The wildest side of the World Cup - critical summary review

There is a piece of paper worth more than it seems. It is not a million-dollar contract. It is not a property deed. It is a crumpled, handwritten sheet that a fourteen-year-old boy hid under his shirt on a cold March night in Bosnia.

March thirty-first, twenty twenty-six. Bilino Polje Stadium, in Zenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina. The European World Cup playoff is on the line. On one side, Italy, four-time world champions. On the other, Bosnia, a country that has only played in one World Cup in its entire history, back in twenty fourteen. The match ends one-one. It goes to penalties.

On the sidelines, among the ball boys collecting balls and holding towels, stands Afan Cizmic. Fourteen years old. A youth player for Celik Zenica ... eighteen goals and fourteen assists in twelve matches this season. A kid with a striker's instinct.

Before the shootout, Cizmic notices something. Italian goalkeeper Gianluigi Donnarumma, the hero of Euro twenty twenty-one, is reading from a piece of paper hidden behind a towel, near his water bottle. A cheat sheet. A detailed report on every Bosnian penalty taker ... which side they usually shoot, how they run up, where they aim.

Cizmic hesitates. Thinks about whether he should or not. And then decides ... whatever happens, happens. He waits for the cameras to turn toward the first Bosnian penalty taker, runs to the goal area and grabs the paper.

Donnarumma only realizes his notes are gone when it is too late. He is furious. He tries to snatch the notes from Bosnian goalkeeper Nikola Vasilj in a kind of retaliation. It does not work. Without his cheat sheet, the Italian keeper dives the same way on every penalty and fails to save a single one. Italy misses three penalties. Bosnia wins four-one in the shootout and qualifies for the World Cup.

Whether Cizmic's trick actually changed the result, no one can say for certain. But the boy became a national hero. He appeared on television shows. He gave interviews to the international press. He keeps the paper in a plastic sleeve and plans to auction it off, with the proceeds going to charity.

When asked if what he did was unsportsmanlike, he answered with disarming honesty ... "If we were playing in Italy, someone would have done the same thing to our goalkeeper."

The World Cup does this sort of thing. It turns ball boys into heroes, rivals into brothers and borders into minor details.

June twenty-seventh, twenty eighteen. Russia. The final group stage match day. While Mexico is losing badly to Sweden, the fate of the Mexican national team is being decided in another stadium, thousands of kilometers away. In the match between South Korea and Germany, the Germans need to win. If Germany wins, Mexico is out.

Mexican fans scattered across bars, squares and stadiums throughout Russia are watching the Korean match with their hearts in their throats. Ninety minutes. No German goal. The tension is so thick the air feels heavier. Then, in stoppage time, Kim Young-Gwon scores for South Korea. VAR confirms ... the goal stands. Minutes later, Son Heung-min adds a second into an empty net. Germany trailing two-nil. Europe's greatest footballing nation is eliminated in the group stage. And Mexico, despite their own defeat, goes through.

What happens next cannot be scripted. Mexican fans pour into the streets of Russia looking for any South Korean to hug. They find a man and lift him onto their shoulders. They sing for him. They offer him tequila. On the other side of the planet, in Mexico City, hundreds of people gather outside the South Korean embassy. Consul General Byoung-Jin Han steps out of the building and is welcomed like a rock star. The chant echoing through the streets of the Mexican capital is ... "Brother, now you are Mexican!"

Similar scenes play out at Korean consulates across the country. Nobody planned any of it. It was a collective, spontaneous surge of gratitude between two nations that share no language, no continent and no history ... but that day shared an enormous joy.

Thirty-six years earlier, in nineteen ninety, another national team was living an experience so unlikely it felt like a movie script. Ireland, managed by Englishman Jack Charlton, was playing in its first ever World Cup. They arrived in Italy with no great expectations. Drew all three group stage matches. Scraped through a penalty shootout against Romania. And suddenly found themselves in the quarterfinals ... with the match set in Rome.

Charlton, known for his dry humor, had made a promise weeks earlier, half-joking. The team's physiotherapist Mick Byrne, a devout Catholic, kept asking to meet the Pope. Charlton told him ... "Alright Mick, if we make it to Rome, I will take you to see the Pope." Nobody took it seriously.

But Ireland made it. And Mick held him to his promise. With the help of a monsignor traveling with the delegation, the audience was arranged. The entire squad, families included, went to the Vatican on the eve of the match against Italy.

The audience lasted nearly three hours. The hall was immense. Bishops from around the world gave speeches. Charlton, restless, could barely sit still. But then the moment came. Pope John Paul the Second passed by the Irish group and stopped in front of goalkeeper Packie Bonner. He placed his hand on Bonner's shoulder, leaned in and, in broken English, revealed that he too had been a goalkeeper in his youth. A bramkarz, as they say in Polish. The two stood there, gesturing with their hands, miming saves, talking about goalkeeping in front of cameras from around the world.

The photograph made every Irish newspaper the following day. For Bonner, a practicing Catholic, it was a moment he never forgot.

The next day, Ireland lost to Italy one-nil. A goal in the thirty-eighth minute, after a misjudged run off his line by Bonner. In the dressing room after the defeat, Charlton thanked everyone. Said they had delivered an exceptional World Cup. Wished them happy holidays. And before walking out, he turned to Bonner and said ... "Oh, and Packie ... the Pope would have saved that one."

