Words. Ideas. Actions.

19 December 2022

What a Final. And what a tournament. I want to relive it a little bit tonight, pointing out a few moments which stuck out to me and describing some of what I was feeling, based on the notes I jotted down for myself between numerous bouts of either holding my breath or screaming at the top of my lungs. 

But before we get started, a few notes. First, one of the many reasons I did not travel to what would have been my seventh World Cup trip was because of the rampant corruption involved in the awarding of the 2022 event to Qatar. There are many great articles about what went into Qatar’s winning bid, but I’d rather recommend a book by Ken Bensinger called Red Card: How the U.S. Blew the Whistle on the World's Biggest Sports Scandal. 

One of the other reasons this year’s trip didn’t happen was due to the callous disregard both FIFA and the officials in Qatar showed to the workers who created the infrastructure needed to host this spectacle in the middle of a desert. It’s unspeakable that, for those of us who love this game, there is no way around the fact that in order to enjoy these matches we have to perform a large exercise of compartmentalization. When we watch, we also need to acknowledge the costs that these games have come with. We cannot justify these deaths. We cannot ignore them. And we should not stop talking about what happened just because we’ve already heard the final whistle. 

Lastly, there is the site itself. Now, there have been valid criticisms about each and every host country that I’ve visited since witnessing my first match in 1994, but this year feels different. The fact that there are numerous laws on their books which they essentially suspended for the duration, but will go back to enforcing immediately afterwards, means the global lens FIFA likes to celebrate when touting how the tournament can foster global change is laughable. Unmarried couples living together is against the law. So is crossdressing. And consensual sex with a same-sex partner. Even spending one tourist dollar in passive support of those laws was a non-starter for me.

Now, with that documented, let’s get to the game (I’m replaying a recording of it right now as I type this!). Even though my Italians weren’t in it this year, I cheered and fretted and worried as if it were 1994 all over again. But this time, it was for Lionel Messi. I’m old enough to have seen Pelé play in the NASL against my beloved Rowdies. I’ve also been lucky enough to have seen Messi play in a few World Cup matches. So I really wanted to see him add this trophy to his long list of accomplishments. 

I had quiet confidence most of the tournament. Even after the first match loss to Saudi Arabia, believe it or not. This year's team seemed much more together. United. And more broadly talented than squads which tended to feature 11 stars only briefly playing on the same pitch together. The group Lionel Scaloni put together each had pieces to contribute to the puzzle as a whole, without relying on Messi to be the biggest, most important piece. This win wouldn’t have happened without the continued contributions from his teammates. It’s the first squad in a while where he wasn’t asked to carry most of them on his back.

Whether it was the way Rodrigo de Paul continually fought through tackles, Alexis Mac Allister threading through the French midfield, or how Ángel Di María kept attacking up the left side of the field to create chance after chance in the box, we saw that this was a team playing to their strengths over and over again. And let’s not leave a pair of Martínez-es out of the discussion. Lautaro Martínez’s late substitution brought a much-needed spark to an increasingly winded squad. As for the keeper, Emiliano Martínez, it’s pretty obvious that despite not seeing a shot from France until the 70th minute, his saves in the last seconds of the second period of extra time, and the huge penalty-kick save on Kingsley Coman during the shoot out are what cemented the Argentine win.

Lionel Messi is the story, though. As he should be. I had some fun the other night letting ChatGPT help me make an argument about how good he is. But even if we look at just his stats from the 2022 tournament, he was remarkable. He played all 690 minutes of Argentina’s games, surpassing Italy’s Paolo Maldini (my absolute favorite player) for most played. He scored 7 goals in 7 games — 2 of those in the Final — one short of the 8 from Golden Boot winner Kylian Mbappé. Oh, he also had 3 assists. It was an absolutely remarkable tournament for the 35-year-old, definitely deserving of the Golden Ball award for the best player of the tournament.

As I look back now, almost two full days later, there’s so much I will miss of this tournament, like the tenacity of the Moroccan defense and the whistles from their fans. I’ll miss the tight passing and ball control from the Japanese team. The sounds of the horns and spirit of hope from the Senegalese. The chants and never-ending effort from the South Koreans. But mostly, I’ll miss the daily reminders that this game rewards not just talent, but teamwork.  Thankfully, another World Cup starts in just seven months when the women kick off in Auckland, New Zealand.

See you tomorrow?

