I generally don’t pick sides in the FIFA World Cup until the very end, but this year I rooted for Mexico, even over the United States. Mexico deserves world-class recognition not just for surviving Donald Trump’s “Mexico’s gonna pay for it” border wall saga and his calling Mexican immigrants “rapists.” The country deserves our admiration for electing a rational, level-headed president in Claudia Sheinbaum. It’s impressive how Mexico has navigated a reckless and abusive neighbor when it is their immigrants and seasonal workers who keep the neighbor economically aloft. Mexico put together a united national team with an amazing fan base and I wanted them to win.

I watched the July 5 match against England curious to see the famed Azteca Stadium, approximately 7,220 feet above sea level. The packed-to-the-gills venue did not disappoint: It had rained heavily in Mexico City during the day and lightning had been spotted above the stadium. The mist that descended was hypnotic, a fugue before the undulating sea of green clothing. I learned from the Fox Sports announcers that the Brits had been anxious about the thin air (England’s highest elevation is 3,209 feet) and facing a massive stadium of amped-up fans. I also learned that Azteca recalled the bad juju of June 1986, when Argentina defeated England there in the quarterfinals.

Even before the start of play, my attention (though not my support) had begun drifting toward “The Lions,” probably because theirs is a story of fall versus rise. It’s rare to have any modern context where you think about “England” all by itself. “England” is history and Shakespeare, not current events. When England lost the World Cup championship in 1986, it was to one of the greatest soccer countries ever. Now they were sweating bullets over Mexico and not just because of the altitude.

In the videos broadcast before the kickoff, the players introduce themselves with poses and often tap the team insignia on their jerseys. When England’s Jude Bellingham did this, I remembered something I hadn’t thought of in ages: the 1990 football anthem recorded by New Order. Yes, that formerly Joy Division New Order. How could I have forgotten “World in Motion,” where England footballer John Barnes is enlisted for a fairly cringey rap segment?

Catch me if you can

’cause I’m the England man

And what you’re looking at

Is the master plan

We ain’t no hooligans

This ain’t a football song

Three lions on my chest

I know we can’t go wrong

The idea of New Order (whose albums famously contain no liner notes) doing any kind of promotion let alone one for an avatar of nationalism was bizarre to me and to many. Margaret Thatcher was still prime minister; the Tories were in charge. The phrase today—being “off brand”—had no context when “selling out” was the worst-case scenario. Sure, the Tories had contempt for football hooligans, but they got the votes of the hooligans’ parents. And the hooligans generally weren’t keen on the artiness of bands that ironically named themselves after the Nazis’ plan for a German-occupied Europe. Lead singer Bernard Sumner told New Musical Express that producing an upbeat Lions campaign song was “the last straw for Joy Division fans.”

The bridge to FIFA was the band’s manager, “Mr. Manchester” Tony Wilson, who jumped at the recording offer from England’s national team. (Ah, Manchester, so much to answer for!) As co-founder of the Factory Records label and founder-manager of the Haçienda nightclub, Wilson represented some of the most successful bands within that proletarian city’s globally renown rave culture. In a sense, Wilson was “Manchester United,” something you’d realize if you saw 24 Hour Party People, Michael Winterbottom’s 2002 film. Of course, in a rave context, you could see the song as ironically as you desire—like maybe the Ecstasy face of “Blue Monday.” Whatever the take, “World in Motion” was New Order’s only song to hit number-one on the U.K. Singles Chart.

Years later, when the market weaned everyone off the turntable, I bought a “best of” CD compilation with “World in Motion” as the last track. I have to admit to finding the sheer impossibility of the proposition endearing:

Love’s got the world in motion

And I know what we can do

Love’s got the world in motion

And I can’t believe it’s true

The song begins and ends with football announcer Kenneth Wolstenholme reenacting his famous words at the end of the 1966 World Cup final against West Germany: “Well, some of the crowd are on the pitch. They think it’s all over. Well it is now.” (He originally said “the people are on the pitch.”) Those words remain poignant for Lions fans given that this was the only FIFA Championship won by the country that invented the game. And it happened at Wembley.

