On the night of 12 July 1998, Paris was preparing for the World Cup final, and the eyes of the entire world were fixed on a 22-year-old named Ronaldo Nazário.
"The Phenomenon" had outpaced his own years, claiming the world's best player award two years in a row, so much so that Brazil — the reigning champions, brimming with stars — seemed to enter the Paris final hanging on him alone, and no one else.
Then, hours before the opening whistle, the news leaked and threw everything into disarray: a sudden health episode, talk of a seizure, his name disappearing from the lineup only to reappear without warning. That was enough to change the atmosphere of the final before a single minute had been played.
Ronaldo did play, but the figure who appeared on the pitch was a pale, heavy shadow — closer to a ghost of The Phenomenon. After ninety minutes, France were world champions, victors by a clean 3–0.
The match ended, and another story began: who sent Ronaldo back out? Was he truly fit to play? Had the sponsoring company applied pressure? Questions multiplied, and rumours filled the void left by answers, until what had happened before the final was spoken of far more than what had happened during it.
In the flood of narratives, one truth was drowned out: Brazil were the defending champions, a side possessed of enough quality to absorb any single player's absence. If anything, the amplification of the news may have weighed more heavily on the team than the absence itself. France, for their part, made shrewd use of their home ground, their crowd, and their opponent's turmoil — and Zidane was there when it mattered, twice, with his head.
And yet the question "What happened to Ronaldo?" outlived the question "How did Zidane and his teammates do it?"
This paradox brought me back to Gustave Le Bon, the French thinker who studied crowd psychology more than a century ago. He observed that crowds do not engage with ideas the way an individual does: they are moved more by what agrees with their feelings than by what evidence establishes, and they grow more confident in an idea the more widely it circulates. A single idea that brushes against an old fear or a prior belief therefore needs only to be repeated to become, in the public mind, more persuasive than any proof.
That is why football has always been fertile ground for such narratives. A piece of news that may be true, a statement open to interpretation, or a refereeing error can open the door to a story that grows with each retelling — until what swirled around the match eclipses what happened inside it.
I believe there is something here that goes beyond Le Bon's philosophy. A narrative can only take hold if it finds a soul already prepared to believe it, and nothing prepares that soul more than the dread of elimination — the anxiety that accompanies every dream in knockout competitions all the way to the final. For in that final, it is not merely a match that ends; a journey ends with it. A team does not simply lose; a dream is lost. And that is why the cruelest thing in football remains the loser's exit.