Granit Xhaka, whose Albanian father was a political prisoner of Serbia,celebrates his goal for Switzerland against the Serbs at the World Cup.
Soccer is a game that can make you feel incredibly alive and yet ready to die all at once, and the World Cup is its apex, its grandest stage, a supernova symphony of success and sadness. As my friend and the terrific young soccer writer Henry Bushnell wrote at Yahoo Sports Friday morning, it’s the place where legacies are written, and it’s the stories that make it so enchanting.
The qualification process itself is a riveting story.
Globally, qualifying plays out over a period of about two years, and this time around, 211 nations entered, playing games on every corner of the earth and taking every imaginable (and some unimaginable) route to get there.
How hard is it to qualify?
What does it mean?
War-torn Syria played home games in Malaysia, with players fighting claims that playing itself made them a tool of the génocidaire Bashar al-Assad. Better to be accused of complicity with al-Assad’s war crimes than have their families put under the dictator’s microscope? Imagine the choice.
In Africa, Egypt spent the prior qualifying cycle playing in empty stadiums, both after the Port Saad Stadium disaster and due to the danger of hosting anyone in the midst of the hope of the Arab Spring and the dark winter of the counter-rebellion that followed. Led by American Bob Bradley and a young star-in-the-making in Mohamed Salah, they nearly qualified, laying the foundation for their run to the final 32 this time around.
The Ebola scares in Africa created other ripples of disruption, altering training schedules, limiting traveling fans, and threatening the Africa Cup of Nations, an early-cycle litmus test of continental success.
In the Caribbean, hurricanes forced scheduling accommodations ahead of crucial qualifiers before the CONCACAF Hex, cutting rest short for some countries and threatening the long-term infrastructure of others.
In South America, Venezuela battled economic collapse and political unrest putting the nation on the brink of civil war as it tried to navigate CONMEBOL. Meanwhile, Peru, who hadn’t been to a World Cup since 1982, partied so much after it qualified through a playoff it caused actual earthquakes- a literal seismic celebration. Peruvians were still dancing, in Russia and across the globe, when they played their final game in Sochi last Tuesday.
In most places, it means everything simply to qualify.
That’s because it’s hard.
United States’ Christian Pulisic, (10) is comforted after losing 2-1 against Trinidad and Tobago during a 2018 World Cup qualifying soccer match in Couva, Trinidad, Tuesday, Oct. 10, 2017. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)
The United States failed, losing 2-1 to a second-choice team from Trinidad and Tobago on the final day of qualifying last October. The ramifications of that failure have infected everything about soccer in America since. But the Americans, slumbering giant they should be, weren’t alone.
Chile, who had won two South American championships over the course of this World Cup cycle, saw its aging team fall short on the final day, partly a testament to the brutality of CONMEBOL and partly a tragic concession to Father Time.
Holland, the creators of the anarchic, mesmerizing “total football” and semifinalists in 2014 and finalists in 2010, weren’t even close, among the first of the traditional powers to miss the field.
Four-time World Cup champion Italy haven’t been the same since winning a cynical title in 2006, and after missing the knock-out rounds in 2014, the star-laden Azzurri missed the field altogether in Russia, knocked out in a playoff by a starless, but cohesive, Sweden.
Despite the stylistic and technical superiority of club soccer, we still define the globe’s game in terms of World Cup cycles, and you’d be hard-pressed to make a long list of club games capable of bringing telecasters to tears, as we saw with these Panamanian men as they heard Panama’s anthem played for the first time in a World Cup two weeks ago.
Wow. Panama commentators reaction off air while they listen for the first time the Panama anthem at the World Cup.
I totally, totally understand them pic.twitter.com/dusriPyXkB— Tancredi Palmeri (@tancredipalmeri) June 24, 2018
It’s also all about to change, when FIFA shifts to the 48-team format in the “United” 2026 tournament to be held in the United States, Mexico and Canada. There are those, like Bushnell, who fear that expansion will ruin the event entirely, and after watching this group stage, it’s an understandable sentiment.
But I mostly think the switch to 48 will just take some getting used to.
The group stages are always the best part of the World Cup anyway; this year’s event was just more evidence of that fact. It’s the inclusivity that’s good, and the joy of just being there that is most affecting. The best stories often come from those who don’t win at all, or, if they do win, do so unexpectedly. History is commonly made by those who defy expectation.
As for this tournament, there was plenty of history made, and we leave this wonderful group stages, the best of my lifetime, with plenty of stories to tell.
I’ve written about a few of them as the tournament has gone on, from Brazil’s new hope to the yin and yang of Paul Pogba and N’Golo Kante of France, to the importance of neighbors, good fences, Mexico’s culture change and a manager’s redemption, to Peru’s infectious joy.
I’d like to focus, for a moment, on one of my other favorite group-stage stories from this exceptional World Cup.
That would be the unforgettable story of Granit Xhaka and Xherdan Shaqiri of Switzerland, who by now, most know, celebrated their goals in Switzerland’s thrilling 2-1 victory over Serbia by flashing winged-eagle hand signs, a nod to the Albanian flag.
Granit Xhaka, whose howitzer put the Swiss on the board, comes from parents that fled Kosovo before his birth. He was born a refugee, and his complaints are compounded by the story of his Albanian father, who was tortured while held as a Serbian political prisoner for protesting Yugoslav rule.
Shaqiri, who scored the winning goal, was born in Kosovo, and when, as an infant, the Balkan wars of the 1990s spilled into genocide committed by Bosnian Serb forces at both Žepa and Srebrenica, his parents fled with him and his three brothers and sisters to Switzerland, where Shaqiri grew up and bloomed into a wonderful footballer.
