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All over South America and across social media, you can find people suggesting that the football powers that be are rigging the tournament for Messi and crew — you know, regular sports hater stuff — but there’s also a lot of scrutiny about the makeup of his country’s squad: in a tournament in which every team in South America and even teams from Scandinavia and East Asia have had Black players, Argentina’s conspicuous absence of them, both now and historically, looks deliberate. There are countless videos online of people tying that fact to the country’s history of ethnic cleansing and ongoing erasure of Afro-Argentines and Indigenous Argentines. And when you put that wider history next to recent incidents — like when their midfielder Enzo Fernandes gleefully sang a racist ditty about France’s Black players and Argentine fans harassing Black fans at World Cup matches — it’s easy to see why the team nicknamed La Albiceleste, the white and sky blue,  is now seen as a team representing a nation of racists. 

But we can see how rooting as a hater gets real tricky real fast, right? If you’re among the lot who want to thwart Argentina in its quest to win the whole shebang again, your last rooting hopes lay with England — who have opponents and longstanding beef on every continent, and with good reason! And, now, your choice is to root for Spain in the final, who of course, were the literal first authors of codified racism, and were responsible for all sorts of colonial destruction in this hemisphere. 

The football pitches of the World Cup have been the arena for this kind of stuff for decades — the subtext of the Argentina-England semifinal was also a relitigation of a 1982 war between those two countries over the Falkland Islands? But as quite a few people have noted, our partisan politics increasingly operates like the zero-sum, identity-totalizing logic of sports fandom. Not to be too much of a downer, but I think this is a manifestation of a broader sense of disempowerment we’re all feeling: it’s hard to do democracy, and harder to exact something that feels like justice or at least the popular will. And so almost all cultural fandoms and anti-fandoms of sufficient size these days are seemingly powered by some sense of moral grievance and/or righteousness, with people’s hopes hanging on every Oscar race, every album review, and every questionable refereeing decision, even though their outcomes can never resolve the issues and history we want them to.