World Cup: How Does a Small Ball Move the Big Earth?

Hi everyone, welcome to Cold-Knowledge Blind Box. Have you been watching the World Cup? It has only been going for a couple of days, and already there has been a very special match: Iran against New Zealand.

On the scoreboard, it was just a group-stage game that ended 2-2. But once you take in the background outside the stadium, it's anything but ordinary. One of the host countries this time is the United States, and the Iranian team was playing on American soil.

In an ordinary year, that might just be a matter of visas, security and diplomatic protocol. But today, it has become very sensitive. The United States and Iran have been tangled up in sanctions, negotiations and military pressure for decades. This year, relations between the two have been stretched to the limit. Yet against this backdrop, Iranian players still got their visas, walked into a stadium in Los Angeles, and finished a match in front of cameras around the world.

That is the strangest thing about football.

It's only a game. Twenty-two people chase one ball. When it goes in, people cheer; when it doesn't, people sigh. But sometimes it is given a very serious role: when politics can't reach agreement, when diplomacy is stuck, when war has blocked every channel, football can still bring hostile sides, for at least ninety minutes, under the same set of rules.

Today's episode, using this World Cup news as a starting point, will briefly talk about: Where did football come from? Why is it always tangled up with war, conflict and peace? How was the modern World Cup born? And why did this sport, which claims to belong to all of humanity, end up becoming a huge business?

First, the origins of football.

If you trace history, you'll find an interesting phenomenon: in many places around the world, in eras when there was no contact between them, people invented similar "ball games."

The ancient Greeks had a game called Episkyros, which we can simply call "Old E." A group of young men split into two teams and fought over a ball sewn from leather on the sand. Both hands and feet were allowed. The ancient Romans had a similar game called Harpastum, which we can call "Old H." This one was more like military training: soldiers pushed, collided and grabbed in the mud, training their physical fitness and their combat skills.

In Han dynasty China there was cuju, which was popular in both the imperial court and the army. Indigenous peoples of North America had the ancestors of lacrosse. And the Maya of Mesoamerica went even further. They had a ball game in which hands and feet could not be used at all. Players had to strike the ball toward stone rings using their hips and elbows.

You see, these civilizations had no WeChat, no flights, no World Cup broadcasts back then. Yet they all, without any coordination, did one same thing: they set a round object on the ground, or in the middle of a field, and then used their bodies to fight over it.

What does that tell us? It suggests that ball games were probably not invented suddenly by one genius nation, but are a very basic human instinct. We like to chase, we like to compete, and we like to squeeze chaotic force into a set of rules. The reason football later swept the world is exactly this: it is simple enough and primal enough. You don't need complicated equipment. An empty field, a ball and a few people, and you can start.

But precisely because it is so primal, its relationship with war has always been very subtle.

The most famous story happened at Christmas in 1914.

It was not long after World War I had begun. On the Western Front in Europe, British and German soldiers lay in their own trenches, with a no man's land between them. That ground was full of barbed wire, shell craters, and corpses that had died and had not yet been collected.

On the evening of December 24, small candle lights suddenly appeared in the German trenches. Someone began singing "Silent Night." The British soldiers were stunned at first, and then they joined in, singing the English version. The next morning, several German soldiers came out of their trenches without weapons, hands raised, calling out in broken English: "Merry Christmas, we have no weapons."

Then something incredible happened. More and more British and German soldiers climbed out of their trenches and walked into no man's land. They shook hands, traded cigarettes, chocolate and buttons, and showed each other photos of their families. Some of them buried their dead comrades together. Later, someone brought out a football, and the two sides played an impromptu match between the shell craters.

It's hard to say how formal that match was, and accounts of the score differ. But the event itself is shocking enough: people who had been shooting at each other only days earlier, because of Christmas and because of a ball, briefly saw each other as human beings again.

Of course, a war cannot stop because of one football match. Higher commands soon ordered that private contact between enemies be strictly forbidden. In the following Christmases, there was never again such a large-scale ceasefire on the front lines. But the football that rolled across no man's land in 1914 remained in human memory. It proved one thing: even inside the most brutal war machine, humanity has not completely disappeared.

The second story happened in Kyiv in 1942.

At the time, Nazi Germany occupied Kyiv. Many Ukrainian players had either died in battle or become prisoners of war, and some of them, to survive, were doing hard labor in a local bakery. Later, in order to dress up the occupied city as "normal life," the German forces had these bakery workers form a football team to play against German military teams.

The team was called FC Start, which we can call "Starting Line."

