Not all contests are worthy of one’s attention, and those that are worthy of attention do not deserve it in equal amounts.

The best reason to pay attention to a contest is that its outcome truly matters — that it will affect the physical well-being of many non-contestants. Wars are the paradigmatic case here; elections too, depending.

Of course, in the realm of sports, no contest falls in this first category. So we must distinguish other ways to construct a hierarchy of contests whose outcomes don’t truly matter.

The highest, most important consideration for these lesser contests is whether and to what extent the contest is structured so that the best contestant wins. At first, this sounds like a trivial ambition — it’s common sense, isn’t it, that the best contestant is the one that wins. But consider a simple contest, a game of rock-paper-scissors, for example. If you and I were to play one game, you might win or I might win, but we wouldn’t then be justified in saying that the winner was the better rock-paper-scissors player. In fact, the loser in such a contest will often say, “Oh come on, best two out of three,” because there’s an excellent chance that the loser would then go on to prevail. A fair test of rock-paper-scissors skill between two competitors might be a longer match, say 101 “throws” — enough throws, anyway, to allow us to say that the results are likely not due mostly to chance. The idea here is closely related to the concept of reliability in the social sciences; a reliable measurement is one that can be repeated in the same circumstances and get the same results.

Assuming that each game consists of one-on-one competition with a winner and loser, the problem of structuring a contest so that it’s “reliable” in the sense described in the previous paragraph becomes much more difficult with more than two contestants. There are various ways to do it. You might have contestants play numerous games against each other in a round-robin structure and then compare their win-loss records after some number of games; an example is “making the playoffs” in Major League Baseball, where teams play each other all season and end up being first or second or whatever in their division. Because the baseball season has more than 100 games, the teams all get to play each other a number of times, and the team with the best record has a plausible claim to being the best in the division.

Baseball is an interesting example, because the best teams go on to play a best-of-some-number-of-games tournament, first for the “league championship” and then for the “world championship.” It’s not always the case that the team with the best record in a league wins the league championship. So which team is better — the one that has the best record at the end of the regular season, or the one that wins the tournament? There is quite a bit of appeal to the claim that the better team should be able to beat the lesser team in head-to-head competition, which is what a tournament provides. Baseball’s use of best-of-five and best-of-seven series is another strong feature here, because we can’t easily dismiss a head-to-head victory (in the series, not in a single game) as a mere fluke. The NBA has a similar structure, with multiple-game series to determine a champion.

Compare that with (American) football. In professional football there is a championship tournament, but with only one game at each stage for each pair of contestants. Now, a football game is longer than a game of rock-paper-scissors, and luck has less to do with the outcome, but a football tournament would still be more “reliable” if it involved series. But football games can’t be played one day after another, and economic considerations keep professional playoff games on Sundays. On the whole, I’d argue, the winner of the Super Bowl is less clearly the best team in the NFL than the winner of the World Series is the best team in baseball. And so the Super Bowl is less worthy of one’s attention as a contest.

Even outside of tournament situations, we might rank contests as more or less “reliable” based on the characteristics of a single game. Rock-paper-scissors is at one end of the spectrum, where luck has a tremendous amount to do with the outcome of a contest between two relatively well matched contestants. At the other end of the spectrum might be a game like tennis, where the contestants engage in so many equally balanced plays (serves, returns) throughout the course of a single game that we can reasonably expect to see the better player rise to the top.

A lesser reason for paying attention to the outcome of a contest is tradition. Nationalism, because of its manifest harmfulness and its deserved reputation as the last refuge of a scoundrel, is a particularly unworthy form of tradition in this respect.

Another reason for paying attention to a contest’s outcome is entertainment value. But the entertainment value of a given contest is at best something subjective, about which there will be wide disagreement among reasonable people. Furthermore, I suspect that any relatively well-developed contest (anything that people have been playing for a century at least) is roughly equally entertaining if the spectator is sufficiently well versed and able to pay attention. Olympic curling is proof of this.

All this leads us to the World Cup, and specifically to one conclusion: It is not worthy of the attention being paid to it.

A single game of soccer is even more like rock-paper-scissors than American football is (that is, it’s further from the tennis end of the spectrum of single-contest reliability). A single soccer game has very few shots on goal; of these, maybe 20 percent (and that seems generous) have any real chance of actually scoring. And of the shots with a chance of scoring, chance is often the operative word — they’re often inadvertently bumped in or out by a player who doesn’t quite know what’s going on around him, or they strike the goal post at just the wrong or just the right angle. And 0-0 or 1-0 games are not uncommon, so a single flicker of chance can often make all the difference between a win and a draw.

Of course, a game that’s not very reliable can be made into a more reliable contest by a properly structured tournament. (Poker is a good example of this. Any one hand has a lot to do with chance, but over the course of an evening good players will build up winnings and bad players will lose money, and over the course of a multi-day tournament the vicissitudes of the cards will even out, leaving the skill of the players in relief.)

Unfortunately, the World Cup is not a well-structured tournament. For one thing, teams play single games, not series, so the chance-bound nature of individual soccer games has undue effects on the tournament outcome. Also, tournament participation is itself determined by an equally flawed series of qualifying tournaments, and the crucial seeding in the “elimination round” of the World Cup depends on the outcome and luck-ridden scoring system of the round-robin round. Thus, France qualifies because a ref didn’t call a proper hand ball in its qualifying match against Ireland, and England has to face Germany rather than Ghana in the next round because of some fairly arbitrary tie-break rule.

And then there’s the bizarre notion that these “national teams” mean much at all. From what I can tell, they’re mostly composed of professional players who often play in different countries altogether, with some smattering of amateurs or maybe lesser-league professionals thrown in.They play together rarely, so there’s no way for any team to put together much of a meaningful win-loss record.

Instead, people talk about “Germany’s proud football tradition” or the “Brazilian style of play,” as if that means anything. What these attributions of continuity point to, of course, is nationalism, the real, base motivator for the displays of World Cup fandom. Nationalism, and a performance of caring-to-fit-in in soccer-playing countries or in soccer-following social milieux in the U.S.

And yet:

That was fucking cool.