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β€œSports plays a societal role in engendering jingoist and chauvinist attitudes. They’re designed to organize a community to be committed to their gladiators.” - Noam Chomsky

This quote os on the cover page of this month's Outlook, which has various stories on the subject.

https://www.outlookindia.com/magazine/issue/234412

As the World Cup progresses, will we slowly see such sentiments rise to the surface?
Sports also plays a societal role in temporarily unifying the masses who can look past other differences and encourages community building.
By the way, where are the trolls complaining about the evil wokes and how they're cancelling poor Qatar? Oh yeah, that's right, they're OK if the wokes cancel only 'certain' countries, just not India...

Genuine invite here btw: please share critique here of how Qatar is being unfairly 'cancelled' and is not as bad as China, etc.
This moderator needs to do their job instead of being a fudging idiot all the time
Please stop griping about moderation, it's a little bit boring and repetitive: we understand that you don't like it when someone disagrees with you, but when you basically use 'woke' to try to insult anyone who disagrees with you rather than engaging with the substance of their argument (whether they're a moderator or not), you're not going to get much sympathy.
Qatar needs to be evaluated against civilized nations, not against dictatorships :D
"Intellectuals heavily invested in the written word will have a bias against anything that requires more than walking, and will intellectualize it in some way to invalidate it, so that they can look at their own physical inadequacies with kindness" - Chomu Nomsky
God they're just hosting a damn game, and as any other host spent billions, engaged labor and made infrastructure for the purposes of sporting culture

Also you are a moderator, you must not espouse such strong views as one. If you do have the urge to really make comments, do it privately under alias, not the mod account, you're disregarding the position and this website.
Hey you foolish mod, where was Qatar cancelled? In fact, the wokes should be criticised for NOT cancelling Qatar.
Hence 'cancelled' in scare quotes... It was a joke but it really seems to have brought out the ones who can't take one :)
Noam Chomsky seems like those lanky, stick-thin or extremely obese college classmates that criticize everything, especially physical activity and have nothing to contribute to anything other than being an all around liability. There can be no undermining the importance of sports and physical fitness in the overall well-being of the body.
No.
1. Those men play football through out the year. For various associations. They even easily change teams based on who offers more money. World Cup is just another international competition between nations that play world Cup.
2. Even women play football. They're getting quite good at it.
No.

There are occasional football fans who are not invested in club football, but will take the time out to watch what is one of the world's great sporting spectacles. Like with all sport, we look for hopes, dreams, drama and emotions- in short, we look for a proxy for life itself.

Having this as a competition between countries gives us a proxy to decide on where to allot our loyalties- based on a range of factors like political leaning of the country, status as a footballing superpower or underdog, erstwhile colonial status, and other things.

It's why we watch the World Cup, and it's what makes it great. Changing it into a contest between clubs takes away everything.

PS- there is also a Woman's World Cup. This should presumably have the same problems you're so quick to point out.

PPS- there's a difference between nationalism and jingoism.
Everyone is a Woke Socialist until they have to fill out a tax return.