What: The FIFA men’s World Cup, the quadrennial showdown of the world’s best national football teams:
Why: Okay, let’s get the jabs out of the way: Men’s football is impossibly broken. The goal is too small, the pitch too big, the rules too impenetrable, the players too overpaid and too hypochondriacal, the referees too powerful and too few, the timekeeping positively jurassic. All true, all irrelevant. The World Cup is so eventful, its name doesn’t even need to say what sport it is. (Which is good, because we seem confused on the subject.) First there’s the international nature of it, pitting the likes of Senegal against France on a level playing field. And there’s the complete dominance of a single country’s sports venues, flooded by the most thunderous assortment of colorful fans. Then there’s the structure: a genius mix of three games per team in eight brackets of “group play” (often featuring a “Group of Death”!), followed by a sixteen-team knockout. Finally, ultimately, there’s the game itself: beautiful, fluid, elemental.
Impact: There is no competitive event, not even the Olympics, that so galvanizes the world. It is the most-watched broadcast in the world, with three quarters of a billion people watching the last final match. Perhaps we don’t see it amid our interminable NBA and NHL playoffs, our confounding NFL playoffs in which teams vie for the right to take the day off, our disastrous college football system, and our topsy-turvy NASCAR chase which places the biggest event at the front. We should open our eyes. And get better. Lots better. In my lifetime, we will win this.
Personal Connection: I’m posting this on my way to Columbus, Ohio, for the delightful Origins game convention. It was at this event two years ago that my friend and partner, Peter Adkison, showed once again that he can see opportunity where no one else can. Several of us were griping that our meetings at the show prevented us from seeing the World Cup transpiring in Germany. Hardly a griper, Peter installed a projector system and fed the broadcasts in an 8-foot-high display on the convention center wall. Suddenly, all meetings moved to just outside the Gen Con booth, now the most popular place in the convention. Even at a show that wasn’t his, Peter dominated by invoking the World Cup.
Other Contenders: the NCAA Division I men’s basketball tournament, for which, despite our religious and political differences, we are all bracketologists; the bizarrely misnamed but still invigorating America’s Cup yachting competition; the richly compact Major League Baseball playoffs; the devil-take-the-hindmost beeline seen on “The Amazing Race”; the Scripps National Spelling Bee, in which every newspaper in North America gets to throw one child into a blender.