Consequence Without Catastrophe: Why Sport Commands Human Attention
I was tense. Not mildly interested. Not casually curious. Genuinely tense.
As the World Cup Final entered its closing minutes, every attack seemed to matter. Every misplaced pass felt consequential. When one team surged forward, I leaned toward the television almost involuntarily. My heart rate rose. I found myself willing the match toward an outcome that, if I were honest, would have almost no meaningful effect on my life. If Spain had lost, my life would be the same. Nothing existential depended on the result. And yet the tension was real. Why?
It is tempting to answer that people simply love sports. But that isn’t really an explanation. It merely restates the phenomenon. The more interesting question is why a symbolic contest between 22 players on a field can produce genuine physiological and emotional investment in billions of people around the world.
What kind of human invention is sport that symbolic stakes can feel psychologically consequential? One answer is that sport may be one of civilization’s most successful attention technologies: a cultural invention designed to organize millions—and sometimes billions—of minds around the same unfolding uncertainty. Rather than simply entertaining us, it synchronizes perception, concentrates emotion, and transforms individual spectators into participants in a shared symbolic reality.
That question leads far beyond soccer. It reaches into anthropology, neuroscience, ritual, warfare, philosophy, and the history of civilization itself. The World Cup may not simply be the world’s most-watched sporting event. It may be one of humanity’s greatest cultural achievements: a way of transforming existential conflict into shared experience—allowing us to feel the intensity of struggle, uncertainty, triumph, and loss without requiring catastrophe.
To understand why sport commands such extraordinary human attention, we first need to understand one of civilization’s greatest inventions: symbolic consequence. Throughout much of human history, the events most capable of synchronizing human attention were those with genuine existential stakes. Warfare, famine, predation, epidemic disease, and environmental catastrophe demanded collective focus because survival depended upon it. Shared danger aligned perception, sharpened attention, and coordinated action with remarkable efficiency.
But as societies became larger and more complex, they confronted a remarkable design challenge: How can a civilization preserve the psychological power of shared stakes without paying the devastating price of perpetual catastrophe? One of humanity’s most elegant solutions was the invention of symbolic stakes—bounded experiences capable of producing genuine attention, emotional investment, and social cohesion without requiring genuine destruction. Sport represents perhaps the most sophisticated expression of this invention: It preserves the emotional grammar of conflict while stripping away its physical destruction, allowing societies to rehearse rivalry without paying war’s irreversible costs.
We often assume that sport commands attention because it is exciting. The reverse may be closer to the truth. Sport has endured across civilizations because it is extraordinarily effective at producing sustained collective attention. Excitement is not merely its appeal; it is one of its functions.
It borrows much of the attentional architecture of existential conflict: opposing sides, defended territory, finite resources, strategic cooperation, temporal urgency, uncertainty, triumph, and defeat. Yet it removes the very feature that makes conflict catastrophic. The contest unfolds within agreed-upon rules, defined boundaries, impartial officiating, and fixed time limits. The conflict is real; its consequences are deliberately constrained.
Between the first and last whistle of a soccer match, an extraordinary transformation occurs. The field becomes a closed ecosystem of meaning. Every possession acquires significance. A defensive stop becomes momentous. A missed opportunity becomes heartbreaking. Time itself seems to accelerate as the final whistle approaches. Although almost nothing changes in the material world for the overwhelming majority of spectators, millions experience authentic tension, anticipation, hope, disappointment, and relief.
It manufactures consequence without catastrophe.
This simple observation points to something far more profound than entertainment. It describes a civilizational achievement. Sport demonstrates that human beings need not face existential danger to experience existential emotions. War confronts us with existential stakes; sport invites us into experiential ones. Both organize emotion, but only one leaves cities in ruins. Unlike theater, whose ending is already written, or war, whose costs are all too real, sport uniquely combines symbolic stakes with genuine uncertainty. Transforming conflict into a symbolic experience allows societies to rehearse cooperation, rivalry, sacrifice, resilience, uncertainty, and collective identity within a framework designed to prevent conflict from spilling into the physical world.
The World Cup is the largest expression of this idea ever created. Throughout the match, billions of people voluntarily inhabit the same unresolved future. They attend to the same clock, the same uncertainty, the same possibility of triumph or defeat. In an age increasingly defined by fragmented media and personalized algorithms, the tournament remains one of the few institutions capable of synchronizing human attention on a planetary scale. The World Cup is therefore not merely an escape from reality. It is a refinement of one of reality’s oldest patterns: the human need to gather around shared stakes, shared uncertainty, and a shared future. Civilization’s genius may have been learning how to satisfy that need symbolically rather than catastrophically.
Attention Follows Uncertainty
We do not lean toward the screen when the outcome is guaranteed. We do not hold our breath for the expected, nor do our hearts race for the inevitable. The human brain is, at its core, a prediction engine—constantly modeling the future to navigate an uncertain world. When the future is largely predictable, attention relaxes; the brain conserves energy. But when the future becomes genuinely unresolved, the mind snaps into high gear.
