They used to call the World Cup, unequivocally, the planet’s biggest sporting event. But it is about to start, right here in North America, and no one much seems to care. Thousands of tickets remain unsold, and just weeks ago, others were being resold well below their official price. In cities around the United States, air traffic isn’t materializing, and hotels that had counted on millions of dollars in additional revenue are watching it trickle instead. FIFA has had to cancel block reservations of rooms, and there’s talk of a global boycott as a kind of protest against President Trump — his wars, his border policies, his imperial vulgarity. When the games begin, interest will surely surge. But at the moment it seems there is less anticipation than there was for this past weekend’s club soccer Champions League final between Arsenal and Paris Saint-Germain. And I think this might be telling us something, beyond the world of sports, about the global landscape of politics and culture.

过去，人们总是毫不含糊地把世界杯称为全球最大的体育赛事。但这届即将在北美举行的赛事却似乎没有太多人关注。数千张门票仍未售出，就在几周前，一些门票的转售价格甚至远低于官方售价。在美国的各大赛事举办城市，预期的航空客流并未出现，那些指望借世界杯增加数百万美元收入的酒店只能眼看着收益远低于预期。国际足联不得不取消许多批量预定的酒店客房。还有人呼吁发起全球抵制，以抗议特朗普总统——抗议他的战争、边境政策以及他那带有帝国主义色彩的粗鄙作风。当然，等比赛真正开始后，关注度肯定会上升。但眼下看来，人们对世界杯的期待甚至还不如上周末阿森纳对巴黎圣日耳曼的欧冠决赛。而且我认为，这或许向我们昭示了一些体育世界之外的、关于全球政治与文化格局的深层走向。

In the States, the indifference might not be surprising, even though the event is being played mostly on U.S. soil. The U.S. team is more talented than in the past but hasn’t looked impressive for years. Soccer is still a growth sport rather than a dominant one in this country, and many Americans aren’t exactly feeling the flush of simplistic patriotism these days. On top of which, the tickets have been priced punishingly high.

在美国，这种漠不关心或许并不令人意外，尽管赛事主要在美国举行。美国队的实力比过去更强，但多年来表现并不出众。足球在这个国家仍是一项新兴运动，远未跻身主流，而眼下许多美国人也无心涌动那种简单直接的爱国热情。此外，门票价格高得离谱。

What is more striking to me is the muted interest of the rest of the world, which every four years for decades seemed to pause for a month to engage in a truly global but appealingly low-stakes performance of tribal nationalism. These days the World Cup no longer seems to tower over the rest of the sporting universe quite so much, with club soccer building a new global ubiquity over the past dozen years or so — if not quite displacing the World Cup at the top of the soccer pecking order, then at least taking a place right beside it.

更让我感到意外的是，世界其他地方同样兴趣寥寥。几十年来，每格四年，全球各地似乎都会按下暂停键，用整整一个月的时间去尽情投入一场真正席卷全球、却又无伤大雅的民族主义表演。如今，随着俱乐部足球在过去十余年间构建起全新的全球影响力，世界杯对整个体育版图的统治已不复当年之盛——即使俱乐部赛事尚未将其从足球食物链的顶端彻底取而代之，至少也已与之并驾齐驱。

What makes this shift so striking is that it has happened alongside a rising tide of political nationalism around the world, which you might think would produce a great surge in soccer nationalism, too. Instead, the age of global populism has coincided with intense interest in the biggest club teams — for-hire rosters assembled largely from international talent by megacorporations boasting jersey sponsorships from foreign conglomerates. Those teams made up of local prodigies wearing their national colors and playing their hearts out for love of country? They still matter to fans, of course. But no one could even pretend to illustrate the age of global populism by talking about the intensity of popular feeling about national teams.

这一转变之所以引人注目，是因为它恰恰发生在全球政治民族主义浪潮高涨之际——你可能会认为，这也会极大地激发足球民族主义。然而事实却是，在全球民粹主义时代，人们狂热关注的反而是那些顶级俱乐部球队——由跨国巨头打造、球衣印着外国大型企业赞助商、依靠全球人才组建的雇佣军式阵容。那些由身披国旗颜色的本土天才组成、为了祖国荣誉拼尽全力的国家队呢？它们对球迷当然仍然重要。但如果时至今日，还有人试图用大家对国家队的激情作为这个全球民粹主义时代的缩影，那这套说辞恐怕连自圆其说都做不到了。

Perhaps this is because if international soccer once channeled nationalistic passions toward athletic competition, in an age of actual nationalism we may need less of an outlet for those feelings. Or it could be because, as Franklin Foer suggested a couple of decades ago in “How Soccer Explains the World,” the tribalism of club soccer was a natural check on feelings of nationalism — and itself a form of resistance to globalism. Or maybe it’s simply because club soccer runs for most of the year, instead of for one month every four, with games played weekly and sometimes more often. How much soccer can fans absorb? How many opportunities for cathexis do they need?

