The Other Tournament

Every four years the World Cup generates two parallel events: the football, and the women watching from the stands. The WAGs—wives and girlfriends of professional players—have always been part of the spectacle, but by Brazil 2014 the phenomenon had fully institutionalized itself. Campaigns built around them. Photo shoots commissioned. The beautiful partner as collectible item, packaged and distributed with a corporate logic that somehow didn’t make the result any less watchable.

Ann-Kathrin Brömmel was the German face of it that summer. She’d go on to marry Mario Götze, who scored the winning goal in the 113th minute of the final against Argentina—a moment that made him, briefly, the most important man in German football. Brömmel has the kind of face that photographs from every angle, which turned out to be convenient given how many cameras were pointed at her. I was not immune to this.

The tournament itself had its own drama beyond the sidelines. Germany’s 7–1 destruction of Brazil in the semi-finals, played in front of the home crowd in Belo Horizonte, was the kind of result that shouldn’t exist. Neymar out injured, the Brazilian defense dissolving in real time, German goals arriving almost apologetically, one after another. That single match was worth more than most entire tournaments.

But I’d be dishonest if I pretended the other tournament wasn’t running alongside it. Yolante Cabau—Dutch actress, then married to Wesley Sneijder—the kind of person who makes you briefly reconsider your opinions about the Netherlands. Strip out the commercial machinery and what remains is still a document of a particular beauty that circulates every four years and then quietly recedes until the next one.