I love soccer, but don't care who wins!

By: Stuart Knight (Founder and CEO) | July 6, 2026

Let’s talk about the World Cup shall we? You know, that sporting event that attracts billions of viewers?  It’s that live experience where you can buy you and your three friends a beer for $80 USD!  Yep, that was me last week at the France/Sweden game in New York.  Hell, the game was on my birthday, so why not go bankrupt!  

Now, for anyone paying attention, the World Cup is more than a soccer/football tournament.  More accurately, I would describe it as a tribal exorcism that exposes humanity in a way that we rarely get to witness.  To better explain this, think about Christmas for a second. Many people love the Christmas period because they get to observe those loving parts that exist within all of us on full display as we channel generosity through the multiple portals this holiday uniquely offers.  

Well, I feel somewhat the same way about watching the World Cup in how it exposes parts of us that are rarely seen.  I don’t think there is another event on planet earth that gives you a better birds eye view into the opposite of what Christmas offers, and that is people’s need to win.  Sure, there are all kinds of great things about the world cup that I could talk about, but none of them surmount the one emotion that trumps them all, which is a deep desire to survive and thrive. This is why people scream, faint, sling insults and even weep.

Now, before I go any further, allow me to offer a perspective through which I see this sport.  My parents immigrated to Canada from England in the 1960’s with about $150 in their pockets, and before long they had three boys.  As working class people, without enough money to place us into Canada’s national sport of hockey, we strapped on cleats and played soccer.  The fact that my father was quite a good player himself obviously streamlined that decision too. 

As a kid, sports always came easy to me, and for the first two decades of my life, I found myself playing on various travel soccer teams, where I experienced the ups and downs of big wins and painful losses.  During that time, I took the game seriously.  I trained hard at practice, and then did extra training by myself.  Every night, I would visualize myself conducting difficult moves, so much so that over thirty years later my conditioned brain automatically does the same thing each evening when I go to bed.   

To say that soccer took a physical toll on me would be an understatement, as each morning I have to will my now arthritic joints to loosen up and move.  I even have the scars to prove it, which you can see on both sides of my right ankle.  A few years ago I was required to have reconstructive surgery, which left me waking up to 32 staples in my foot.  Good times!  All of this to say, I’ve been committed to the game for most of my life, and am proud to report that at the age of 53, I still play once a week.  

Ironically, soccer didn’t have just a physical impact on my body, but it also had a mental one on my mind.  In short, I hated losing.  Like, I really hated it.  To the point where I am embarrassed to say that even in my 30’s I obsessively replayed the Co-Ed Rec league games I played in each week trying to figure out what we could have done differently if we had lost.  This, of course, spilled over into the games I was watching on TV when “my team” would win or lose.  If they won, drinks were on me, and if they lost, I’d be ruminating over it days later.  

However, it was during this same decade of my life that I began taking a deep dive into spirituality, the ego, mindfulness and our collective sense of self.  And the deeper I went, the more able I was to see myself not as the person playing the game, but rather the observer of the person playing the game.  Or if I was watching a game on TV, it was slowly becoming less “my team”, and was beginning to become just “a team”.  

Slowly, I was beginning to see that the image I attach to who I think I am when I win, or when my team wins, is just a story that I make up, and for that reason one that I can choose to believe.  Or not.  Am I really more successful, charming, handsome, funny, interesting, important etc. the more I win, or when my chosen team wins?  Or is that just a story that I’ve made up and subconsciously believe?  Well, it took me years to understand the difference between the two, but when you see it, you can’t "unsee" it.  

All of a sudden, it’s not you, or your favorite team that is being scored on, but instead is a bunch of physical bodies that a bunch of souls have chosen to inhabit that are being scored on.  You quickly realize that the mind, body and spirit are three very different things, of which two can be hurt, and the third cannot.  For the first 30-40 years of my life, I had been operating from the mind and body, which I still most often do today.  However, the more I train myself to operate from the spirit, the softer life becomes, and the less attached I am to outcomes.  More specifically, the experience takes precedence over the outcome.

And for that reason, this is the first World Cup that I have ever watched where I don’t care who wins.  Instead, I simply watch the game and have deep appreciation for the game itself, and the beautiful moves being conducted on the field, regardless of who the player is.  The same has happened with the games I’m playing in each week.  When an opposing player makes a great pass, or scores on the team I’m playing for, I take joy in giving them a high five, or congratulating them on a great move.  

It’s taken me years to get there, and I can easily regress back into my past self, but with each new day I find myself getting better at being who I truly am as opposed to the person I always thought I was.  And I’ve found that life is so much easier there than anywhere else.  To the point where each week as I arrive home from my weekly soccer game, when my son inevitably asks me who won, I can honestly say, “I don’t know”.

Much Love,

Stuart

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