 或许是因为，如果说国际足球曾经将民族主义热情走引导向体育竞技，在如今这个民族主义盛行的时代，我们可能不再需要如此多的宣泄渠道。也可能如富兰克林·富尔在20年前《足球如何解释世界》(How Soccer Explains the World)一书中所暗示的，俱乐部足球的部落性是对民族主义情感的天然制衡——其本身就是对全球化的一种抵抗形式。抑或仅仅是因为俱乐部赛事贯穿全年大半时间，每周乃至更频繁地上演，而非四年才有一个月。球迷究竟能消化多少足球？他们又需要多少这样的情感投注机会？

But this pattern nevertheless feels like a puzzle to me. This is perhaps in part because one of the descriptions of the new age of populism during its early days noted that it was powered by people who felt abandoned by their nations’ elites, who had through wealth and cosmopolitanism graduated into a kind of global business sphere — almost the way local soccer stars would graduate to bigger clubs and leave behind their roots.

然而，这种模式对我来说仍然像个谜。部分原因在于，在民粹主义新时代刚开始时，人们常常认为它的动力来自那些感觉被本国精英抛弃的人——那些精英凭借财富与世界主义已跻身某种全球商业圈层，这有点像地方足球明星加盟更大的俱乐部后把自己的家乡抛在身后一样。

That is also a pretty good description of how globalization changed club soccer itself. Beginning in the 1990s and then accelerating strongly in the 2000s and 2010s, the leading leagues (chiefly the English Premier League and Spain’s La Liga) and the leading clubs (Real Madrid, Manchester United and Barcelona, for instance) began stocking their rosters with global talent and then serving it back to global audiences via rapidly expanding cable and satellite television. This has been a phenomenally successful business proposition, but the cultural fallout feels a little stranger, with, for instance, New York’s Uganda-born, ethnically Indian mayor celebrating Arsenal’s Premier League championship and its race through the Champions League at least as intensely as he has the Knicks’ run to the N.B.A. finals, and Barstool Sports’ Massachusetts-born gadfly-bro Dave Portnoy celebrating Tottenham’s avoiding a relegation disaster on the season’s final day with as much passion as he tends to show for the Patriots or the Red Sox. When it comes to club soccer, fandom is now pretty global — which is to say, in many cases pretty arbitrary.

这同样是对全球化如何改变俱乐部足球本身的一个贴切写照。这一进程始于1990年代，2000至2010年代更是大幅提速，各大顶级联赛（主要是英格兰超级联赛和西班牙甲级联赛）以及各顶级俱乐部（如皇家马德里、曼彻斯特联队和巴塞罗那）大规模引入全球人才，再经由迅速扩张的有线和卫星电视网络将球星阵容输送给全球受众。这在商业层面取得了惊人成功，但从文化角度看，其后果却显得有些奇怪。例如，出生于乌干达、有印度族裔背景的纽约市长对阿森纳英超夺冠和欧冠征程的热情丝毫不亚于他对纽约尼克斯打进NBA总决赛的关注；而Barstool Sports那位马萨诸塞州出生的嘴欠老哥戴夫·波特诺伊庆祝热刺在赛季最后一天避免降级灾难时所表现出的激情也丝毫不逊于他支持爱国者队或红袜队时的热情。在俱乐部足球这个领域，球迷群体现在已相当全球化——换句话说，在很多情况下，球迷对一支队伍的追捧其实带有很强的偶然性。

In theory, national teams should offer a different appeal, one that is less arbitrary. And a way for those who feel their countries have been drained of patriotism and national identity to enact their fantasy of replenishing those feelings. In the time of Marine Le Pen, you might expect French football fans to be especially animated about Les Bleus, for instance, instead of raging about criticism from the team’s Black star Kylian Mbappé. In Britain’s Reform era, you might expect a kind of national revival of the proud hooliganism of earlier, less globalized eras. You might see that hooliganism on the streets of Tommy Robinson’s Unite the Kingdom rallies, but when it comes to soccer, London seems more worked up about Arsenal than about the Lions. The Oasis reunion tour might prove a bigger event for national unity than the World Cup.

理论上，国家队应该提供一种不同的、不那么随意的吸引力。对于那些感到国家被抽空了爱国情感和民族认同的人来说，更是一种重拾和填补这些情感的想象空间。例如，在玛丽娜·勒庞的时代，你可能会期望法国足球迷对国家队格外热情，而不是对队中黑人球星基利安·姆巴佩发表的批评火冒三丈。在英国改革党崛起的时代，人们或许会期待看到早期的、不是那么全球化时代的那种带有民族主义色彩的足球流氓文化在全国卷土重来。你或许能在汤米·罗宾逊的“团结王国”大游行的街头看到那种流氓行径，但在足球方面，伦敦人似乎更关心阿森纳，而不是“三狮军团”。甚至连绿洲乐队重组巡演都可能比世界杯更能凝聚英国人的人心。

Why would this be? One simple answer is just that club soccer has gotten too big and too important to too many people, sometimes demonstrating play at a much higher level than international competition can offer. Others have argued that FIFA’s 2015 corruption scandal had taken a toll, that the organization’s off-putting president has steered FIFA in the wrong direction or that the recent run of host sites — Russia, Qatar, the United States — has come with a cost. And because national teams rarely play together, with players from many different leagues sometimes parachuting in for a weekend to play a World Cup qualifier, the spectacle itself feels a bit drained of meaning — a bit more corporate, thin, pallid.

