Never has a World Cup started so badly.  Offered in Qatar, with Zinédine Zidane as ambassador, in a suspicious climate of corruption. Everything has been said about this country, as big as half of Brittany, managing to change the season of the World Cup for the first time since its existence, air-conditioning its stadiums, and killing workers on the job so that all stadiums are ready on time. About the change of date: playing in the summer after the club season, allowed to prepare the players and to form a group, which is always difficult with national teams, the chemistry has to happen in a short time and the results must be immediate; playing in winter guarantees having players who have not played an entire season, who are therefore less mentally and physically worn out and who benefit from their pre-season preparation… Regarding the workforce, have we ever heard of the low-cost labor that has been used systematically for decades at every High Mass organization around the world? Similarly, the argument of gossiping about the health of players at risk in this climate was laughable. Who cared about the health of players at the 1986 World Cup in Mexico, for example, where impossible heat and humidity reigned, this organization did not move the world at the time. The choice of Qatar should have been denounced as soon as the name of this country rustled, afterwards, it was too late and decency should have prevailed. In terms of play, this World Cup marked the end of an extraordinary generation: Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi played their last World Cup. This World Cup was announced as the advent of Mbappé. The young French prodigy was about to bury the old glories without firing a shot.

From the start of the competition, the organization proved to be remarkable. Of course, shouts arose to decry the air conditioning, it was necessary to maintain this feeling of suspicion. We thus heard a former President of the French Republic complaining about this World Cup and saying "that he wouldn't have been there", someone whispered in his ear that in this case, he should no longer go to the Parc des Princes support the Paris Saint-Germain team. As always in the football World Cup, nations are pitted against nations. This is the inimitable charm of this competition, the football world cup, the greatest planetary event, recalls the differences between peoples and revives them. In a sense, if the World Cup is the illustration of capitalism and liberal society, it continues to reflect an image contrary to globalism. Where club teams are sold to the financial powers and often no longer have any local players in their roster, no longer practice any or almost no training, buy and resell sort of modern-day slaves, even if some of them they earn incredible sums, all of which should alert us to the ability of this world to remain human. National teams are resisting, the World Cup is resisting, clubs have tried to take power through world championships, it is not certain that they will not succeed one day or another, but for the moment the national teams are resisting, come what may . The football world cup takes on a very particular aspect if we compare it to the world cup of another sport, here the singularity of the game agrees with the nationality. The game of football is not only based on strength or speed, therefore on the physical, but on the technique of the foot, a member with which it is much easier to do badly than to do well, hence the expression play like a foot. The rhythm, the cadence, the way of going from point A to point B, the story told during this journey, the way of telling this story; the dependence on one's origin, on one's culture, crystallizes a way of playing and makes it inimitable. Football is literature, poetry, music, and Brazilian literature, poetry and music do not resemble French literature, poetry or music. Thus the football World Cup escapes globalism, which can only strangle itself and use its armed arms, liberalism and capitalism, to keep this tournament in its fold, which taunts it. The Football World Cup revives the idea of ​​country, people and communion. Asians and Africans do not necessarily succeed in this, could this be because none of the three are missing?

