By Natalia Antonova

The World Cup comes around as another cycle of change has begun. Four years ago, I was a barely eighteen-year old high school graduate, waiting my first year of Duke to begin and desperately clawing my way out of depression. Now I’m a barely twenty-two year old Duke graduate, waiting for a job recruiter to get back to me and desperately clawing my way out of depression. The carousel has spun around and I begin again.

The beautiful game, played out on a stage with over a billion audience members around the world, fills me with the most peculiar kind of longing. Each time, I promise myself that the next four years will be different. Each time, I expect to end up in the thick of things the following tournament. My highs and lows interweave themselves with the ups and downs of my favourite teams: the cornerkick gone wrong, the bicycle in slo-mo, the waving and drooping flags, the tears, the legs, pumping as fast as my heart.

In her heyday, my aunt was married to a Ukrainian footie player. He adored her, but she left him anyway. My only memories of him take place already after the divorce, when he would show up at our house with a bag of sweets for me, his muddy trainers resting in the hallway like worn-out horses. My aunt regretted leaving him, and it is as if her rue has somehow managed to seep into my childhood dreams, making my soul ache all over each time I watch a game.

Football used to divide my household by gender lines. The men watched, drank beer, and screamed “ai!” at the television set, while the women smoked irritably in the kitchen. My hormones tore away at the system. I came of age and realized that I quite liked the game, not to mention the thick calves and shaggy hair of the players.

The players were the perfect fantasy: abstract and real, graceful, fit, with success resting on something as deceptively simple as getting the ball past the goalkeeper. If goal = eternal happiness, then I could be more than comfortable with such an arrangement. My attachment to football became both sexual and traditional. It was the perfect opportunity to bond with my father, provided I didn’t lick my lips too obviously as the latest eighteen-year old prodigy thumped the ball on his pretty head and into the spiderweb of the goal.

My mother did everything in her power to turn me off of football. She reminded me of the fact that football can cause serious injury and that the players were egocentric imbeciles who dated trashy women.

“My aunt is a trashy woman?”

“Her husband was the exception!”

“Not an egocentric imbecile then?”

“No. But he was the only one.”

“Are you telling me that in the entire world of international football [auntie’s husband] is the only decent human being?”

“Yes. Now take the trash out.”

“But the penalty…”

“TAKE THE TRASH OUT.”

My mother saw my conversion to the cult of football as a dangerous shift against the gender norms that were most familiar to her. I didn’t just like men, I ogled them. I wasn’t merely looking for a mate who would father viable offspring and provide me with trips to the coast every year, I actively championed the notion of enjoying men’s looks. On some level, sports culture appealed to me precisely because of its lack of depth, its potential to be attractive and uncomplicated at the same time. I was like a gay man trapped in a woman’s body, lascivious and unstoppable.

And while she worried about the consequences of my cavalier approach to the male gender, my mother missed out on the poetry I saw in football: its potential to bring people together (like my father and me), its simple sorrows and joys, its elegance and grit, something about the trajectory of the flying ball and the swift leg retreating after a kick and the octopus arms of the goalkeeper and the roar of the crowd all mixing together in a symphony that transcended all matters of human difference and discord.

Football is both insidious and pure. It’s corroded by class and money, it does weird things to one’s pride. It’s as much a part of family lore (echoes of a regrettable divorce, beer bottles, arguments) as it is of world history. It can define a nation, particularly in cases such as Ukraine’s fledgling program recovering after the Fall, or the scorn indirectly heaped on the Saudi Arabian government and its policies following the 8-nil debacle of 2002, or the loneliness a fan might feel in apathetic America during the biggest challenges that face her team in the World Cup.

And the World Cup is as much a time of shouting at a television as it is a time of reflection and quiet, burning shame. Shame, because once upon a time, I was a girl who did not behave like a girl. I would not be found at the kitchen. I would not lower my gaze. I was a frothing-at-the-mouth-leaping-off-the-couch football fan, and that has made all the difference.