At the top of the world with no way down
Wednesday, 15 July 2026
Joe Bennett is an award-winning Lyttelton-based writer, columnist and playwright. He is a regular contributor.
OPINION: They are the two best-known syllables in the world. Among the headwaters of the Amazon there may be some naked Stone Age tribe that hasn’t heard them, but I doubt it. Those syllables are foot and ball.
The Football World Cup is the only world World Cup. Football is the game played in every country on earth because it is the game we instinctively play with toddlers on a rug, with beachballs on the beach, with pebbles in the yard. It needs no gear. It needs no rules. It takes no understanding.
It is the game for the ape that reared onto its hind legs. It is co-operative and yet individual. And it suits the physique of the hunter-gatherer who runs across the plain. So footballers tend to look how we ought to look, how we’d look in the wild - slim, lithe, well-proportioned.
Defenders tend to be men. But the goal-scorers are the boy-men who defy them, the young heroes, the champions, the Davids. They are the ones that the kids want to be. They are the ones whose shirts sell out. They are the ones who get the money, the fame and the worship. And they get it so young. It’s a dangerous game for the ego-saddled, for the self-adoring.
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Take Ronaldo. You can sense he senses himself on the big screen. It echoes what is playing in his head. This will have been his last World Cup. Though the man is 40 now and has lost the speed he had, he still craves the praise, the bath of glory. But he has already sunk to a Saudi Arabian football league where he is paid vast sums to play the ghost of himself. He has become a used commodity, his own packaging. What will he do when even the Saudis tire of him?
There are many examples for him to follow. Or not. George Best was an early glamour boy. After football he spent his money on women, cars and booze and “the rest I just squandered”. He died of the drink at 59. Some years later he had an airport named after him.
Diego Maradona went much the same way to the endless bonfire. He came from a country that venerates its footballers, perhaps in reaction to the horror of its politics. Maradona was far too vain to stand a chance. After football he believed his own myth, got drunk, got high, got fat, got thin again, tried to stop drinking, tried to stop drugging, drank again, drugged again, and died at 60 a national hero.
There are other ways to go. David Beckham married a pop singer, gave strange names to their children, moved to LA and plunged deep into shallowness. He looked after his looks and devoted himself to selling stuff. He sells cosmetics, razors, mattresses, hamburgers, with the word “he” meaning a two-dimensional parody of a self. He has become a brand.
And in the crowd at one of the World Cup games was yet another way to age. There in a private box, sought out by the cameras, zoomed in on among the hundreds of thousands, was a body still as slim as a footballer’s, a body still seemingly lithe. But it was topped by a ravaged face, a face like extreme topography, a face eroded and unelasticated by the years, and yet still recognisable as the face of former youth, of pouting beauty, of strutting sexuality, the face of Mick Jagger.
“You can’t always get what you want,” sang Jagger 60 years ago. What he didn’t know then is that that’s not the problem. The problem is climbing the mountain too young and having to find a way down.