World Cup in football held in the USA, Canada and Mexico. One of the greatest TV events, or perhaps the greatest, shows that watching a football match on television, live, is still a unique experience today. How do we see him in Serbia?
Since we didn't qualify, we watched the matches played by our neighbors through the stall, BiH i Croatians. Did we root for our neighbors? That way. It seems to me that the tabloids were mostly waiting for outbursts of nationalism, they counted the Serbs by team, along with Austria, or Germany where there were a little more of them.
Croatia came to the championship with high hopes, with significant results in the past, while BiH was a pleasant surprise, especially after the victory over the Italians. Selector Sergej Barbarez had an impossible mission to create a national team that is quite dysfunctional. That's why it was a good decision to invite players who are mostly from the diaspora and avoid pressure and counting from the Federation and Republika Srpska. The base of the team was in "Mala Bosnia", i.e. in St. Louis, where a large number of refugees were relocated after Dayton, especially from western Bosnia and Cazinska Krajina, in fear of reprisals for supporting Fikret Abdić Baba.
We watch the broadcasts with a special show on RTS and TV Arena. All of that looks decent, but finally a wider range of guests should be invited to such shows, which would confirm the thesis of a passion for football that knows no age, gender or occupation. That's why sometimes "sports experts" can drown.
Colleagues are in charge of "interesting things", i.e. the accompanying phenomena that go along with football, the advertising blocks are absolutely dominated by bookmakers, whose terminology is becoming increasingly difficult to understand, but the fact that nowadays knowledge of the terms "free spins" and "bets" is considered general knowledge, apart from "odds" and "tickets".
You can also bet on goals without Var, in short you can bet on anything, literally.
Interesting spots are for chips, where apart from Messi, current American actors also appear, as a kind of promotion of football, that is, "soccer".
Interesting, new recordings from the field, from the game, from the referee's cameras were introduced into the broadcast.
In short - the NBA model is increasingly present, from thumbnails, trials, the most expensive tickets in the history of championships to the need to put the show in the center instead of the game.
The idea that modern technology will make the trial fairer has proven to be wrong. Our neighbors were the victims of a kind of manipulation. Croatians were shown unusual results by VAR, in millimetres, which led to the cancellation of their goal in the match against Portugal. Allegedly, a sensor in the ball was activated which registered the touch of the Croatian football player's hair, so the goal was canceled due to offside.
Bosnia, when eliminated by the USA, was the victim of extremely rough play, which led to a red card for the goal scorer for the Americans. However, FIFA showed an incredible level of hypocrisy when, at Trump's request, she canceled the punishment of the football player in question (Balogun), because he had to miss one game. His sentence was "suspended" and changed to probation - not to repeat the crime in the next year. President Tramp, who was given a fictitious award by the same FIFA for his contribution to world peace during the bombing of Iran and Gaza, praised her decision to see through the fingers of the American player. This is a complete discredit to fair play, similar to the decision at one time that American athletes could not be tested by the International Anti-Doping Commission. This strange and biased decision led to a new conflict between UEFA and FIFA, which could be considered a defense of football against "Americanization", with huge pressure from big money.
We will wait until the end of the championship to analyze the success, but it is already possible to state the progress of the teams from Africa, of which the team from Cape Verde left a special impression. There are no outsiders, no favorites, which actually reminded us all that, despite the pressures, football remains a passion and a game, not a gladiatorial show of millionaires on the field and in the stands.
He is also fascinated by the longevity and efficiency of great football stars, such as Messi, Ronaldo, Mbappe, Salah, but also Modric, along with the incredible Haaland, who also excels. So far, no new star has particularly shone, but, for example, everyone will remember the Cape Verdean Islands game, Cabral's goal against Argentina, or the incredible defense of the goalkeeper and captain of Vozinja, which became a phenomenon on social networks. Here, football has become a way of promoting an entire country.
In the end, apart from being a sport, football once again proves to be a universal metaphor for social relations, geopolitics, "psychology of the people", national stereotypes but also power relations, economic inequalities, political tricks, populism, the relationship between individualism and collectivism, faith, superstition, standards of beauty, for players and girls in the stands, as well as many, many other things.
Our role this year, again symbolically, is that of observers, not participants and actors. Any analogy with our status in international relations, EU membership, relations with neighbors and great powers is simply striking.
Real journalism costs money, and we will not be bought by tycoons and corporations. Support us with a one-time or monthly donation. The time for it is now!
