Be Like Ronaldinho: I Hope the Next World Cup Feels This Way
Netflix’s Turbo Sports Productions has just released a three-part series about Ronaldinho. Ronaldinho is my favorite player in history, by far. It is not just the cosmic football, the passes, the goals, the ball control, the dribbling, the imagination of someone on an LSD diet, or the fact that he used to watch NBA games to learn the concept of the no-look pass, and then executed it on a football pitch. It is all of that too. But when Ronaldinho moves from Paris Saint-Germain to Barcelona, ends the drought, and returns the Catalan club to the center of the world stage, none of the speakers, not the president, not the players, not the journalist and not the fans, talk about football. They talk about Ronaldinho in mystical terms, freedom, love, fun, joy.
2 View gallery Freedom, love, fun, joy. Ronaldinho ( Photo: AP )
The 2026 World Cup in the United States, Canada and Mexico is reaching the starting line like a man who has finished a marathon and then stepped into the ring with Mike Tyson. It is battered. The enormous number of participating teams, the number of matches and their quality, entry visas, Iran, prices, FIFA corruption, Trump, the exhausting heat, fears of an economic flop. Cage fights opposite the White House, the host’s 250th birthday. Who knows what a day in Guadalajara will bring. The Greens have already announced protests: “During the five weeks of the games, air pollution equivalent to that produced by an entire country over a year will be caused,” they claim. For at least some of the national teams, the feeling is that they are entering a house where the host is about to mistreat them. For spectators, in the stadiums and on the screens, the feeling is not much better, like being invited to dinner at a family in the middle of an argument.
You think about all this negativity and then you remember, just two years ago, with the war in Gaza and the war in Ukraine, and the trade war and tariffs, and the war of why not, and the European Championship. Turks kissing German women, German women dancing with Englishmen, and the orange wave of thousands of Dutch fans moving from Leipzig to Dortmund, with a stop in Berlin, taking over entire streets like a tsunami of life and beer, to the right and to the left. And you, trailing behind and to the side, tears streaming down your cheeks because it is so much fun, and then you grab someone’s hand, and to the right and to the left. And what fucking happiness. The world’s toy store, where there will be competition, and refereeing mistakes, but only a little. A scratch, not a tattoo. That for one month football and sport will take a break from being a mirror of reality, and go back to being the world’s toy store.
2 View gallery Sports supplement headline of “Yedioth Ahronoth”, today Let it be an tournament of grace. Of sportsmanship. Of handshakes. Tears. A sea of tears from sports. Let the heavens open and cast upon the heatwave freedom from the south, love from the north, fun from the east and joy from the west. Let this World Cup be the Woodstock of 60 years ago. Let people roll in the mud, do Messi, sniff Yamal, swallow and run, sniff Kane. Let them sing. Let there be singing that does not stop. Before, during, after.
Over the past month, at noon, when 14-year-old Noam comes home from school, he always comes back with two packs of stickers from the supermarket or the local kiosk. If you buy 40 euros’ worth of products, you get two packs free. I try to explain to him that it might be better just to buy the two packs for 11.98 euros, but I stay quiet. How do you explain to a child that football causes temporary insanity. Like falling in love.
He sits down on the rug, and together we arrange stickers of players, teams and flags in the official World Cup album. And suddenly, I look at him from the side, 14 again, forgetting the tragedies that then surrounded my life. I am in love with Dalit from Atad Street, and the soundtrack of my love is Prince and George Michael and Paul Young, and the goal by Junior or Maradona’s red card, and Toni Schumacher, and Marco Tardelli shouting in ecstasy as if God had appeared before him.
And I wish him, and all of us: let it be a Ronaldinho World Cup.
