The Magicians

Next Thursday, Mexico will play South Africa at Estadio Azteca in the opening match of the 2026 FIFA World Cup. The kickoff is at 3pm local time. The stadium has hosted two World Cup finals — 1970 and 1986 — and is about to host the opener of the first 48-team, 104-match, 39-day, three-country tournament in the sport’s history. I will be in at my home in India — the TV may be a little different, but watching games well into the early hours of the morning will feel very familiar.

The first World Cup I watched was Italy 1990. I was a kid in India. The matches kicked off after midnight, India time, and ran past 3am. I stayed up. I missed school. The day after the final on July 8, 1990 — Andreas Brehme, weaker foot, 85th minute — I did not show up for the first day at my new middle school. I have written about this before, so I will not belabor the personal part. The relevant fact for this essay is the next one.

I have not missed a single game played in any World Cup since.

That is nine tournaments. Italy 1990. United States 1994. France 1998. Korea-Japan 2002. Germany 2006. South Africa 2010. Brazil 2014. Russia 2018. Qatar 2022. Somewhere on the order of five hundred and fifty matches (1990 and 1994 each ran 52 matches across 24 teams; 1998 onwards 64 matches across 32). All of them, live, in the middle of someone’s night.

Through those nine tournaments, the constant has been the magicians — and the moments that nine tournaments later I still cannot un-remember.

This essay is about both.

I have not missed a single game played in any World Cup since.

Maradona, on his way down

The Maradona of 1990 was not the Maradona of 1986. The 1986 Maradona — the Hand of God, the Goal of the Century, all in the same quarter-final against England — was the most famous footballer who had ever lived, at the absolute height of his powers. The 1990 Maradona was already breaking down. Ankle-injured, surrounded by a poor Argentina side that lost its opening match to Cameroon 1-0 at the San Siro and scraped through the group in third place.

I will tell you what I remember. The round of 16, Argentina against Brazil, in Turin. A 1-0 game built on a Brazilian side that hit the post repeatedly and could not put the ball away. In the 80th minute, Maradona — being man-marked, with two more defenders nearby — picked up the ball at the halfway line, slalomed past four players, and slid it to Claudio Caniggia for the only goal of the match. It was a four-second sequence that held three men’s worth of work and one man’s worth of magic. Argentina won. Brazil went home.

That was the Maradona moment of 1990. He produced one. It got Argentina through to the next round. He was running on willpower. There were no others.

In the final at the Stadio Olimpico in Rome, West Germany’s defender Guido Buchwald man-marked Maradona for ninety minutes. Brehme converted a late penalty with his theoretically weaker foot. West Germany 1, Argentina 0. At the final whistle, Maradona burst into tears. He blamed the referee. The cameras lingered. The whole stadium watched the magician cry.

That tournament holds the record for the lowest goals-per-game average in World Cup history — 2.21 across 52 matches — and is remembered by historians of the game as the most defensive, most negative World Cup that has been played. It is also, for me, the World Cup that recruited me to football for life. Some of that is a function of being twelve. Most of it is a function of Maradona, even past his peak, being a man who could turn a defensive 1-0 into a moment that survived its tournament.

Maradona died on November 25, 2020, at the age of 60, of cardiac arrest, while recovering from brain surgery for a blood clot. He was between two World Cups when he went — Russia 2018 was already in the books, Qatar 2022 was still two years away. I do not know how I was supposed to feel. I am still not sure I am over it.

Klinsmann, who finished what Maradona could not

The other side of the Stadio Olimpico that night was a German team that was, on paper, the best Germany had fielded in two decades. The captain was Lothar Matthäus, that year’s Ballon d’Or winner. The forwards were Rudi Völler and Jürgen Klinsmann. Klinsmann was 25, lean, two-footed, almost unfair in the air. He scored three goals in the tournament and was, alongside Matthäus, the structural spine of a team that dropped only two points in seven games.

The Klinsmann magic was different from the Maradona magic. Where Maradona’s was personal — the four-defender slalom, the ankle holding together by force of will — Klinsmann’s was structural. He did not run past four men. He arrived at exactly the right place at exactly the right time, and the ball arrived too. He was the kind of magician who made the magic look like the system, and made the system look like something inevitable. Germany, that summer, was inevitable.

There was also the joy of him. The diving celebration he made his signature in the years after — head-first, arms forward, sliding ten meters across the grass on his stomach — was a self-aware reference to the European reputation that German strikers dove. He turned the joke on himself, and on the system, and made it part of the iconography of ’90s football. The country that produced him is not, as a national stereotype, a joyful one. He was the joyful German. That, too, was a kind of magic.

