BS Summary: This article contains 37 faulty reasoning types, including Anecdotal, Negativity Bias, and Appeal to Emotion, with Biased Writer Voice as the most egregious example at 46.5% saturation with 734 hits. Analysis detected 4,142 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,578 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 46.3% and a BS Rank of 43% (9,521 of 16,550 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 57.50% of the article peer group.
For days before England played Argentina in the World Cup semi-final, the old dread had been rising in me like damp through a wall.
England against Argentina has never once been merely a football match.
I will spare you the suspense, since England never do: it ended badly.
It is the how that matters.
I was six the first and only time my father took me to Wembley.
It was 1966, and we went to watch England play Argentina in a bad-tempered, goalless quarter-final that passed into legend when the Argentine captain, Antonio Rattín, was sent off, and refused for a small eternity to leave the pitch.
He clearly wasn’t a gentleman.
Twenty years later, in Mexico, Diego Maradona knocked England out with two goals, one of them scored with his hand.
“It was as if we had beaten a country, not just a football team,” he said afterwards; the Falklands War was four years gone, and “we knew they had killed a lot of Argentine boys there, killed them like little birds.
And this was revenge.”
Football, as someone ought to have said before me, is the continuation of war by other means.
This is the uncomfortable thing the World Cup keeps trying to tell us about ourselves.
The tournament is the largest recurring ritual of group identity our disenchanted species still performs, and what it reveals is that the group has two faces.
Consider first the good one.
When Jean-Paul Sartre wanted to describe how a mere collection of separate individuals becomes something more, he reached, of all improbable things, for football.
In the Critique of Dialectical Reason, he distinguishes the series — the inert bus queue, each of us alone together, a plurality of solitudes — from what he calls the group-in-fusion, in which separate people dissolve into a single acting body bent on a common object.
A good team is exactly this: 11 private ambitions subordinated to, and elevated by, a shape that none of them possesses alone.
And so is a crowd.
What happens in a stadium when your side scores is that a series of strangers becomes, for a few delirious seconds, a group.
Émile Durkheim gave this its name a century ago: collective effervescence, the heat that runs through a gathered crowd until it boils over and lifts each person clean out of himself.
His scandalous conclusion was that this, and not any doctrine, is the origin of the sacred.
The god, on this account, is the fever of the group.
I have felt the fever, and not only at Anfield.
I once watched Liverpool beat Bayern in Munich from a Scottish pub in the northern suburbs of Athens, among the Pan-Hellenic Liverpool supporters’ club, and found myself, against every instinct of my nature, high-fiving strangers whose language I do not speak (I am not, in the ordinary run of things, a hugger).
For those 90 minutes everything was, briefly, right with the world.
“The tournament is the largest recurring ritual of group identity our disenchanted species still performs.”
The anthropology here inverts what we tend to assume.
We imagine that a community exists first and then expresses its readymade unity in a shared rite.
It is the other way about: the rite makes the community.
“If one must act as though one believed,” wrote the anthropologist E.
E.
Evans-Pritchard, “one ends in believing… as one acts.”
First you buy the shirt, sing the song, take the same seat; the belonging arrives afterwards, as a gift of the doing.
This is why a nation you were merely assigned at birth can be felt, across 90 minutes, as the most intimate thing about you — and why a nation not your own can be borrowed wholesale.
My first experience of passionate national feeling was for Brazil, in 1970; aged 10, in a full yellow kit, I rolled the names — Pelé, Jairzinho, Rivelino, Tostão, Gerson — silently around my mouth like an incantation.
Identity, the World Cup teaches, is not a possession but a performance, and a fluid one — fluid to the point of vertigo.
At the 2006 tournament, I watched Serbia and Montenegro play on as a nation that had, a few weeks earlier, ceased to exist, singing the anthem of a Yugoslavia that had ceased to exist before it, and losing 6–0 to Argentina for good measure.
My hosts in Belgrade were delighted, rather than crushed: here was a theater not of identity but of its endless differentiation — family, city, tribe, nation — against the forces of fate.
But here is the turn.
The very warmth that binds the group is also what curdles into its opposite.
Durkheim knew it, and so does anyone who has stood on a terrace.
The same effervescence that produces the embrace produces the howl; the fever that makes the choir makes the mob.
The going-out of the self is as available to the lynch party as to the congregation.
I have heard grown men make jokes about the 97 dead of Hillsborough and the dead of Munich; I have wondered how much of the particular venom aimed at Mohamed Salah, an Egyptian and a Muslim, belongs to this darker order.
Years ago, watching England go out of another tournament, I wrote of the “stupid, bloody-minded white tribalism that surrounds the England team, even when most of the best players are black”.
That the phrase still fits, 12 years on, is itself the lesson.
The fused group needs an enemy against which to fuse, and the World Cup, by dressing the tribe up as a nation and handing each one a flag, obligingly supplies one every four years, with fireworks.
This is not an argument against the tribe.
It is an argument for the rule.
Every tradition that has taken ecstasy seriously — every mystery cult, every church — has hedged it with ritual, an appointed time and place, a law.
The rule is not the enemy of the rapture; it is what keeps the rapture from becoming a fire.
Football’s genius, when it works, is to be at once the most tribal and the most rule-bound thing we do: a bounded 90 minutes, 17 laws, a marked and consecrated pitch, within which the fiercest collective passion is licensed precisely because it is contained.
Off the terrace, I can loathe Manchester United and still, over a pint, hear out a United supporter’s reasons and grant that they are good ones.
The small miracle of football talk is that it holds tribal loyalty and reasoned respect for the enemy in the same hand.
If only our politics could manage the trick.
Suggested reading America: land of the cheats
It was Bill Shankly — a socialist who thought the game came down to “everyone working for each other, and everyone having a share of the rewards at the end of the day” — who liked to remind us that the true name of the sport is association football.
That is the whole of it.
The World Cup is the greatest festival of association we have left, and association is double through and through: the free society of equals and the baying pack are grown from a single root, and the only thing that decides which we get on the night is the rule we agree to keep.
And so, once again, I kept my seat and my superstitions, and gave myself over to the thing that is, as Shankly did not quite say, a good deal more important than life and death.
For 55 minutes I even dared to believe: Anthony Gordon put England ahead, and in the treacherous minutes that followed I permitted myself a small vision of the final.
I should have known better.
I did know better.
In the 85th minute, Enzo Fernández rose unmarked to shoot in a cross from Messi; in stoppage time, Lautaro Martínez scored with a header, from precisely the same source.
One–two, and it was finished.
Two goals, two crosses, both floated in by the little magician who is Maradona’s true heir — though this time, mercifully, he used no hand at all, only his feet, which somehow makes it worse.
A decade ago, in the same doomed spirit, I wrote of the “headless chicken panic” that grips England the moment an opponent “dares to cross it into the penalty box”.
It is a bleak little consolation to be proved right twice in seven minutes.
But it is never the losing that undoes you.
England have a long and distinguished record of contriving to lose to Argentina in the end, and there is a certain grim solidarity to be had in it — the solidarity of the funeral.
As Prometheus tells the chorus, chained to his rock, the one gift he gave to mortals was to stop them foreseeing their doom: “I sowed in them blind hopes.”
That is the 90-minute anxiety dream — you are trapped, you can see exactly what is coming, and it comes anyway — and it is the tournament’s last and best revelation about the tribe.
What binds us is not the certainty of glory but the blind, renewable, faintly ridiculous hope we hold in common: the hope that kills you, and that you would not, for all the world, be without.
Spain will play Argentina on Sunday.
I shall watch with the serenity of the neutral, which is to say with none at all.
There is always 2030.
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