Imagine watching a football match on five screens simultaneously. One for the game itself. One for other people’s reactions. One for your live bet. One tracking the financial value of the players on the pitch, because you can now buy fractional formation rights on a footballer the way you buy stock. And a fifth screen, the strangest of all: pointed at yourself, recording your own face, in case your reaction goes viral.
This image sits at the centre of Chilean writer Juan Pablo Meneses’ new book Postfootball, and it’s worth dwelling on. The fan at the extreme end of this circuit is less an aberration than a symptom made legible.
Postfootball uses the sport as a prism to read something larger: how platforms extract attention, how surveillance has been normalized through entertainment, how collective rituals quietly dissolve into individual feeds. Meneses, a veteran chronicler of Latin American football culture, frames his central argument as a provocation, that football has become a different sport entirely, and the gesture works best as a diagnostic one, an invitation to look at what surrounds the game.
The shift the book describes is the fan becoming a user. A fan belongs to something, a club, a city, a collective identity built over time. A user navigates an interface, shaped by metrics, responsive to algorithms, producing data as a byproduct of consumption. Meneses is careful to note that this transformation didn’t originate in football. Platforms, betting infrastructure, streaming, financial speculation: football absorbed these logics because it couldn’t remain outside the world that produced them.
The spectator at a contemporary football match works for the spectacle. They film, edit, upload and distribute, with the latent hope that their reaction, their angle, their face in the crowd might become content. Meneses describes the stadium as something close to a workplace: people in the stands functioning simultaneously as camerapersons, editors and distributors, feeding a circulation of images with no fixed origin and no clear outside. The game generates images. The images generate reactions. The reactions generate more images.
McLuhan described television as an electronic campfire, the medium that gathered the tribe around a shared light. The World Cup was perhaps the clearest expression of that logic: a single event watched by billions at once, a temporary axis mundi, the most observed moment in the global calendar. What Meneses documents is the fragmentation of that campfire into millions of individual screens, each personalized, each also a camera. Surveillance and spectacle, once distinct categories, now run as a single system. Millions of cameras transmit the match. Millions more watch the millimeter of a VAR decision. The spectators in the stands are themselves watched, filmed, processed. We live, as Meneses puts it, surrounded by cameras. The World Cup is simply where that condition becomes hardest to ignore.
The ball itself has changed. Recent tournament balls contain sensors registering thousands of touches per game, transmitting data in real time, feeding the betting and engagement infrastructure built around the ninety minutes. When the object of the game becomes a data-collection device, the game becomes infrastructure. Speculation, attention, content, financial instruments: that is the actual product.
Football’s entanglement with capital and spectacle is not new, and Meneses knows this. What has changed is the density and granularity of the extraction: every pause, every image, every body and every emotion has become monetizable, susceptible to speculation in real time.
That is a transformation of what watching means, and of who, exactly, is being watched.
A meme that went viral during the first days of the 2026 World Cup, after fans noticed how much technology referees were now wearing on the pitch.