My memories of watching FIFA World Cup games, beginning with the 1986 edition held in Mexico and continuing through the most recent tournament in Doha, Qatar, both on television and in person, were a major source that I drew upon while writing Sevens. In 1986, I had not watched much soccer apart from the local Sevens tournaments where I grew up. By then, I had moved to another town to begin college. Television broadcasting itself had not been available in the state for very long. Only the government-run Doordarshan telecast programs in those days, and there were not many interesting things to watch, especially in sports. Therefore, the live telecast of the World Cup, that too from a foreign country, was a novelty, and even people who were not interested in soccer wanted to see what the excitement was about.
Much of that excitement was generated by the vernacular newspapers, which covered the World Cup remarkably well during a time when obtaining information was not easy. The matches were telecast live during the wee hours of the night, but a group of us stayed up to watch them, drinking glasses of sweetened black coffee to keep ourselves awake.
While the 1986 World Cup was largely an international sporting spectacle for me, I watched the 1990 World Cup as a much more educated follower of soccer, even though I never had the opportunity to watch anything similar in person. There were no top-quality football events held anywhere in the state, apart from the invitational Nehru Trophy tournament in Kochi, in which a few second-tier national teams participated.
The highlight of the 1990 World Cup was the outstanding performance of the Cameroon team, especially that of its veteran player Roger Milla. One strand of the novel’s storyline is inspired by Cameroon’s remarkable run in that tournament. During the years that followed, I moved around quite a bit in both India and the United States, but I always made an effort to watch as much of each World Cup as possible when it was held every four years, even if I could not watch every match. One item on my bucket list was to attend a World Cup match in person, and I finally achieved that during the World Cup in Doha, Qatar. A friend and I flew from San Francisco to Doha for a weekend and were fortunate enough to watch a couple of matches, including one involving the United States.
This time, FIFA has awarded the World Cup to the entire North American continent, with cities in the United States, Mexico, and Canada hosting matches. A few group-stage games will be held at Levi’s Stadium in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live. FIFA has made access to tickets unnecessarily difficult, but I still plan to watch at least one match.
It has been disappointing to see the increasing commercialization of the World Cup and the way FIFA has pushed it beyond the reach of many middle-class fans in pursuit of short-term profits. In doing so, it risks diminishing some of the charm of the Beautiful Game, which continues to enjoy enormous popular appeal around the world.