The Germans did not take them seriously at first. But Start beat the German air force team 5-1. The Nazi officers felt humiliated and arranged a rematch. Before the rematch, everyone knew this was no ordinary game. If Start won again, the consequences could be very serious.

But they won anyway, 5-3.

Afterward, some of the Start players were arrested by the Gestapo, and some died in concentration camps. There have been films about this history, and there are many disputes over details, such as whether they were really executed right after the win. But the core fact has not changed: in an occupied city, a group of men without guns used football to carry out a public act of resistance.

In 1914, football let enemies embrace briefly. In 1942, football let the occupied keep their dignity. You can see that the most special thing about football is not that it can end war. It's that, inside war, it can preserve a little space where people are still willing to follow the rules and still willing to acknowledge each other's existence.

This leads us to the birth of the modern World Cup.

FIFA was actually founded in 1904, but at first its influence was quite limited. The person who really pushed the World Cup forward was the Frenchman Jules Rimet. The name is a bit of a mouthful, so we'll call him "Old Rimet" from here on.

Old Rimet had lived through World War I. After he saw Europe torn apart by war, he began to think about a question: must humanity's instinct to compete be released through war? Could that competition be placed inside a set of rules, so that nations compete through matches rather than through guns and cannons?

That is the original ideal of the World Cup. It did not exist from the start to sell broadcasting rights, sponsorship or tickets. Its underlying idea was to translate conflict into a match, to compress violence into ninety minutes, and to put national emotion onto a patch of grass.

In 1930, driven by Rimet, the first World Cup was held in Uruguay. Conditions were very shabby. European teams disliked the long journey, and many countries did not want to take a boat to South America. In the end, only 13 teams took part. But once this mechanism started, it was hard to stop.

Because the World Cup satisfies a very deep need: every country wants to be seen, and every ordinary person wants, in a safe setting, to cheer once for "us."

Later, television broadcasting appeared, globalization arrived, and commercial sponsorship came too. The World Cup gradually changed from an idealistic international event into the largest attention machine in the world.

The business model of this machine is actually quite simple.

The host country pays. It builds stadiums, subways and airports, handles security, receives tourists, and bears the public pressure and operational risk. FIFA controls the core assets: the event brand, broadcasting rights, sponsorship rights, licensed merchandise, and also the rules of the game and eligibility to compete.

So you see a very strange phenomenon: host countries often don't make money, and sometimes lose a great deal. Brazil spent a lot of money hosting the World Cup, and some of its stadiums were later barely used. Qatar's investment was astronomical, and ticket sales and tourism simply could not recoup it.

But FIFA makes money. It does not have to bear the same costs for every subway line, every stadium and every security operation, yet it takes the bulk of the revenue from global broadcasting, advertising and sponsorship.

So the question is: since host countries know they may lose money, why do they fight to host?

The answer is that they are not buying football itself. They are buying national image.

Qatar hosted the World Cup to make the world see it anew: not just a rich small energy country, but a diplomatic, commercial and cultural center in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia wants to host one too, with similar logic: it wants to repackage itself from a traditional oil giant into a center of modern tourism, entertainment and investment.

So the World Cup is certainly controversial. It has been dogged by rumors of corruption, labor problems, human rights disputes, enormous waste, and the power of FIFA as a super-organization. But at the same time, it is still one of the few shared events in the world today that can draw the attention of billions of people at once.

That is the most complicated thing about the World Cup.

On one side, it is very commercial, even very realistic. On the other side, it genuinely still holds a trace of idealism.

Just like Iran's team standing on an American pitch this time. You can say there is politics in it, there is calculation, there are FIFA's interests and the host's pressure. But you also cannot deny this: when the whistle blows, the rules on the pitch temporarily outweigh the other rules. At least in those ninety minutes, people are not watching missiles, sanctions and negotiating tables. They are watching passes, shots, saves and the score.

That may be the reason football has survived to this day.

Humans invented many things, and then those things turned around and shaped humans. We invented writing, and writing gave us history. We invented money, and money changed exchange and relationships. We invented football, which was originally only for play, and it slowly became a ritual shared by all of humanity.

A small ball being kicked back and forth looks very light. But it has rolled across ancient grass, rolled across the no man's land of World War I, rolled through occupied Kyiv, and it has also rolled into today's World Cup stadiums. It has no power to bring peace to the world. But at least it reminds us: as long as people are still willing to play a match under the same set of rules, humanity has not completely given up on one another.

So football is, of course, just football. But sometimes, it is also more than football.

Well, that's the end of this episode of Cold-Knowledge Blind Box. See you next time!

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