In its contemporary version, the Soccer World Cup is a fabulous commercial and political event sustained by the emotions that soccer players have sought for a century.
Uruguay, a small country of 176,000 square kilometers, 3.4 million inhabitants and a burning passion for soccer, organized the first World Cup in 1930.
Qatar, a nation of 11,500 square kilometers, 15 times smaller than Uruguay, with a population of three million inhabitants and without any interest in soccer until very recently, will host this edition.
It is not difficult to predict that Uruguay will never again host the World Cup alone.
It is easier to assume that at some point, we do not know when and under what circumstances, another Qatar will officiate the tournament.
A game that was born in the mid-19th century never ceases to fascinate an audience that has multiplied exponentially due to the advances that make it possible to enjoy football without leaving the sofa.
Basically it hasn't changed.
As in its beginnings, the secret of soccer is in the soccer players.
Without them, nothing of the gigantic world that surrounds them makes sense.
To some extent, the position of the players has not changed in the last 100 years.
About the stars of that time, in the case of the Uruguayans Scarone and Andrade or the Argentines Ferreira, Stabile and Luisito Monti, and the rivalry of their teams, the story that still presides over football was built, with other names of figures: Messi, Mbappé , Neymar, Kane, Cristiano Ronaldo or Modric.
They will be evaluated with the same criteria as then.
Some will dazzle, others will disappoint and some will leave no mark in Qatar.
As for his responsibility, it will be the same as half a century ago, when Pelé, Beckenbauer and Cruyff awed, or in the 1930s, when the Spanish Ricardo Zamora, the Italian Meazza and the Austrian Sindelar captured the fan's imagination.
The difference is not in the role they play, but in the exorbitant global business that has been carved out of their prowess on the pitch.
While the current stars are due some of the impressive mercantile soufflé that football has built around them, their role in Qatar will be none other than to justify the inordinate attention they will feed for four weeks.
They are the generators of a business whose owners present them as a breed of capricious, unsupportive and privileged.
Of the true power, the one that is ventilated in the big soccer corporations, the soccer players scratch very little or nothing.
The Qatar World Cup portrays the splendid ill-health of soccer, a sport that in its highest instances is in the grip of endless greed, systemic corruption -the Netflix platform these days offers an educational tour of all the miseries in the series Uncovered (The ins and outs of FIFA)— and the arrogance to consider itself a state outside the law, with corporate headquarters in Switzerland and offices in the most convenient tax havens on the planet.
The World Cup in Qatar is extravagant in the eyes of anyone, but it is undoubtedly the most consistent with the current times.
None of the scandals that have occurred on the planet of FIFA and its surroundings, conflicts that would bring down any other institution, have really had an impact on this World Cup.
On the contrary, each of the latest global vicissitudes—for example, the global financial crash in 2008 and the energy fallout from the Russian invasion of Ukraine—have placed bottomless gas pit Qatar in a position of extreme geopolitical and maximum economic guarantee, which is why soccer's prodigious nose for money goes to a small country on the Persian Gulf and will never return to the small and very soccer-loving Uruguay.
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