Throughout evolutionary history, uncertainty often signaled danger. A rustle in the tall grass, an unexpected storm on the horizon, an unfamiliar silhouette at the edge of camp—these were moments when the inability to predict the next five seconds could mean death. To survive, humans evolved neural systems exquisitely sensitive to uncertainty. When the future becomes difficult to predict, networks involved in attention, motivation, learning, and decision-making become more active, sharpening perception and pulling consciousness into the present moment.
Sport hijacks this ancient survival mechanism and puts it in a bell jar.
The brain is not merely watching a ball. It is continuously interpreting a dense stream of social information—cooperation, competition, strategy, adaptation, trust, and leadership—that is compressed into a shared symbolic contest. A match is a deliberate machine for generating structured unpredictability. In close contests, the brain treats each new play as evidence bearing on an unresolved future, continuously updating expectations as the possible outcome shifts from moment to moment. Unlike a theater performance or a novel, where the ending has already been written and merely awaits revelation, a sporting event is authored in real time. The actor on stage cannot truly fail to deliver a line without breaking the play; the striker on the field can miss an open net by an inch, forever altering the story that everyone is living together.
Yet uncertainty alone cannot explain the extraordinary power of sport. The world is filled with uncertain events that command almost none of our attention. We do not become emotionally invested in the outcome of a stranger’s coin toss, nor do billions gather to watch an unfamiliar stock price fluctuate. Uncertainty is necessary, but it is not sufficient.
Attention follows uncertainty when uncertainty has been endowed with shared consequence. This is the mechanism by which sport functions as an attention technology. For the length of a match, civilization constructs a closed ecosystem of meaning. That is precisely what sport accomplishes. Within the carefully bounded world of the game, civilization temporarily assigns profound meaning to an otherwise arbitrary sequence of events. Every action acquires symbolic weight. Every pass matters. Every tackle matters. Every shot matters. Not because the physical world depends upon them, but because millions of people have agreed to temporarily inhabit the same symbolic universe. The game has temporarily become its own universe of consequence.
The brain is not merely tracking the movement of a ball. It is reading leadership, cooperation, sacrifice, deception, resilience, timing, and trust compressed into two hours of embodied interaction. Sport, therefore, accomplishes something remarkable. It does not merely manufacture consequence without catastrophe; it manufactures uncertainty without catastrophe. It creates a genuinely unresolved future while ensuring the conflict remains bounded by rules, time, and mutual consent. The emotional architecture of existential life is preserved, but its destructive consequences are held in check.
This is why sport captures us in a way scripted drama rarely can. It offers something increasingly rare in modern life: a domain of absolute rule-bound order that nevertheless yields genuine unpredictability. The rules never change, yet the ending remains unknowable.
When billions of people watch a World Cup match, they are not merely observing a game. They are inhabiting the same unresolved future. Once spectators enter that symbolic world, the players cease to be merely strangers. They become temporary representatives of hopes, identities, and possible futures that spectators have chosen to inhabit. Every pass, every tackle, every shot represents a branching point in a story whose ending has not yet been written. Their collective attention converges not because the movement of a ball is inherently meaningful, but because civilization has temporarily endowed that uncertainty with shared consequence.
The World Cup thus reveals something profound about the human condition. We do not simply crave certainty, nor do we seek chaos. We seek meaningful uncertainty—a future whose outcome matters, but whose consequences need not destroy us. Sport may be one of civilization’s greatest inventions precisely because it gives us that experience, again and again, without requiring catastrophe.
The Grammar of Conflict
Civilizations did not invent sport randomly, nor did they preserve its form by accident. Across centuries and across cultures separated by oceans and eras, sport has consistently retained a remarkably similar family of structural features. It is tempting to dismiss these as mere rules of play, but they are anything but arbitrary. They endure because they are precisely the elements that organize human attention around collective struggle.
Together, they form what can only be called the grammar of conflict. Like every language, this grammar consists of a small set of recurring elements that can be recombined into countless different expressions. Its basic vocabulary includes:
- Two Sides: The irreducible binary. Before attention can unify, perception must first bifurcate: us and them, self and other.
- Territory & Boundaries: A physical space endowed with symbolic meaning, where progress is measured, positions are defended, and movement itself becomes consequential.
- Uniforms: The temporary subordination of the individual to the collective. The uniform instantly communicates allegiance, transforming isolated people into a visible coalition.
- The Clock: Time ceases to be an abstract continuum and becomes a dwindling resource. Every passing second changes the meaning of every decision.
- Rules & Referees: The external authority that prevents conflict from collapsing into chaos. Rules preserve uncertainty while ensuring that the contest remains symbolic rather than violent.
- Spectators: Conflict becomes culture because it is witnessed. The audience does not merely observe the contest; it amplifies its significance by investing collective attention in its outcome.
- Stakes: Every contest requires something that can be won or lost. The specific prize may be symbolic—a trophy, a championship, national pride—but without stakes, uncertainty becomes mere randomness rather than meaningful drama.
- Victory & Defeat: Every sentence in the language of conflict seeks resolution. In a world full of ambiguity, negotiation, and inconclusive debates, the final score delivers a clear ending. Someone wins. Someone loses. The uncertainty is resolved.
