The Wit's Guide to Football

Or, there's a soccer born every minute

In the olden days depicted on this French postcard, players wore brogues and had spindly legs.

No matter whether you call it soccer, football, Canadian football, footie, footsie, Australian no-rules football, rugby, ruggers, rugelach, New Zealand some-rules football, pickleball, kickabout, or calcio, there can be no denying that the one where they kick a ball is truly The Beautiful Game.

“In Brazil no one doubts that the ball is a woman.”
— Eduard Galeano

It’s well documented that FIFA (the Football International Football Association, redundant but that’s the price of globalization) is one of the most corrupt organizations on earth, though competition is ever intensifying. Think how much money the IOC could make by selling naming rights to each of the five Olympic rings! If you squint, this can be seen as a testament to the beauty of seeing the world bond over sport, a connection so heartwarming and emotional that a little embezzlement seems like the cost of doing business.

“Being in politics is like being a football coach. You have to be smart enough to understand the game and dumb enough to think it’s important.”
— Eugene McCarthy

In 2014, the terrific FT columnist Simon Kuper got it wrong in the best way as he described the recent history of the World Cup as watching “planet’s biggest nationalist spectacle evolve into a cosmopolitan party.” The fact that the best players were “transnational elite more at home in first-class airport lounges than in the streets of their own countries” and that fans chose teams based on preference rather than bloodline exemplified “the worldwide retreat from nationalism.” Then history went and happened again, but still: A great thesis.

“Football is like chess, only without the dice.”
— Lukas Podolski

One charming byproduct of globalized soccer is hearing pasty Brits yell “Vamos!” at one another. As linguist Txuss Martin told The Athletic: “The sequence is highly sonorous and easy to project. Crucially, either of the two vowels can be prolonged for several seconds: ‘vamooooos!’ That makes it particularly well suited to chants, celebrations and collective displays of enthusiasm.”

“The ball is round, the game lasts ninety minutes, and everything else is just theory.”
— Sepp Herberger

People always ask me, what is the greatest game of football ever played? And I say my money is on the Fiorentina vs. Pistoiese game of October 27, 1954, when 10,000 Tuscan fans witnessed a group of cigar-shaped UFOs hover over the field and sprinkle silvery glitter all about. As Jehan Azad explained this week, the most plausible earth-bound explanation was some sort of spider migration, though a chemical analysis of the “glitter” suggested that wasn’t quite right. This is where Ziggy Stardust found his Spiders from Mars, and since the game was called on account of extraterrestrial excretions, we can say the aliens won.

“In football everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite team.”
— Jean-Paul Sartre

Once, in North America, soccer was the ideal sport for people who didn’t care for sports. Now, we need to find something else. Vamoooos rugelach!

“Intellectual football-lovers are a beleaguered crew, despised by intellectuals and football-lovers alike.”
— Martin Amis

These days, what crew isn’t beleaguered? Next week?

Each month my paid subscribers and I exchange some of the best things we’ve read, seen, heard, and experienced in a special issue called Get Wit Picks. As a reader service, I generally avoid sharing anything about modern politics, but I’ll make an exception for two great pieces I read in the last week.

First, an investigation from The Fence and Bungalow (they’ve never heard of you either) into whether the short-fingered vulgarian is in fact that. How has no one done this before? The best line:

“When he’s not gesturing, they hang from his sleeves like crepe rubber gloves filled with yoghurt.”

And as a chaser, Tina Brown’s caustically even-handed comparison of recent events on both sides of the aisle. A pox on both their White Houses:

“Maybe it’s a law of history: as empires begin to die of misrule, their rulers build monuments, a hopeful lie to fool future historians.”

Get Wit Quick No. 376 was an edge-of-your-seat nailbiter that ended in a score of nil-zilch, meaning everyone continues into next week. The mascot of this newsletter is Magnus the magpie, named after the magician from the Deptford Trilogy. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck. The inferior-for-now and still free AI replicant is at getwitquicker.replit.app. The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. Before you leave, please clean up the stands like Japanese fans and tap the ❤️ below.