There is a version of this tournament that exists only in press releases: 104 games, three countries, a halftime show with more headline acts than most music festivals manage in a weekend, a Peace Prize nobody quite understands, hydration breaks timed to the minute.
FIFA built something enormous this summer, then spent five weeks discovering that a football tournament, however large you make it, still insists on being decided by 22 people and a ball.
Tonight, at the MetLife Stadium, Madonna, Shakira and BTS will perform to a crowd that mostly just wants them to hurry up so Argentina and Spain can get on with it. That, in miniature, has been the story of the last month: spectacle straining against substance and mostly, gloriously, losing.
Noise before a ball was kicked
Start with the noise, because there was so much of it before a ball was even kicked. The draw itself happened under a cloud, staged at a Kennedy Centre now reshaped in Donald Trump’s image, with enough absent artists to make the guest list feel like a boycott by omission.