This grammar is not unique to sport. War, politics, courtroom litigation, geopolitics, elections, and even many modern video games draw upon remarkably similar structural principles. Each recombines the same underlying vocabulary to produce different kinds of conflict. Sport, then, does not imitate war. Rather, sport and war are two different sentences written in the same underlying language.
The crucial difference is that sport systematically transforms that language. It preserves the generative grammar of consequential conflict while removing its catastrophic consequences. The struggle remains real; the destruction does not. By deploying this grammar within a bounded arena, civilization created a high-stakes language that nearly everyone can intuitively understand. We do not need to be taught how to feel when a team advances into enemy territory as the clock winds down. Our species has been reading this grammar for millennia.
When we sit down to watch a match, we are not learning a new language. We are speaking one of humanity’s oldest ones. Civilization’s achievement was not inventing that language, but teaching it to speak without bloodshed.
The Planetary Ritual
Every four years, something extraordinary happens. For a brief window of time, billions of people—separated by language, ideology, geography, and wealth—voluntarily orient their attention toward the same unfolding reality. They watch the same clock tick down. They react to the same sudden moments of triumph and despair. Strangers across opposite hemispheres inhabit the same symbolic present.
In the early 20th century, the sociologist Émile Durkheim sought to understand what held human societies together. He coined the term collective effervescence to describe those rare, heightened moments when individuals gather around a shared symbol, participate in a common ritual, and suddenly experience themselves as part of something vastly larger than their individual lives. In these moments, the boundary between the self and the group briefly dissolves.
The World Cup may be the largest recurring instance of collective effervescence in human history. This is not merely because sports are popular. It is because civilizations require recurring mechanisms that transform individual attention into collective attention. Durkheim described the subjective experience of this synchronization. The World Cup reveals one of its most remarkable modern expressions. Throughout history, this function has been performed by a relatively small number of institutions. Shared religious rituals gathered villages beneath a single roof. Harvest festivals marked the turning of the seasons. Public coronations reaffirmed political authority. And, most destructively, war forced entire populations to align their attention toward a common existential threat.
As traditional institutions have fractured, the need for shared focus has not vanished. It has simply sought new containers. This reveals one of the defining scarcities of the twenty-first century. Information is no longer scarce; it is overwhelming. Computing power continues to expand. Data accumulates faster than any individual could ever consume it. What has become genuinely rare is something else: shared attention.
Algorithms increasingly optimize for individual engagement rather than collective experience. Media is personalized. Feeds are curated for each user. Millions of people can inhabit the same city while occupying entirely different informational worlds. We rarely look at the same sky, let alone the same screen. We increasingly inhabit parallel realities tailored to our individual interests, anxieties, and desires.
The Olympics and the World Cup represent two different expressions of human excellence. The Olympics celebrate the extraordinary diversity of human achievement, inviting our attention to move among dozens of sports, stories, and champions. The World Cup does almost the opposite. It gathers billions of people around a single unfolding narrative, concentrating attention on a single unresolved future that the world experiences together. Its achievement is not breadth, but convergence.
In this context, the World Cup becomes far more than a tournament. It is a planetary ritual. It remains one of the last institutions capable of resisting fragmentation—one of the few occasions when billions of people voluntarily inhabit the same unresolved future, speak the same ancient grammar of conflict, and experience the same rising and falling tension together, without requiring a single life to be lost. Perhaps this is the deeper purpose of sport. Not simply to entertain us, nor merely to determine who is strongest, fastest, or most skilled. Its greatest achievement may be reminding billions of strangers what it feels like to inhabit the same present together.
I was tense. So were billions of other people. Not because we knew one another. Not because our survival depended upon the outcome. But because, for the duration of the match, civilization had once again aligned billions of minds around a future that none of us could predict.
The Species That Plays
In his 1938 classic Homo Ludens, the historian Johan Huizinga argued that play is not merely an activity contained within culture. Culture itself arises in play and as play. We are not only the species that thinks—Homo sapiens—or the species that makes—Homo faber. We are also Homo ludens: the species that plays. Yet Huizinga’s observation leaves us with a deeper, more intimate mystery. Why do we seek play? Why do billions of people voluntarily spend their time, emotion, and anxiety entering artificial domains of tension?
Consider what we do when we sit down to watch a match, open a novel, attend a performance, or follow an election. We willingly surrender our equilibrium. We allow events beyond our control to elevate our heart rates. We weep over symbolic triumphs and mourn symbolic defeats. We submit ourselves to suspense even when nothing in our immediate survival depends upon the resolution.
If human beings were purely rational creatures driven solely by the pursuit of comfort and security, this behavior would be inexplicable. We would seek only ease, certainty, and predictable pleasure.
Instead, we actively seek tension. The reason touches something fundamental about human consciousness. Humans do not simply seek pleasure. We seek meaningful participation in an unresolved future. To be alive is to exist in time—to stand continually at the narrow, razor-sharp boundary between a remembered past and an unwritten future. Nothing feels more suffocating to the human spirit than a future that appears entirely predetermined, rigid, or indifferent. Nothing feels more thrillingly vital than a future that hangs in the balance: one in which action matters, choices ripple outward, and the ending remains genuinely unknown.