The Real Ronaldo

I want to be careful here, because to say “Ronaldo” without qualification in 2026 is to invite an entirely different argument about an entirely different player. The Ronaldo I am talking about is Ronaldo Luís Nazário de Lima, the original, the Fenômeno, the Brazilian who scored eight goals in the 2002 tournament and won the Golden Boot. There is a generation now that did not see him play, and I am sorry for them.

The 1998 Ronaldo was 21 years old and the best forward in the world by a margin so large the question was uninteresting. He carried Brazil to the final in Paris. And then, on the morning of the final against France, something went badly wrong in his hotel room. He convulsed. His body shook uncontrollably. He foamed at the mouth. His teammate Roberto Carlos was the one who first found him. He was taken to a hospital, given a clean bill of health, returned to the squad, and inserted into the starting lineup at the very last moment, against medical advice and against common sense. He was, on the pitch that night, a ghost of himself. France won 3-0. Zidane scored twice. We will get to Zidane.

The 2002 Ronaldo was a different man. He had spent four years rebuilding two destroyed knees. He had been written off, multiple times, by people whose job was to write off footballers. He came back. He scored eight goals — a tally that earned him the Golden Boot and tied him for the most goals in a World Cup since the 1970s. He scored both goals in the final against Germany. The first one was a poacher’s strike off a Rivaldo shot that Oliver Kahn parried straight at his feet. The second one was vintage — Ronaldo collecting a pass at the top of the box, taking one touch to set himself, and lashing the ball into the corner with the inside of his right foot. Brazil 2, Germany 0. Brazil won its fifth World Cup.

The 2002 final is the only World Cup final I have watched in which the winner was, transparently and unmistakably, the answer to a question the universe had owed someone for four years. It is also, as a matter of pure footballing skill, the cleanest performance by an out-and-out striker that I have ever seen in a final. Both things were true at once. That is rare. That is what I mean by magic.

Zidane, who could not be man-marked

Zinedine Zidane never quite fit the template of the magician. He was not fast. He did not score a lot. He did not slalom past four defenders. What he did was control the geometry of a football match for ninety minutes at a time, in a way that the people defending against him could feel but could not stop.

The 1998 final was the apotheosis. France against Brazil at the Stade de France. The Brazil that, twenty-four hours earlier, had received the first version of the Ronaldo news. Zidane scored two goals — both headers, both from corners — in the first half. France 2-0 at the break. Petit added a third in stoppage time. France 3, Brazil 0. A team that had never won a World Cup beat the team that was supposed to win every World Cup. Zidane scored two of the three goals with his head. He was historically not known for heading the ball, which made the moment funnier and stranger and more permanent.

The 2006 final was the other apotheosis, and the inverse of the first. France against Italy in Berlin. Zidane scored an audacious chipped penalty in the seventh minute. It hit the underside of the crossbar, bounced behind the line, and bounced out. He was thirty-four years old. He had announced before the tournament that this would be his last competitive match, win or lose. He played the entire game like a man who knew exactly how much was left. And then, in the 110th minute of the final — the second period of extra time, with the score 1-1 — Marco Materazzi said something to him about his sister, and Zidane turned around, and headbutted Materazzi in the chest, and was sent off, and walked past the World Cup trophy on his way to the tunnel without looking at it. Italy won on penalties.

It is one of the most studied moments in the history of the sport. There are essays about what Materazzi said. There are essays about whether Zidane regrets it. He has said he does and does not. The thing I keep coming back to is that the same player produced both finals — the one in 1998 in which he was the entire reason a country won a World Cup it had never won, and the one in 2006 in which he was the entire reason a country lost a World Cup it deserved to win. The same head. Eight years apart.

That, too, is the magic. The magic is not always good. The magic is a refusal to be a system.

The Moments

The magicians produced moments. So did people who were not magicians. The most-remembered goals of the World Cup are a list that runs deeper than any list of players, because the World Cup is about the moment more than it is about the man — and the World Cup is the rare arena where a player who is otherwise a footnote can manufacture a moment that survives him.

Dennis Bergkamp, France 1998, 90th minute, against Argentina in Marseille. Frank de Boer hit a long, looping ball from inside his own half. Bergkamp ran underneath it, took it down with the outside of his right foot in a single touch that defied physics, took a second touch to push the ball past Roberto Ayala, and a third touch to lash it past the Argentine goalkeeper Carlos Roa. Three touches. Three different functions. One goal. Argentina out. The Dutch announcer, Jack van Gelder, screamed Bergkamp’s name three times in succession on a frequency that has not been heard since on Dutch television. There is no debate among football people about the technical content of that goal. It is the single best argument I know that a footballer can produce, in three seconds, a sequence that thirty years later still has not been bettered.

