Will I ever come to love the beautiful game?

After the Bell has never been known for its insights into sport. We turn to people like Craig Ray if we really want to understand why Spain is better than Argentina and how a third- and fourth-place playoff might have been the best game of the football World Cup.

But we do have some thoughts about the product that is football.

I grew up in a particular time and place where soccer was something you played at primary school.

My parents tried (hard!) to foster some kind of joy in it. I used to walk to a local club from my house in Rondebosch when I was fairly young.

By the time we moved to Joburg my lack of talent was already evident. And after playing many games as left-back for a non-team side in my later primary school years, my departure from the field of play was welcomed. Both by myself and my long-suffering coaches.

And then into high school I went where a rugby culture took me over lock, prop and hooker (although thankfully I never played hooker).

Over the years I’ve been lucky enough to pick up a slight interest in our domestic leagues, and can talk for hours about the scouting system at Mamelodi Sundowns and how the Amakhosi didn’t trouble their trophy cabinet for so long.

Each time a football World Cup comes along I think this might be my moment (I don’t call it the “Fifa World Cup”, football doesn’t belong to them).

And once again a football World Cup has just passed me by.

I thought it was just me. Perhaps too many games as the tighthead prop for the under-14 H rugby team had a permanent but as yet unseen impact. And I couldn’t see the exquisite beauty of a game everyone else can.

But a few people have made the same point about this tournament – it just didn’t do anything for them.

Obviously the time zone was a big factor. Some of the really good games were just too late for anyone who hopes to be productive the next day.

I know many of us got up for Bafana’s 3am start against South Korea, but it takes real commitment to get up that early if your team is not playing. And it also meant that when you woke up the main action was over and you just never caught up with it.

I also didn’t come across any particular moment or incident or “thing” that provided much joy.

The main discussion point of this tournament was Donald Trump’s intervention for the US player who had been red-carded, and that, amazingly, his ban was rescinded.

But there was no on-field incident, no short video that made me want to share it with the kids.

The last Rugby World Cup seemed to generate that in spades. Whether it was Manie Libbok’s no-look kick that found Cheslin Kolbe with unbelievable accuracy or pretty much anything Cheslin did that involved charging down that conversion kick or anything else, those short videos are still watched again and again.

I do also think the other problem with this World Cup was that politics seemed to hang over everything.

This was inevitable. Gianni Infantino seems to have decided to do whatever Trump wants.

If the person running Fifa had been a South African and they were worried a Somali referee was going to be banned for no reason, he would have been on hand at the airport to personally welcome him. The live footage would have turned that into a very real incident. And it might well have forced Trump, and the MAGA nutters around him, to change course.

Instead Infantino just allowed Trump to use the World Cup for his own benefit.

No wonder both were booed when they went out on the pitch last night.

If I were running Fifa I would start to take politics very seriously. There are some very thoughtful people who have suggested that this might well be the “last World Cup”.

The people behind the Soccernomics podcast reckon Fifa will not be able to manage all of the competing geopolitical tensions forever. And in particular there is huge tension about money. This is about the relationship between the European football body Uefa and Fifa.

It would have been completely different if Bafana had got into another round. I would have woken the whole family for that and made sure we got involved.

But alas.

For me, as an outsider to the game, I think the world, and football, would survive without the World Cup. Because the tournament is not football’s best product.

The actual football is boring, it’s become political, Fifa is grubby and greedy – it just doesn’t do it for me.

The Premier League has none of these problems. It’s fully international, the players produce wonderful moments of glory, the managers are characters and the administration of it all is, thankfully, apolitical.

Maybe I will have a football epiphany.

In four years. DM