Stories, theater, music, politics, religion, and sport all organize this experience in different ways. They draw us out of the monotony of predictable routine and place us inside moments of meaningful contingency. They create structures in which anticipation intensifies, possibilities multiply, and what happens next appears to matter.
Sport may be the purest version because its conclusion has not yet been composed. The players do not know the ending. The spectators do not know it. Even the institutions that built the arena and established its rules cannot determine what will happen once play begins. When we immerse ourselves in the outcome of a match, we are rehearsing what it means to be alive in time. We reach for an ancient human longing: to care deeply about what happens next, to feel the weight of possibility, and to experience the electrifying sensation that the future—if only for one hundred twenty minutes—is still waiting to be written.
Epilogue: After the Whistle
The whistle blows.
Its sharp sound cuts through the roaring stadium, and in a fraction of a second, the universe of the game collapses. The bench spills onto the turf in jubilation. The losing side sinks into the grass, staring blankly into the sky. On screens thousands of miles away, cameras move across faces streaked with tears and faces radiant with disbelieving joy.
Then, slowly, the dissolution begins. The broadcast ends. Television screens flicker off in living rooms from Buenos Aires to Tokyo. Flags are folded and tucked into coats. Millions of people step into dark streets, board late-night trains, or close their laptops and walk into quietly lit kitchens to make a cup of tea. In a physical sense, almost nothing has changed. The political borders of the world remain where they were two hours earlier. The economy continues along its indifferent axis. The personal burdens, obligations, and quiet heartbreaks that each spectator carried into the room are waiting exactly where they left them.
Yet something real has happened. During the match, the boundaries of individual isolation briefly became permeable. Billions of separate minds, enclosed within private worries and algorithmically curated worlds, agreed to inhabit the same present. They watched the same clock. They reacted to the same collisions and reversals. They held their breath as the same ball descended through the air, even when they hoped it would land in different places.
The final whistle does not merely end a soccer match. It dissolves one of the largest temporary communities of attention ever assembled on Earth. Like all rituals, it leaves behind a peculiar stillness—the stadium empties. Paper drifts across rows of vacant plastic seats. The grass, stamped with the marks of studs and bodies, cools beneath the floodlights. Millions return to their regular lives.
I stopped watching the television. My heart rate slowly returned to normal. I had been tense. And so had billions of others. We did not know one another. We did not all want the same outcome. Our survival did not depend upon what happened on the field. But for a little while, amid an ocean of noise and fragmentation, we had cared about the same unresolved future. And that shared tension had been enough.
The World Cup Reminded Us What America Can Be
The most powerful moments of the World Cup did not happen only inside stadiums. They happened in restaurants, city streets, neighborhood bars, national parks, and conversations between strangers who realized the person standing across from them was not a stereotype. They were a human being.
Millions of people came to North America expecting to find a country they had seen through television screens, political debates, and international headlines. Instead, they discovered something far more complicated and far more meaningful: actual people.
They found families cheering in stadiums. Volunteers helping visitors navigate unfamiliar cities. Small business owners welcoming new customers. Strangers sharing recommendations about their favorite restaurants, parks, and neighborhoods.
For a few weeks, the world did not experience America as an argument.
It experienced America as a place.
And perhaps that is one of the most important things that could have happened.
The World Cup has always been about more than soccer. It is a celebration of national identity, but it is also one of the largest human gatherings on earth. It creates moments where cultures meet, curiosity replaces suspicion, and people discover that the differences they imagined are often smaller than the similarities they share.
During this tournament, millions of visitors encountered the United States not through political narratives or social media conflicts, but through direct experience.
They walked our streets. They explored our cities. They visited our natural landscapes. They tasted our food. They encountered our contradictions.
And yes, they encountered some very American forms of excess.
International visitors were fascinated by our enormous grocery stores, massive restaurant portions, and the sheer scale of places like Bass Pro Shops and Buc-ee’s. They photographed hotel ice machines. They debated the cultural importance of ranch dressing. They laughed at our tendency to make everything bigger.
Some of it was funny because, honestly, some of it is a little ridiculous.
But beneath the humor was something more important. They were experiencing a culture that is creative, diverse, and constantly evolving.
Every country has traditions that seem unusual from the outside. Every society has things that make visitors pause and ask, “Why do you do that?”
Curiosity is often the beginning of understanding.
And the World Cup gave the world a reason to be curious about America.
Some of the most memorable moments of the tournament had little to do with what happened on the field.
Scottish fans transformed Boston into a celebration of music, friendship, and national pride, filling pubs and neighborhoods with such enthusiasm that locals joked they had nearly emptied the city’s supply of beer.
Norwegian supporters brought their famous row-bow celebration to Times Square, turning one of the world’s most recognizable public spaces into a spontaneous display of joy and cultural pride.
In Atlanta, more than 500,000 visitors arrived for matches and the FIFA Fan Festival. Fans embraced local traditions, documenting their love for American staples like Waffle House and Carolina barbecue. Local businesses became international gathering places where conversations began over shared meals.
In Philadelphia, Brazilian supporters transformed the famous Rocky Steps into a massive celebration of music, dancing, and national pride. Local bars and restaurants experienced crowds comparable to some of the biggest sporting events in America.
