The World Cup newsletter

In which I watch almost all of the World Cup Official Films and talk about when I went to Qatar

Nov 18, 2022

Welcome to the latest edition of SSWOS, the Sick, Sad World of Sports, where sports is the mechanism by which we learn about the depths of shithousery and assholery and dipshittery of the human soul.

I hope you find it fun or informative but not both. If you want more of this particular species of brain worms, follow @scksadwos.

I also write exclusively about rugby league on pythagonrl.com and @pythagonrl.

Reviewing every FIFA™ World Cup™ Official Film™

I’ve developed odd ways of preparing for big sporting events. In order to get into the right mindset for the upcoming World Cup, I thought I’d see what I could find to get up to speed on the lore. It turns out FIFA has an official feature-length film for each tournament since 1954

So I sat down to watch them all and at the time I’ve writing, I’ve watched all of them bar 1998 and the most recent three (2010, 2014 and 2018). Presuming I can get FIFA’s shitty ass streaming service, FIFA+, working or find a complete Youtube upload of La Coupe De La Gloire, I should have watched them all by kick off. If not, I have played enough FIFA 98 to fill in the gaps.

I originally had planned to review and rank them all one-by-one but as I worked my way through the 80s realised this would be extremely boring, so instead, here’s what I learned.

1. Each film is a snapshot in time

Each Official Film is made around the time of the tournament, so each one shows us not only the actual football but is a little time capsule of the style of film making in vogue at the time and, sometimes, what the host nation was like. It’s entirely possible that I am the one person in the world who finds this interesting. I want to see how things are different, what’s shown and what’s missing, how people act, how players play and to get a view of the past that isn’t filtered through someone else’s sepia tones.

My main conclusion was that, boy, were the players lacking in polish in the 50s. The emergence of Pele in 1958 is the emergence of the first recognisably modern player, one gifted with grace and style and tact that is missing from his clumsy forebears. The bumbling amateurs of 1930 through 1958 have been eliminated by 1966, at which I chose to focus on whatever the fuck Bobby Charlton was doing with his hair

and the insanely subdued narration, including multiple sighing references to the defensiveness of the modern game and a Python-esque potshot at industrial Liverpool.

After that, the game starts to look a lot like what you'd expect. As technology improves, we can see more of the intricate detail of the players' skills, which makes me wonder if the absence of this in the past helps contribute to Discourse about whether this era’s players would be competitive in a past era and vice versa

Other things that I found striking:

There is a surprising lack of smoking shown.
The game was rougher in the old days, largely because the players were a lot less skillful at tackling and lacked the subtle concealment of tactics that modern players use to unseat their opposition.
Diving for penalties and intimidating the referee has been around a lot longer than I would have expected and in fact, the latter used to be a lot worse than it is today. I’m surprised more referees weren’t punched in the 70s and 80s.
Displaying the flag of England, as opposed to the Union Jack, is a relatively recent thing for English fans.
While merchandise in general has always been a thing, wearable merchandise, like jersies and scarves, becomes more and more common with each subsequent World Cup. Ironically, shirtlessness also increases with each subsequent World Cup, starting with overheated English fans in Spain in 1982.
Crowd reaction shots, as a means of conveying the significance of a given moment, were overused in the 50s, minimised through the 70s and 80s and are back by the 00s but with a lot more crying.
Based on this tiny sample size, Brazilians love playing and dancing to samba music and have no other discernible personality. English fans are middle aged, overweight and red. Africans always add a dash of colour (specifically, green, yellow and red).
Inserted sound effects are just as annoying as they were on Funniest Home Videos.
Even making allowances for the period, an atonal, atmospheric musical score can easily ruin one of these films (e.g. 1990).
South Korea and Japan built eighteen brand new stadiums for 2002. Insane.
These are not documentaries. These are films and, largely, FIFA propaganda. Some are forthright but most gloss over any issues with curosry attention to spend more time on replays of long goals.

