The beautiful game’s losing streak
As the World Cup gets going, it’s worth remembering that the natural state of the football fan is disappointment.
This past season, 20 teams competed for the English Premier League. 19 of them failed to win it. Only Arsenal fans can celebrate victory and even that is tinged with disappointment as they lost the Champions League final.
I should know. For most of my life I have supported Bristol City, the most boring team in English football. When I started supporting them in the mid 1960s, they were somewhere around the middle of the second tier of English football. That is exactly where they are today. We’ve had a few ups and downs over the years but for the last 11 years we have ended up solidly in the middle of the Championship, rarely threatening to go up or to go down.
This World Cup has more teams than ever, 48 in total. Over the next five weeks, there will be the grand total of 103 matches, culminating in the final on July 19, after which one team will jig around the pitch with the gold trophy, draped in smiles and their national flag. The other team will slink back to the dressing room, feeling miserable.
For some, losing will be less painful than others. If Haiti or Curaçao (yes I admit I had to look it up to see where it was) win a game, or even get a draw, they will be over the moon, as they say. Cape Verde have already won their World Cup with their astonishing draw against European Champions, Spain. Yet all three will almost certainly go out at the earliest stage, after the group games. Yet for the bigger teams, like Argentina, Brazil, France or Spain, failure to win the tournament will be just that – failure.
England have an odd relationship with the World Cup. There is that solitary win, the iconic day of July 30, 1966, when Nobby Stiles danced, and Bobby Moore held up the Jules Rimet trophy in the early evening Wembley sunshine. That victory is both the glory and the curse of English football. Ever since then, English football fans expect that every time the World Cup happens, their team should win it, even though they have never won it in the14 tournaments since. They usually go out in the quarter-finals, and there’s a fair bet they’ll do it again this time – which will be viewed as a failure.
Then there is the USA. The dominance of global American culture, the common rhetoric in the USA that it is ‘the greatest country in the world’, naturally leads to an expectation of sporting success. Of course, not many other countries play their main games, baseball and (American) football, which leads to little international competition. The USA usually ends up top of the medal table at the Olympics, but when they do compete internationally at sports which others take seriously and they lose, it can precipitate a national crisis.
It’s pretty unlikely that the USA will win the World Cup. They have a relatively easy group so may well progress from the group stages but sooner or later will meet one of the bigger teams and will go out. When the World Cup is held elsewhere in the world, it rarely registers on the horizon of the average American sports fan. However, this time it might be different as they are the main host of the competition. Donald Trump, as is well known, has little time for losers and yet his American team will, almost certainly, end up as exactly that – losers. Will this result in a crisis of confidence in America? Will it be tied to American struggles in Iran and put a dent in the national confidence, especially if Iran do better than expected at the World Cup?
When New Zealand loses at rugby, gloom descends on the country. When the USA loses the Ryder Cup, they have a national self-examination. The expectation of sporting success is a burden hard to bear, precisely because sport doesn’t respect expectation. It is unpredictable. Which is the point of it.
The nature of competition is that there is usually only one winner. Our kids’ primary school didn’t like this and tried to hold races where everyone was declared a winner. The kids – and many of their parents – were outraged. They knew instinctively that that is not how sport works. In sport, winning matters. Winning tournaments is great (at least that’s what I remember of the great Bristol City Freight Rover Trophy win at Wembley in 1986.)
The reality is that even winners end up as losers. Liverpool won the Premier League last year and have just sacked their manager after a relatively moderate season. In fact, when it comes to tournaments, winning is just a temporary interruption in a long series of losing – which is exactly what 1966 was in the long story of World Cup failure for England. In a recent interview, Roy Keane said:
“Sport is all about disappointments. If you survive long enough you get a few highs along the way. But if you want to talk about disappointments, we could be here all night.”
St Paul’s taught that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” An alternative translation might be: “we are all, at the end of the day, losers “. So get used to it. Learning to lose is a vital skill in life. If you can’t lose well, have the humility to give credit to those who are better than you at something, then you are destined for a miserable life.
In that way, sport is a mirror to life. Yet in another it isn’t. The second half of that line from St Paul says “but we are justified by his grace as a gift”.
Kaka, the great Brazilian footballer, Ballon d’Or winner, and devout Christian, often struggled with the expectation and criticism of fans. He once said: “I gained the firm conviction that I was neither the best in the world nor the worst signing by Real Madrid – I was a child of God”.
We might all be losers, who just occasionally enjoy a win, but at the end of the day, unlike in sport, it doesn’t really matter. In life, winning and losing is not everything. Life is not a struggle to win and to avoid ever losing. It is about being able to admire and appreciate the skills of others, to learn to be a good loser. It is to live in gratitude that being a loser is fine, because your value does not rest in whether you win or lose, but in something bigger – and more predictable – than winning a World Cup.
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