09 December 2022

I was so looking forward to writing tonight's post after viewing two unbelievable World Cup quarterfinal matches today. I wanted to talk about Brazil going home. The tenacity of the Croatians. My hatred of penalty kicks. And then I’d probably struggle to not spew a book-length number of words about the monumental match between The Netherlands and Argentina. But that all changed when I headed out with the dog for our last walk of the evening. I grabbed my coat, and the leash, cued up my evening podcasts in my headphones and headed out the door. Not halfway down the block, I was stopped in my tracks by the hourly NPR News podcast update reporting that Grant Wahl has died. 

At the moment, I think the only thing that’s clear to me is how stunned I am. For U.S. soccer fans, I think that feeling is pretty prevalent. Wahl was one of us, an advocate for a game we loved that struggled for years to gain a secure foothold in the imaginations of most of our otherwise sports-obsessed population. He reported with passion and curiosity in equal amounts. And he did it on his own terms, even after getting canned by Sports Illustrated in 2020. 

Since venturing out on his own, he still brought the same integrity and reporting to us, despite having to provide all the support infrastructure for it himself. I only met him once, after a disastrous EURO 2012 Final in Kyiv. I was still licking my wounds after seeing Spain completely dismantle my Italians, 4 – 0, but he was eager to talk to another American who had made his way to Ukraine to feed his passion for The Beautiful Game. What I remember most about our conversation was how quickly he put me at ease, not having to prove his stature or his credentials; just two guys talking about witnessing the game they loved in an unfamiliar land. Again. And how often we had both done that. 

Now, this isn’t the time or place to talk about the merits of parasocial relationships, but when you’ve been following someone for years, through podcasts, newsletters, and a publicly shared soccer calendar, you develop a familiarness that is unlike most other relationships you have with people you only know online. These mediums, and the number of ways we can connect, leads to a closeness and intimacy that’s hard to describe. You are part of a community of two, but it’s unidirectional. When that relationship ends, though, the pain is real. Even if it feels a little … I’m struggling for the right word … silly? It’s a loss, for sure. But not one which you’ll feel as acutely as his family, friends, and colleagues. But you mourn nonetheless.

With all that is wrong about this World Cup, Grant Wahl was everything that was right. He balanced his love and knowledge of the beautiful game with the critical, unflinching eye that’s so needed in today’s game in an attempt to hold officials accountable. During what has been — in my opinion — one of the most fascinating tournaments ever held, I cannot wrap my mind around the fact that he won’t see how it will end. The coverage, and our understanding of it, will be much lesser for it. 

See you tomorrow?

02 December 2022

I want to revisit an idea that I mentioned a few days ago. When I talked about the World Cup, and the FIFA World rankings, I got a bit hot under the collar about how sure certain commentators are about their predictions. A lot of this confidence comes from the arrogance of ignorance. But another good portion comes from a lack of imagination about how well a team can come together when they share a vision and purpose. 

Now, I don’t think this tonight’s post will be as long, or as much of a tirade as that other one, but who knows? What I do know is that there is a prevailing wisdom that there are things that should happen “on paper,” but when results turn out differently, these talking heads are stunned. So, let’s break that down a little bit. For analysts to compare teams, they usually do it one-to-one; which goalkeeper is better, who has the more prolific forwards, which defender is the fastest. They may even go so far as to compare individual matchups, trying to predict how a forward may fare against a specific defender, for example. All of those comparisons can be done on paper. But that’s exactly the reason why they’re shit. Nobody plays the game on paper.

When these players take the field, they do it as a team. And if their coaches and training have been effective, they become a greater entity working as one whole than they do as individual 11. That cohesion isn’t going to show up on any stats sheet. Just look at this year’s squad from Japan as a prime example of this. They have, twice, come from behind to win games very few analysts gave them a shot in. But they believed in themselves. Believed in their system. In their coaching. And they never quit. It’s been remarkable to watch. And the same argument can be made for Morocco or Australia or Senegal. These “underdog” teams are playing better than expected because the expectations are on paper, and they all came to win on the pitch. 

As the knock-out round gets ready to kick off, and the favorites start to dominate, it’s not going to be because they’re better on paper. It’s going to come down to training and coaching and conditioning. More likely than not, Brazil will get a long way through toward the Final. But if this tournament has proven anything, it’s that no one knows anything. And the five-time winners could be derailed by something utterly unpredictable, like a fluky own-goal, deteriorating field conditions, or a team-wide outbreak of COVID. We don’t know what’s going to happen in the hours and days to come. That’s true in football and in life. But I’d love it if we could contain a little more of life’s unpredictability to soccer instead of our survival.

