It was over four hours after the final whistle, well beyond the length of Donald Trump’s attention span, that the Spain players finally emerged from the MetLife Stadium dressing room. They were savouring that rarest and most precious of feelings in football: what it means to be world champions.
Nico Williams kept just saying it to teammates, “champions of the world, champions of the world”. Lamine Yamal, disrupting a dance, pointed to the second star. That depth of emotion is what it’s really about, even as Fifa and so many other elements try to use it for something else.
