Mexico City’s World Cup festivities have taken a macabre turn, with four souls crushed to death in a stadium stampede. The scene: a modern colosseum, its stands trembling with the fervour of a nation that worships football as a secular religion. But let us not pretend this was a freak accident, a bolt from the blue.
It was, rather, the inevitable product of a society that has swapped substance for spectacle, order for ecstasy. The Romans knew that bread and circuses could pacify the masses, but they also knew that the crowd, when inflamed, becomes a beast. Today’s stadium crush is a signal: we have recreated the Colosseum, but our emperors are feeble, and our gladiators are merely overpaid athletes.
The victims are not gladiators, but fans—ordinary people who paid for the privilege of being crushed. This is the decadence of the modern age: we die for our entertainments, and we call it celebration. The authorities will wring their hands, offer condolences, promise reforms.
But nothing will change. The next tournament will see bigger crowds, higher stakes, and more deaths. We are living in the twilight of a civilisation that has forgotten how to build safe amphitheatres, or perhaps simply doesn’t care.
Four dead in Mexico City. A small price, it seems, for the gods of football.
