I don't really like football and four conclusions from the 2026 World Cup | Lior Dayan

It is time for me to say it — I do not really like football. I mean the game itself. And accordingly, the last World Cup that we just went through — like the one before it and the one before that — did not interest me particularly.

Football as a game, purely, is a rather idiotic and unsophisticated game. That is, of course, its secret, its simplicity. But as such, it is also quite boring if you remove the identity component from it. Without identity, there is no value in football. Football is not a physical game; football is a story. Bnei Yehuda, for example, the team I support fervently, is one of the most fascinating stories in Israeli football, and that is one of the things I love about it so much.

In general, I am not impressed by football at the level of the ball's movement against physics and gravity; all that interests me is my team and what happens with it. And as it happens, my team is in the National League, so I do not watch the World Cup, nor the Champions League, nor the English or Spanish leagues, and not even the Israeli Super League.

It should also be said that, in general, for years there has been no great story or quality storyteller in world football. There was one once — his name was Diego Maradona, and he knew how to tell a story and be a story himself. I truly do not understand the admiration for a player like Messi, who does not know how to string together more than one decent sentence and has never said, in any press conference, anything interesting or just unexpected. The well-known story of Messi, a story about a child who needed growth hormones and thanks to his football talent received funding for the expensive hormones (from the Barcelona youth team), is a Disney story for beginners, lacking brilliance. Maradona, from his childhood to his maturity and death, is a story that belongs to the highest league of personal stories. And therefore, personally, when asked who is greater: Maradona or Messi, I clearly answer that it is Maradona — because football is talent plus a story.

What is true, of course, is that like everyone else, I happened to find myself in recent weeks watching some of the games together, and I noticed a few interesting things in the story of world football as it is reflected in the World Cup.

One: The superpowers are completely absent from the event. While the world is managed jointly by two particularly dominant superpowers — the USA and China — they do not really exist on the map of world football. Their national teams are extremely marginal. Their dominance, by the way, can be seen mainly on advertising billboards. The tournament's biggest advertisers are still mainly American (Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Visa, and Verizon) and Chinese (Lenovo).

Two: While the best European teams feature players of African descent who are at the top of the world's football players — for example, Mbappe and Dembele in France, Bellingham and Saka in England — the African teams themselves are quite unsuccessful. It is quite amazing that there is no prominent African team. Because talent, as one can learn from the starting lineups of England, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, is not lacking in Africa. It is inevitable to conclude something about the management in African countries, which fail to utilize their raw talent. Their inability to build proper football academies commensurate with the amount of talent and population size is glaring.

Three: Despite the Muslim "invasion" of Europe (mainly the Syrian refugees of 2015), which influenced and changed politics in Europe, it has no influence in European football. Since it has always been claimed that football is a lifeline for weak populations, one would expect an Arab-Muslim boom in European national teams. But in fact, there is no trace of this, and there is no prominent Arab player in any European national team (except for Lamine Yamal, if he proves himself). This is in contrast to the Africans who managed to integrate well into European teams and star in European football. By the way, if you brought Napoleon back to life and brought him to see the France vs. Spain game, he would never have imagined who the French team was.

Four: Norway is, of course, a wonder country, and it is hard to explain the miracle that it is. A country of 5.5 million residents that has produced a miraculous football team. What they did in Norway in sports — and by the way, not only in sports, but also, for example, in their sovereign wealth fund — should be studied and copied in many places in the world. In places like, for example, the State of Israel, which has double the population. But if by chance the Norwegian team arrives to play against the Israeli one, the Home Front Command's recommendation will be to enter the shelters immediately.