For a month, people who agree on almost nothing found themselves agreeing on one thing — from Lagos to Liverpool to Lima, all quietly hoping for the same result.

For a month, people who agree on almost nothing found themselves agreeing on one thing. From Lagos to Liverpool to lima, neutrals who couldn’t name a single Argentine defender lined up beside lifelong obsessives, all quietly hoping for the same result: anyone but Argentina. American magazines called them the tournaments surprise villains; serious newspapers ran pieces counting how many countries wanted them to lose. By the final, cheering for Spain had become, for a lot of the world, mostly a way of cheering against the other lot.

When Spain won it 1-0 in extra time on Monday, through a Ferran Torres goal deep into the second period, the reaction around the world wasn’t really admiration for Spain, fine as they were. It was relief, the favourite, the defending champion, the side that carried itself as though the trophy were already engraved, had been caught at the very last. The easy explanation is jealousy, people resent winners, and Argentina had won almost everything for the best part of a decade. Theres something to that.

But it doesn’t explain why this Argentina drew a reaction the beloved Argentina of four years ago never did. The same country, more or less the same players, the same captain: adored in 2022, resented in 2026. something changed, and it’s worth working out what. Before going further, let me put the obvious objection on the table, because I share the instinct behind it. Sport is meant to be the one thing we can enjoy without dragging politics into it, but the politics didn’t turn up because I went looking for it, it turned up because other people, far more powerful than any of us spent this tournament pushing it onto centre pitch.

All I'm doing is noticing what they did. Four years ago, Argentina was the neutral’s dream, a country buckling under runaway inflation, an ageing genius chasing the one prize that had escaped him, a team that played every round on a knife’s edge. The world wanted Messi to have his moment, and when he got it, plenty of people who owed Argentina nothing felt a lump in their throats. This time the team arrived carrying more than its own hopes. Argentina is now run by a hard right government, and over the tournament the national side became a kind of billboard for it.

When a newspaper asked why the squad didn’t include a single black player the account of the president’s party shot back that Argentina is a country, not a Disney movie. When Brazil went out, one of the president’s senior advisers used the moment to mock black people online. Then there was the sense that the whole thing had been rigged in Argentina’s favour. Egypt left their game convinced they had been robbed. England fans were sure the semi-final was fixed. Argentina’s players denied it, FIFA, predictably waved every complaint away.

You can set aside whether any single decision was wrong. The revealing thing is how readily, and how widely people assumed the worst. The assumption didn’t come from nowhere; it came from watching how this sport is governed. This is the same FIFA that handed showpiece to dictatorships, staged a tournament built by workers who died by the thousand, let states with grim reputations buy a little glamour through the game, and steadily priced ordinary fans out of grounds to make room for corporate boxes.

When people have watched all that assume the powerful get the benefit of the doubt, there not inventing a conspiracy there going on the evidence of their own eyes. Whatever the truth about any one penalty, the deeper suspicion, that football at the top is run for money and for the people who already have it, is simply correct. To see the same instinct from the other side, look at who the neutrals loved. This was the world cup of Cabe Verde, a nation of about half a million people scattered across volcanic islands off the coast of West Africa, ranked sixty seventh in the world arriving at their first finals after seven failed attempts.

Nobody outside the islands expected a thing from them. What they delivered was one of the greatest underdog stories the tournament has ever produced. A goalless draw with Spain, the second ranked side on earth, a goalkeeper past forty making save after save; a 2-2 slugging match with two-time champions Uruguay; and a place in the knockout rounds, the smallest country ever to reach them, earned without losing a single group game. People who had never given Cabe Verde a second thought found themselves on their feet for them.

The reason is the exact mirror of the reason they wanted Argentina beaten. Here was a side owed nothing, the had bought no advantage, that turned up with none of the swagger and none of the machinery, and a competed anyway, on merit and nerve alone they played it straight and they played it clean, and they refused to be brushed aside by opponents who were meant to swat them without breaking a stride. There is a hard little irony in how their run ended. The team that knocked Cabe Verde out, in the round of 32, Was Argentina.

And even then Cabe Verde would not lie down. Argentina went ahead, Cabe Verde dragged it level, Argentina went ahead again the islanders came back at them, taking every blow and staying on their feet until the favourites greater firepower finally told. It's not that hard to see why the appetite to watch Argentina lose only grew from there. Put the two teams' side by side and the whole month makes sense. The feeling that lifted Cabe Verde is the feeling that turned on Argentina.

It's one of the instincts, not two. A pull towards the side that plays fair and earns what it gets, and a recoil from the side that struts and expects the results to be handed over. Strip away the tribalism and the shirt's colours, and that is what was on display, everywhere, all at once. Aussies know this instinct well; we call it a distaste for tall poppies and a soft spot for the battler, and at its best it is more than envy of the winner or pity for the loser. It is the belief that a person having a go deserves a fair go in return.

And that anyone who treats winning as a birthright has it coming. It is one of the better things about us, and it runs deep. What struck me this month is that millions of people, most of whom would never call themselves political, reached the same judgement at the same time and without being told to: that fairness is worth wanting, that a small side playing straight deserves to be roared on, that the entitled favourite deserves to be brought down a peg. That is not a small or a silly thing, it’s one of the soundest instincts people have.

It would be dishonest to pretend all of it was noble. Plenty of the feeling against argentina was ordinary rivalry, no deeper than booing the away side. Some of it, particularly around Latin America, slid into crude generalisations about Argentines as people, which is just prejudice wearing a football scarf. A sense of fairness is a good starting point, not a finished argument, and the same resentment that can stand up for the underdog can be turned, by the wrong hands, into something mean.

The movement now governing Argentina is itself proof of that, it runs on resentment, aimed carefully downward. The clearest example of the instinct going astray came, fittingly, from the top. The loudest official protest of the tournament was the English establishment demanding that FIFA punish Argentina over the Malvinas banner. You don't have to hold any settled view on the Falkland's to notice the strangeness of the old imperial power playing the wounded party over a flag.

A slogan on a bedsheet is not the scandal of this world cup. The scandal is a game owned, from top to bottom, by a small number of officials, sponsors and club owners who run it as a private business while the people who love it pay for the privilege. If you're going to be angry about unfairness in football, that is the thing to be angry about. So where does that leave the question, we started with, about whether any of this is really more than sport? The honest answer is that the people who spent a month wanting Argentina beaten, and Cabe Verde carried through, weren't being irrational, and they weren't being tricked.

They were responding, accurately, to fairness on one side and to entitledness and a well-founded suspicion of a fix on the other, because all of it was really there. The only mistake, if it was one, was to aim so much of that feeling at footballers, when the entitlement and the fix in football sit much higher up, with the people who own and govern the game, and when the same pattern, the powerful arranging the result in advance, is hardly confined to sport. You already know unfairness when you see it.

That is the whole point. A month of football has just proved that the instinct is alive and well in nearly everyone, that it crosses every border, and that no official denial can switch it off. We will cheer the little islands playing clean, and we will jeer the giant who expects the trophy as of right. The question was never whether we can feel it, plainly we can. The question is what we decide to do with it once the tournament is over, and the same old arrangement, dressed in something other than a football shirt, is staring back at us from somewhere that matters a great deal more than a pitch.

Originally published in The Tocsin at workershub.org.au.