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The plastic balls rumble around the glass bowls of destiny. Portentous music plays. There is a sense of possibility, as though the inner workings of the universe have suddenly been laid bare, a door opening to reveal the three Fates sitting by their spinning wheel, measuring rod and shears in hand.
A World Cup draw is a moment of perfection, a platonic vision before reality has had time to intervene. Everybody is fit and in form. Every nation is playing as an ideal version of itself – no injuries, no disputes over bonuses, no concerns about fatigue or the temperature or whether a player might be distracted by a possible transfer; it’s the World Cup as pure potential. With Friday’s draw, next summer will suddenly feel a lot closer.
There will be fixtures and opponents, a schedule and planning. But the draw also says a lot about the hosts: it’s an early indicator of what sort of tournament can be expected. Last time the United States hosted, in 1994, they went all out for glitz, glamour and Americana. The draw was staged in Las Vegas, very much a home of determining the future through guided randomness.
Pelé, despite being the only footballer many Americans could name, was notably absent, having accused the then Fifa president, João Havelange, of corruption. Faye Dunaway, Robin Williams, Beau Bridges, the gymnast Mary Lou Retton and Evander Holyfield were there, though, conducting the draw along with Franz Beckenbauer, Eusébio and Bobby Charlton, as though to try to batter sceptical Americans into taking an interest through star power alone.
And to an extent it worked, even if Germany’s 1-0 win over Bolivia in the opening game was overshadowed by OJ Simpson’s car chase through Los Angeles the same day.
Jules Rimet, the Fifa president largely responsible for the invention of the World Cup, understood the iconography of a draw. Sickened by the fascist excesses of Mussolini’s Italy in 1934, he had shown remarkable diplomatic skill to ensure France rather than Nazi Germany hosted in 1938, avoiding the grim possibility of the World Cup becoming a propaganda spectacle like the 1936 Olympics.
To emphasise the wholesome tone, in the ornate Salon de l’Horloge at the Quai d’Orsay in Paris, Rimet had his six-year-old grandson Yves, hair awkwardly scraped into a side-parting, wearing collar and tie, shorts and knee-length socks, gleefully pulling balls out of a glass vase as though they were toffees from a jar.
For years after that, the draw featured Fifa committee men awkwardly sitting behind a desk with something akin to a railway departure board behind them. The days of David Beckham, Gary Lineker and Jermaine Jenas, Charlize Theron, Fernanda Lima and Samantha Johnson were a long way in the future.
The ne plus ultra of all draws came for the 1982 World Cup : nothing else has quite captured the same blend of United Nations aesthetic with Jeux sans frontières spirit. There was Havelange, sinister and handsome, like a Bond villain pretending the chaos is part of the plan while secretly plotting a terrible revenge. There was Sepp Blatter, in those days the secretary general, before his hair had gone, so it looked like somebody had dropped a toupée on the trophy.
There was a baffled Archie Macpherson, the Scottish football commentator, desperately trying to work out what was going on when Fifa messed up the draw procedure before reminding his audience that – perhaps uniquely – he had been right in the first place. There was a crew of confused and sulky Spanish orphans in absurd traditional dress, one of whom ended up being berated by a seething Blatter.
The giant steel cage tombola used for the Spanish national lottery malfunctioned, with balls becoming jammed in the release tube. One ball fell apart completely. Best of all was the Fifa vice-president Hermann Neuberger, president of the West German football association, who became increasingly uncomfortable before, as Blatter glared at him, breaking into hysterical laughter when West Germany were grouped with Austria.
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What unfolds on Friday will, sadly, be both far glitzier and far slicker. It will be staged not in Las Vegas as had been widely expected but at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC, which is itself of political significance given how Donald Trump has taken it over. It will go on for ever, and be conducted by an array of celebrities aligned with the president’s Make America Great Again movement and the usual Fifa cast of assimilated and unthreatening former players. It will feature 16 more teams than ever before, with a greater degree of interference to keep the top-ranked sides apart.
It’s been standard since the first World Cup in 1930 to draw one seed in each group (a special prize to anybody who knew that the four seeds in Montevideo were Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil and the USA) and the practice of structuring the draw to try to ensure a geographical spread is familiar, but this is the first time an attempt has been made to seed within the seeds so that, if they win their groups, Argentina, Spain, France and England cannot meet until the semi-finals.
Rimet would have disdained such gerrymandering. At the draw for the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics, when Henry of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, the husband of Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands, pulled out his country to face the champions, Uruguay, and (probably) jokingly asked if he could have another go, he was met with frosty silence; integrity was not something to be trifled with.
The break with tradition is yet another example of the game’s leaders prioritising marketing over sporting concerns but football retains a pleasing capacity to upset the best-laid plans. In 1982, Italy’s and Argentina’s struggles plus Spain’s unexpected 1-0 defeat to Northern Ireland messed up the seeding, leading to one second-phase group of Brazil, Italy and Argentina and another of Spain, West Germany and England.
Football’s self-defence mechanisms are going to be severely tested over the coming months. This is going to be another World Cup in which the glory of the sport itself stands in contrast to the ugliness that surrounds it. Friday will be the first real indication of just how much that may encroach on the actual football.
For now, though, let’s just imagine the glorious prospect of a group featuring ideal versions of Spain, Ecuador, Norway and Ghana.