Shaqiri, a blinding fast, physical winger with deft dribbles and dazzling free kick skills, has longed paid homage to his Kosovan roots. He tends to wear boots that reflect the colors of Albania and Kosovo and when he took the field in Kaliningrad, he wore boots that, on his right heel, bore the flag of Kosovo, with the flag of Switzerland on his left.
That the Serbian Aleksandar Mitrović felt the regrettable need to respond to Shaqiri’s political statement, by asking why he doesn’t just play for Kosovo, tells you all you need to know about how sentiments haven’t softened, regardless of whether one is a Kosovan or the Serbian son of the generation that orchestrated the genocidal violence.
It bears noting here that Mitrović’s protests are largely absurdist.
Nearly two decades after NATO entered Kosovo in an effort to halt Serbian ethnic cleansing, the little nation of Kosovo took a huge step towards playing soccer as a fully-recognized member of FIFA and UEFA by playing its first friendly in 2014. At the time, Kosovo had already been recognized by various international sporting bodies in other sports, but as is often the case, FIFA dragged its feet. It didn’t help matters that Serbia publicly opposed the idea so strongly they wrote a letter to FIFA and UEFA pleading that the first Kosovo game- against Haiti, another tiny country that knows a thing or two about being resilient in the face of unspeakable tragedy and violence- be cancelled.
Kosovo fans enjoy their nation’s first match, against Haiti, in 2014.
Michel Platini went all Platini, changing like the wind, praising the game afterwards as a measure of Kosovo’s will to break its perennial isolation but opposing the idea to begin with. Ultimately, it was Sepp Blatter who gave the go-ahead– with plenty of Blatter-like caveats: no anthems could be played, no flags flown, no national symbols worn, no matches against former Yugoslav republics, and only, for now, “non-competitive” friendlies. Kosovo played anyway, despite the stipulations, and primarily, it did so because many within Kosovo feel football can assist with political reconciliation.
For two more years, Kosovo plied on as a fledgling footballing nation until finally, after multiple requests, in the autumn of 2016, FIFA afforded players with Kosovan identity claims to file a one-time switch to play for Kosovo. Shaqiri, Xhaka, and their other teammates with claims to Kosovan identity, Valon Behrami, as well as Belgium’s Adnan Januzaz, among others, all elected to stay where they had played forever, in the nations that had accepted them as refugees.
For these players, the chance to play Serbia was and is deeply personal. Mitrović’s decision to question the choice to play for Switzerland while honoring their cultural heritage and familial home does violence to the way identity is never homogenous, even, perhaps especially, in soccer.
Soccer is so much about identity: community identity, historical identity, personal identity- that it is rarely non-political, and in international football, which interpellates nationalism with a collective of identites, politics is unavoidable.
Even at the club level, bitterness and the remnants of the Balkan conflict live on, whether in the nasty, nationalism-fueled, always political fights between supporters of clubs like Red Star Belgrade and Partizan or in the openly racist and essentialist claims made by scouts about Serbian, Kosovan, Slovenian and Croatian players (described by one 2011 Serbian-authored essay as follows: “Slovenians defend superbly, Croatians are masterful technicians in midfield and elite poachers, Serbians and Kosovans are creative, elite passers but lack critical thought and acumen).
Other club-level political (and even religious) wars rage on in rivalries like Barca-Real Madrid, Rangers-Celtic and AC Milan and Inter.
International football just lays bare the obvious interaction between identity, nationalism and politics, with the world watching.
FIFA, of course, likes to pretend otherwise, and immediately launched an “investigation” into the Shaqiri and Xhaka celebrations, threatening to suspend the childhood refugees for celebrating a goal against the nation they blame for the murder so many of their countrymen.
The investigation ultimately ended with both players receiving a $10,000 fine instead of a two-game suspension for a celebration that “incites violence”, and the Albanian prime minister has promised to help raise money to pay the fines. The irony of suspending players for inciting violence while silently protesting genocidal violence speaks for itself, and in this contemporary moment, the suppression of quiet, peaceful protest should hit close to home for some readers.
FIFA’s desire to avoid politics, as it counts its money and fills its coffers in the most corporatized World Cup yet, held on Russian soil against the global backdrop of creeping authoritarian and nativist violence, raises an important point, one that has been resurrected in various forms throughout this World Cup.
There’s no way to avoid nationhood, or the multiplicity of identities that often spring from association with nationhood. To do so wouldn’t simply be ironic in a game that opens with national anthems, it would be too strip away personhood, specifically the way that where we are from shapes who we are and how we think and speak about the world.
Nationhood doesn’t have to mean fixing oneself to the state. It can- and is, I think- vitally important in providing a sense of place, identity and history. And I think the World Cup is a recognition of that reality, just as Shaqiri and Xhaka’s celebration were beautiful recognitions that gesture at how soccer allows for and encourages the expression of the idea that identity itself is complicated.
For me, the beauty of the Group stages lies at least in part in that idea, whether we locate it in a beautiful style of play or in a goal celebration that remembers unspeakable suffering and violence or in a culturally, ethnically diverse team like France, who, a year removed from a contentious election about what it means to be French and what the role of nativism and nationalism is in the future of Europe, are one of the last sixteen teams standing, and perhaps, the favorites to win.
The show will go on beginning Saturday, but thanks to a sensational group stage, a lifetime of memories are already in place.
Neil W. Blackmon co-founded The Yanks Are Coming. Follow him on Twitter @nwblackmon.