CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

The Empire Loses the Ball

Image by Karsten Winegeart.

There comes a moment in every empire’s reign when the maps stop making sense.

Not necessarily because the borders move. But because there comes a time when the people who used to draw them no longer get to decide what the world looks like.

The World Cup has become that moment.

For weeks we’ve been force-fed the usual sentimental slop by broadcasters who sell every tournament as a Disney movie with shin pads. Childhood sacrifices. The little pitch where the captain learned to dream. Somewhere a violin is playing while a drone shot circles the dusty makeshift pitch where he scored his first triumphs. Every World Cup arrives wrapped in manufactured emotion sufficient to distract from the only story that actually matters.

They are all missing it.

The real story isn’t about one magical teenager or one heroic underdog (though there are plenty). The story is that Europe, and its colonial offspring in South America, have finally lost their exclusive claim to what they spent a century calling the beautiful game. Not ownership on paper. Ownership of the imagination. And the people losing that ownership are not handling it with any particular grace.

Listen carefully enough and you can almost hear the panic.

Germany’s captain Joshua Kimmich, a man paid approximately the GDP of a mid-sized African island nation to kick a ball into a net, lamented after his country’s elimination that they hadn’t even faced “world-class” opposition — yet Germany had deserved to go home because they’d been poor against everyone they met. It was remarkably candid. It was also accidentally hilarious in the manner of a man who complains that the cliff he walked off wasn’t tall enough to justify the fall.

It is entirely possible that Kimmich didn’t intend a racial hierarchy in his remarks. Intentions are a luxury that history rarely extends to the people on the receiving end of them. When a German captain casually dismisses opponents from Africa and the Global South as not “world-class,” certain historical resonances are simply unavoidable. Not because the son is responsible for the grandfather’s crimes, but because Europe has spent centuries confusing dominance with superiority, and the confusion did not evaporate when the flags came down. That is the peculiar tragedy of predominance. It demands that reality keep apologizing for contradicting it. When reality refuses, the superior man concludes not that he was mistaken, but that reality itself has become unreasonable.

The old football aristocracy cannot quite process what is happening. They still believe greatness comes with passports, UEFA coefficients, television contracts and a kind of protected designation of origin. They keep looking at the badge instead of the ball. The teams they spent decades treating as colorful, token guests have, not so quietly, become full members. History, that most patient and merciless of ironists, is at it again.

Football was supposedly invented on a damp little island whose greatest modern export seems to be nostalgia for when it mattered. The English wrapped the game in rules, measurements and Victorian certainty before exporting it alongside railways, missionaries and the assumption that everyone else would forever remain grateful wards. But the game, unlike empire, refused to obey. It escaped. It rolled downhill through oil towns in Algeria, fishing villages in Senegal, barrios in Colombia, refugee camps, favelas, concrete housing estates, mountain schools and beaches where the goalposts are flip-flops and the ball is held together with string, tape and stubborn optimism. Nobody asked permission. Nobody waited for a UEFA coaching license. Somewhere along the journey the colonies stole........

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