In a world where “Blue Monday” can be heard in Volvo commercials, the pose of 1980s gloom and doom can seem quaint. Even though a stadium full of normie Brits singing “Wonderwall” seems stranger to me than the New Order commission, it’s part and parcel with a transactional world. Stranger still was hearing the cosmopolitan, multi-ethnic American team sing the words “West Virginia, mountain mama” to a stadium of “U.S.A.!” fans. (Not that I have anything against John Denver. I once passed a bar on Ninth Avenue in Hell’s Kitchen and there in broad daylight was a guy in Daisy Dukes standing on the bar singing “Thank God I’m a Country Boy.” That I totally get.)

It was just a week ago that I first saw the original “World in Motion” video, where Sumner in his big white T-shirt looks like a nonbinary 12-year-old and the rapping Barnes looks adorably charming. New Order’s bassist Peter Hook is notably nowhere to be seen. The lip-synching team members look older than players today and nowhere as lithe (“thicky” in Monty Python parlance), though they did the actual singing in the rousing refrain:

We’re playing for England (En-ger-land!)

We’re playing the song

We’re singing for England (En-ger-land!)

Arrivederci it’s one on one

As Barnes sings along with the lads, the comedian Keith Allen holds up a cue card: EN-GER-LAND. If I’d seen that in 1990, I might’ve got in on the joke.

Was it really a joke to say that “love” had the world in motion in 1990? The song was released a few weeks before the June 8 start of the matches in Rome. I paid no attention to the World Cup in those days, but that was certainly a summer of frisson. Four months after Nelson Mandela was released from prison, I went to see him speak in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston on June 23. He’d been imprisoned almost the entirety of my life.

With that and the wall coming down, it seemed like maybe things were getting better. Earlier that year Mikhail Gorbachev and George H.W. Bush signed a bilateral accord to halt the production of chemical weapons. During the World Cup run, the Russian SFSR’s First Congress of People’s Deputies adopted the Declaration of State Sovereignty. American media acted like the collapse of the Soviet Union had wiped the slate of all the covert shenanigans of Ronald Reagan’s eight years in office.

Maybe this was the summer of love. Or at least a moment of innocence before the paint dries: the World Cup champs were still, after all, West Germany. The first Gulf War and President Bush’s “new world order” hadn’t yet happened. Though Francis Fukuyama had declared the rout of communism “the end of history,” the world in 1990 hadn’t become so small. Other continents were still exotic. Europe had a whole bunch of currencies; monoculture hadn’t yet got its chokehold. Even for young lefties, the American filter was in place. We were different (in a good way!) from all the other countries playing their football in silky short-shorts and thick knee socks. (NBA players had silky short-shorts, but none of those Alpine-looking socks!)

I guess it was true that the world was in motion: continents converging toward global capitalism and neoliberalism, the creeping authoritarianism of Boris Yeltsin’s Russia, the phenomenal economic growth of a socially oppressive China, the Continent’s economic reckoning with the European Union, the rise of unsustainable income inequality in the United States. In a globe compressed and diminished by the internet, it’s no wonder nationalistic flourishes like grunting Vikings, a duck in a jersey, and an army of kilts are welcomed novelties.

I don’t know the ins and outs of FIFA corruption: Is it on par or worse than Donald Trump and his administration of bootlickers? Probably not as bad by comparison. But detractors say that you can’t win if you’re not Argentina or Brazil or part of Western Europe—the grift zones of the soccer economy. People complain that it’s never going to be Mexico or Columbia let alone the Democratic Republic of Congo or Capo Verde.

But even with corruption running through the veins of so many earthlings, there will always be moments of “the people are on the pitch”—and things will miraculously change. Whether with FIFA Championships, the Olympics, or our own NBA playoffs, there will be unexpected comebacks and breathtaking rises by underdogs. And for brief moments we will feel under our skin that things are right in the universe, that the hardships and struggle were worth it, that this is how it should be. §