A Non-Soccer Fan's World Cup Anxiety: Happily Lost in the Beautiful Game
By
David Roth
Crisp on the outside, thoughtful on the inside. A keeper.
Summary
A non-soccer fan reflects on the peculiar, mild anxiety that comes with the quadrennial arrival of the World Cup — a feeling of being happily swept up in something vast and unfamiliar. The author embraces not knowing everything about the 48-team tournament, framing it as a pleasant surrender to the unknown.
Key quotes
· 4 pulledIt's not the sort of anxiety that haunts you, or maybe it just rates below too many of my other haunting anxieties to register.
But as a non-soccer person, the quadrennial arrival of the World Cup has a peculiar and not altogether unpleasant anxiety about it.
A bunch of stuff is about to happen that I do not really know anything about, and I am going to put myself happily in that wave's way and not know what hit me.
This year's 48-team World Cup field is sufficiently vast and varied that I couldn't learn everything about it if I wanted to.
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