I have measured my life in World Cups. The first blurry moments of childhood memory, the passing into adolescence, starting university. Each tournament marks a season of life. Each one is also associated with potent, formative emotional events: Roger Milla dancing around the corner flag when Cameroon became the first African team to reach the quarter-finals in 1990; Roberto Baggio’s devastating goal that knocked out a Nigeria that had been on a thriller streak in 1994; Zinedine Zidane’s tragically ignominious head-butt in 2006 during his last-ever match. But this World Cup has felt different from the start.
Watching the World Cup as a Black diaspora viewer is a broadly unhinged exercise that still adheres to an elegant logic. You might describe the process of deciding your allegiance as a sort of “identity maths”. You support the African teams until they get knocked out (and thanks to the extended format, this time around we had so many more heroic teams such as Cape Verde and the DRC). Then you move on to a combination of Black diaspora teams from elsewhere, then adopted homelands, and then just adopted teams because you like their vibe or their country’s politics. The last category is really tenuous and involves a lot of projection. Spain is a good example of this, a country that has a sort of unproblematic European outlier aura that imbues it with more political proximity to the post-colonial experience than, say, Norway. Then there’s France, which, despite being an ex-colonial power, has a majority-Black team and therefore trumps Spain. I do not make the rules of identity maths.
