The two histories of the World Cup Final

In 1994, I watched my first World Cup final on a couch with my uncle in a suburb of Toronto. In 1998, I cheered maniacally from my friend’s couch in downtown Toronto as Zinedine Zidane overcame what I believed to be some incredible odds to put away Mário Zagallo’s weirdo Brazil, before parading down to football-mad College Street to see what was out there.

In 2002, I arrived late from my dusty, leaky apartment building near St. Laurent to an early morning church job in Montreal (I was, and to some degree still am, a professional singer) after seeing Ronaldo beat Germany and right the wrong of the Stade de France four years ago.

In 2006, I drank cheap vodka in my friend’s illegal basement apartment to calm my nerves after a frantic opening petered out between Italy and France, and then witnessed the Azzuri throng descend on College Street to celebrate their first win since 1982. In 2010, I settled at home with my wife, flying back from France in time to see Netherlands try to wallop Spain.

No matter how disappointing a World Cup might be as a whole, you remember the finals, where you were, who you watched with, whether you were bored, delirious, nervous, exhausted. Amid all the discussion of the quality of this game and the points to remember from that game and whether the World Cup is still what it used to be and how it rates among the lot, we forget these tournaments are also defined and remembered by the way spill into the lives of the millions who follow them from beginning to end.

That’s why there are two World Cup histories. The first is the Official Record—what the journalists say, what ends up in World Cup retrospective videos, what we rely on to win pub debates about which was the best tournament ever and why. Lineker looking at the bench and pointing to his temple while Gazza broke down in 1990, Baggio skying his penalty, Dennis Bergkamp scoring that goal against Argentina...you know them all. When we talk about football, we stick to the Official Record.

Then there is World Cup as Personal History. Here the football doesn’t matter much as how you watched it, where and with whom—where you were in your life. This is best exemplified in the finals, particularly if you are young enough to naively believe as Pele once did, along with countless others after him including Jerome Boateng, that you might one day play in one.

Here we use an entirely different calculus to rate World Cups. For that reason 2002 was my favourite, with its punishing overnight kick off times, pubs switching from draft to coffee and eggs without skipping a beat. I was in my second year of university in Montreal, still at an age capable of handling the brutal hours, gleefully kicking the doors of my sleeping roommates to tell them the final score. And I will always remember the awful final of 1994, because even with no goals and plenty of fouls, it was my first.

That’s important to keep in mind—while many of us older and more cynical fans are thanking the heavens for what has been a great tournament after several less than thrilling World Cups, there are countless others for whom Brazil 2014 is their first. Many are young and don’t know or care about goals per game rates or whether the knockout rounds failed to live up to the group stages. For them, they will take the memory of this tournament with them for the rest of their lives, a marker against which all future World Cups will be remembered. And most of all, they will remember the final.