The erasure of local cultures by globalism is like a sandcastle and the national stubbornness of the World Cup to the waves that come up to assault it with the tide. The natural takes its place: local cultures, and therefore the history of peoples. In this context, the big match of the World Cup has been played from the start between Europe and South America. Between the colonizers and the colonized. Argentina is the first soccer country in South America because the Jesuits brought the game there. The game in South America can be discussed for hours. Each country shows a way of touching and juggling the ball that resembles it. Ecuador has thus deployed a singular game and appreciated by observers in Qatar. When a South American coach manages a country other than his own, he will first show his knowledge of local football before deploying his own strategy. If the victories between Europe and AmSud, as South America is nicknamed, established perfect parity, since 2002 and Brazil's last victory, Europe has taken the lead and leads by twelve victories to nine. In 2002, the match was 9 for Amsud against eight for Europe. Since 2006 and the acceleration of globalism, Europe has won the World Cup four times and left no crumbs to Amsud. A few months before the 2022 World Cup, the best French player of his generation, Kylian Mbappé gave an interview to the Brazilian channel, TNT Sports, and affirmed with his legendary relaxation tinged with a certain arrogance: "Brazil is a good team. . Afterwards, there are many European teams too. The advantage that we Europeans have is that we play among ourselves with high-level matches all the time, such as the Nations League for example. When we arrive at the World Cup, we are ready where Brazil and Argentina do not have this level in South America, believes Mbappé. Football is not as advanced as in Europe. That's why during the last World Cups, it's always the Europeans who win. Not the best way to make friends in South America in general and Brazil in particular. In the past, we learned to turn our tongue in our mouth before speaking! If anything works well in Amsud, it's memory. Amsud frequents globalism through its financial circuits, for the rest and even if it has adopted the mores in force in Europe (kind of soft culture of globalism, last Christian fires to believe to dispose of the good), the countries of America of the South camp on their singularity and on their identity. It is enough to see a South American football team singing its national anthem to realize that it is not a question of looking good in front of the cameras, of fooling the population who watches them and follows them with enamored eyes, or a dull appetizer. Representing your country is the best thing these players can experience. They would offer everything for their country, wish to show the honor that represents for them to wear the jersey of their country. And this passion for the national thing or what represents it reaches all layers of society. Mbappé in his interview could have diplomatically underlined this difference as it seems to be the main difference between Europe and Amsud. “Dibu” Martinez, the Argentinian goalkeeper, had replied to him by inviting him to come and play in South America in order to see “the difficulty of playing at 3000 meters above sea level, in La Paz, Ecuador under 35° , or in Colombia where you can't even breathe, they always play on perfect courts, billiards. He doesn't know what South America is. Every time we go to play with the selection, we are exhausted and we cannot train much. When an Englishman goes to train in England, he is there in thirty minutes. Let him play in Colombia or Ecuador and we'll see if it's easy. »

 

But the declaration of the young prodigy from Bondy also advanced that football was not so advanced in South America! What does that mean? Understand that the new generation watered down in American sports only believe in one thing: statistics. In American sport, statistics are set up as the only criterion of judgment, but if a sport escapes statistics, it is football. How could a sport played with the feet escape statistics? And South American football infinitely more than European football. For the South American, it's the soul that counts. We see the gap! In 1978, at the end of the final between Argentina and Holland, Ubaldo Fillol, the Argentinian goalkeeper, and Alberto Tarantini, a defender, fell into each other's arms, very close to them, a supporter is leaning forward, his sleeves devoid of any arms virtually embracing the two players. The photo signed Ricardo Alfieri will make the cover of El Grafico and continues to remain in the hearts of Argentines who call it: El abrazo del alma (the embrace of the soul). For many reasons, this photo would not exist in Europe. Probably because eugenics proceeds from an ethnic cleansing of everything that we find dirty and different, of everything that seems to us to lack perfection. In South America, the dirty, the little swarthy, the poorly educated, the cheater, still find their place in society... What did we not hear before the final, in particular from the pen or from the mouths of journalists who spoke of Argentina like those people with open contempt! The sanitized world is devoid of words too strong to caricature these portenos .  An Argentinian hero, in the pantheon of Argentinian mythology, Diego Maradona, continued to write this story of revenge against a poetryless and robotized world by defending the poor against the petty bourgeois in white collar, he wrote it from Argentina in Naples, another stronghold of a world that is disappearing under the battering of globalism. “The Neapolitans are today a great tribe… which has decided to die out, rejecting the new power, that is, what we call history or modernity… It is a refusal, stemming from the heart of the community (we know of collective suicides among herds of animals); a fatal negation against which there is nothing to do. It provokes a deep melancholy, like all tragedies that happen slowly; and moreover, a deep consolation, because this refusal, this negation of history is just, is sacrosanct”, wrote Pier-Paolo Pasolini. In this life where the street dictates its law, poetry is omnipresent. Because poetry relates life. Poetry just ends when life turns into an "air-conditioned nightmare". Kylian Mbappé expressed in his interview the smug arrogance of a European thinking that South America was the Third World, that the facilities were not up to par with those in Europe, that the players if they had technical qualities had no more than the Europeans, that the Europeans had even caught up with them… It is surprising to often encounter this arrogance among young people from disadvantaged suburbs (a term that would make an Argentinian between us burst out laughing, be it said) , this arrogance would have been totally absent from the players of the French team of the end of the 80s. created themselves. A spontaneous generation.

