World Cup LARPing

watching soccer as anthropological research

I must admit that I’m not one to express much interest in watching sports. As those who know me well will tell you, I haven’t an athletic bone in my body. Rather, most would relegate me to more artsy, intellectual archetypes. I usually swipe past Instagram story posts about sports wins and tune out the sports related banter at the table, pretentiously sneering at people’s infantile fixation with something as banal and common as professional sports. And yet, this year I gave in–mostly out of a fetishistic curiosity, a flair for performance art, and admittedly out of a little bit of FOMO–to “caring” about the World Cup.

In a devious way, I enjoyed slipping into a false identity…putting on a show, a feat of artifice, just because I could. I relished dressing up in team jerseys, and shouting animalistically at the screen at a sports bar, pretending to actually be invested in the meaningless fact that some guy across the world who is paid by sinister technocrats just kicked a ball made by sweatshop workers in a developing country into a net.

Before delving into my cultural experiment in soccer fan LARPing, I ought to give some more background. Despite not being athletic, I played tennis all four years of high school–mostly just to have something to do after school. I didn’t try very hard, and thankfully neither did most of my teammates. The tennis team was for class clowns, nerds, queers, and those who weren’t athletic enough to make it onto sports teams that required you to actually be good. Our team placed little value in winning, and instead focused on cracking jokes, talking shit about the opposing team, and lancing metal clay court line sweepers at each other.

I only played and watch tennis because it allows the most space for performance art (other than WWE, the lowbrow version of tennis). Tennis is camp. Tennis is an elitist celebration of artifice. Tennis is perhaps the sport most hospitable to modern individualism. Tennis is the sport that lends itself most readily to being “queered,” or for lack of a better term, being “yassified.”