See you tomorrow?

29 November 2022

Fair warning: I have no idea how long this post is going to be tonight. I have a very ranty idea in my head, and a self-imposed deadline to get this out before midnight, so depending on how quickly the thoughts come, and how much or how little editing I do on these paragraphs, the length and conclusion of this post is, at this point, totally unknown. And, coincidentally, that unpredictability pairs very well with what I want to think out loud about this evening. Strap in, and let’s go for a ride.

See, as you probably know, I’ve been watching the World Cup. I always watch, even in this problematic year. I can’t help it. It is my favorite sporting event. By far. It’s why I have traveled to six of them. The reason I bring it up is because I want to tie it to another one of my passions: politics. And this year, more than most, recent results have shown that we put too much faith in “experts” when really they’re just pundits. And I’ve been wondering why.

Let’s start with The Beautiful Game. This tournament, more than most, has been rife with upsets. And not just little surprises. These are big, foundation-shaking stunners. I mentioned in a previous post about Argentina’s loss to Saudi Arabia. That’s still probably the most monumental one. Since then, however, we’ve seen favorites like Germany, Belgium, and South Korea fall to “underdogs.” I mean Japan surprised Germany, and then gets a proper shock themselves from Costa Rica. This tournament has been bananas.

Next, let’s look at the recent mid-term elections. There are a number of reasons why we’re still trying to figure out how, and who, got so many predictions wrong, but one of the underreported aspects of all the horse-race election coverage is accountability. See, when talking heads tell you what they think is going to happen, and then the exact opposite thing occurs, do we hear from them less? No. And why not? Because they’re not measured by how many predictions they get right. They’re rewarded for how many eyeballs watched them make the call in the first place. We’ve incentivized the attention instead of the accuracy. And that can be said for a lot of the news industry these days. 

But if we go deeper and ask why these predictions are so wrong so often, we uncover another flaw in the way our news is presented to us: familiarity. The same people go to the same parties and hear the same stories from the same faces. These get repeated over and over enough to become conventional wisdom. And then we get spoonful after spoonful of it fed to us each election cycle, again and again. 

To combat this, though, some outlets partake in mid-western diner tourism, thinking if they find enough anecdotal, contrarian opinions, they’ve presented “both sides” of an argument. What we really need, though, are facts. And we’re just not that good at finding and presenting those in a way where people will actually pay attention. Instead, we get “roundtables.” And “expert opinions.” And polling (for a great look at polls, take a listen to this episode of “Planet Money”). But all of this is just the same handfuls of people talking about what’s familiar to them, with those also familiar to them, rather than really getting out and discovering what they actually know and what they don’t. Then, we wake up the day after election day to “surprises” and “upsets” and “stunners.” While all these uncertain outcomes make these great spectacles, we need to ask ourselves — whether they’re World Cup Matches or election results — why we’re aghast at these outcomes.  

If we consider these legitimate upsets, we first have to put faith in the systems we rely on for our conventional wisdom in the first place. And, as we’ve seen over and over vividly illustrated in these last few years, our existing systems have — to put it mildly — some blindspots. 

Now, I want to be careful here and not go down the “do your own research” rabbit hole. That’s definitely not what I’m saying. What I’m trying to point out is that there is a place for experts, and there is a place for opinions. But we need to do a better job at separating, scrutinizing, and evaluating them. Let’s go back to The Cup for a moment. When these pre-game talking heads tell you that a team is ranked #1 in the world, do you know what that’s based on? I sure didn’t. And I watch this stuff like my life depends on it. So, what goes into a FIFA World ranking? Well, I “did my own research” and here’s a part of the explanation, according to FIFA themselves: 

The points which are added or subtracted are partially determined by the relative strength of the two opponents, including the logical expectation that teams higher in the ranking should fare better against teams lower in the ranking.

The “logical expectation”‽ Whose, the kleptocrats in FIFA; give me a break! As detailed in FIFA’s own documentation, one portion of the points formula is the “expected result of the match” and that expectation is based on the “difference in ratings of the two playing teams”. Let’s break that down for a second: The formula for the ranking includes a variable for the expected winner which is based on … wait for it … the rankings of the two teams playing against each other. That’s like asking the inventor of the pencil what the best writing implement is. It’s turtles all the way down.