South America therefore does not live on the same tempo. There, programs parade during prime time to discuss tactics, poetry again, dribbling, this goal that summed up the whole Ecuadorian or Brazilian soul... Players participate accompanied by intellectuals, philosophers, psychologists , sometimes priests. Jorge Valdano, striker for the victorious Argentina team in 1986, moved to Mexico for the competition with a library of a hundred books to read during the competition. Luis César Menotti, coach of the Argentine team in 1978, began his press conferences by quoting Borgès or Ocampo… Imagine for a moment Didier Deschamps answering a journalist by quoting Chateaubriand or Houellebecq to support his point? In 1990, Diego Maradona affirmed when arriving with the Argentine selection in the United States, place of the World Cup that year, that if the selection won the cup, he would not take it to the presidential palace (Carlos Menem was then entangled in cases of corruption), but would lay her down at the feet of Ernesto Sabato (an immense Argentine writer then suffering). Culture irrigates the Argentine street as much as football. The authority of a great writer is revered there. Even if we have never read it, we know its importance. We admire it by repeating a sentence or a turn of phrase. And we talk about football for hours, Argentina is torn apart, a European country in South America, it knows the followers of Menotti who like the flamboyant and offensive game, and the followers of Bilardo, more suspicious, more cautious, more realistic... Argentine coaches enjoy an immense reputation, they often train the selections of other South American national teams. But the South American particularities are gradually fading as the cultures that support and root them are swept away by globalism. Thus, they wake up and reveal themselves at the World Cup. For how much longer ? South American players come very young to play in Europe. They are therefore uprooted. Money is flowing in Europe. The South Americans are crumbling under poverty and under the debts contracted with these same European countries, they cannot refuse the sums offered by Europe for the least talented nugget which appears. We remember that Pelé or Maradona had been nationalized so as not to leave Brazil and Argentina too soon. These young players who sometimes arrive before their twenties, uprooted, removed from their families when they have not yet formed one, find themselves immersed in a world totally different from the one they have learned to know. This regular looting by Europe looks so much like modern slavery which exploded with the Bosman judgment (legal judgment of 1996 removing the limit on the number of Community or non-Community sportsmen and women who had signed association or cooperation agreements with the European Union in a team or an official competition).  

What about Europe? For a long time, Germany and Italy dominated Europe. One represented strength and power, the other technique and mischief. We liked one or the other, that social networks did not invent it. We debated endlessly, leaning on the counter. That too, social networks did not invent it. So we're just picking up old ideas that we think are dead. Northern Europe embodied power, unleashed force, efficiency, and Southern Europe talent, virtuosity, ease. Southern Europe was Italy, and Northern Europe was Germany, and Italy beat out Germany. The recent balance has been achieved by adding Latin selections. France audacious mixture was the first to shake the building. France had the talent and the strength, not everything was perfectly adjusted, but they had the best of both worlds. But she was crumbly. The German mentality and the Italian mentality, the taste for victory that one obtains only after having overcome, remained their prerogative and France suffered, marvelously, nevertheless she suffered. The acme of this fight will remain France-Germany in the semi-finals of the 1982 World Cup in Seville, where France playing romantic football and reaching a paroxysm of creativity against Germany not giving up and scoring the last penalty by a former butcher boy, Horst Rubesch. The dish turned out to be indigestible. France could have the impression of having set the table, the garlands, repaired the electricity, prepared a sumptuous dinner, and at the end a person came to shoot a fireworks display with three firecrackers and won the bet. Once again the weapons differ. Then France won its first title thanks to a Platini worthy of a superhero, the 1984 European Championship. Never has a Frenchman played at this level in an international competition. Platini scored nine goals in seven games, but that's a matter of statistics. His mastery, his hold on his team, his certainty of showing Europe that he was the best European player was perfect, indomitable and tempestuous. The great champions have a gesture that resembles them. France will have left its mark on the competition with a way, a way, which belonged only to her, which was only hers, which could only come from her, because she mixed the technique and strength, pride and humility, skill and innovation. But the