为什么会这样？一个简单的答案是，俱乐部足球已经变得过于庞大，对太多人来说过于重要，有时其比赛水平远高于国际比赛。还有人认为，国际足联2015年的腐败丑闻留下了难以消弭的阴影，国际足联那位不受欢迎的主席把组织带偏了方向，而俄罗斯、卡塔尔、美国这一连串东道主选择也让这项盛事付出了声誉代价。此外，国家队队员难得聚首，来自不同联赛的球员往往只是临时集结踢几场预选赛，这使得整个赛事的意义被抽空，给人的感觉更为商业化、更单薄、更苍白。

But I think it’s possible to see something deeper at work, too. Take the episode in France, in which Mbappé ignited a right-wing furor when he suggested he was worried about the rise of Le Pen’s National Rally party and what it meant for the future of the nation. Whenever athletes talk politics, it risks a backlash; think of Laura Ingraham’s “Shut up and dribble,” for instance, or for that matter, the recent anguish over the Giants quarterback Jaxson Dart’s introducing President Trump at a political rally. But here we had a conflict even more difficult to reconcile, in which the face of the country’s national team declared that one of its major parties seemed to have no place for him in its vision of France, at least as he saw it, and then that party’s leaders responded by illustrating the point, treating him even more as a traitorous interloper and a kind of undeserving vessel for their national pride.

但我认为，背后可能还有更深层次的原因。以法国的事件为例，姆巴佩曾表示自己担心勒庞领导的国民联盟崛起以及这对法国未来意味着什么，这立刻引发了右翼阵营的怒火。运动员发表政治意见总会遭遇反弹——想想吧，例如美国主持人劳拉·英格拉汉姆曾对勒布朗·詹姆斯说过“闭嘴，好好打你的球”；又或者最近围绕纽约巨人队四分卫杰克森·达特在政治集会上介绍特朗普所引发的争议。但这里我们遇到了一个更难调和的冲突：法国国家队的门面人物公开宣称，该国一大主要政党的法国愿景中似乎没有他的位置——至少在他看来如此。而那个政党的领导人随后的反应又恰恰印证了他的判断，将他视为背信弃义的外来闯入者，不配承载他们的民族自豪感。

This kind of conflict is no longer so unusual, with the rosters of national teams now drawn from various diasporas and internal pockets of recent migration and less closely resembling the blood-and-soil fantasies of unapologetic right-wingers. This is the kind of development that might compel Barack Obama to celebrate France’s victory in the 2018 World Cup but that may offer a different kind of meaning for, let’s say, those hoping to reassert the centrality of ethnicity for national identity.

这种冲突如今已不再罕见，国家队阵容现在来自不同的移民后裔以及新移民社群，与公然的右翼分子所幻想的“血脉与土地”的民族图景越来越不吻合。这种转变可能令巴拉克·奥巴马为法国2018年世界杯夺冠欢欣雀跃，但对那些急于以族裔来重新定义国家认同核心的人而言，其意义可能截然不同。

And that may tell us something about the broader phenomenon, too. Namely, that what we identify as nationalism in global affairs might be better described as a form of parochialism, with populists making particular claims not about the nation per se so much as the ways it should be reformed — presumably toward some reactionary ideal, its contours often more local than genuinely national. In this reading, globalization hasn’t just generated a backlash among those who resent deindustrialization, capital flight and the stateless lives of the world’s billionaires. It has also made the nation itself seem like a somewhat untrustworthy unit of political and social organization to many people on the right. For them, what might once have served as a source of patriotism and pride now produces feelings of resentment and regret. Not that liberals aren’t queasy about nationalism these days, either. For all of us, rooting for Arsenal or P.S.G. might now be more appealing precisely because it’s essentially meaningless.

而这或许也在更宏观的层面上揭示了某些东西。具体而言，我们在全球事务中定义的民族主义或许更应该被描述为一种地方主义。民粹主义者所提出的那些具体主张与其说是关于“国家本身应该如何”，不如说是关于“国家应该以何种方式被改造”——通常朝着某种反动的理想方向，其轮廓往往更具地方色彩，而非真正意义上的国家高度。从这个角度看，全球化不仅引发了那些不满产业空心化、资本外流以及全球富豪无国界生活方式的人们的反弹；对于许多右翼人士来说，它还让“国家”本身也变成了一个不那么值得信赖的政治和社会组织单位。对这些人而言，过去曾经激发爱国心与自豪感的事物如今反而更容易带来怨恨和失落。当然，自由派如今对民族主义也同样感到不安。对我们所有人来说，支持阿森纳或巴黎圣日耳曼现在可能更具吸引力，恰恰是因为这种热爱在本质上是没有意义的。