As usual, Europe has dominated this World Cup. Six of the last eight teams were European, and now three of the last four.

For years, a breakthrough by Africa, Asia or South America (excepting the regulars – Argentina and Brazil) has been predicted, and hasn’t happened. Every once in a while, a team outside the starting roster will stick its head over the wall (South Korea in ’02, Morocco in ’22), but it’s never been a regular thing.

As a result, Europe remains the unquestioned world leader in just two things – soccer and nostalgia.

Recently, Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal mused about how the two things together might turn out to be worth something in the age of artificial general intelligence. His slightly tongue-in-cheek argument is that as history cannot be manufactured, it could be commodified. (Or, if you’ve ever fought your way into and out of Rome’s Colosseum on a smoking hot August afternoon, further commodified.)

In the tech evangelist vision of the future, “where many things have become virtually free or highly automated, it might be that the costly maintenance of the past ends up paying big returns,” Weisenthal wrote.

It’s a useful thought experiment when it comes to sports in general. There are only so many of them. Nobody’s invented a good one in ages. I don’t count mixed martial arts here, since it’s boxing plus professional wrestling.

You’d think that in such a glamorous, booming business, someone would be going the disruption route. But there’s none of that. When investors try new things – padel or pickleball – they are old things repackaged. There has been no Apple, Tesla or Shopify of sport. The biggest players remain the ones everyone grew up with.

Switzerland-based FIFA is the best example. One hundred and twenty-two years old and unquestionably the most powerful sports organization that exists currently, or ever has. What other industry features a business like that?

Cathal Kelly: When it comes to soccer, this is as good as it gets for Canada

Since nobody’s been able to disrupt sports, the only way up is out. Hence the explosion of women’s professional leagues. It’s the sports you already like, but better for you. Like probiotic soda.

Really, it’s just a way to separate the few remaining sports agnostics from their money, while building upon the same infrastructure and history. Somehow we’ve convinced people who don’t fancy men’s sports that they owe it to everyone to buy women’s sports instead. It’s some feat of marketing.

Soccer remains the top of this pyramid, for obvious reasons. It’s a sport that can be played anywhere, by anyone, with minimal cost and equipment. You don’t need to be a physical freak – à la basketball or American football – to excel at it. Its rules are so simple they can be explained to a small child, and even a middle-aged man. It resists innovation and change. Soccer is a perfect technology.

However, while everybody can buy some of it, only a few people can own it. The vast majority of them are and always will be in Europe.

Nobody can build an English football tradition from the ground up because nobody can travel back in time and invent the sport. Nobody can manufacture the global romance of FC Barcelona or Real Madrid. The Saudis and Americans are trying and failing.

According to Forbes, the most valuable non-European team is Inter Miami (so named to ape its European betters). Half of that valuation is Lionel Messi. Once he leaves, it’s just a crummy team featuring a bunch of has-beens based in a city that would much rather be going to a Bayern Munich friendly.

It is still the case that no player of true ambition has ever considered leaving Europe for anywhere else. The rest of the world gets the semi-promising up-and-comers, the aged-out and the chancers.

If we take this argument at face value, Canada would be wrong to redistribute resources to emerging sports like soccer and basketball. Instead, we should focus on the thing we own – hockey.

It’s not soccer in terms of an international status boost, but it’s a reliable way to stick it to the Russians and Americans, which isn’t nothing. Why risk giving up our clear lead in a recognized game of global consequence in order to chase other, riskier propositions that we’ll never be anything more than pretty good at?

It’s an unromantic way to look at sport, but that’s only if you concede that games don’t actually matter, either as a cultural activity or a national industry. If you believe they do, then it behooves Canada to think strategically about them.

This doesn’t mean opening up the money tap – which is what people who work in sport will tell you solves everything.

If you buy Weisenthal’s argument, even a little, then there is no sense in building out new sport. Unless you’re the U.S. or China, you can’t scale it or export it. All a country Canada’s size can do is leverage what we have by leaning into nostalgia.

We already do this. Hockey is the only completely self-sustaining sport in Canada. If all public handouts were removed, it would continue to thrive because hockey is the only sport we think of as our own.

Whenever we play anything else, we recognize that we are borrowing – if not outright stealing – from someone else’s tradition. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s not a business proposition.

Cathal Kelly: You don’t need bribes to fix a World Cup, only status

FIFA got a lot of stick for charging outrageous prices to attend this World Cup. What was less discussed is how many people were willing to pay them. I didn’t notice many empty seats, even at the least attractive games.

Every other cultural industry is either reeling, publicly funded or recycling itself endlessly. Meanwhile, the best of sports is always new, always being discussed and, regardless of price, never short of customers.

Between FIFA and its stranglehold on the biggest show on Earth, Europe has a plan for how to leverage this advantage going forward.

Does Canada have a plan? Do we even plan to have a plan? And if not, why not?