How To Watch The World Cup

With 104 games over the next six weeks, and with the United States (along with Canada and Mexico) hosting, the World Cup will be all-encompassing for the near future. Soccer is a very easy sport to get drawn into, especially during a World Cup, but the complexity of the game lives below the surface. Sure, you can enter the tournament with minimal knowledge and still appreciate the appeal of a well-hit ball that flies into the top corner, but my hope is that I can break down some of the intricacies of soccer a little, in order to give you a head start on impressing the half-drunk hooligans you might encounter at your local watering hole between now and the final on July 19. Worst case, this guide will serve as an ode to one specific USMNT player I have been a fan of for years, and that feels worth it to me right there. There's a famous quote, almost certainly apocryphal, about former Spain and Barcelona midfielder Sergio Busquets that will be helpful here. Supposedly said by World Cup–winning Spanish manager Vicente del Bosque, it goes like this: If you watch the game, you don't see Busquets. But if you watch Busquets, you see the whole game. It's a little pat, and again almost definitely did not originate from Del Bosque himself, but it still gets at a truth about soccer, which is that most of what's important in the game happens away from the ball. With that in mind, I want to introduce you to what I will call the Busquets Method, a way to understand what happens and why by looking away from where your eye is most naturally drawn.