Dear reader,This morning, in America’s Kansas City, the 38-year-old Lionel Messi, who has spent two decades collecting all the game’s honours, finally claimed the one that had eluded him. He struck three times against Algeria, the first hat-trick of his six World Cups, and drew level with Miroslav Klose on 16 goals, the most anyone has scored at the World Cup.Watching it, a question came to mind that any fan would call heresy. Pelé is credited with calling this the beautiful game, but is it also a complete game? And if it is, is it complete because it works, or because it never quite does?Let’s start with the physicality of football. It is easily one of the most physical of the major team sports, certainly the most psychological, and possibly also the most political. It has, in fact, even started a war. In June 1969, Honduras and El Salvador met across three qualifying matches for the 1970 World Cup, and within weeks their armies were fighting along the border. Ryszard Kapuściński, the Polish reporter who happened to be in the region, wrote about it in The Soccer War, about what the game can set loose.He knew that the football had started nothing. The war grew out of land: Salvadoran peasants pushed off Honduran soil by land reforms, and around 1,00,000 of them sent to a country with no room for them. The matches only gave the rage a place to gather. An 18-year-old in San Salvador, Amelia Bolaños, shot herself when Honduras scored in the dying minute of the first half. Her funeral was televised, with the President and the national team walking behind the coffin. Several thousand people died in the hours that followed.This is the first thing to understand about football’s completeness. It is complete because it is porous. It lets the world in. The land hunger of Central America, the rivalries of the Balkans, the long humiliation of the colonised, the swagger of the rich, all of it leaks onto the pitch, because the pitch is one of the few places where a poor nation can stand level with a wealthy one for 90 minutes and occasionally win. That is why dictators crave it and why the dispossessed guard it. The journalist John Pilger argued that in football, as in much else, Western power disguises its interests in the language of freedom, and the modern World Cup gives a textbook case.The current World Cup is being staged across the US, Mexico, and Canada, and the host has turned the welcome into a kind of weapon. Donald Trump’s travel ban, covering 12 countries outright and seven more in part, carved out a narrow exemption for athletes while leaving their supporters stranded. Iran qualified on the field and then saw 15 members of its football federation denied visas; the players were cleared only 10 days before the first match, and the team has been made to camp in Tijuana, across the Mexican border, while playing its group games on the American West Coast. The players may enter. The fans, the ordinary Iranians who would have saved for years for this moment, may not. A government locked in war with Iran has found a way to keep it going in the football stadium.Yet, the same tournament also offers its other face, the one that justifies all the devotion. Days ago, in Houston, Curaçao played against Germany. Curaçao is a Caribbean island of about 1.6 lakh people, the smallest nation by population ever to reach a World Cup, smaller than many of our taluk towns, with its squad stitched together from the children of Dutch emigrants. Germany has 83 million people and four world titles. In the 21st minute, Livano Comenencia scored. Germany recovered and won the match seven to one, as everyone knew it would. But the goal happened. It cannot be taken back. A country that could fit inside one stand of a large stadium made the four-time champions concede first, and that is a fact now lodged permanently in the record.Put that next to our own nation. India has more than 1.4 billion people and has reached the World Cup exactly never. The lesson is not about talent, of which we have plenty. It is about what a society chooses to organise itself around.But beyond the underdog stories, the beautiful game has an ugly underside. While gloriously physical and democratic on the field, football is brutally hierarchical off it. Talent grows in the poor world and is harvested by the rich one. African football has bled players to Europe for half a century in what scholars now call a “muscle drain”. Boys give up school and their families spend their savings on the dream of a European contract. Morocco reached the World Cup semi-final in 2022 with a squad largely born in the Netherlands, Belgium, and France to workers who had emigrated there for the jobs Europe needed doing. The diaspora then came home to play, which is moving, but also a measure of how thoroughly the old colonial geography still shapes who develops whom. South American clubs at least built a system that pays the academy when a player it raised is later sold. Much of Africa gets nothing for the talent it exports, producing what it does not consume and consuming what it does not produce.Club football, meanwhile, is eating the international game it pretends to serve. The richest clubs now command resources that dwarf the national federations of entire continents, and the players they own are insured assets first and patriots second. The Nigerian defender Efe Ambrose put it plainly: when he played for his country, he felt the weight of the people from his town watching, and he now sees younger players decline national duty for fear of an injury that might cost them a club paycheck. You can hardly blame the player. The wage is real and the career is short. But something is being stripped out when the shirt of your country matters less than the shirt your wages come from.So no, it is not a complete game in the sense of a perfect one. It is complete the way a person is complete, which is to say flawed all the way through and more interesting for it. Its heroes cheat. Maradona punched a goal past England and called it the hand of God, and half the world forgave him because the same afternoon he scored the most beautiful goal anyone had seen, slaloming through the same English side from his own half. The game’s fanatical fans cause riots, but they also pool what little they have to follow their teams across continents. The tournament is captured by the powerful but is still the one event where Curaçao gets 90 minutes against Germany.Maybe this is why, to some of us, football writing reads differently from cricket writing. Cricket prose is composed; it has time to be elegant because the game gives it time. Football is written at the speed of the heart, in short breaths, because the thing it describes can turn in a single second and ruin or redeem a nation’s afternoon. One of my favourite pastimes is to follow The Guardian’s live text blog during a match; it is a small marvel.Watching Messi this morning, an old man among boys, I thought about how he started: small, undersized, treated with growth hormones his family could not afford until a club agreed to pay. The greatest player of the age was once a poor boy with a medical bill. That is the game. It takes from the bottom and occasionally, gloriously, it gives something back. It is complete because nothing essential about us is left out of it.With these thoughts, I welcome you to the FIFA World Cup package we have curated for you. There is archival material, and also two recent pieces by Aditya Sinha and Vidyarthy Chatterjee, and the stories go beyond the game to look at the politics, the sociology, and the business of the sport.If reading this has stirred a memory, an argument or a football story of your own, write back and tell us. We would be glad to hear from you.Wishing you a spirited football season ahead,Jinoy Jose P.Digital Editor,FrontlineCONTRIBUTE YOUR COMMENTS