Jonathan Tah’s header was disallowed. Then he missed his penalty. Germany went out of the World Cup, and within hours the internet had decided this was not really a story about a football match at all. It was a story about Germany.
Newsweek ran a piece linking the exit to falling car production, a stagnant economy and the rise of the AfD, closing with the observation that Tah’s penalty sailing over the bar had become a kind of symbol — „a nation once defined by precision and inevitability now facing uncertainty.“ It’s a good sentence. It is also nonsense, and the nonsense is worth sitting with for a second, because it’s a very common kind of nonsense.
Everything the article says about Germany’s economy is probably true. Car production really has been sliding. The AfD really has been rising. Deindustrialisation is real, and the economists quoted have spent careers thinking about it properly. None of that is in dispute. What’s in dispute is the idea that any of it has the faintest thing to do with a 27-year-old centre-back’s run-up. Play the counterfactual: if Tah’s penalty had gone in, and Germany had won on penalties, would car production have recovered? Would the AfD’s polling have dipped? No.
Would Newsweek have run „The Resilience of Germany,“ with the exact same economists making the exact same points about deindustrialisation, only now filed under a headline about grit and comeback spirit? Of course they would have. The economics doesn’t care who wins a shootout. Only the headline does.
I want to call this the reverse-engineered omen. The writer already has the thesis — a country is declining, a relationship is exploitative, a nation has lost its confidence — and goes looking through the football for a moment that can be made to carry it. The football doesn’t generate the argument. It’s borrowed for its drama, the way a photographer might borrow a dramatic sky for a photo that was never really about the weather.
The other version of the same move
A few days earlier, England had played Ghana, a country I lived and worked in as a young journalist, and one I still think about a lot. Harry Kane, discussing how to break down a well-organised defence, referred to opponents like Ghana as „these countries“ — shorthand, in football, for teams that sit deep in a disciplined low block and make you work for every yard. The Fairtrade Foundation posted a long Facebook statement arguing that the phrase „speaks to the long and painful relationship Britain and other European countries has with countries across the world that we’ve colonised,“ a relationship of exploitation and power imbalance persisting to this day.
I understand the impulse. I’ve spent time reporting on cocoa farmers and the price injustices built into the global chocolate supply chain, in Ghana and in Nicaragua, and that story deserves every bit of attention it can get. But Harry Kane was not making a point about colonialism. He was a tired footballer talking about low blocks, three days after playing a smaller Central American country who set up exactly the same way and got exactly the same description. The same tactics were used by England’s opponents Slovakia in Euro 24.
Footballers who have spent their whole careers in dressing in rooms full of teammates from every continent tend to have a working respect for each other that doesn’t announce itself and doesn’t need policing. Reaching for the „unconscious colonial mindset“ reading here doesn’t illuminate anything real about Britain’s relationship with Ghana. It just borrows a real and serious grievance to add weight to a throwaway football quote that couldn’t bear it.
It’s the same trick as the Newsweek piece, wearing a different coat. One writer needed Germany to be declining, so a missed penalty became decline. Another writer needed a demonstration of unconscious bias, so a tactical cliché became bias. In both cases the football result is doing none of the actual work — it’s set dressing for an argument that already existed and would have existed with or without the game.
History has already run this experiment
We don’t even have to speculate about how badly these narratives age, because we’ve watched it happen. In 1998, France won the World Cup with a multiracial squad — Zidane, Thuram, Karembeu, Djorkaeff — and much of the international press declared the birth of a „rainbow nation,“ a France reconciled with itself. I was living there a few months later, and the same country that had just been declared spiritually transformed watched riots break out in the banlieues and soon after Jean-Marie Le Pen reached the second round of the presidential election. The country hadn’t changed. The story had just been written too early, off the back of a result rather than off the back of anything actually happening in French society.
Compare that with Germany in 2006. That summer genuinely did change something — not because Germany won (they didn’t; they finished third), but because for six weeks Germans flew their own flag in their own streets without the old post-war flinch, and outside observers and Germans themselves noticed it was different. That’s not a theory extracted from a scoreline. That’s a thing you could watch happen while standing on a street in Berlin. The distinction matters: football tells you something true about a society when the thing being described is actually observable — who’s in the stands, who’s on the pitch, what people are doing with their flags — not when it depends on which way a ball bounces.
Which is really the whole argument. Multiracial squads on the pitch are a fact, not an interpretation. Visa bans stopping fans from Ivory Coast and Senegal travelling to this tournament are a fact, not an interpretation. A flag flying differently than it used to is a fact you can watch happen. A missed penalty is a coin flip with studs on.
It’s just football. Mostly.
Ask any of the players. Austria went into stoppage time against Algeria staring down what the commentator called, with a straight face, „one of the most bitter moments in Austrian history,“ and then somebody’s forehead met a cross and it became a famous night instead. Nothing about Austria changed in that instant except the scoreline. The car industry did not notice. Confidence in the coalition government did not shift. It was 90 seconds of chance and a good header, which is what most of football actually is, underneath all the prose that gets built on top of it afterwards.
None of this means football is politically weightless — it isn’t, and it would be its own kind of lazy contrarianism to pretend otherwise. It’s just that football’s real political weight tends to sit in the slow, visible stuff: who gets to play, who gets a visa, what people do with their flags on a Tuesday afternoon in June. It rarely sits in a penalty kick. So when Germany goes out on penalties, or a tired Harry Kane explains the difficulty of breaking through against a defensive team, the correct response probably isn’t a thousand words on national decline or historical reckoning. It’s simpler than that, and slightly less exciting to write: sometimes a nervous 27-year-old just misses a penalty.