2. House style

It’s incredible how patronising the 1950s films are. Not just in response to shots of female fans but also the “brown faces” of Brazil, never mind any of the minnows that managed to turn up to a 16-team 1950s tournament. While the overt patronisation disappears, along with almost any depiction of a woman who isn’t both Brazilian and dancing to samba music, we are treated to gratutious beach tits in 1982’s G'olé! for reasons that are both unclear and very clear simultaneously. Oh this was produced by “Ladbrokes Entertainment”? Interesting.

It’s hard to attribute this to wokeism but any variation in the ways the films are made, is slowly replaced by what I would call the house style, starting Mexico 86 and completed by Germany 06. It’s a focus on professional writing and narration (including Sean Connery, Michael Caine and the wonderful tandem of George Vecsey and Liev Schriber), removing any trace of humour or racism or sexism or anything that’s not factual recount of the highlights, minimising any material beyond the stadium that can’t be connceted back to the game itself and a modern sound track. The point is to corporatise the product and sand off its rough edges which is fine and understandable but pretty boring.

Where the films are allowed to be interesting, is where they show the minnows and where they show some of life in the host country. The cameos and stories of Kuwait, Cameroon and New Zealand, also in 1982’s G'olé!, show this all too well. Even the tedious interludes about children trying to make their way to the final (a device used in two separate films), allows us to see the Switzerland and Mexico that exists beyond the stadiums. Arica, a desolate village in the middle of the Chilean desert holding a global sporting event against a background of barely concealed poverty in 1962, might be the most enduring image of this whole exercise. Both provide much needed depth to the films, when allowed to be used.

There might be more interesting stories to be told. Consider the collapse of the British Empire in the 1960s contrasted with England’s win at home

in 1966 and then the subsequent reliance on the children of immigrants from the colonies to help England stay ahead of the increasingly competitive teams from those same colonies. Perhaps that's too long an arc and a story someone else will have to tell.

3. Flattening

Let’s be clear: the official films are not designed to consumed one after another, every night, for two to three weeks. They are meant to be watched probably 4 years apart and later editions would’ve been bought as barely-thoughtful Christmas gifts on VHS or DVD, maybe watched once, and then never touched again.

But when you do it this way, what happens is the actual achievement of winning the World Cup flattens out

. Because the style of each film tends to focus on the nations that feature at the pointy end of the Cup, we hear about Brazil, Argentina, France, Germany, Italy, etc repeatedly

, with a brief appearance from the tournament’s prominent African success story in later editions, and it all starts to blur together. After 90 or 120 minutes, I don't really care which western European or South American country triumphs and gets the almost identically shot-for-shot trophy lift and stirring music.

4. Giving Qatar hosting rights is not exactly unusual for FIFA

Juan Peron, then ex-dictator of Argentina, died during the 1974 tournament and as a mark of respect, the game that was in progress stopped for a minute. Irrespective of your personal politics, you have to applaud the show of civility. Now to look up Peron and take a big sip of water…

Interesting.

The next World Cup in 1978 was held in Argentina and to quote again from Wikipedia:

This tournament was marred by flagrant controversy, domestic politics, and alleged interference and match-fixing by the Argentine authoritarian military junta government, who were using this tournament as an opportunity for nationalistic propaganda, and for the relatively new military junta to seek legitimacy on the world stage.

Which all sounds pretty familiar. FIFA did nothing to address the political situation or the use of its centrepiece tournament as a propaganda tool for a regime that Wikipedia says:

Less than a year before the World Cup, in September 1977, Interior Minister General Albano Harguindeguy, stated that 5,618 people had recently disappeared. The infamous Higher School of Mechanics of the Navy held concentration camp prisoners of the Dirty War and those held captive reportedly could hear the roars of the crowd during matches held at River Plate's Monumental Stadium, located only a mile away; prompting echoes of Hitler's and Mussolini's alleged political manipulation of sports during the 1936 Berlin Olympics and 1934 FIFA World Cup.

Argentina, ““coincidentally””, won the tournament.

