Do you know how foie gras is made? You take a duck or a goose, stick a 20 to 30-centimetre tube down its throat, and force-feed it corn until its liver becomes diseased. That’s what this 48-team World Cup feels like.
Too many matches, too many groups, too much pageantry, too many hydration breaks, too many ad breaks, too much stoppage time. Too much, too much, too much, too much. The result of this force-feeding is ageusia, the condition that causes a complete loss of taste.
Football fans crave umami; FIFA responds with an indigestible all-you-can-eat buffet and constant close-ups of fans, celebrities' cleavage, and crying children - even when the ball is in play.
48 teams... why not 64? Or better yet, 128, with 16 groups of eight teams, no one eliminated, and two-legged round-of-64 ties, since everyone wants a piece, since hyperbole helps with re-elections, since we’re willing to do anything - even dilute the spectacle - to satisfy this gluttony, to the point where Monty Python's obscenely obese Mister Creosote would look like an ascetic?
Rivers of cream to mask an industrial dessert. It starts as soon as the players walk onto the pitch: 52 players, four referees, child mascots, and volunteers waving gigantic flags. That’s at least 150 people, just to oversell match-ups that aren’t really match-ups, to falsely turn the ordinary into something exceptional, until the exceptional becomes mundane.
After the anthems: ads. At the halfway point of the half: ads. At half-time: ads, ads, ads. You start to wonder what football is even doing in the middle of this advertising onslaught.
In the stands, Gianni Infantino sits in splendour, with his skyrocketing carbon footprint and the acute scoliosis caused by all the bowing to Donald Trump, whose administration refuses a Somali referee just because of his nationality, interrogates the Iraqi captain for hours, and imposes draconian conditions on the Iranian team to keep them on US soil for as little time as possible.
Next to him, football legends watch, starstruck and obsequious, as the sport that made them famous is destroyed.
And in the stadium, as in front of the screens: us, compelled to watch, watch, and watch again and again, like Alex DeLarge in A Clockwork Orange - except we strap ourselves in to keep our eyes wide open, ready for an orgy of goals, garish replays, celebrations, crowd roars, controversies, overpriced tickets and overpriced merchandise.
Football to the bitter end, with no break for players or fans. The carousel must never stop spinning, no respite for anyone. And since no one can hit the brakes... Football fades away, the pleasure drains, but since there’s always more, why pull your head out of the trough?
The World Cup is a gourmet restaurant that, edition after edition, looks more and more like a fast food joint. Too fatty, too sweet, too salty - but the profit margin is just too good.
When the force-feeding works, the animal becomes addicted. What it doesn’t know is that it’s headed for the slaughterhouse. And even though humans are self-aware, they keep begging their executioner for more, never satisfied.
We could rebel, get outraged, refuse to take part in this madness - but there are the best third-place probabilities to calculate, so maybe we’ll think about it another day...