I heard once, I can’t remember from where, that the greatest measure of your time remaining on this planet was in how many more World Cups you could reasonably expect to witness before death. Instead of saying “I am 30,” you could say “I hope to see 12 more World Cups.”
That struck me as a reasonable philosophy.
Birthdays start to come and go with an increasing desire to make less of what starts to seem like a doomsday countdown, but the World Cup — with its quadrennial rarity — stands out as a month-long celebration of the best of our outward reality.
It’s the one thing we all understand, and as the tournament approaches its 100-year anniversary, you start to appreciate how it’s imprinted itself on the global human psyche by forming a thread between generations.
The four-year cycle is what makes it transcendental, like the Olympic Games. If you move it to every two years — taking a page out of the Gold Cup’s book — you’ll start to see players opt out of tournaments in favor of getting some rest, and who could blame them? There’ll be another World Cup soon enough.
FIFA’s plan for a biennial World Cup says to hell with history and humanity in favor of that nefarious approach that the organization likes to refer to as “growing the game.”
The growth is always an upward trajectory of profits. Everyone knows the men's game is fully grown now and FIFA’s basically just Britney Spears' dad.
When FIFA first announced how it was moving forward with its plan, it cited a small survey it had conducted as proof of how fans supported the change. FIFA has now opened its website to feedback with an official form.
Provide your name, email, country of residence and let FIFA know what you really think.
