There is a phrase that is loved by every business school teacher, every venture capitalist and every man who has ever won a morning meeting: the playing field.
It is the first myth of competition itself, the idea that we all start from the same line, breathe the same air and sweat, so to speak, the same sweat. And this summer, FIFA took that great idea, marched it into the Philadelphia sunshine and left it there to explode.
Because let’s clarify what actually happened in this World Cup. On Saturday afternoon, France and Paraguay were sent to a sweltering football game in Philadelphia with the heat index hovering around a filthy 40C, the kind of temperature where sensible countries close their shops, pull the shutters and go to bed until October. Meanwhile, other teams in the same tournament spent a month roaming Atlanta, Dallas and Houston, three fully enclosed, climate-controlled arenas where the thermostat sits at a balmy 22C, about a fifth of all games are played in air-conditioned comfort, and the biggest physical hazard is a super-cool bottle of Gatora.
That is not a level playing field. It’s not even the same game. That’s judging oranges against oranges, yes, but one orange was kept in the freezer and the other was left on the dashboard of a Ford Focus in a Texas parking lot.
And tonight it gets better, or worse, depending on whether you’re English. England face Mexico at the Estadio Azteca, a soccer cathedral that sits 2,240 meters above sea level, where the air is thin, oxygen limited and the home team has lived, trained and played in the clouds for the entire tournament. Mexico has played three of four games at the Azteca. England have had a few days to acclimatise to conditions which physiologists suggest would require weeks. It’s a sport to ask a Surrey accounting firm to draw up a contract in Mexico City, in Spanish, while you’re a little confused.
Now, I can already hear the rejonder. Sports have always had their own geography. True enough. But there is a difference between attractive spatial diversity and structural inequality baked into a painting. When one quarter-finalist has spent the group stage in a constant 22C and another has been lightly roasted in Miami and Monterrey in wet-bulb temperatures doctors politely describe as dangerous, the bracket itself becomes a lottery of thermodynamics. Uzbekistan, thankfully, has drawn up an excellent lottery system. Tunisia drew the hottest. No one found it. The air conditioning worked.
FIFA’s response to all this has been the cooling off, that odd little ritual where 22 millionaires gather in a box as cool as a weasel in a watering hole while the referee reads his watch. It is a concrete that adheres to the sun. A three-minute stoppage doesn’t put you off 87 minutes of play in conditions that would shut down a construction site in Britain, and everyone from the players’ union to the team doctors knows that.
Students of business will recognize this pattern immediately, because this is how markets fail. It is the holder of a subsidized energy contract that competes with the prices of the first paying locations. We can call it an unbalanced regulatory environment and write angry letters about it. FIFA calls it a tournament.
And here’s a proper British irony: while the players are desperate, the UK economy is having a good time. The tillers are singing about the £3.8 billion World Cup spend on cheap venues, bookies and takeaways, and smart small firms are now thinking of MATCH to win the event’s economy. The only heat map that matters in Britain this month is the one showing which beer gardens have a big screen.
Tonight’s event will start at 1am UK time, which is why unions are urging employers to allow flexible working on Monday mornings, and why half of the country’s bosses will be getting up at 9am with sunglasses on. Keep a thought, as you yawn, of Harry Kane and his teammates, who will be running theirs at high altitude, with 40 percent less oxygen, against 87,000 Mexicans who consider the Azteca a family heirloom.
Therefore, this World Cup does not judge oranges and oranges. It’s a great, chaotic, occasionally dangerous test of competitive imbalance, and whoever lifts the trophy will deserve a thermometer-shaped star. If England can win tonight, not holding their breath at all, it will rank among our best days. And if we lose, at least we will have a good excuse before the games start. Which, as any England fan will tell you, is a true national game.
