The World Cup has afforded us a timely lesson that applies to much more than sports. On the world stage, winning and losing have everything to do with how you keep score.
Bear Bryant once said that a tie in football was like kissing your sister. His sport listened, and over time instituted a variety of tie-breaker schemes at both the college and professional level.
If a tie is so ignominious, then a scoreless tie would count as the worst of all. So how is it that the first World Cup game played in Mercedes-Benz Stadium, a 0-0 tie between Cape Verde and Spain, has been proclaimed not only as a staggering upset, but a classic example of what they call the beautiful game?
In World Cup soccer, tie-breaking rules don’t kick in until the knockout and elimination rounds. Until then, each team is given one point in the standings for a tied game. So in the Atlanta match, Cape Verde, a nation with a population almost identical in size to the city where it was playing, stayed even in the competition with Spain, the 2010 FIFA world champion, making its 17th appearance in the quadrennial competition.
Anchored by Vozinha, its 40-year-old goalkeeper, Cape Verde has gone on to tie Uruguay and Saudi Arabia. In its first World Cup appearance, Cape Verde has made it all the way to a knockout-round match with Argentina, the 2022 FIFA world champion, led by Lionel Messi, considered the greatest player in the sport.
That game, to be played in Miami Friday night, looks like a gigantic mismatch, and the team’s Cinderella story has been clouded this week by news its captain is under investigation by New Zealand police on a rape and physical assault charge. No matter the result of that game, however, the world has scored Cape Verde, with neither a win nor a loss, a victor in these games.
The rules aren’t as tidy in the global struggle for power, but here, also, the game is all about how the world keeps score.
Both Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy magazines have come out in the past week with essays making different arguments for why the United States was the winner of the war in Iran, despite the widespread belief that Iran ended the war in a better position than it began.
By the measure that in the Vietnam War came to be known as the body count, the United States is unquestionably the victor in this war, having destroyed an enormous amount of the Iranians’ military infrastructure and imposed a blockade on its economy.
But the rest of the world isn’t keeping score by the body count. It measures this conflict by the price of oil and the stability of the region where so much of the world’s oil comes from. In the United States, critics on the left and right have measured the Memorandum of Understanding against the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by the Obama administration and found it wanting.
The weakest link in the argument that the U.S. has won this war is that the Iranians appear not to believe it’s over. This has resulted in a prolonged game of cat and mouse, not all-out war but not peace either.
There is, by the way, a war in which body count has become, quite literally, an accepted means of keeping score. The Ukrainian military has announced a goal of killing 50,000 Russian troops a month, up from the current level, which has been estimated at 30,000-35,000 killed each month.
That’s an impressive demonstration, not only of the deadly effectiveness of Ukrainian drone warfare, but of the Russians’ historic willingness to sacrifice its citizens in battle.
Online, Russian sources are claiming the Ukrainians have begun outsourcing actual drone missions to gamers around the world, and offering cash rewards to those who take out the most troops.
Three or four years ago, that kind of claim would be considered laughable. In 2026, not so much.
