THE NEW GODS OF THE WORLD CUP

From Tokyo to Rio de Janeiro, Munich to Mexico, GQ presents its starting lineup of the most electric players to watch at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.

- Roger Bennett

I ONCE ASKED LEGENDARY British commentator Martin Tyler to explain what makes a soccer player a global hero. 'Football, he said, 'is a simple game in which any player has three decisions to choose from when they take possession of the ball. Should I pass, run, or shoot?' He paused theatrically. The greatest players make better decisions than the merely good ones most of the time?

There's no greater stage on which Tyler's theory can play out than the World Cup, the 2022 edition, which kicked off on 20 November. It's the world's greatest blockbuster franchise played out live, with a projected cumulative audience of five billion. A crucible of pressure where the mantle of greatness can be assumed in a heartbeat. One exclamation point goal can forge a generation of memories, and the choreography of feints, flicks and flamboyance will be mimicked by millions of kids on dusty schoolyards across the world. The 2022 World Cup is guaranteed to be a singular experience, for reasons both commendable and skulduggerous. It's the first World Cup to be staged in the Middle East, held in Qatar, a tiny, natural-gas-rich petrostate located on a finger of desert in the Persian Gulf that won the hosting duties corruptly, despite having never previously qualified for the tournament. With summer temperatures in the desert hovering at 106°C, organisers at FIFA were forced to shift the competition from July to November, seeking cooler climes and disrupting the rhythm of the club calendar in the process.

On the field, this is certainly the tournament where the curtain falls on the international careers of two of the most dominant players of all time: Cristiano Ronaldo, the 37-year-old Portuguese bottle of Drakkar Noir in human form, and his archrival, 35-year-old Lionel Messi, the diminutive Argentine with the imagination of a peerless poet-warrior.