Roberto Baggio, USA 1994 final, penalty shootout against Brazil. Il Divin Codino — the Divine Ponytail — had carried Italy to the final almost single-handedly, scoring five goals on his way through the knockouts on legs that were visibly failing. Italy and Brazil drew 0-0 through 120 minutes. Penalties. Baresi missed. Massaro missed. With Italy needing Baggio to convert to keep the tournament alive, Il Divin Codino put the ball on the spot, ran up, and ballooned the kick over the bar. Brazil won its fourth World Cup. Baggio stood with his hands on his hips, head down, in the most-replayed image of footballing devastation that exists. He told an interviewer many years later, in a quote that is not embellished: “I failed that time, and it affected me for years.”

Saudi Arabia 2, Argentina 1, Qatar 2022. Group stage opener. Argentina entered the tournament on a 36-match unbeaten run dating back to 2019. The team had Lionel Messi at the height of his late career. Saudi Arabia’s lineup featured exactly zero players from a top-five European league. Argentina led 1-0 after a Messi penalty. In the second half, in the space of five minutes, Saleh Al-Shehri and Salem Al-Dawsari scored two of the most outrageous goals the tournament would produce. The Al-Dawsari goal in particular — a curled finish into the top corner from outside the box, off a touch he had no right to — would have been a Goal of the Tournament candidate even if the team scoring it had been Brazil. Argentina lost. The 36-match streak ended in 90 minutes. Gracenote later called it the most surprising result in World Cup history. Three weeks later, Argentina won the tournament.

Lionel Messi, Qatar 2022 final, against France. Messi scored. Di María scored. Argentina led 2-0 with ten minutes to go. Then Mbappé scored. Then Mbappé scored again, ninety seconds later, and the game went to extra time. Then Messi scored, in the 108th minute, and Argentina led 3-2. Then Mbappé scored a third, in the 118th minute, the second hat trick in a World Cup final in history. Penalty shootout. Argentina won. Messi, at thirty-five, on his fifth World Cup, lifted the trophy he had been chasing for almost two decades. The image of Messi being carried around the pitch on his teammates’ shoulders, holding a trophy he had spent his entire career being told he could not win, is the closest thing to an unmixed happy ending that the modern World Cup has produced.

These are five moments. There are fifty more I could list. The point is that the World Cup is the only sporting event that consistently produces moments at this density, with this much history attached to each one, in front of an audience this large. There is no equivalent in any other sport. That is why I have not missed a game.

What Football Holds

The structural thing the World Cup does, that nothing else does, is that it lets a single moment in a single match become a permanent fixture of a billion people’s mental furniture. The Maradona slalom, the Bergkamp touch, Zidane’s headbutt, Baggio’s miss, the Al-Dawsari curler, the Messi lift — these are not local events. They are global ones, simultaneous ones, watched in real time by audiences that no other event on earth assembles. The 2022 final was watched by an estimated 1.5 billion people across all platforms, which is roughly one in five humans alive.

The thing nine tournaments has taught me is that the moments are the asset. Not the matches, not the standings, not even the trophies — the moments. Most of the World Cup matches are bad. The 1990 tournament I just spent six paragraphs writing about was 2.21 goals per game. Most of those goals were ugly. I have sat through hundreds of bad World Cup matches in the middle of my night, and I have stayed because the math of the moment is asymmetric: most matches will not produce one, but the ones that do will sit in your memory for thirty-six years.

The other thing I want to say is that the magicians are not interchangeable with the system. The system can produce a tournament. The magicians produce the moments. Brazil 2002 had Ronaldo. France 1998 had Zidane. Argentina 1990 had Maradona, on one ankle, dragging a mediocre team to a final he should have won. Argentina 2022 had Messi. None of these tournaments would be remembered the way they are remembered without the man at the center.

The system needs the magician. The magician does not need the system. That is the asymmetry that makes football, as a global sport, work.

June 11

In six days the next tournament begins. I do not know who its magicians will be. I have guesses — there is a French phenomenon, an English midfielder, a 17-year-old Spaniard, a Brazilian winger who has been the best in the world for some part of every season since 2023 — but the guesses are not the point. The point is that the magicians of 2026 are not yet known. The names are still incomplete. The list is being written across the next six weeks, in 104 matches, in 16 cities across three countries, ending at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey on July 19.

There’s a kid, in Lagos and Mumbai and Tokyo and Manila, watching a midnight match on whatever screen he or she can find, is the kid I was. And the math of the moment will work for that kid too. Most of the matches will be ordinary. One or two of them will produce something he or she will carry for the next thirty-six years.