Belgian nausea, ad nauseam

Just once, I'd like the chance to market the World Cup. I have a vision. I'd do it right.

On the first day, God created light. On my first day in charge of marketing the World Cup, I would ban the ungainly CGI mascots that, every four years, force the world to watch them discover ambulatory functions. And I would do everything in my power to set free this year's iteration, La'eeb, who has clearly been pressured against his will into performing the Sieg Heil.

After that, I'd really get to work. For too long, the World Cup has been bathed in a warm yellow glow of global harmony, the inevitable conclusion of decades of Nike ads and Waka Waka videos starring crescent-smiled children juggling balls amongst superstars, the scenes always set in some ambiguous favela, the children always shoeless. It's a hollow ideal, really - even beyond the overt, crass exploitation of poverty as a vehicle to sell more Coca-Cola and Levis, it's a reflection of an image that does not exist, one where the World Cup is joy entirely devoid of misery and everyone in the Heineken ad somehow, impossibly, possesses a clear line of sight to the television. Misery, of course, is more inherent to the World Cup than anything else, even more than the English missing penalties or the Dutch giving bizarrely sexual press conferences. There is real misery, of course - tens of billions of dollars spent on new stadiums that are discarded after a month, thousands of migrant workers exploited and dead, nations left in crippling debt after expected tourism surges fail to materialize - and there is the more frivolous misery that arrives, inescapably, to thirty-one groups of supporters as they watch their teams crash out of the tournament, often pathetically. Misery. I'd sell that. Even better - I'd sell Belgium.

Four years ago, the Belgian men's national team was widely seen as one of the favorites to win the World Cup. That such success could even be discussed in the same sentence as Belgium, a nation of fewer than twelve million, was considered evidence of a disciplined, energetic Royal Belgian Football Association (RBFA) and a grassroots youth organization capable of identifying talent even before kids had hit puberty. Sure, there were cracks in the foundation - the RBFA could only afford a meager salary for managers, resulting in a string of mediocrity at the top - but the pure talent that dazzled on the pitch was enough to distract any substantial criticism. Players like Kevin de Bruyne, Eden Hazard, Thibaut Courtois, and Romelu Lukaku weren't just strong by flabby Belgian standards - at various moments, each could have credibly claimed to be among the best three players in the world (Lukaku less so). And it was a team that played like one. The goals came from defenders' foreheads and wingers' shins, the juxtaposed fros of Marouane Fellaini and Axel Witsel bobbed up and down in the midfield like synchronized buoys warning of ball-stealing obstacles, and even in adversity, the team refused to abandon one another. Belgium's greatest moment in that World Cup came as they bested Brazil (a match I hiked thirty miles in a day in order to watch on television, and forever one of my greatest memories shared with my Belgian father), but no game better captured their easy harmony than the devastating comeback against Japan, when we witnessed a world-class striker dare to defy nature, his trust in the unit so encompassing that he allowed the ball to roll beneath his withdrawn foot, the final blow delivered instead by an onrushing, gleeful backup Belgian winger.

Today, the Belgian team is a hollow shell, the broken spaces left where once was youth and cohesion now wide enough for the wind to push sand and dust through, which have collected in a small pool at the bottom. The manager and the team remain largely the same four years later which, of course, is the core of the problem. Players who were thirty in 2018 are thirty-four today and they are slower, hobbled by age and injury. This is part and parcel of soccer and indeed, of life too, where degeneration is not merely expected but appreciated for its sobriety, the imminence of decline what allows for a recognition of the preciousness of those rare moments at the top. But degeneration only carries utility if it is accompanied by regeneration and in Belgium's case, as a result of immense mismanagement, there has been no companionship. For four years, the air mattress has been steadily leaking air.

Where to begin advertising Belgium's problems? Is it best to discuss the foibles of Eden Hazard, at his peak capable of tricks only Messi, Ronaldo, and Neymar could replicate? No, that's too sad. Hazard, one of the rare players whose playing style perfectly mirrored his personality (mirthful, cheeky, teasing), weathered a fall from grace so dramatic and pitiful that it's enough to make you believe in deities and their inclination towards anti-Walloon vindictiveness. After securing his dream €150m move to Real Madrid in 2019, Hazard promptly spent the next three years injured and overweight on the bench, his precipitous collapse a wonderfully tidy metaphor for the current state of the Belgian team and the stuff of nightmares for insurance adjusters everywhere. Much of the narrative around Hazard's implosion, humiliatingly, has been framed around his self-destructive predilection towards hamburgers. The consequence is a bizarre, grotesque imbalance, wherein Hazard spends much of his time as a forgotten man in Madrid before jetting off to retain his central role with Belgium, where his middling, shuffling performances both break the heart and offer the most pointed evidence of this team's baffling commitment to elder abuse. Too sad. No Hazard ads.

