Wake Me When the World Cup Starts

Four years. Four years of waiting for the World Cup to come back around — and I was asleep by the 35th minute of the very first game.

Not a metaphor. Actually asleep. On the sofa, during the opening match of the biggest sporting event on the planet, my eyes just… closed. If the football can’t keep a man who’s been counting down for four years awake past the half-hour mark, something has gone wrong.

The scene of the crime: Mexico vs South Africa

Let’s talk about South Africa, because I have to get this off my chest. What was that?

They couldn’t string two passes together. Two. An opening match of a World Cup is supposed to grab you by the collar and announce that the next six weeks are going to be glorious. This one quietly tucked me in and turned off the lights. The xG wouldn’t have woken a sleeping cat. It wasn’t a football match so much as a very long, very polite refusal to play football.

You wait four years for the curtain to go up, and the first act is two teams seemingly terrified of the ball.

In defence of the only thing that showed up: the Azteca

And yet — credit where it’s due, and it’s due in enormous quantity — the Azteca.

What a cathedral. The opening ceremony, the colour, that great green wall of Mexican fans, the noise rolling down off those steep stands like weather. This is the stadium that gave us Pelé lifting the trophy in 1970 and Maradona’s Hand of God and his Goal of the Century in 1986 — the only ground to ever host two World Cup finals, now opening a third tournament. It has seen things. It radiates them.

The building was magnificent. The atmosphere was everything you could want. The vibes, the fans, the sheer cathedral-ness of the place — genuinely beautiful, and I loved every second of it. The only problem was the actual match happening inside it. The venue brought a ten out of ten. The footballers forgot to show up to their own party.

And it wasn’t just the one game

Because Korea vs Czechia did me no favours either. Scoreless tedium until a couple of goals finally went in late and briefly forced everyone — me included, jolted awake — to care. Two boring games to christen the biggest show on earth. Day one, and the headline was the stadium architecture, not the football.

Okay — the honest part

In fairness to the tournament, and to my own four-years-of-hype: opening games are always like this. Nobody wants to lose the first match of a six-week marathon. With 48 teams and the expanded format, a cagey draw on matchday one isn’t fatal, so everyone plays not-to-lose instead of to-win. The good stuff comes later — it always does. I’m not writing off a whole World Cup because of one sleepy afternoon. I know better.

But there’s a nag I can’t shake, and it ties straight back to the two other things I’ve written here.

I wrote that 2010 was the most human World Cup ever — soul, songs, a continent’s heart. And I wrote about how football optimised the soul out of itself — caution, systems, the fear of losing sanding off the joy. Day one felt like Exhibit C in that second essay. The same risk-aversion that flattened club football has now reached the World Cup’s front door. Even here — the one tournament that’s supposed to be pure romance, the thing we wait four years for — the opening act was two teams more frightened of losing than hungry to win.

That’s the bit that stings. Not that the games were bad — first-day games are often bad. It’s that the fear has crept into the one place that was supposed to be immune to it.

So, for now

The Azteca was a cathedral and the football was a sermon I slept through. The stadium did its job. The opening ceremony did its job. The fans did their job. The twenty-two players on the pitch filed a sick note.

I’m not giving up — I’ll be back on that sofa tonight, and the night after, because that’s the deal you make with this tournament. But somebody, please, wake the World Cup up. Right now it’s snoozing, and it’s taking me down with it.

Wake me when it actually starts.

— Written one eye open, the other already gone.