Across the country, visitors traveled between host cities and encountered an America that rarely appears in political debates. They found roadside attractions, family restaurants, neighborhood gathering places, and landscapes that inspire awe.
They did not simply attend matches.
They experienced a country.
And perhaps most importantly, they met Americans.
One of the great dangers of modern life is that we increasingly believe we know people we have never met.
We learn about entire countries through headlines. We form opinions about communities through viral videos. We reduce millions of individuals into political categories and cultural stereotypes.
The World Cup offered a powerful reminder that human beings cannot be understood from a distance.
The visitor from another country is not simply a representative of a nation. They are a person with a family, a history, a sense of humor, struggles, hopes, and dreams.
The same is true of Americans.
For many people around the world, America is often encountered through images of political division, economic power, and cultural conflict. Those things are real. We should not ignore our challenges.
But America is also the volunteer helping a visitor find their seat at a stadium.
It is the stranger explaining which hiking trail to visit.
It is the family recommending their favorite local restaurant.
It is the immigrant helping a traveler navigate an unfamiliar city.
In Seattle and Houston, immigrant volunteers played an important role helping international visitors navigate stadiums, training facilities, and local communities. Their presence reflected something fundamental about the American experience: newcomers do not simply arrive in America. They help create America.
This lesson became personal for me through the experience of a close friend.
One of my best friends traveled with his brother from Denver, Colorado, to Guadalajara, Mexico, to attend the Colombia versus DR Congo World Cup match.
When he told me about the trip, I was thrilled for him. Watching a World Cup match in another country is the kind of experience many sports fans dream about. To witness the passion, culture, and energy surrounding a global event firsthand is something truly special.
I was also a little jealous.
I have to confess that.
But his trip forced me to ask myself an important question: Would I have done the same thing?
And if not, why not?
The honest answer is that, like many Americans, I have absorbed certain messages about Mexico for much of my life. We are often presented with images of cartel violence, danger, and instability. We are sometimes encouraged to see Mexico primarily as a place to fear rather than a place filled with millions of people living ordinary, meaningful lives.
Of course, every country has real challenges. But how much of our fear is based on reality, and how much comes from a constant stream of images that prevent us from seeing the full picture?
My friend chose not to let fear make the decision for him.
He followed his passion for soccer. He followed his curiosity. He followed his desire to experience something beyond his own familiar surroundings.
And what did he discover?
Not a stereotype.
A country.
He found hospitality, culture, history, food, music, and people eager to share their home with visitors.
His experience expanded his understanding because he was willing to step beyond the boundaries created by fear.
That is one of the great gifts of travel. It challenges assumptions. It complicates the stories we inherit. It reminds us that no country can be reduced to its worst moments.
Fear can protect us.
But fear can also limit us.
When we allow fear to determine where we go, who we meet, and what we believe, we shrink our world.
When we choose curiosity instead, the world becomes larger.
This is where the ideas of philosopher Karl Popper remain profoundly relevant.
In The Open Society and Its Enemies, Popper argued that free societies are strengthened by openness: openness to new ideas, criticism, diversity, and human exchange.
“We are social creatures to the inmost center of our being,” Popper wrote.
Human beings do not flourish in isolation. We develop through relationships, conversations, friendships, and encounters with people whose experiences differ from our own.
Popper warned about the dangers of the “closed society,” a world built around rigid identities, unquestioned beliefs, and suspicion toward outsiders.
Closed societies seek comfort through separation.
Open societies discover strength through exchange.
A closed society fears difference.
An open society learns from it.
Popper also understood that openness requires responsibility. A free society must defend the conditions that allow freedom to exist. As he famously wrote, “Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance.”
A healthy democracy can maintain borders, uphold laws, and protect its citizens while still embracing the diversity and exchange that make societies stronger.
The choice is not between chaos and isolation.
The choice is between fear and confidence.
Few issues reveal this tension more clearly than immigration.
Immigrants have always helped shape America. They have built businesses, advanced science, enriched the arts, strengthened communities, served in our military, taught in our schools, and cared for our families.
Immigration is not a footnote in American history.
It is American history.
The United States has never been powerful because it kept the world away. It has been powerful because it invited people from around the world to contribute to something larger than themselves.
That is not weakness.
That is our strength.
The World Cup demonstrated this in a way that no political campaign could manufacture.
People did not develop a deeper appreciation for America because of a speech or a slogan.
They experienced America through relationships.
They met us.
And being met changed everything.
We often think international relations happen only in government buildings, conference rooms, and diplomatic meetings.
But some of the most important diplomacy happens in ordinary places.
It happens over shared meals.
It happens on city streets.
It happens when someone from another country visits an American landscape and understands why we protect our public lands.
It happens when fans from different nations celebrate together.
The World Cup may have done more to improve America’s image around the world than any carefully designed public relations effort because it allowed people to experience the country without a filter.
Not the America of stereotypes.
Not the America of political advertisements.
The America of everyday life.
A country that is loud, complicated, imperfect, creative, generous, and always becoming.
The greatest lesson of the World Cup is not about soccer.
It is about humanity.
It is about remembering that democracy is not sustained by people who all look alike, think alike, or come from the same places. It is sustained by people willing to build something together despite their differences.
