At eight o’clock on a Thursday evening, in a living room somewhere in North America, with the light still in the sky because it is June, somebody puts a plate on their knees and watches a World Cup match.
That sentence is unremarkable and it has not been available here since 1994.
The tournament opened on the eleventh, across the United States, Canada and Mexico. For a very large number of people on this continent, a World Cup is happening in their own time zone for the first time in thirty two years.
What the wrong hours were like
Every tournament of the last three decades has been somewhere else, which has meant watching at hours nobody would choose.
Korea and Japan in 2002 was the extreme case: group games kicking off in the small hours, a month of people arriving at work having already seen something the rest of the office had not. Qatar in 2022 put matches in the late morning. Europe put them at breakfast. Brazil was kind to the Americas and brutal to everyone east of it, which is the point: somebody is always watching at the wrong time.
And the wrong time produced a particular kind of watching. You set an alarm. You went to a bar that had opened specially, at six in the morning, and found forty other people who had also decided this mattered more than sleep. There was a solidarity in it that came entirely from the inconvenience.
It also made it a minority activity, here. A thing you did if you cared a great deal, at a cost, apart from the household.
What convenience does to it
The first thing is that other people are in the room.
A match at eight in the evening is a thing a family can be in the same space for, which a match at five in the morning is not. That is the actual change: not more viewers in the abstract, but the same viewer watching alongside people who did not seek it out and are now present for it.
Children can watch. That is the part with the longest tail, and every football association on this continent knows it. A person’s attachment to this tournament is formed at about nine or ten years old, and for three decades the fixtures have been on while nine year olds were asleep or at school.
The second thing is that it becomes ordinary, and I mean that neutrally. A World Cup match at eight o’clock competes with everything else at eight o’clock. It is not an expedition. You can half watch it while doing something else, which is how most television is consumed and which no previous tournament here was consumed.
The thing that is lost
I want to be honest about the trade, because the convenience is not free.
What made the 2002 tournament memorable to the people who watched it here was precisely that it cost something. A thing you get out of bed at three in the morning for becomes important partly because you got out of bed. The effort is not incidental to the experience; it is a substantial part of it.
Remove the effort and you have a better tournament and a thinner memory. The people in that bar at six in the morning will remember the bar. The family on the sofa at eight will remember the match, if it was any good, and not otherwise.
That is not an argument for inconvenience. It is a note that the two things are not the same thing, and that the second is what is on offer this month.
The stickers
One packet costs about a dollar and contains five stickers, and there are several hundred in the album, and every parent who has ever done this arithmetic has arrived at the same place by about the third week.
The mathematics of it are genuinely unkind. The last forty stickers take longer to find than the first four hundred, because each new packet is increasingly likely to contain something already stuck in. This has been true since 1970 and no amount of explaining it to a nine year old has ever helped.
What the album actually does, and the reason it survives every prediction of its death, is give a child a reason to learn the names of footballers from countries they have not heard of. A Cape Verdean defender is an abstraction until he is a gap on page forty two.
The curtains
The small physical detail I keep noticing this week is that people are not closing them, and that this is entirely a function of the hour rather than of anybody’s mood.
A match at five in the morning is watched in the dark, with the sound low, alone. A match at eight in June is watched in a room that still has daylight in it, at normal volume, with the windows open because it is warm, which means you can hear when somebody four houses down reacts before you do, because their stream is two seconds ahead.
That is the tournament being in your own time zone. It is not better football. It is the same football, at an hour when the street can hear it, which is a different thing from watching it, and is the part of this month that will not come round again here for another thirty years or so.
