Which Team Should You Hate at the World Cup?

(Photo via)

Cool Runnings, in case you didn’t have a childhood, is a film about four Jamaican sprinters and one obese American coach who head to the Winter Olympics as the island’s first ever bobsled team. The heart of the film is the classic underdog struggle to prove that you belong with the big boys; in this case, the cold and calculated Swiss team, who pad around the place in their thermals like snow Nazis and treat the Jamaicans like shit.

For instance, in one scene the Swiss alpha male swaggers over to two of our Jamaican heroes and – in a voice long-beloved of actors who've been asked to play SS troops – sneers: “You have no business here, Jamaica. You and your stupid friend, playing like you are bobsledders. Why don’t you tourists go back to where it is you came from and leave the bobsledding to the real men, ja?”

'That fucking prick,' you think, as the film breaks out into a comedy bar fight, and you feel yourselves rooting for the Jamaicans even harder – proving that every true underdog needs a proper villain to rile against.

From that scheming arsehole Lucifer to #Kony2012, the world is rich with hate figures – and the World Cup is no different. If you want to feel involved in the biggest sporting event on Earth, you need to find a team you hate just as much as a team you love. For instance, it’s less fun cheering for Bosnia and Herzegovina if all the big teams they face are gracious and sporting and don't taunt them for being n00b pricks.

Traditionally, damaging, patronising, yet nonetheless enduring stereotypes play a big part in choosing any World Cup's most evil team. You can’t dislike any African teams because – the cliche dictates – they are all just strong, fast men who don’t understand the concept of defending or the position of goalkeeper. The Japanese and South Korean players are far too small, plucky and hardworking to be hated. And while the American and Australian teams and their fans are usually unbearable, chest-thumping douchebags, both countries still thankfully suck too much at football to be properly hateable.

For the English fan, history often means that the Germans – who, like the Swiss in Cool Runnings, are presented as cardboard cut-out sociopaths, each member of the team basically just HR Giger's Alien in a man-suit – are the team to hate. In England – the land of “one World Cup and two World Wars” – the German football squad is still somehow representative of the Nazis, something the Sun reminds us of every time the two teams meet.

But obviously this is now just as dumb and redundant as the old stereotypes about the African and East Asian teams. Sure, Bastian Schweinsteiger may look a bit like the guy in this SS poster, and former German keeper Harald Schumacher once famously went in for some on-pitch attempted-homicide (see here, complete with emotive Gladiator music and wonderfully distressed French voiceover), but the team of today is a different beast. There aren't even that many Aryans in it and they're fond of playing the kind of exciting, fast-paced attacking football that has made the Bundesliga more blogged about than Rihanna's Instagram and privilege.

German fans watching the 2006 World Cup. How does this make you feel? Do you hate the German national squad? (Photo via)

The other problem with Germany as the tournament villain is that they don’t win any more – not whole tournaments, at least. Relentless winning is part of what makes a team hateable, just look at Manchester United. The same reasoning used to apply to Argentina, who are responsible for the most hated side in the history of the World Cup: the team they took to Italia 90.

Coached by Carlos Bilardo, the team – who'd also won the previous tournament – was made up of an injured Maradona, Claudio Caniggia and a collection of cheating henchmen. In a second-round match against Brazil, the Argentines are widely believed to have slipped tranquilisers into the water of Brazilian left-back Branco. Maradona admitted the crime had taken place – he’d even slapped the offending bottle of water out of the hands of Argie ‘keeper Sergio Goycochea – and manager Carlos Bilardo went on to say, "I'm not saying it didn't happen. I don’t know." At the 2010 World Cup, the same man supposedly declared: "If Argentina wins the World Cup, I'll let whoever scores the winning goal do me up the arse."

Unfortunately, the current Argentinian team aren't winners, and with all of them piously dedicated to making Leo Messi happy, this hilarious villainy just isn't as alive as it used to be.

The Spanish squad at the Euro 2012 final. What about them? Will you choose them to hate? (Photo via)

Weighing up the current landscape through that highly systematic methodology, Spain have emerged as a potential team to hate. They won the last World Cup and the last Euros, their endless sideways passing is getting more tedious than tennis and they have all those annoying non-Spanish fans who still won't shut up about “tiki-taka”. They’re too polished, like a school prefect – the kid who told his parents about the secret house party you were having. Their success is also one made weirder by the petty bullshit that exists between the Barca and Real factions; they even gave Iker Casillas and Xavi an award just for being friends, as if – after ten years of being national teammates – this was some kind of achievement.

That said, at least they aren’t the Dutch, the team that openly hate each other, ruined the last World Cup final and are spearheaded by the cheat Arjen Robben and the self-obsessed megalomaniac van Persie. Or the Portuguese, with their obsessive dependence on hair gel vessel Cristiano Ronaldo. Or even – and it’s kind of sacrilegious to hate on the host nation – Brazil, who, with their team of turbo-charged midfield pitbulls, aren’t exactly the carefree artists of yesteryear. Plus, they're still lacking a player as loveable as Fat Ronaldo.

The problem, though, is that none of this is hateable enough. It’s as if every team at the World Cup has made a conscious decision not to be wankers. Even France, who can usually be relied upon to regress to teething children before flying home in disgrace, have at least halved their chances of this happening by leaving Samir Nasri to stew on a beach somewhere with his girlfriend, who’s currently being sued by coach Didier Deschamps. Perhaps a truly hateable team will emerge during the tournament but for now, the most despised group of people in football will not be found on a pitch, but reclining in their air-conditioned suites at the Copacabana Palace hotel, quaffing the blood of migrant children, torturing miniature horses, admiring the trailer for their own Hollywood-ready PR stunt and studiously ignoring reports of their massive corruption.

Because for the moment the most hateable team at the World Cup is obviously, inarguably FIFA; the emperors of the stuffed, unmarked envelope, the corpulent Jabba the Hutts inching the beautiful game towards the edges of their deathpit as the world gradually rounds on them. They’ve taken the good-hearted idea of bringing the tournament to previously ignored parts of the footballing globe and used it to enrich themselves and the corrupt regimes they’re working with. They are the slobbering face of global capital once it's lost all sight of what is even barely acceptable and this World Cup – instead of hating on the Germans or the Argentines – everyone will be hating on them.

In fact, because of them, this might even be the last good World Cup ever – what better reason could there be for making it count?

@oscarrickettnow

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