America’s greatest strength has never come from closing itself off from the world.
It has come from engaging with the world.
The World Cup gave us a glimpse of America at its best: a place where strangers become neighbors, where cultures meet and create something new, and where diversity becomes not a source of fear but a foundation for belonging.
The open society is not simply a philosophical idea.
It is a daily practice.
And for a few unforgettable weeks, the world came here and reminded us why it still matters.
Marilyn Monroe and the World Cup
Milton H. Greene, Marilyn Monroe ‘Ballerina’ sitting, 1954. Photo: Courtesy National Portrait Gallery.
Marilyn and Joe D.
If any, it was baseball that was Marilyn Monroe’s game. In 1954, she married the recently retired, New York Yankees great Joe DiMaggio. She attended games with Joe and was once photographed standing at home plate with a baseball bat on her shoulder. In truth, she knew little about the game and didn’t care about sports – “I’ll leave those things to the men,” she said.
Maybe she chose DiMaggio for his grace – he didn’t run so much run as glide toward flyballs in center field; or maybe his steadiness – in 1941 he set a record for getting hits in 56 consecutive games. But whatever the reason, she picked wrong. After showing up uninvited on the location set of The Seven Year Itch on East 58th Street in Manhattan, he grew incensed watching take after take of the famous subway grate scene and onlookers ogling his wife. Did he think he married Eve Arden? The marriage was over before it barely started.
I went to see Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait, at the National Portrait Gallery in London, the morning after the much-anticipated World Cup football game between England and Argentina. I’m not a big sports fan, and have no attachment to the English squad, but after weeks of public build-up, discussion and expectation, the debacle in Dallas was deflating. I was ready to think about something else and MM seemed an undemanding choice. Little did I guess the exhibition would describe another kind of catastrophe — one more personally affecting than the one that befell English football.
Choosing sides in the World Cup
Though I wanted to be a good ex-pat and root for the American team to win the World Cup, that was impossible. A victory (unlikely though it was) meant a team visit to the White House and Trump crowing that the U.S. was the “hottest” country in the world. And if that wasn’t enough to turn me off the American team, supporters in stadiums chanting “U S A! U S A!” were. They might have been attending a MAGA rally. Trump’s successful overturning of the red card against the American star Folarin Balogun was the clincher. I couldn’t root for a team helped by the cheater-in-chief
England was the natural place to land. I live in Norwich, U.K. and know lots of people who are big supporters of the English squad. It’s nice to fit in. But that too proved difficult. Could I forget English captain Harry Kane’s golf game with Trump? Would he have said about Hitler what he said about the president: “His golf is pretty good to be honest with you.”
Then there’s the matter of the St. George’s Cross, unfurled on playing fields, waved by fans, and painted on faces and bared (mostly male) torsos. In recent years, the red and white banner has become a sign of British chauvinism, racism and xenophobia. A few journalists have said the proudly multi-cultural English club has reclaimed the banner from the far right. But that’s overly optimistic. A few weeks ago, my wife Harriet and I visited the town of Caister-on-Sea in Norfolk. St. George banners and pennants flew from poles at homes and businesses, and atop the light posts on the high street. Unsurprisingly, the town votes mostly Reform UK or the even further right Great-Yarmouth First Party, an offshoot of Restore Britain, led by Rupert Lowe, Nigel Farage’s rebel angel. Among the policies they support are mass deportation of “illegal migrants,” restoration of the death penalty, strengthening Britain’s “Christian heritage,” and banning halal and kosher meat. UK football fans have no business carrying the St. George Cross unless they want to be associated with that.
And finally, there’s the national anthem sung before English games. It has the same melody as the American contrafactum, “My Country Tis of Thee”:
God save our gracious King! Long live our noble King!
God save the King! Send him victorious, Happy and glorious,
Long to reign over us, God save the King.
Many Brits don’t know the words. When I asked Harriet if she did, she replied “of course!” and sang: “God save our dah-dah king, dah dah dah, dah, dah-dah, God save our King.” But there on the football field in Atlanta, was the English squad, singing every word. You’d think the nation would long ago have retired the song. Imperial nostalgia has for generations crippled the country. It lay behind the Suez debacle in 1956, the elections of Margaret Thatcher, John Major, David Cameron, Teresa May and Boris Johnson, Brexit and the U.K.’s senseless and self-destructive participation in the American wars against Afghanistan and Iraq. The yearning for past, imperial glories (aka crimes) has fortified Britain’s fascist right for a generation and now fuels the rise of the fascist and corrupt Farage. So please, British people, no “victorious” king to “reign over us.” Love your team (and even savvy old Charles) but skip the anthem!
I couldn’t support Argentina either. Though the country was subjected for most of the 19th and early 20thcenturies to dependence on the “British world system,” as Adam Tooze has recently written, that relationship is long over. The country is now governed by the corrupt, autocratic, obnoxious and chain-saw loving President Javier Milei whose politics are a throwback to the years of the military junta and Dirty War (1976-’83). He was recently re-elected after receiving a promise from his friend Trump and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant of a $20 billion currency swap and another $20 billion of private investment. Rooting for Argentina against England was out of the question.
