Information overload robbing tournament of its romance

THE WORLD Cup isn’t what it was. It’s twice what it was, you might say, given the expansion to 32 teams, but that’s not what we’re getting at.

The World Cup used to be about revelation, not confirmation. You found things out instead of having your opinions reinforced. There was a time it rolled into town like an arthouse gem rather than a summer blockbuster, merchandising deals and viral marketing attached; in the ’70s the build-up wasn’t nearly as all-encompassing. There was mystique. There was glamour.

Yes, there’s a dangerously slippery slope involved here. This is precisely the kind of thing that leads via a short hop to rugby (“Thomond Park now, is it? Ha — you should have been up in Ravenhill in the 80s for the interpros, that was rugby,”) or GAA (“Sure don’t be talking, wasn’t I one of the lads carried halfway down the Hill when Bomber got his third that day”).

But in truth there was something just a little bit more romantic about watching World Cups in the 70s. For one thing, just who were the players?

The Panini stickers proved invaluable in identifying long-haired strikers and burly goalkeepers, because without the Internet and alternative TV channels, your uneducated guess was often as good as the commentator’s. Nowadays a quick wave of the mouse can tell you the Paraguay reserve keeper’s favourite movie star, but the fuzzy pictures coming in from Argentina in ’78 — or the frighteningly sharp images from Germany four years earlier — depicted men never seen before and never heard of since. God be with the days of Leopoldo Luque and Ramon ‘El Loco’ Quiroga.

That was the attraction, the sheer joy of discovery. Before this year’s edition kicked off, everyone knew the wide men, second-choice attackers and formations of each side and, in the case of Sven-Goran Eriksson, better than at least one coach. Back in the decade taste forgot there were dim rumours in the months leading up to each World Cup, and that was it.

These whispers followed an accepted pattern. Brazil had a new Pele (there was always a new Pele); the Dutch weren’t talking to each other (they never were); the Italians had some hulking left-full who would, in turn, decapitate the new Pele; and the Argentinians had a teenage genius waiting in the wings and the whole nation wanted him on the team.

That was Maradona. Even in the days before Google shrank the earth his talent was like a distant radio signal, but such was the innocence of those days that when a TV soft-drink commercial of the time featured an unidentified dark-haired youth juggling a ball, schoolyard rumour had it that this was Maradona, the teenage wizard we’d heard of but never seen.

That rumour wouldn’t survive one mouse-click now, but back then it had the currency of a negative proposition: it couldn’t be disproved.

Nowadays? At the Cannes Film Festival this year one of the star attractions was ‘Zinedine Zidane’, a Douglas Gordon documentary which follows the great Frenchman through an entire game with 50 cameramen. Yes, 50. Think Zizou could retain much mystery when every drop of sweat is so lovingly captured?

However, mystery and innocence died for us just before this World Cup kicked off, and it was an unnoticed death at that. In his recently published autobiography, the greatest Brazilian of them all crushed the fond dream of generations of Irish people by firmly rejecting any suggestion his name was derived from the Irish word “peil”.

For a long time the spurious suggestion that a dazzled Christian Brother had given Pele his name was our only link to the glamour of the big show, spurious as it was, and much like the misidentification of Maradona in the ad, it survived because in the old days the world was too big for it to be refuted. That its extinction passed with nary a comment in Ireland probably tells you something about how we’ve changed as well, but we’ll leave the sociologists to explain why we shouldn’t feel ashamed. What revelations remain from this year’s model? Graeme Souness as the World’s Most Exasperated Man (“Bill, I can’t believe they’re set up like that ... ”)? The shock discovery that the Germans could run a complex international sports tournament like a Swiss watch?

Exasperation and efficiency. Where’s the romance in that?