The World Cup Is About Great Players And Nothing Else

Like every https://defector.com/the-world-cup-belongs-to-the-dreamers">previous edition, this World Cup has been great at producing stories.

The most uplifting was the one about the shrinking gap between soccer's established powers and the rest of the world, as told by the group-stage https://defector.com/dr-congo-welcomes-you-to-africas-world-cup">success of the African teams, and most memorably by https://defector.com/cape-verde-defeats-spain-0-0">Cape https://defector.com/cape-verde-deserved-better-than-whatever-the-hell-jp-dellacamera-was-doing">Verde.

You also had the tactical story of the tournament, in how the teams with the most fluid and attractive attacking play achieved it by eschewing the sport's dominant strategic meta—the spread-'em-wide-and-pin-'em-high positional gambit, which has grown boring to watch and increasingly easy for defenses to counteract—to instead bring players closer together, looking to create space through spontaneous movement, collaboration, and deception, producing unpredictable moves full of technical inventiveness that baffled opponents and dazzled spectators.

The exemplars of this refreshing brand of free-flowing soccer were Morocco and Colombia (honorable mentions go to the group-stage versions of Argentina and the https://defector.com/i-have-died-and-gone-to-usmnt-heaven">United States), and in particular the brief but extraordinary cameos of Colombian cult favorite, Juan Fernando Quintero.

Then there was the anti-VAR story.

It doesn't require belief in the more fanciful conspiracies about FIFA rigging the tournament in favor of Argentina to appreciate all the ways VAR has made the game worse.

To wit, it has dulled the emotional impact of what should be moments of explosive sentiment, has made it so that the key replays after goals are no longer the best angles of amazing strikes but rather freeze-frames of back lines so that you can guess whether review will deem someone offside by an eyebrow, and overall has created conditions that only exacerbate the sense of inconsistency, suspicion, and unfairness that the replay system was meant to eliminate.

Breel Embolo's https://defector.com/argentina-switzerland-world-cup">red card against Argentina was the nadir, a call that by the letter of the new, confusing law may have been correct, but that violated any conceivable notion of justice.

So yes, over the course of a long tournament, especially during the early, most entertaining stage, the World Cup offers a rich variety of stories, all of them worthwhile in their own right.

But as the competition winds toward its conclusion, the World Cup always returns to its principal theme: that the only thing that truly matters in soccer is having the best of the best.