The World Cup Between Reason and Magic

Midway through the 2026 World Cup, Argentina came back from two goals down to draw 2–2 against Egypt in agonizing fashion. While forty-six million people oscillated between cardiac arrest and euphoria, something stranger happened in a pharmacy in the city of Córdoba. An elderly customer walked in at the exact moment the comeback materialized. The employees, perceiving the mystical correlation, refused to let her leave. They brought her a chair; she had to remain. If the old lady left, the matrix of victory would shatter. The security-camera footage went viral within hours.

To the modern eye, this is charming folklore — a comic pressure valve in a football-mad country. To the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, it would have been the most direct empirical confirmation of his masterwork, The Savage Mind (1962). I first reached Lévi-Strauss decades ago through an essay by Ernesto Sábato, and rereading both for this piece, I found the questions they posed have only grown sharper: what happens in the mind of a hyper-technological society when chance becomes unbearable? Why does the innocent superstition slide so easily into the lynching of the designated jinx? Perhaps there is simply one idea most people cannot tolerate: that millions of decisive events just happen, and nobody controls them.

The logic of the concrete

Lévi-Strauss’s great heresy was to demonstrate that so-called “primitive thought” is not an inferior stage of human evolution but a parallel track. Science operates through abstract concepts; magic operates through the logic of the concrete. Both systems pursue the same end: imposing order on chaos. The difference is that magical thought demands totality. In its universe, chance does not exist; everything is interconnected. The woman in the pharmacy is not a customer — she is a causal component of the goal. Scientific rationality tells us, with exact and unbearable precision, that whatever you do in your living room has zero impact on Lionel Messi’s left foot. Magical thought restores the illusion of control. Sábato, a physicist turned existentialist, spent many years of his life arguing that cold Western rationality leaves human beings unsheltered. On this point, at least, he was right.

From private myth to digital tribe

The architecture of Argentine superstition  (the cábala) has mutated drastically. I remember being a kid in the World Cups of 1986 or 1990, that the fan performed his rite behind closed doors: the same worn armchair, the same shirt, a cigarette lit at the same minute of every match. It was an intimate, defensive pact with fate.

In the age of social media, superstition went public. It became a tribal and coercive performance. Argentines flood their networks with the phrase anulo mufa (roughly, “I hereby annul the jinx”) a mandatory counter-spell typed under any post that dares to predict victory. These are no longer expressions of hope; they operate as performative linguistic devices, exactly as in the traditional societies Lévi-Strauss studied, where to name something is to summon it. Saying “we will win” contaminates the system; the counter-spell restores structural order. And if you refuse to type it, you can be marked, stigmatized, expelled from the tribe.

The fan as bricoleur

Lévi-Strauss coined the figure of the bricoleur: one who does not invent new tools but reassembles the fragments at hand into new meaning. Many die-hard fans are the definitive bricoleur. They describe rituals of mathematical rigidity: crossing the leg toward the side the national team is attacking, arranging the arms so that the dominant limb mirrors the team’s dominance on the pitch. One legendary Argentinian fan called Pasman, recalled that his daughter once had to watch a match perched on an uncomfortable marble countertop, peering at the television through a window — because that was where she happened to be when the goal went in.

Argentina is hardly unique. Baseball players refuse to step on foul lines, NHL teams grow playoff beards, tennis champions repeat elaborate pre-match routines, and theatre actors avoid uttering "Macbeth" backstage. We see symbols change, but the underlying structure does not. From that day on, the discomfort became sacred law. Success fixes the rule: a logistical accident hardens into immovable mythical structure.

Two kinds of magic

A necessary distinction: non-rational thought has strata. The crude face of magical thinking is external, mechanical, fragmentary — freezing an orange the color of the rival’s shirt, wearing the same unwashed clothes. The subject does not transform himself; he tries to manipulate the environment through fetishes, driven by fear of contingency. The deep face (meditation, visualization, mystical trance) points inward. An athlete visualizing her movements before competing is not bending physics at a distance; she is modifying her own neurobiology, lowering cortisol, focusing attention. It is “magic” applied to the only territory where it actually works: one’s own mind. The fan in the pharmacy operates from fear of the outside; the mystic in trance operates from mastery of the inside.

The scapegoat mechanism

Here is where the folklore stops being innocent. Because magical thought does not accept chance, when the team loses, someone has to pay. As writer Balmaceda recalls Argentina has a long tradition of designated jinxes. The word is mufa — inherited, via Buenos Aires, from the Neapolitan jettatura. In 1919, the newspaper Crítica ran campaigns branding President Hipólito Yrigoyen a jettatore; decades later President Carlos Menem became “the unnameable,” a man whose very name fans still refuse to pronounce. Folklore even built the perfect inverse: invoking the tango legend Osvaldo Pugliese as the definitive anti-jinx shield.

René Girard explained that when collective anxiety reaches crisis, the group needs a scapegoat to unify its anguish and avoid devouring itself. The digital algorithm has industrialized the mechanism. When social networks coordinate mass attacks on an influencer spotted in the stands, or when a group of friends locks a young woman in the bathroom for the duration of a match because they consider her a jinx — a real case, not a hypothesis — a line has been crossed. Stripping someone of their name and calling them mufa is a process of dehumanization. The lynching becomes acceptable because it disguises itself as communal self-defense. What was once local folklore now functions as a small-scale ritual authoritarianism.

What would Lévi-Strauss say?

If Lévi-Strauss could see our hyperconnected present, he would confirm his thesis with a bitter smile. Technological progress is merely a backdrop: it did not make us more logical; it only gave us faster tools to propagate our atavistic myths. The structures of the savage mind never disappeared; they merely acquired smartphones... Football has become the last unifying religion of a society emptied of grand narratives, and its dogmas are defended with ferocity.

Some rituals attempt to control the world; others transform the subject; most fans still live in the delicate equilibrium between the two. But we are not as free, nor as rational, as we pretend. Beneath the varnish of modernity beats the ancestral fear of uncertainty. And faced with that fear, the human mind would rather lock a girl in a bathroom, or hold an elderly woman hostage in a pharmacy, than accept the cold and logical truth that destiny, sometimes, is a coin spinning in the air.

References and Further Reading

•         Balmaceda, D. (2022). “Yetas y mufas de la historia”. Infobae.

•         Girard, R. (1986). The Scapegoat. Johns Hopkins University Press.

•         Laferrère, G. (1904). ¡Jettatore! The classic Argentine play that popularized the persecution of alleged carriers of bad luck in Río de la Plata culture.

•         Lévi-Strauss, C. (1966). The Savage Mind. University of Chicago Press. (Especially Chapter 1, “The Science of the Concrete”.)

•         Redacción La Voz (2026). “Cábala inesperada: empleados retienen a ‘abuela’ que entró en una farmacia mientras Argentina remontaba”. La Voz del Interior.

•         Sábato, E. (1945/1951). Uno y el Universo; Hombres y engranajes. Essays on the limits of scientific positivism and the crisis of Western reason.