Germany advanced to the World Cup final by a very rare, convincing, historic (7-1) beatdown, Argentina by one of the more typical squeakers. The main deficiency of [world] football [US] soccer as a sport is the poor correlation between score and team performance, mainly because goals are so rare that they are swamped by randomness. So in game after game, the team that wins didn’t necessarily play better than the losers.
Its main deficiency as a social institution is actually similar (though not intrinsic), and more important: almost two hundred million Brazilians are miserable this week, rending their garments as though losing a game indicated something important about them or their country. From the press reports, it would seem that winning the world cup would have made made up for the failures in actually presenting the event (or all the expensive stadiums that will sit empty henceforth), or would count more than this real world-class victory.
There’s nothing wrong with team sports, being fans, and having unifying cultural institutions, and soccer has big virtues: it’s genuinely athletic, not very dangerous, and anyone can enjoy it with a ball and a largish flat place to kick it around in. But being proud of your local team as though you had anything to do with their success, or as though they say anything about you when they win, or as though the outcome of a soccer game has any enduring value anyway, is as genuinely stupid as being proud of your ancestors. The correlation between putting up a winning soccer team and being an admirable or successful nation is even worse than the correlation between a soccer score and quality of play.
This, on the other hand, (Um a Zero was written on the occasion of a famous Brazil 1-0 win) is something to properly make Brazilian hearts swell, a bunch of kids from all over the world coming together in Boston to play a choro almost a hundred years old.
[Cross-posted at The Reality-Based Community]
