There is no pot so ugly that it does not have its cover. Humanity is so generous that it gives all its members the ability to mate. Well, not everyone. There are the incels to take the opposite and represent the statistical abnormality with their involuntary and moody bachelorhood. Affections and wants are built through a thousand intricacies, like hate. Also in national team football. Each national ensign – discounting the patriots – adds a legion of followers whose passport does not match that of the fans they decide to join. They respond to four profiles: nationalists without a team that they consider their own, pure soccer fans who detest the homeland appropriation of the ball, people born to be contrary, and finally individuals infatuated with a squad that neither goes nor comes to them, who knows why. I have asked my contacts about their World Cup wishes. 187 people have responded, the vast majority via WhatsApp. All, men and women, administratively Spanish. Who do you want to raise the glass?
The tango and the barbecue have prevailed over the pasodoble and the paella. Barcelona fans want to definitively enthrone Messi as the best player in history and that is why Argentina is the majority bet. Spain follows, thanks to the sum of various motivations: patriotism, that the red team is trained by Luis Enrique or that Barça is the one that contributes the most players to the team. So many arguments are not enough for the red to overcome the albiceleste.
From there multiple responses, some very numerous and built on aversion rather than esteem. The most repeated: anyone but Spain or the one that is less France. The romantics also abound and distribute their messy intestinal passion haphazardly: Uruguay, to pay homage to prehistoric soccer; Holland more for what it was than for what it is; England for the reverie that that nation continues to provoke despite the enormous efforts that it makes to ridicule itself or Germany because it is always cool to go with the winners.
And Brazil? You are right. The country of Rio de Janeiro is the great surprise of this survey of walking around the house. Very few votes for the cariocas. The Messi effect sinks them. Fuck you, Pele!
The hooligans and the conscientious are missing, who have also accumulated many votes. They are the ones who have decided that this World Cup matters a damn or two to them. The vote of a very wise woman, very soccer fan and very well known sums up the feeling of this pairing well: any team whose players show their ass to the Qatari emir from the center of the field after collecting the trophy. Since I have voted after reading all the answers, I have had the advantage of being able to combine them. So there goes my wish: to see Messi’s butt in his last World Cup, even if it’s the one of shame.