Platini era was to end and France was to live in the shadow of resurgent Italy and Germany. Football learns to play with its strengths and not those of the adversary. Romantic France marked the meeting of Hidalgo and Platini, two men whose name says it all about France. The France team can only be a conglomerate. On the other hand, the association of the players of this team, especially in 1982, leaves the taste of an extraordinary alchemy, of a highly refined dish, and whose expression of freedom was unknown to the world. After Platini, came the Bosman judgment which began to kill the formation since it was enough to buy the players. The players began to no longer belong to the country, to be a kind of franchise… because you had to become American all the way, you had to copy everything. In 1998, France won the World Cup for the first time; a victory built on the success of 1984. Aimé Jacquet, a man fed with agricultural work, provided with a CAP of metallurgist, supported the team of France under the lazzis of the Parisian journalists. If Aimé Jacquet was the link between the two generations being born in 1941, he stayed away from this romantic and creative football model to favor defensive solidity. There are two types of coach: the one who wants to take one goal less than the opponent and the one who wants to score one goal more. In the defense of Aimé Jacquet, one could affirm that the fashion for the romantic game had ceased. The 1982 World Cup marked a kind of peak of this game, three teams practiced it: Argentina, Brazil and France, with selections including two or three number 10s and insisting on creativity. None of these three selections will reach the final of the 82 World Cup which will see Italy face and defeat Germany. These two national teams having reinforced defensive foundations. The 86 World Cup in Mexico will see Argentina win by having abandoned its flamboyant style... If the French team from 1974 to 1982 relied on the Hidalgo-Platini link, the French team from 1996 to the present establishes the link Jacquet Deschamps. Having the same philosophy and the same pragmatic approach to the field, the two men acquiesced in the idea that football should first be based on athletic men and defensive solidity. At the time of the German domination, Gary Lineker, English player emeritus declared: “Football is a game which is played with eleven against eleven, where it is the Germans who win at the end. With Aimé Jacquet and, even more, Didier Deschamps, the sentence could be taken up by changing the name of Germany to that of France.

In 1978, the Argentine players came to find their trainer, Luis César Menotti, admitting that they were afraid to play against the German players they had just met and to whom they gave back centimeters and kilos. “How can you win against such athletes, coach? They are beautiful and overpowering! We have no chance! ". Menotti, faithful to his wise style, looked at them and replied: "They are bigger than you, they are stronger than you, they are more powerful than you, but they would not last a fortnight if they were placed in your living conditions. So don't be afraid of them, they should be afraid of you. Football remains a sport in which David can defeat Goliath. The slingshot, the trick, the technique of David, this is what the Argentines benefit from in the face of force.

The World Cup in Qatar was going to pit Europe against South America, the old glories were ready to do battle with the young contenders. France swept the Indian sign of the previous winners out of their group, it is true very easy. Brazil the same. Argentina started in a chaotic way by losing in front of Saudi Arabia. The first World Cup played in winter was in full swing and had its surprises in store. Few teams stood out for the game, few of them were reckless, Ecuador won the prize for the most shimmering game. As always since 1986, the second round saw the tension rise, as the knockout matches began. What we quickly noticed was the fervor of the South American fans, Brazil and Argentina were playing at home. More than 50,000 Argentinian spectators without counting all the support for Messi, for his last World Cup. Among the Argentinians there are the two Lionels: Messi and Scaloni, the coach, who has built a solid, homogeneous team and, above all, who will be able to see the players capable of surpassing themselves. The consistency of his choice of men will be the key to success. Scaloni is a child of José Pekerman, himself a child of Menotti. Filiation, history, still count as much for Argentines who think of themselves as a people. This feeling is constantly encouraged by players who refer to "la gente" (the people) as the most sacred thing for them. The song of La Mosca , a real Argentine anthem: Muchachos, ahora vivemos a illusionar tells the modern history of Argentina bringing together under one hat: the victims of the Falklands war, Diego Maradona and his parents, the misfortunes of Argentina and its capacity for resilience! The Argentine federation after decades of procrastination had decided to give itself the means to build, nothing is less simple in the modern world. Scaloni, foolish