Is what we are watching at the current World Cup merely a series of matches and competition between 22 players on a green rectangle, or has the matter become entirely different, transcending football into many other areas related to belonging and soft power? Until a few years ago, many parents in various countries around the world would blame and scold their children for playing football, seeing it as a distraction from studying, academic achievement, and serious life.
In past decades, if any student dared to tell his family of his desire to become a professional footballer or pursue a similar sport, his father would grow furious and might even throw him out of the house.
Fathers in the past dreamed of seeing their sons work in professions they regarded as a mark of prestige — the judiciary and public prosecution, officers in the police or armed forces, doctors, engineers, and businessmen. That has changed greatly now, and securing a place for a young child in a well-known football club or sports academy anywhere in the world has become extremely difficult, requiring enormous effort, as large numbers of young people have rushed to join clubs and academies in the hope of becoming famous players.
The mindset of today's fathers has changed considerably. Some in Egypt, for example, dream of seeing their son replicate the career of global star Mohamed Salah, or Omar Marmoush, or the stars of the Moroccan national team — who finished fourth at the Doha World Cup four years ago and continue to deliver a distinguished performance at the current tournament.
The media and social media have played an important role in transforming the negative perception of football into an overwhelmingly positive one. I know someone who sent his son to study law at a British university, dreaming of seeing him become a prominent international lawyer. The son graduated with distinction, but then chose a specialisation that had never crossed his father's mind: he chose to specialise in representing clients and pleading cases in football-related disputes, and to try to open an office as a players' agent. This is a new specialisation in the Arab world, but it reveals how perspectives have shifted — not only toward football itself, but toward the many fields connected to it.
In the past, a footballer was keen to secure a guaranteed job after retirement, on the grounds that playing football offered no certainty; most players retire in their mid-thirties. Even more significantly, many Arab families would not allow their daughters to marry footballers, believing they had no future.
All that has changed greatly now. Prominent and established families wish to see their daughters marry footballers — especially stars who earn astronomical wages that most other professions cannot match. Football today is a large, fully integrated industry, as are some other sports, yet football remains the most popular game in the vast majority of countries in the world, with only a few exceptions such as the United States.
Football stars in the past earned very modest wages compared with today's astronomical pay scales, as seen in the transfers of Messi and Neymar to Paris Saint-Germain. Football has become a genuine industry because billions of people have grown attached to it, following it day and night, and millions earn their livelihood from it. It is no longer merely a match in which 22 players from two teams compete; it has become one of the most important vehicles for entertainment, competition, soft power, and profit — indeed, a significant marker of the strength of any country or club.
As some wrote honestly on Facebook a few days ago: "In the moment of a match, the homeland transforms from an abstract political idea into a tangible image embodied in a jersey, a flag, an anthem, and a stand that chants with a single voice. Just as schools, armies, and the media manufacture the symbols of identity, sport creates emotional moments that people live through together, making them feel that the collective is not a distant concept but an experience that can be seen and heard."
When any country's national team plays an important match, that match becomes a symbolic space in which the nation's image is tested — its strength, its dignity, its capacity to compete, and its standing among others.
Amid the multiplicity of sub-identities and backgrounds, matches arrive as a collective ritual that temporarily suspends differences and reproduces a shared national feeling around a single moment. That is why we remember not only the result of the match, but where we were, with whom we watched it, and how the streets came alive after the final whistle — because football, in its most important moments, does not only score goals.