All of Ireland laughed. And they still do. When the team returned to Dublin, more than five hundred thousand people lined the streets to welcome them home. For a country enduring a severe recession and two decades of conflict in the north, those three weeks of World Cup football were a collective pause from sadness. Some Irish people say, half-seriously, that the good spirit of ninety helped lift the country out of its crisis.

But if there is one story that shows football in its purest form, as a window into the impossible, it begins in a refugee camp in Ghana.

Buduburam. Late nineteen nineties. A makeshift camp on the Ghanaian coast, set up to receive Liberians fleeing civil war. Shacks made of chipboard and corrugated iron. The daily search for clean water and food was a victory in itself. That is where Alphonso Davies was born.

His father, Debeah, summed up life in the camp in one sentence ... "The only way to survive, sometimes, was to carry guns." When Alphonso was five, his family managed to emigrate to Canada. They settled in Edmonton, in the far north, where winters reach minus forty degrees.

The boy barely spoke English. He struggled in school. But with a ball at his feet, everything changed. A scout named Marco Bossio watched him play in a street tournament and later said ... "There was something special about that kid. Lightning-quick feet." At fourteen, Davies joined the Vancouver Whitecaps academy. At sixteen, he became the youngest player to score in a Gold Cup. At eighteen, he signed with Bayern Munich for a record MLS transfer fee.

In twenty twenty-two, in Qatar, Canada was playing in its first World Cup in thirty-six years. In the first match, against Belgium, Davies missed a penalty. The pain was immense. But in the second match, against Croatia, the script changed. Sixty-seven seconds in. A perfect cross from Tajon Buchanan on the right. Davies rose higher than everyone else and headed the ball into the net. The fastest goal of that World Cup. And Canada's first ever goal in men's World Cup history.

The goal took sixty-seven seconds. The journey to get there took thirty-six years, if you count by the national team. Or a lifetime, if you count by the child who was born in a chipboard shack not knowing whether there would be food the next day.

Canada ended up losing the match four-one. They did not advance past the group stage. But after the game, Davies posted a message that read ... "A kid born in a refugee camp was not supposed to make it. Do not let anyone tell you that your dreams are unrealistic."

And when dreams do come true in football, the joy can be so enormous that no space can contain it.

December eighteenth, twenty twenty-two. Argentina, led by Lionel Messi, defeats France in the World Cup final in Qatar. The match alone would have been legendary ... three-all in regular time, with Mbappé scoring three goals, and an Argentine victory on penalties.

But what happened next was even more extraordinary.

When the team's plane landed in Buenos Aires at two forty in the morning, thousands of fans were already waiting at Ezeiza airport. Messi stepped off the plane holding the trophy. The Argentine government had declared a national holiday.

The following morning, the players climbed onto an open-top bus and began their parade through the city. And then Buenos Aires showed what happens when four million people try to occupy the same space at the same time. The streets disappeared. There was no sidewalk or asphalt left ... only people. Fans climbed lampposts, bus shelters, rooftops, trees, anything that could bear the weight of a human being.

The bus, which was supposed to head to the Obelisk, a historic monument in the city center, could barely move. After more than four hours crawling through the crowd, the logistics collapsed. Security could not clear a path. The parade had to be called off.

The solution? Helicopters. The players were transferred from the bus to military aircraft and flew over Buenos Aires with the trophy. The government spokesperson called it "an explosion of the people's happiness." And a father who had been downtown with his seven-year-old daughter put it simply ... "I am not disappointed. We lived the party."

Five percent of the country's population, by some estimates, left their homes that day. Not to protest. Not to demand anything. Just to celebrate together.

WHAT TO DO WITH THIS INFORMATION

The twenty twenty-six World Cup begins in June, in the United States, Canada and Mexico. It will be the largest in history ... forty-eight teams, one hundred and four matches. And with it comes a question that applies to any great collective celebration ... how do you make the most of it?

First, the question of how to celebrate. The Argentine parade is a lesson. Four million people in the streets produced beautiful scenes ... but also created real risks. Fans got hurt. Traffic stopped. Logistics fell apart. Celebrating in a healthy way does not mean celebrating less. It means staying hydrated, avoiding excessive alcohol, arranging meeting points with friends and family, and remembering that joy does not need recklessness to be intense.

Second, what these stories tell us about borders. Mexicans hugging Koreans. The Irish laughing with the Pope. A Bosnian kid becoming a continental hero. A Liberian refugee scoring for Canada. Football does not resolve diplomatic conflicts, it does not eliminate prejudice and it does not replace public policy. But it creates, for a few weeks, a temporary zone where people who would not normally look each other in the eye share the same emotion. That has value.

Third, the upcoming World Cup is the first to be held across three countries simultaneously. This will put hundreds of thousands of fans crossing borders between the United States, Mexico and Canada. It is an enormous opportunity for tourism and for the local economies of host cities. But it is also an unprecedented logistical challenge ... visas, transport, security, accommodation. For those planning to attend, the time to organize is now. For those watching from home, it is worth remembering that the collective experience, even in a pub or a living room, is what turns a match into a memory.

Finally, perhaps the simplest lesson of all. What do a fourteen-year-old ball boy, a South Korean consul drinking tequila and a goalkeeper chatting with the Pope have in common? None of them planned what happened. They were in the right place at the right time and said yes when the moment arrived. The World Cup is made of matches. But what we remember, decades later, are the stories of the people around the pitch.