To digress a bit, (I know, this entire post feels like a series of digressions, but please hang with me for a bit more) one of the ways people talk about Twitter is to position it as a global town square. I’ve always had trouble with that for a number of reasons, but let’s assume for a moment that it is. Or was (we don’t have time for a digression within a digression). In this global town square, you’re not going to listen to everyone talking all at once. Even if you wanted to, you can’t. So you pick and choose the conversations you want to be part of. You self-select. You start your own. And then, all of a sudden, you’ve gone from being able to be part of any and every conversation on the globe to a select few where you either feel comfortable or confident. Which probably just reaffirms what you already believe. Think about it, how many times was your mind changed based on something you saw in a Tweet? I bet it’s very few. But you definitely Liked and Retweeted the opinions you agreed with, right? Or added an endorsement to those who put your thoughts more eloquently than you ever could. I know I’ve done that. Many times. So maybe because I did it, I assume you did it, too? See, confirmation bias!

We create these bubbles for ourselves, convinced that we know best. But the confirmation bias is moving us to a place where we are placing so much faith in names that we know that we fail to recognize when we actually have no idea about something. Mainly because we want so desperately to believe it ourselves. But that conviction doesn’t make it true, does it? I don’t really have any great solution for this. I wish I did. I guess I just offer some advice: Be as curious as you are skeptical. Including about all you’ve just read here. Almost everything I think I know I learned from a source I trusted. But I’m old enough to understand that what I learned a few years ago may be outdated. Or too myopic. Or just plain misremembered. Experts have their place. As do lived experiences. And if you put enough of those together, you get just enough information to be comfortable. But I’ve never learned anything new from my comfort zone. Here’s to getting a little more uncomfortable.

See you tomorrow?

21 November 2022

Tonight, let’s start with some facts:

1. I’m writing these posts in an effort to collect some of my thoughts instead of posting them to Twitter.

2. For better or worse, most of my thoughts lately have been about Twitter.

3. I love watching the World Cup.

4. Supporting the World Cup this year (and in 2018, to be honest) is more than problematic.

5. Watching the World Cup without Tweeting about it eliminates a ton of the enjoyment I get out of the tournament.

6. I’m having a very hard time enjoying the things that I love while they are simultaneously being destroyed by ego and greed.

In 2018, I spent hours in The Lodge on the fifth floor of Twitter’s HQ watching match after match of the last World Cup. I was taking pictures and encouraging people to wear their favorite jerseys to work and help create a community around one of my favorite events. All of it was to help illustrate that you could be yourself when you came to work for Twitter. Your passions and personality matter, and we wanted it to show up every day. Since I just so happened to be the Design And Research blog’s editor-in-chief at the time, I also assigned myself a blog post about it, in part to justify all my screen time down there.

I’ve written about the World Cup many times before. In fact, the first item I ever posted on Medium was about going to my first match in 1994. Since that inaugural outing, I’ve traveled to France 98, Korea Japan 2002, Germany 2006, South Africa 2010, and the 2014 edition in Brazil. But with each passing tournament, being a fan of the World Cup became more and more problematic because it also meant you had to be a customer of FIFA. And the level of corruption and misdeeds there just kept getting bigger and bigger. Between the bribery in awarding Russia the 2018 event, and the fact that neither the U.S. nor my beloved Italians qualified for it, I was more than deterred from going to see any matches that year. Watching them at work, and turning those viewing sessions into something positive, just felt like the right antidote.

Putting aside the fact that Italy again failed to qualify this year, the corruption, human rights record, and abuses of the workers hired to build all the needed infrastructure kept me from getting on a plane to Qatar this year. Surely, though, I could find a World Cup community at my new job, especially with the help of my Twitter feed, right? Well, as we now know, Twitter is far from the tool it used to be for following the Cup this year. And I’m left with a very similar question: How can I continue to enjoy something when I disagree so vociferously with the people who control it?

Like many things I enjoy in my life, the enjoyment includes introducing and sharing them with others. Most of the time, that sharing came through Twitter. Without that outlet this year, I’m finding the already subdued reaction I’m having to this year’s World Cup — it’s in November for chrissakes! — even more muted as I watch without a large part of my community.  There’s no immediacy. No online joy. No memes! I hope that this post, and the ones which will probably follow, will help me find a new tribe. Maybe even on Post. But if you’re watching, too, and have complicated feelings about enjoying the matches or Tweeting your reactions, or both, please know that I’m here for you. Even if the Azzurri are not.

See you tomorrow?