A World Cup, hosted by a nation at war with one of the participating countries, in an age of bitter polarisation, ended in contradiction rather than triumph.
Minutes after Spain’s final whistle, Leandro Paredes had Eric Garcia by the throat and was sent off for it. Nahuel Molina appeared to punch Spain captain Rodri as he ran past. Lionel Scaloni had to physically prise his own coaching staff off Spain’s players. It was, by several accounts, a disgraceful way for Argentina’s tournament to end. And in the same few minutes, on the same pitch, Lamine Yamal walked over to a Messi sitting alone on the turf, and held him.
Both things happened. Neither cancels the other out. If this World Cup proved anything about football and the world pressing in around it, it is that the sport does not transcend its politics and its ugliness so much as absorb them, and still, somehow, keep finding room for grace.
Spain’s tactical masterclass shut Messi out of the final; Argentina, ten men for the closing stretch after Enzo Fernandez’s second yellow, couldn’t engineer one last escape.
It was one-sided for long periods, but both sides had fought hard, and the frustration boiled over the instant the whistle went. What followed the brawl mattered more than the brawl itself. One Barcelona legend and another in the making, in the same frame: a photograph worth explaining to anyone who thinks football has stopped being able to surprise you.
Many non-sporting narratives tried to attach themselves to this tournament. Some had real substance. In the lead-up to the World Cup, FIFA opened disciplinary proceedings against Spain’s own federation after fans chanted “whoever doesn’t jump is a Muslim” during a warm-up friendly against Egypt.
Yamal, who is himself Muslim, condemned it as the work of “ignorant and racist people” before his own brilliance at the tournament pushed the story into the background. Iran’s federation accused US authorities of harassing captain Mehdi Taremi at an airport; the White House’s World Cup task force disputed the claim, saying the team had arrived early. Neither version fully survived contact with the football.
Why does the game keep finding itself dragged into these fights? Football’s global reach is its blessing and its curse in the same breath. It is one of the only stages that puts nations still nursing old, unhealed wounds on the same pitch, under the same lights, and asks them to just play. That reach also invites everyone in: historians, sociologists, opinion writers who otherwise stay admirably impartial in their own fields but turn into partisans the moment their favourite team walks out. Football is better read by Johan Cruyff, Alex Ferguson and Pep Guardiola than by Plato or Freud.
Every four years it gets over-intellectualised anyway. Its real virtue is simplicity: eleven against eleven, two goals to aim at.
The tournament’s best stories understood that instinctively. Iran’s goalkeeper, Alireza Beiranvand, grew up in a nomadic shepherding family in Lorestan and ran away to Tehran as a teenager with no money and no contacts, sleeping outside a club’s gates and surviving on odd jobs: washing cars, sweeping streets, working a late-night pizza shop. Against Belgium, he made seven saves to hold a goalless draw, Iran’s wall standing between his country and elimination.
A FIFA-approved referee, the Somali official Omar Artan, was detained for roughly eleven hours at a US airport and deported before he ever took charge of a match, on “vetting concerns” a White House official could not substantiate beyond alleging he had been “talking to some very bad people.”
A different kind of immigrant story, welcomed rather than turned away, unfolded around Canada’s captain, Alphonso Davies, born in a Ghanaian refugee camp after his parents fled Liberia’s civil war, raised in Edmonton from the age of five. He wore the armband as Canada, co-hosting for the first time, reached the knockout stage for the first time in the country’s history, though it was his teammate Stephen Eustaquio, not Davies himself, who scored the stoppage-time goal that got them there, seconds after handing Davies the armband on his tournament debut as a substitute.
America’s own visa costs produced an uglier footnote and, eventually, a warmer one. The $15,000 bond the US demanded of visitors from Cape Verde, among other nations, kept Vozinha’s mother from watching her son’s first World Cup match, a stunning goalless draw against Spain in which the 40-year-old goalkeeper made seven saves of his own. He spoke about missing her afterwards, visibly moved. A fan-funded campaign and an intervention from US House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries got her a visa in time for the next game. She was in the stands to see him play Uruguay.
The more this World Cup drifted from football, into visa fees and deportations and airport disputes and, finally, into fists after the final whistle, the more its footballers dragged it back: an old rival’s arm around a beaten Messi, a goalkeeper’s hard-won clean sheet, a mother reunited with her son in time to watch him play.
Football did not defeat the ugliness around it this time. It just kept being good enough, often enough, that the ugliness never got the last word.
The writer is National Sports Editor, The Indian Express
sandeep.dwivedi@expressindia.com
Football needs to be left alone. Give it a break, it's merely a contest between two sides of 11 players, aiming to put the ball in the two cages on either end of the field 
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