The beautiful game has overshadowed politics
Sometimes when the pitch is flat, it isn’t a terrible thing. The football World Cup in Russia has been on song partly due to the lesser lights proving that the divide between traditional powerhouses and the rest is gradually shrinking.
The early elimination of Germany, Argentina, Portugal and Spain points to that shifting landscape, although enough exciting teams remain for an unpredictable finale. While the matches continue on the field, one winner was on the sidelines during the opening encounter between host Russia and Saudi Arabia. That may well have been an omen for how things have gone for Moscow this summer, and that doesn’t even refer to the home team’s opening performance. There was Russian President Vladimir Putin watching, conveying his wonder at the outcome — not just the scoreline that day, 5-0 for the Russians, but how the tournament has been a publicity coup for the strongman. The carping over the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014 was missing, and while there were complaints on how the event was normalising the Putin regime, those dissipated as it progressed.
The World Cup also provides the perfect platform for yet another Putin PR win: The meeting with his American counterpart Donald Trump in Helsinki the day after the final, also just following the NATO summit in Belgium. Timing, as with a striker’s goalward bound shot, is everything and, unless dramatic events happen off the field between now and then, Putin will have already seized that advantage.
Trump is unlikely to be very clued into the niceties of the action on the pitch, but even football has given him yet another opportunity to preen. That, of course, is taking credit for FIFA, football’s governing body, giving the 2026 tournament to the United States, Canada and Mexico. You could call that the NAFTA Cup, except that nobody knows if NAFTA will still be around by then. That cooperative contest has been scheduled even as the continental compact suffers from Trump’s tariff wars and the wild card of a new populist leader in Mexico.
Those will make for a politically-loaded arrangement even as the free trade agreement’s revision or rejection will form a compelling narrative in the years ahead to the World Cup’s buildup. The best part of the 2026 Cup, though probably not for purists, is that it will expand to 48 teams, and with a fourth of the world’s nations represented at North American venues that year, perhaps even India will finally find its place within that fraternity. That may be a distant dream, but sometimes long shots do come off, as the current Cup has again shown.
But for most, the politics pervading these events is, for a while, secondary to the actual action. This truly great game, at least for 90 minutes (or more, during the knockout rounds), thankfully overshadows the Great Game of geopolitics being played out across the world. The physicist Albert Einstein once said, “The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.” Well, naturally, one cannot but be in awe while contemplating the mysteries of life. It is this desire to know the ‘small and big mysteries’ that stokes the fire of learning, no matter what the age. No wonder, it is said that curiosity is the wick in the candle of learning. A person with a curious nature is able to retain information more meaningfully. Philosopher Ber- trand Russell said: “It’s healthy now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.” Also, there is a direct correlation between our levels of curiosity and desire for personal growth as well as our ability to connect with different kinds of people around us.
Curiosity generates interest, so it leads us towards warm relationships at work, home and everywhere. It has an immense capacity to quash the stereotypes and develop an open mindset. And most important of all, curiosity does not only make life purposeful but also gives one the drive to work towards that purpose. Remember, “He who has a ‘why’ to live for can bear almost any ‘how’.”