choice at the time, recently retired player, who played with Messi in the 2006 World Cup, built with former renowned players: Ayala, Aimar, Samuel, under the authority of Menotti. Here again: rooting! If the Mosca sings the modern history of Argentina, Scaloni and his group base their knowledge on the history of Argentine football for forty years. In Argentina, the taste of the beautiful dribble, the beautiful pass, on a rhythm of tango, is more successful if one is technically gifted! Technical and grinta ! Yes, let's add the mind and the attitude, the pride to complete the portrait of Argentine football. The grinta that gives chills and can incite players to be too aggressive sometimes. Before the final, the first thing that jumps out is a feeling of superiority that extends Mbappé's statements. Kolo Muani said at a press conference: “I played against Messi and it didn't change my life! Even if we believe it willingly and we can be sure that the converse is even more true, humility would dictate that we speak otherwise of a living legend. And the French press continued in this vein and showed contempt for Argentina, thinking itself very superior, displaying it and wondering how this team of “workers” (removing Messi all the same) could worry our blues. But for an Argentinian, his team must look like him! And this selection looks like him! A selection that is fighting step by step with France or Holland, economic powers without equal. It's the eternal Argentina! And the way Scaloni and his “scalonetta” (nickname given to the national team) started this final immediately showed that they were in no way intimidated by facing the world champions. To what looked like arrogance, a kind of racism at times, a pronounced Eurocentrism, the Argentines would respond with their pride, their grinta and their technique. Scaloni first outclassed Deschamps in tactics! For three matches, the Argentinian coach had been fine-tuning his team which he had had to improvise over the course of the competition and especially after the defeat against Saudi Arabia where some players had shown themselves out of form. You could see the inspiration of a Pekerman there, with an extraordinary midfield made up of Mac Allister, De Paul and Hernandez who evolved like three number 5s (the South American number 5: the libero in front of the defense which puts order in the house and who is almost a remote number 10 playing with the same freedom as a number 10). Scaloni has built a midfield with three players who all play like number 5s playing their own part by covering an immense portion of the field and proceeding by centrifugal and centripetal circles, and simultaneously as a single and same number 5 with three members who could invert and drive opponents crazy, seeing them one shot to the left, one shot to the right. The second Argentinian goal is thus sublime with Mac Allister taking the right wing when he was on the left and Paul occupying the French midfield in an area where he ventured very little. With also this madness to continue his actions until the end as we learn at the Masia of Barcelona and that Pekerman praised for example, carrying the ball as long as we can carry it to push and disorganize the opposing team. With a maestro like Messi to oil all these components, a daring and constantly pressing Juan Alvarez, this team could hope for great things. From Holland to France, in three matches, Argentina built this midfield, refined it, polished it and dominated all its opponents, even the midfield of Croatia, praised throughout the competition, was swallowed up by the Argentinian environment. And that didn't worry anyone on the French side? The final will know the drama that we know now, magnificent, very hard for Argentina who could have finished the match in 90 minutes if they had pushed their actions after leading 2-0. And the grinta will play a vital role when, in extra time, Argentina raised their heads and resumed their game plan and began to dominate again as if nothing had happened despite having weathered a storm where their survival held by a thread, as if the cruelty of the match did not touch this team, as if they knew, like the fate of Argentina, that they were going to suffer once again to see the light, at the end of the tunnel, could have say Ernesto Sabato. Lionel Messi, who has the record for World Cup matches, is the first player to score in the group stage, in the eighth, in the quarters, in the semis and in the final! A consecration. And the intensity that Messi has put into this World Cup will have been incredible. It is this intensity that the Argentinians have recognized. The introverted Messi turned out to be captain of this team, and it was by forging this quality, by becoming another Messi, more exterior, more extroverted, that Messi became Messi! Maradona's descendant became his equal. Four million Argentines took to the streets to celebrate its heroes. Four million people ! The earth shook! The whole world supported Argentina! The whole world is painted sky blue and white. The whole world has become Albiceleste . This is how Argentina showed Mbappé that South American football was not dead!