You have to hand it to football’s governing body. In the midst of a global tournament, they have managed to conjure up the perfect metaphor for our times. Fans on concourses, not seats.
It is the architectural equivalent of a national identity crisis. We have built magnificent stadiums, gleaming cathedrals of sport, and yet we cannot fill them properly. The issue, we are told, is safety regulations.
But I suspect the problem is far more profound. It is a question of soul. The Victorians understood that a crowd is not a mob; it is a living organism, a contract between the individual and the collective.
You sit in your designated seat, you cheer, you suffer, you partake in the ritual. To be relegated to a concourse is to be reduced to a spectator of a spectator. It is symptomatic of a culture that has lost its nerve, a bureaucracy that values risk assessment over rapture.
The Fall of Rome, I am often reminded, was preceded by a withdrawal from public life. Amphitheatres emptied, not because of building codes, but because the people had forgotten why they gathered. Fifa’s concern, as ever, is with optics.
But the empty seat is not a logistical problem. It is a spiritual one. We have traded the thrill of the collective roar for the sterile comfort of a standing zone.
And we call it progress.