I don’t think copy+paste of Wikipedia is an earth-shattering discovery, even if it was nearly a half century ago, or that if you’re reading this, you wouldn’t already think that FIFA are some of the scummiest examples of the human race found outside of a parliamentary building or Fortune 500 boardroom. However, it is pretty clear what’s going to happen with Qatar: the tournament will be held, we won’t see any of the behind-the-scenes disasters, content will be milled out of the moral hand wringing, a winner will be annoited (maybe even Qatar!), the film will be made, the controversy will be given a line or two and we’ll move on to 2026 in North America.

Incidentally, I suspect the reason that FIFA has not commissioned retrospectives of 1934, 1938 or 1950, or endorsed ones made at the time, might be the excess of fascist imagery which, considering what happened in the 1940s, could be considered distsasteful.

5. The ranking

(please understand that I did not account for your personal feelings of the tournament itself, or its outcome, in compiling this list because those things are unknowable and irrelevant to me)

1994
1974
1966
2002
1982
1962
1978
1986
2006
1958
1954
1970
1990

The grace, the beauty of sports

No room in this edition, sorry!

Qatar itself

Here’s a fun little personal fact: I’ve actually been to Qatar. My now-wife and I stopped over for two days in 2016 on our way to Europe to visit some friends of mine who were living in Doha.

Here are my main memories:

It was hot. 50+ degrees during the day and surprisingly full-on humidity in August. Exercise probably would’ve only been doable in the pre-dawn hours of the morning.
We stayed with our friends in The Pearl, which is a community for ex-pats north of downtown Doha. The whole place had the vibe of a resort that was barely occupied, and we had nothing to do. The endless run of luxury shops were empty, staffed by people who were clearly and extremely bored. There were no amenities that might facilitate your day-to-day life (as my friend pointed out, no newsagents). The pool was like a bath. I assume everyone was either at work or at home, both air conditioned.
Alcohol is obviously banned. You can drink in 5-star western hotels and you used to be able to in The Pearl, before a rumoured unpleasantness involving a high status Qatari put an end to that. We dropped into a hotel for a drink - a Belgian Beer Cafe, if I remember
8
- and it was probably the single most unpleasant drinking experience of my life in which I wasn't sick. Imagine a fat, mid-50s, divorced white South African guy on an extortionate salary. Now imagine a room full of them. Now imagine that room is full of smoke, because of course you can smoke indoors, and they're all drunk. This must have been what it was like to drink in the 70s.
There were two tourist attractions in Doha at the time: the Souk and the Islamic Museum. The Islamic Museum was closed on the day we went.
The Souk, the old quarter marketplace, is at least interesting. You can probably find whatever you like and it’s home to the Peninsula’s leading hospital for falcons
9
because falconry is big business there. We walked at least a couple of shops just filled with falcons. It was like being at the show, except with deadly raptors in lieu of more traditional European farm animals.

Qatar Airways is fine and if that’s how you end up in Doha, so be it, but I wouldn’t be going out of my way to go there unless you were particularly keen on the World Cup. Lord knows how you’d go if you weren’t a straight, white male.

Prediction

A winner? Um, Argentina I guess? No, Brazil. Uh, actually maybe France. Who cares?

My actual prediction is that I’ve put a lot of effort into getting ready for what will go down as the worst World Cup in history, although that’s probably the immediate epitaph of every tournament (obviously excluding 1994 and 2002).

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And a 15 minute special for the 1930 tournament, made in 2010.

Which was clearly not selected a film shown at a high level of definition that wouldn’t exist for a couple more decades in mind.

The favoured Discourse of the online poisoned millennial that’s had to listen to too much shit from boomers since birth.

In what were clearly dangerous stadiums.

‘Flattening’ is a great word because it covers so much of the tenuous connection to reality created by viewing everything through the internet, i.e. much of the experience of being alive in the 20s.

Almost invariably, one of them fails to get out of the group stage.

*looking up from my phone* Oh yeah? Brazil won again did they? Well, bully for them. God how many more of these do I have to go through?

A brand I thought was Australian only but there you go.

Undoubtedly better healthcare that migrant workers got.