Despite everything FIFA threw at it, football really was the winner

July 25, 2026 — 9:30am

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“So it’s over – the few weeks every four years when you pretend you know something about football.”

Cutting words to hear, at the end of an all-absorbing FIFA World Cup. My son spoke with his hand over his mouth, so I appealed to the referee (his mother) to get him sent off, but she was busy watching video replays.

Having lost the point, I went down screaming in agony, ankle in one hand, eye socket in the other, rolling downhill on a flat floor. This earnt a red card for “blatant simulation”, so I called the President of the United States to get it overturned. But he was busy taking a call from Bryson DeChambeau whining at him to impose Mar-a-Lago rules on the British Open. Under the Mar-a-Lago rules of golf, it’s OK for a “winner” to stomp down the grass around your ball. Hell, it’s OK to throw your ball back onto the fairway. Mar-a-Lago rules had already been invoked to rig the World Cup, so why not the Open?

But the President couldn’t take my call. As the final loser, I claimed there was a conspiracy against me. Don’t tell me I don’t know something about soccer. Soccer unites the world in sore-loserism.

The chaotic scenes after the World Cup final – Argentine players trying to punch on and earning posthumous red cards, doddering US Presidents trying to muscle into the winner’s celebration, the eruption of conspiracy theories about the game being rigged – turned out to be completely consistent with the philosophy now embedded into global professional sport. Throughout........

© Brisbane Times