And to be honest, the sight of skinny, pale, Anthony Gordon in the match against Argentina, sprinting toward the goal to tap in Morgan Rogers’ cross was thrilling – I cheered wildly. But just then, with at least 25 minutes left in the game, the English coach Thomas Teuchel, a lean, tough talking German whose last name is uncomfortably close to Teufel (devil), pulled out Gordon and several other attackers and replaced them with a defensive team unable to mount an offense. The result was predictable: almost the entire rest of the game was played near the English goal, the one place on the field were Lionel Messi, perhaps the greatest of all time, had a freehold. He directed the attack and himself teed up two perfect passes for Argentine scorers. Just after the game ended, I bought my next morning, senior-discount, off-peak, day-return (in American “round-trip”) ticket to London.
Disaster pictures
Around the corner from the much larger National Gallery on Trafalgar Square, catercorner to the church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields on St. Martin’s Lane, sits the National Portrait Gallery, established in 1856, and housed in its current premises since 1896. Formerly a staid institution, stuffed with portraits of kings, queens and notables, it has received successive face lifts and lately a new mission – to bring in more tourists, new audiences, and more money. It has obliged in the expected ways: by mounting exhibitions of portraits by younger and non-white artists, and more significantly for the bottom line, celebrity themed and fashion forward exhibitions. Marilyn Monroe on her 100th birthday was a no-brainer.
The material in the exhibition was cleverly organized by photographer and date. While Monroe worked with a few photographers for nearly the whole of her adult life (she died in 1962, aged 36), she mostly moved from one to another: So, the story of her photographic history is also the story of her life. First the teenager was documented by Andre de Dienes and Bruno Bernard; then in her 20s by Cecil Beaton, Milton H. Greene, and Sam Shaw; then Richard Avedon, Alfred Eisenstadt, Eve Arnold, Inge Morath, Bert Stern, and so on.
Monroe was a confident and canny model. Almost from the beginning, she understood the value of establishing a close relationship with her photographers (sometimes sexual) and insisting upon editorial discretion. She would examine contact sheets, circling the ones she liked and crossing out with a marker the ones she didn’t. Sometimes, as in the case of Bert Stern in 1962, she even reviewed the negatives, using a stylus to scratch an X on the ones she rejected, making them unusable. (Stern nevertheless printed these disfigured images after Monroe’s death – some are in the exhibition.) In just a few cases, she allowed photographers to publish images she didn’t like – that was the case with Richard Avedon’s sad Marilyn, titled Marilyn Monroes, Actress, New York, 1957. Monroe knew a genius when she met one.
The exhibition also includes painted homages to Monroe, mostly posthumous. An exception is Willem de Kooing’s Marilyn Monroe from 1954. It’s a good, Abstract Expressionist painting, with advancing reds and yellows held in check by brushy black contours. But it would be hard to call it a portrait; we learn nothing from it about Monroe because nothing is said. The same is true for the famous Warhol images, three of which are in the exhibition. The paintings (made with paint and screens) and screen prints (made with ink and screens) are concerned with celebrity, commodity, repetition, desire and surfeit – but not Marilyn Monroe. Indeed, it’s her disguise that we see — heavy lidded eyes, open-mouthed half smile, yellow hair and beauty mark — not her character or temperament. This is icon, not individual.
Gene Kornman, publicity portrait of Marilyn Monroe as Rose Loomis in the 1953 film Niagara, Wikimedia Commons; and Andy Warhol, Green Marilyn, 1962. National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. Photo: Courtesy National Portrait Gallery, London.
The latter is what we search for in photo after photo of Marilyn but rarely discover. Even in her nudes, she kept herself to herself. There are perhaps glimpses of sorrow in Avedon’s photos, self-reflection in Shaw’s pictures of her and her husband, playwright Arthur Miller, and vulnerability in Milton Greene’s image of Marilyn as a ballerina from 1954. That was the year she became a bona fide star from three films released the year before: the Hitchcockian noir Niagara, and two comedies, How to Marry a Millionaire and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. I still cry from delight and admiration every time I see her, dressed in a pink satin, floor length, strapless gown and matching pink opera gloves, singing “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” The song and its performance offer one answer to Marxist-feminist Evelyn Reed’s contemporaneous argument that capitalism progressed “from selling women as commodities, to selling commodities to women.” Marilyn’s fetish-forward production number argues that women should use the promise of sex to trick wealthy men into giving them diamonds. A gift economy is the antithesis of capitalism.
The earliest Warhol picture in the exhibition, Green Marilyn, was part of his “Disaster Series” (1962-67) which represented plane crashes, car crashes, the electric chair, suicides, and similar subjects. They are widely considered the artist’s best works because they appear to undermine the image of the U.S. – still widespread on the cusp of the Vietnam War – as a land of affluence and ease. In 1963, even before the assassination of Kennedy, Warhol said about the series:
The big plane crash picture, the front page of the newspaper: ‘129 Die.’ I was also painting the Marilyns. I realized that everything I was doing must have been Death. It was Christmas or Labor Day—a holiday—and every time you turned on the radio, they said something like ‘4 million are going to die.’ That started it.
