{"text":[[{"start":6.8,"text":"By the time you read this, I hope to have landed in Philadelphia, and perhaps even passed through customs and begun watching the World Cup in the stadium. It will be my 10th tournament. But for the first time in decades, I’ve had a week watching the World Cup the way normal people do: at home. The experience has confirmed my long-held suspicion that the emotional centre of this event isn’t the stadium but the living-room. "}],[{"start":32.1,"text":"I delayed my departure from Paris because my boys are doing their final school exams, and it was felt I should be present at least for bits of the experience. I think they are revising, but the evening before the first exam I was watching Germany-Curaçao with one son, 17, when he remarked: “Is this the first World Cup game we’ve ever watched together?” It was. That evening I was going to a Dutch friend’s house to see my team, the Netherlands, play Japan. The son asked, “When was the last time you watched Holland at a World Cup at home?” I had to think. I’ve been to every World Cup since 1990. The Dutch didn’t qualify in 1986 or 1982. The correct answer was therefore the Argentina-Netherlands final in 1978. "}],[{"start":76.5,"text":"I was eight years old, sitting in my pyjamas in our living room in a small Dutch town, watching with my parents and grandparents. Argentina were 1-0 up with 12 minutes left when Dick Nanninga, the big Dutch centre-forward who ran a flower kiosk in daily life, headed the equaliser into the confetti-strewn net. In my memory, a communal cheer rose from the neighbouring houses. Argentina won 3-1. "}],[{"start":103.75,"text":"My grandparents and mother are long dead, but I can still picture us sitting in the living room — as vivid an image as almost anything else in my childhood. A World Cup is like Proust’s madeleine. Each new World Cup reminds you of past World Cups, and the people you watched with. "}],[{"start":121.4,"text":"My children’s golden World Cup is 2018, won by their team, France. They watched each French game with their school friends and the parents in somebody’s flat over pizzas. When it was our turn to host, our living room walls were smeared with red-white-and-blue face paint from the children’s celebrations — or so I’m told. I don’t feature in my kids’ World Cup memories, because I was always at the World Cup. "}],[{"start":145.20000000000002,"text":"Contrary to popular opinion, the stadium at World Cups is usually a tame place. The crowd tends to be less involved than at a club match, because the spectators are overwhelmingly people from the host country, ie neutrals. Think of a game like Argentina-Nigeria in Ibaraki, Japan in 2002. When Argentina scored, the camera probably panned across distraught Nigerian fans — concealing the fact that there were only about 43 of them in the ground. The Japanese spectators around them didn’t care who won, and in some cases didn’t know. (Stadium announcers at World Cups state the score at the end of each game.) And since 2018 the stands have been full of people taking selfies. For atmosphere, try your neighbourhood bar. "}],[{"start":191.90000000000003,"text":"The mood is even tamer in the “media tribune”, where I typically watch matches eating my dinner of peanuts from the stadium vending machine. The unwritten “no cheering in the press box” rule still generally applies. Over the decades I can recall only the odd exception. During England-Argentina in St Étienne in 1998, when 18-year-old Michael Owen got the ball in the centre-circle and began haring at inhuman pace past Argentines, hard-bitten middle-aged English journalists around me rose from their seats, pounding their desks and screaming, “Go on, my son!”, until he put the ball into Carlos Roa’s top corner. "}],[{"start":226.85000000000002,"text":"The very architecture militates against passion. The typical World Cup stadium is what French anthropologist Marc Augé calls a “non-place” — broadly, a “supermodern” site of transience, like an airport or hotel lobby, where humans barely leave their idiosyncratic marks. It’s usually new, without handed-down history — or in the case of the US, with a history of gridiron football. It’s Dallas but it could have been Nizhny Novgorod. There is no “there” here. "}],[{"start":253.85000000000002,"text":"Tarik Oualalou, the Moroccan architect building the world’s biggest football stadium in Casablanca for the next World Cup, told me that modern stadiums — like the ones at this tournament — are built as “movie sets”. The stands are set far back, so as to accommodate broadcast facilities, VIP lounges and restaurants. Contrast that with a pre-TV stadium like Liverpool’s Anfield, where fans are right by the pitch, creating electricity."}],[{"start":279.65000000000003,"text":"On Monday I’ll be at France-Iraq in Philadelphia. I’d like to say I’d rather be at home with the kids creating indelible memories, but despite it all I wouldn’t miss out on the stadium. "}],[{"start":290.95000000000005,"text":"Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend Magazine on X and FT Weekend on Instagram"}],[{"start":304.6000000000001,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1781842087_7298.mp3"}