Klinsmann, Jurgen

A common language and a common goal have resulted in a homogenizing of the World Cup’s teams, and a rise in parity.DOHA, Qatar — The key word of this World Cup is not one that FIFA would be especially happy to plaster on its marketing materials. It has become the tournament’s leitmotif, the focus of countless news conferences and interviews. It has been cast as the sport’s ultimate virtue.We have been told, again and again over the past month, that there is one trait more than any other that a player must possess, that a team must display, that determines who gets to win and who has to lose: the ability, as almost everyone involved in the tournament has said, to suffer.It has been used as a warning: Luka Modric, a Croatia midfielder, declared in the round of 16 that his team was “used to suffering, and if we have to suffer, we will.” It has been used as a boast: “We have an excellent technical staff, we know how to suffer,” Croatia’s manager, Zlatko Dalic, said a few days later.Some teams see it as part of their identity — “We are a team that knows how to suffer,” the French defender Jules Koundé said after a semifinal victory — and some see it as an option of last resort. “We know how to suffer when it is necessary,” as Lionel Messi put it after a semifinal victory over Croatia. Very occasionally, a stray voice arises, wondering if it is all such a good idea. “We know how to suffer,” Messi’s Argentina teammate Nicolás Tagliafico said. “But we must try to suffer less.”If the word sounds just a touch discordant in English — this expression, it seems most likely, has entered the sport’s lingua franca from the Spanish verb sufrir and would be better translated as “endure” — it fairly neatly encapsulates the nature of the soccer we have seen over the past month.France ended Morocco’s unlikely run in the semifinals.Kirill Kudryavtsev/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThere has been no shortage of tense, compelling games in Qatar. Whether that quite justified the assertion of Gianni Infantino, the FIFA president, that this tournament produced the “best ever” group stage is a little more complex. Tense, compelling games are, after all, the World Cup’s calling card: Its rarity and its unforgiving format mean that this is essentially what it is designed to produce.A Brief Guide to the 2022 World CupCard 1 of 9What is the World Cup? More