Knowing how the story ends — Marilyn Monroe’s suicide by drug overdose — nearly every image at the National Portrait Gallery exhibition is a disaster picture.
Parapraxis on Sutton Place
One work especially brought this home to me. It wasn’t the small paintings by Margaret Harrison (Marilyn is Dead! 1998) and Marlene Dumas (Dead Marilyn, 2008) based upon autopsy photographs. It was the photo by Sam Shaw of her and Monroe’s husband Arthur Miller standing on Sutton Place near their apartment at 444 East 57th Street in Manhattan. Behind them is the Queensboro Bridge. I know that location well because of a childhood misunderstanding, a kind of Freudian parapraxis.
My family lived on the other side of the Queensboro Bridge, in Forest Hills, about nine miles east on Queens Boulevard. I have just a few, but clear memories of Monroe’s death on August 4, 1962. Everybody was talking about it, my parents and two older siblings included. In addition to being famous and beloved, Monroe had married Miller a few years before and converted to Judaism, making her one of us. Though I was just six, I remember my mother crying and the two-word headline of the New York Daily News, “Marilyn Dead.” (It’s possible the latter is a false memory, and I only saw the newspaper headline later. My parents mostly read The New York Times.)
Daily News, “Marilyn Dead,” August 6, 1962; and Wurts Bros., Facade of 444 East 57th Street. 1949. Collection of the Museum of the City of New York, MNY243067. Public Domain.
Soon after that, coincidentally, my father drove with me beside him over the Queensboro Bridge into Manhattan. Exiting the bridge from the lower ramp, he pointed toward the building off Sutton Place where Monroe lived, and I assumed, died. Before then, I’d never thought about death as occurring at a specific time and nearby place.
Though I learned some years later that Monroe died in her little house with a pool in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles and not in her New York penthouse, Sutton place continued for years to invoke for me the actuality of death. Every time I crossed the bridge by bus or car and exited via the 59th Street off-ramp, there it was, 444 East 57th Street. I haven’t returned there in years, but Sam Shaws’s picture of Marilyn and Arthur Miller brought it back to mind.
Monroe’s premature death was the result of multiple factors: illness, miscarriages, spousal abuse, drug addiction, psychiatric mistreatment, professional anxiety, loneliness and depression. Together they caused a tragedy -– that’s what was so vividly staged at the National Portrait Gallery.
World Cup final
A few days after my return to Norwich, Marilyn’s death safely secreted again in memory, I was back to watching football: the final game of the World Cup between Spain and Argentina. What a disappointment! On the Spanish side, there was lots of passing but little finishing; on the Argentine, lots of fouling and copious diving. At one point, the great Messi, after a collision with Spaniard Aymeric Laporte, lay on the ground, stiff and straight as a board, like a child playing dead. He got a foul but not the penalty kick he was hoping for. On another occasion, after Argentina’s Enzo Fernández was rightly given a red card for upending the Spanish Pau Cubarshe, Messi spotted Spanish left-back Marc Cucurella momentarily covering his mouth as he spoke. Messi ran to the nearest referee, pointed to Cucurella, and insisted he be thrown off the field for covering his mouth, a rule drafted to prevent racist abuse. (Messi is white – part Spanish and part Italian; Cucurella said nothing racist). The referees quickly dismissed the ploy. After the game, Messi claimed that “the system was rigged” against the 39-year-old, billionaire footballer.
In the end, Spain, the far better team, prevailed. As important, 80-year-old Donald Trump used up three hours of his limited term of office and respiration, watching a boring game. He also had to endure Gianni Infantino’s ingratiation and the nearly 30 minute half-time show, featuring Madonna’s lip-synced, frozen-faced mash-up of pop and disco; Shakira lip-syncing the FIFA anthem titled “Dai Dai” (“C’mon, C’mon”) dressed in a Hula-skirt; and a somnambulist troubadour Justin Bieber performing his Gospel-lite “Everything Hallelujah.” He wore, naturally, items from his own clothing line: Hoodies $160, sunglasses $200.
Equally gratifying, Trump and Infantino were greeted with lusty boos when they walked on the field after the game to present awards. Then things went from bad to worse for them. First, Infantino wouldn’t let the president by himself carry the 18th carat gold, World Cup Trophy, apparently worried the kleptocrat-in-chief would make off with it. Then after shaking a few reluctant Spanish hands, Trump was ushered aside by team captain Rodri — no yellow card was issued, but the Secret Service must have been nervous. The U.S. president was subsequently edited out of the official Spanish and FIFA World Cup champions photographs.Trump, who two weeks ago called Spain “hopeless” and a country with “bad people,” was beaten. He now praised the country’s team and denied any previous trash-talking: “I have no tension. I have no tension with anybody.”
At about the same time in Argentina, President Milei was mocked for failing to delete his pre-scheduled posting on X declaring a national holiday for “the victory celebrations for the Argentine National Team.” Elsewhere, Palestinians and their allies celebrated the victory of Spain, whose president publicly recognized that Israel’s conduct in Gaza constituted a genocide and said that its president, Benjamin Netanyahu was “a criminal who must be arrested immediately.” For a little while, there were glimmers of justice.
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