The World Cup final was a vulgar circus

METLIFE STADIUM — By the time the ball hit the net we were all Spanish. The goal felt like an override by the gods fed up with Argentina’s anti-ballers and a referee that struck off what appeared to be a legitimate Spanish goal in normal time and restricted the red cards to one, the inevitable Enzo Fernandez. Few will remember this World Cup for a final of unrelenting poverty. Well done to Spain for enduring. So bad was “the show” that it rendered the half-time intrusion, as impressively inauthentic as it was, an upgrade on the football. After a diet of the “best World Cup ever” according to Fifa and its acolytes, Argentina’s version of warball stripped the contest of pattern and rhythm so much that Justin Bieber’s mournful balladeering seemed almost entertaining. Moreover, Bieber’s cultish indulgence landed like a weighty counterpoint to Madonna’s slapstick journey to pitchside in a car steered by the Brazilian football royalty of Ronaldinho and Ronaldo. Madonna with Brazil icons Ronaldinho and Ronaldo during the half-time show (Photo: Reuters) A pair of footballers laughing their heads off at the wheel was probably not in the playbook agreed to by the ancient pop diva. It cheered up everyone else, however. Either side of those contributions K-pop band BTS and Shakira “headlined” in a blizzard of sequins and silk. So disorienting was the experience it made us forget about the football. Probably the least said about the first half the better. Spain knocked it about, Argentina knocked Spain about and the referee allowed it to happen. It remains one of the game’s great ironies that its most celebrated player should walk among them. There is little to admire in Argentina’s brazen thuggery or boorish attachment to national identity. The nobility in Argentina rests with its people and their capacity for absorbing profound suffering associated with historic failures of government and political abuse. They deserve better than a team that dresses up base impulse and vulgarity as character. As the match laboured through the second period competing emotions swirled about English observers in the audience. Sorrow, regret, mystery that England thought so little of themselves to surrender to an Argentina team with such a limited, joyless view of the game. Spain kept at it without ever touching the sublimity of their best stuff. The second half was spent almost entirely in Argentina’s half. Trump just refusing to leave when they’re lifting the trophy.Infantino desperately trying to get him to move.Circus. pic.twitter.com/JABUGKUWXm— Out of Context Football Manager (@nocontextfm1) July 19, 2026 Who could have imagined that the artistry ordinarily associated with this global emblem would suffer this distortion? Argentina’s lack of ambition killed Messi as much as the spectacle. He just wasn’t in the game. And as a result neither were we. Argentina’s first attempt at goal did not come until extra time. You had to wonder what the president of the United States made of it all if this whole soccer thing is predicated on goals. When he made his way on to present the trophy, he was booed – hardly the ending he can have imagined. Maybe there should be scope for presidential decree in circumstances like this to persuade Fifa president Gianni Infantino, who sat alongside him behind a bullet proof screen, to award the trophy to England on a count back, most goals scored.