in 2022, both of those finals had overarching narratives: England’s quest to win its first World Cup in the former; Diego Maradona’s attempt to prove his status as the best player on the planet in the latter. Perhaps the answer is time, and age, and circumstance: The World Cup, after all, means different things to different people. Lionel Messi has been the player of my lifetime; his triumph, his glory, resonates in a way that Bobby Charlton’s or Maradona’s does not, for me.

On the goal, there is less scope for mitigation and interpretation. Mary Loch may not even have regarded Di María’s strike as the best of the game — “I believe Mbappé’s second goal was the greatest goal of the final,” she wrote — but I’m inclined to go with the counterargument, as provided by Jurek Patoczka.

“I would challenge anybody to show me a goal, anywhere, anytime, that was scored after a sequence of six one-touch passes,” he wrote. “And this was on the grandest stage possible.”

Having relitigated all of that — and changed absolutely nobody’s minds in the process — we can move on, grumbling with discontent. Jacqueline Davis wanted to know if this would be the last time we see the World Cup take place in both the Arab world and the European winter.

“I heard Saudi Arabia was being encouraged to throw its hat in the ring for 2030,” she wrote. “Would that not present many of the same difficulties as Qatar? Did the experience of 2022 improve the Arab world’s chances?”

The answer, there, is unquestionably yes. If anything, Qatar has effectively provided a blueprint for what FIFA would like the World Cup to look like in the future. The nostalgic, romantic choice for 2030 is a South American bid that includes Uruguay, host of the first tournament a century earlier. The practical one, from FIFA’s point of view, is an impossibly wealthy autocracy that can provide the same sort of fantasyland as it enjoyed in Doha.

Gunnar Birgisson is more concerned by the format of future tournaments. He worries that 32 teams is too few, but that 48 — as planned for 2026 and beyond — means teams that “don’t really have the quality to participate” will end up as seat-fillers and cannon fodder, rendering “qualification in North and South America largely meaningless.”

His solution is both original and elegant. “Keep the 32-team format but create more playoffs between teams in different continents as a sort of pre-World Cup tournament,” he suggested. Continents would have a certain number of guaranteed slots, but an additional number of teams would participate in the playoffs, allowing a continent to earn additional spots.

That is an idea FIFA has skirted, at times, as part of its ongoing Big Thoughts approach to growth, and it is one that has some merit: retaining the symmetry of the current set-up while allowing for some expansion. The downside, of course, is that it would take longer, and teams that have to go through the extra qualifiers would be at something of a disadvantage for the finals tournament itself.

Given that FIFA has accepted that its original plan, for 16 groups of three teams, was as awful as everyone could see it would be as soon as it was mentioned, there is still room for these sorts of ideas to be adopted in time for 2026, though there is a different question occupying Jacob Myers.

“What will it take for soccer fandom in America and Major League Soccer to take off following the 2026 World Cup?” he asked. “There has been this thought that the World Cup in the U.S. in 2026 will automatically launch the sport into new heights. There’s likely to be a boost, but this idea of soccer all of a sudden gaining a ton of popularity year-round is offered up without any interrogation of the logistics.”

The problem with this question — and we ask a version of it on the other side of the Atlantic, too — is I’m never quite sure what the bar is supposed to be. Does the United States have a popular domestic league? Are attendances pretty strong? Is youth participation booming? Are your television schedules infused with endless soccer coverage that would have been unimaginable a decade ago?

It’s very much a yes, to all of the above, right? Of course, M.L.S. can continue to grow in popularity. Viewing figures can go up. Things like the World Cup final will help to bring in new fans. But, from a few thousand miles away, it looks an awful lot like soccer is now embedded in the U.S. sporting consciousness. In such a competitive landscape, that is no mean feat. 2026 is not, in that sense, soccer breaking new ground; it is, if anything, its coming out party, a showcase of just how much it belongs.

If that does not convince you, let’s finish on this, from Paul Bauer. “Living in a senior citizen condo complex in New Jersey, I am surrounded by neighbors whose understanding of soccer is that it exists,” he wrote. “This World Cup changed that. After the final, neighbors who never watch approached me and shared with me how much they enjoyed the game. I’m so glad that they now understand my passion for football. The rest will follow.”

The Glaringly Obvious

Jürgen Klopp is, as a rule, right about soccer’s unhealthy obsession with transfers. He is right to be exasperated, and more than a little irritated, by not only the demand for constant churn but the veneration of it, by the deep-seated belief that every problem is a recruitment problem, by the ease with which fans spend their own teams’ money.

He must know, by now, that trying to persuade people to his way of thinking and Liverpool’s way of working is — in his own words — like talking to a microwave. But there is something admirable in the fact that he continues doing it. “We signed an outstanding player like Cody Gakpo,” he said last week, “and then next thing you can read is: ‘Who next?’ It’s like we didn’t have a team.”

The problem, in this instance, is that those voices telling Klopp to spend money — not just fans, but members of the Premier League’s grand constellation of talking heads — are not doing so because they are bored, or fickle, or because they are unreconstructed spendthrifts. They are doing so because Liverpool, very clearly, has a problem in midfield, one that the $50 million signing of Gakpo — a wide forward — does not address.

There might, in time, be a recognized condition in soccer in which a manager’s desire for their advocated approach to be proved right begins to impact, negatively, on their ability to win games. It might be called Mourinho Syndrome, for the camera-shy Portuguese, or Wengeritis, for the noted FIFA apparatchik.

Ordinarily, it affects the way a manager wants their team to play, manifesting in a refusal to adopt new methods or ideas, or to amend obvious shortcomings on the field. Klopp is too open-minded, too happy to delegate, to be at risk of that. It is possible, though, that he has reiterated so often that not every problem is to do with personnel that he is either no longer able or no longer willing to recognize when that is precisely the issue.