Germany has a football team to match its ambition and character. Photograph: Rex FeaturesIs anything more global than football? Fifa believes that the 2014 World Cup will exceed the total world audience of 3.2 billion that watched the 2010 South African tournament. The USA team's games have attracted record viewing figures at home, and, in an increasingly fragmented media world, national team's games have truly exceptional audiences everywhere. Few singular events – not a man on the moon, not the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics – have held humanity's attention like the World Cup final between Germany and Argentina that awaits us.
Alongside the 75,000 people in the crowd at Rio's Maracanã on Sunday the global digital chorus will be immense. Facebook announced more than a billion World Cup-related interactions during the first half of the tournament among 220 million people. In the first week alone, the 459m exchanges exceeded those reported for Sochi 2014, this year's Super Bowl and the Oscars combined. The semi-final between Brazil and Germany generated 35m tweets peaking at more than half a million a minute when Germany's fifth goal went in.
Among the tweeters inside the Maracanã on Sunday we can expect commentary from Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, seated alongside the rest of the BRIC premiers: Brazil's president Rousseff, Russia's Vladimir Putin, South Africa's Jacob Zuma and China's Xi Jinping. The Brazilian foreign service will need to find some space for the finalists themselves: chancellor Merkel and presidents Gauck and Kirchner. No doubt the heads of state of Costa Rica, Mexico, Iran and the US, all of whom have been engaging via social media, will put in their 1o cents' worth too.
In this respect the World Cup is political theatre of the highest order – an instrument of soft power, a node in the global networks of power – but its dramatic structure is a complex and shifting thing. For the devotee, the early rounds are like gorging on an addictive DVD box set. Suddenly one is watching two, three, even four episodes a night. A significant part of the world has been rearranging its sleeping and working patterns around the tournament. In China, reports suggest this has triggered a wave of deaths through nervous overexhaustion.
Alongside the spectacle has run the counterspectacle of the protest movements and the Kevlar-plated leviathan of the Brazilian security forces. This feels more like an experimental parallel-universe novel, where two worlds run alongside each other reflecting and commenting but only very rarely actually touching. The protests have taken many forms – street art, computer hacking of sponsors' websites – but the demonstrations dwindled to almost nothing. The cost of this has been the militarisation of public space and the absurdly aggressive policing of dissent, making the few brave forays by dissidents the critical grit beneath the glitter.
The multi-character, multi-layer stories that the tournament has generated, the highly structured dramatic climaxes of the games, and the mad chatter of public running commentary on characters and private lives, makes the World Cup feel like a great global soap opera. Cameroon and Ghana are consumed by fights over money between the players and their notoriously rapacious football officials. Luis Suárez loses his emotional control and is punished, globally lampooned but lauded in Uruguay.
While the games in Brazil are the fulcrum of any one of these many plotlines their most dramatic and meaningful expressions occur at home. This is more the territory of a multi-authored international collection of short stories and essays. England's journey seemed a textbook exposition of the private opulence of the Premier League and the public squalor of the national team. In Iran, it is the female characters who are strongest. Officially banned from viewing football with men, they have followed the national team surreptitiously in mixed cafes and then paraded through central Tehran in defiance of the theocracy. Hundreds of thousands of ecstatic Colombians welcomed home their team as if they were champions rather than defeated quarter-finalists – their best World Cup performance ever serving as a suitable marker for a nation finally moving beyond the protracted drug wars of the last three decades.
These nations and stories are no longer tied to just one place but are diasporas. Mexico's victory against Croatia saw LA Chicanos take to the streets of South Central in such numbers that the LAPD intervened. Algeria's passage to the second round was met by ecstatic crowds and magnesium flares in Algiers, but also in Paris, Lyon, Marseille and Roubaix, where celebrations turned into street fights with the police.
Is there something grander at work than this global kaleidoscope? Is there no clearer arc of meaning at work? There are certainly recurring themes. The global inequalities of ethnicity, gender and class were surely on display when one compared the makeup of the crowds with their teams, and the teams with their coaching staff. But it is narrative that we crave. As teams have been eliminated and the incredible cacophony of games and goals quietens, the semi-finals have focused our attention on the plotlines of just four nations.
The Dutch are returning home to contemplate the limits of being a small nation in the global order and by some way the smallest population of the four. However much team and economy are nurtured by brilliant coaching and innovative education, there seems to be a ceiling on their progress. Brazil has had a bitterer pill to swallow – the manner of their departure from the competition, comprehensively humiliated by Germany 7-1, forensically laid bare the illusions of Brazilian football. Brazil no longer plays good or beautiful football: the game, like many of its institutions, has been poisoned by corruption, elite mismanagement, cynicism, a brutally Hobbesian will to win, and no amount of overwrought patriotism, mawkish crying and fist pumping can disguise it.
The backdrop to the Argentinians' almost impregnable nerve and defensive concentration on the field is president Kirchner's bitter fight with US-based vulture funds over its rescheduled debt obligations. Under immense economic pressure and looking a major debt default in the eye, the country still aims to cock a snook at the international order. The huge numbers of Argentinian fans have been the most voluble and unruly at the tournament. The idea that they might win the final is their host's nightmare scenario.
Germany, still described in the hapless cliches of efficient machines and ruthless, clinical finishing, were actually dazzling: precisely the word that the French press used to laud the Brazilians at the 1938 World Cup when they surprised the world and showed us what the new football looked like. Now the positions are reversed. Germany, finally emerging as what it has been for decades, the pre-eminent European power, has a football team to match its ambitions and its character: brilliantly organised but instantly flexible, individually accomplished but telepathically networked, technically superior to the Brazilians in touch, positioning and anticipation. Yet they carry other German traits too: a collective solidarity that disdains the egotistical, and a realistic conservatism about an uncertain world, for no one feels victory is assured.
Clifford Geertz, the anthropologist wrote: "Culture is the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves." If there is a global culture and a global humanity, then the World Cup, more than any other phenomenon, is where those tales are told. We are fortunate then that the game we have chosen as our collective avatar should be so inventive a storyteller that a single game of football – the World Cup final – can, for 90 minutes, bind so many strands of this turbulent planet together.