What about one of the other numerous minor, quiet tragedies at work within the team? Romelu Lukaku, the star striker, transferred to Chelsea in a move of failed magnitude second only to Hazard's. Jan Vertonghen and Toby Alderweireld, formerly gifted Premier League defenders, are thirty-three and thirty-five respectively, with Vertonghen possessing a turning radius indistinguishable from the container ship that recently lodged itself into the side of the Suez Canal. There is the simmering - and absurd - tension that still allegedly lingers between Kevin de Bruyne (the best midfielder in the world) and Thibaut Courtois (the best goalkeeper in the world) over an affair that Courtois had with de Bruyne's girlfriend a decade ago. And of course, after numerous internal deliberations were published in the Belgian press, sparking suspicions of a leak within the team, Courtois masterfully walked the tightrope of disputing the veracity of anything the mole had said while simultaneously threatening reporters that if the team found out who it was, “it [would] probably be his last day in the squad." These are the kinds of storylines that the 18-49 demo will adore.

Looming over this beautiful, dirt-strewn tableau is the fact that Belgian footballers are, as a rule, notoriously blunt. The Germans blush at the honesty Belgian players show when on international duty. That's why so few observers were particularly surprised when de Bruyne (who was once recorded screeching at his Manchester City teammates 'let me talk'), three days into the tournament, gave an interview that emphatically dispelled any doubts about whether Belgium could win the World Cup by answering "No chance. We're too old." After Belgium lost the next day without scoring, Vertonghen responded in kind, clearly incensed: “We probably also attack badly because we are too old, that must be it now, surely?” A team once built around harmony (or, at least, the perception of as much) had surrendered to ignominious infighting. For Belgians, this geriatric repartee was agony. For everyone else, the opportunity to laugh while another nation with a dark colonial legacy crumples on the global stage was simply irresistible. After all, there are teams in harmony, there are teams in dysfunction, and then there are the teams you never forget, like France at the 2010 World Cup, where the players locked themselves on the team bus, staged an infamous mutiny, and went home without winning a game. This Belgian team would have almost certainly managed to surpass 2010 France's messiness if they hadn't already been eliminated on Thursday morning. That would sell, yeah?

Belgium's collapse came to a pathetic end against Croatia, their group stage exit assured after Lukaku was presented with, statistically, more golden scoring opportunities in forty-five minutes than group winners Morroco enjoyed throughout the entirety of the group stage - and missed them all. It was a performance that could be excused - Lukaku has been injured for months and has barely played, his rustiness was inevitable - but as Lukaku stormed off the pitch (pausing to destroy the dugout in what can only be understood as a poignant show of solidarity with Qatar's mistreated laborers), such an end felt almost fitting, the perfect culmination to Belgium's tournament of stopped starts, internal convulsions, and a compulsion towards the self-destructive. The team that finished third in the 2018 World Cup could only manage to finish third in their group in 2022. The Golden Generation was dead. As Head Coach Roberto Martinez tendered his resignation within an hour of the defeat, the Spaniard ended his long-expired tenure in brilliantly Belgian fashion: by giving a deluded interview where he said that the team "had no regrets [and could] leave with our heads held high." Remarkably, it seems, this team's greatest legacy will not be of the delightful football it so often played, nor the haunting failure of potential so nakedly visible and so heartbreakingly unfulfilled. Instead, if this team is to be remembered at all, it will be for the precedents it set in the glorious field of media relations.

There is a World Cup to be sold off this Belgian experience, and it is an image that might, for once, veer dangerously close to something authentic. Enough of the buoyant Joga Bonito commercials, no more glorious three-minute narratives that encourage you to believe that the only thing between you and national glory is the right pair of boots: let's sell the 2026 tournament by giving a platform to misery. Think of the ad campaign we could create. Sepia-toned 15-second spots of Lukaku inconsolable on the sidelines; an authoritative voice smugly asking the viewer "This won't happen to your team, will it?" Comedy is an option - Skechers could certainly offload a few pairs of Shape-Ups if they were willing to stage and televise a match between Belgium's defenders and the occupants of a Brussels senior citizens home. Or we could just lean into the pain, zoom in close on the faces of Belgium fans as they list the few things that have disappointed them more than this team: "nothing comes to mind apart from my son" says Jean-Claude, a postman in Antwerp.

Ultimately, it is always the misery that lingers. My memory of this team that I loved will include the Brazil victory, of course, but more indelible will be how Belgium's regular letdowns offered the lens through which I first saw refracted the many shades of my father's football-incurred nihilism and progressively, watched that nihilism become my own. It is meaningful, truly, to have a form of misery that you can abide without too much difficulty. In a world defined by suffering that is both relentless and anything but superficial, the World Cup offers a more compartmentalizable form that is easily shared and neither existential nor permanent. Everything else is already for sale - why not sell that too?