Trying to understand the game…
Football game, FIFA, soccer- should I even bother picking a name for it? To me it is just a word, and one I don’t really connect with.
Sometimes it is the World Cup, other times it’s just a random Tuesday like today and some league match I am completely unaware of.
Either way, everyone around me decides to care about the same 90 minutes at the same time, and I am somehow still stuck in the same spot.
It feels like standing outside a group chat, watching messages pile up, with no idea what any of it means.
I remember being in college, sitting quietly in the library, catching up on a deadline, when a classmate asked me the score. I told him my scores were great.
He laughed, and I had no idea why. Years have passed since then, and here I am, still the same girl, not with a bag of chips with a bowl of salad this time, nodding along, laughing a beat too late because I am just taking my cue from everyone else’s face.
This is a strange feeling, a left-out one. Not because I actually want to sit through a full match, honestly, I am fine without it but because it feels like everyone’s in on something and I missed the memo. It shows up everywhere.
Office small talk. Family group chats blowing up out of nowhere. Two strangers hugging on the street over a goal I didn’t even see happen. It is not that I wish I liked football.
I just wish I understood why it makes people lose their minds like this.
The funny thing is that I still end up absorbing bits of it anyway. For me it is either Ronaldo or Messi floating around in my head whenever someone asks who I am supporting.
It was only recently that I even learned the name Lamine Yamal, thanks, mostly, to Instagram reels. By the end of any conversation, I can throw out a “yeah, that was a rough call” with total confidence and absolutely zero clue what actually happened.
Maybe that’s the whole point, though. It was never really about football for me. It is the noise around it, the collective holding of breath, a whole city reacting to the same second at the same time. You don’t need to know the offside rule to feel that part. I am not watching the game.
I am watching everyone else watch it. And weirdly, that’s been entertaining enough on its own.
