The Beautiful Game, as Told by a Noob

I now get football. But also, I do not get football.

Ria Tagulinao
7 min readJan 25, 2023
My only photos from the Argentina-France final watch party

“So what’s your team?”, Ena asked me. She knew I wasn’t a football fan, so I readily admitted that I didn’t know. Argentina? Because you know, Messi, GOAT, the bandwagon. But I told her there was this cute French guy I’d met on vacation a few years ago, which was clearly enough reason for me to also root for France. (I wore a denim-colored top so I could swing both ways.)

I wasn’t completely in the dark about football when I walked into the hotel room, bearing lemons and a pack of salt to pair with the tequila they had — a token for letting me crash their World Cup final watch party.

For one, I knew France was the standing World Cup champion because of my job in 2018. I was working for an international brand then, handling the HORECA (Hotels, Restaurants, and Cafes) space. A month shy of the start of the season, bar owners approached us for support for game viewings: matching personalized jerseys for the whole staff, hand-held country flags for every match, mini football balls as table centerpieces. One hotel even wanted us to mount a small indoor football pitch! In my head, I was like, really? All this work for a league?

Throw it back eight years earlier when I first heard of this football player called Lionel Messi…

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Ria Tagulinao

Fun-sized Filipina Writer | To stay up-to-date with my work, here's my Sunday newsletter: http://riatagulinao.substack.com