Here’s another vote affirming that the 2022 men’s World Cup tournament was pretty pretty good. Fabulous sporting theater, with a championship final that just might have been the greatest soccer game ever played. (It certainly was the best I’ve seen. But it is difficult to accept that anyone has witnessed each of the 22 World Cup title matches dating to 1930, let alone every soccer game throughout history, so such a definitive statement clearly is on shaky ground. I’ve seen a mere nine Cup finals, two in person, and maybe a few hundred other games, total, in a sport that has been around for more than 150 years.)

Of course there were imperfections beyond the playing field, given the collision of convivial fun-and-games with the ugly back story of Qatar’s corrupt acquisition of the event, the host nation’s treatment of immigrant workers and its general strong-armed opposition to dissent.

But, OK, even if we don’t ignore those particulars—the way Fox TV did—it’s fair to wonder how the tense, riveting athletic drama could have been any better.

So let’s move on to the aspect of marketing, which is the soul of any such enterprise these days, and one relatively overlooked facet during the Qatar extravaganza was the 2022 World Cup mascot.

It happens that I fancy myself an aficionado of international sports mascots, having been on site for 11 Olympic Games and two World Cups. (The photo above is a team picture of the Olympic mascots I collected.)

In modern times, the mascot’s primary function is to symbolize a particular event or organization, a sort of branding exercise, and at the Qatar tournament the mascot, La’eeb, did check significant cultural and soccer-related boxes. La’eeb’s  personification was of a white, floating ghutrah—the traditional headdress worn by Arab men—with eyes, eyebrows and an open mouth, and its name is the Arabic word meaning “super-skilled player.”

Similar comparisons were Italy’s 1990 Cup mascot, a stick-figure with a soccer head called “Ciao,” the familiar Italian greeting, and Mexico’s 1970 “Juanito,” attired in a Mexican soccer uniform and a sombrero. FIFA, the sport’s international ruling body which owns and operates the World Cup, described La’eeb as being from “a parallel mascot-verse that is indescribable.”

But Sam Knight, in a wide-ranging and thoroughly enlightening World Cup report for The New Yorker, found La’eeb, being a sort of ghostly thing, reminded of the thousands of reported fatalities during the construction of the Cup venues by “hundreds of thousands of workers, imported from the Global South and frequently abused in one of the smallest and riches countries on earth.”

Knight wrote that, seeing La’eeb, “everyone was encouraged to find his or her own meaning, even if that meaning was death.”

Beyond that, a typical purpose of a big-event mascot is to plug the wares of official sponsors, and in Qatar’s case, that wasn’t about to happen after the local authorities’ last-minute ban on beer sales at Cup venues. Though Budweiser had a $75 million contract with FIFA and reportedly wound up losing at least $5 million during the tournament, the promotion of its product suddenly became out of the question.

So La’eeb obviously was no Cobi, a classic mascot role model from the 1992 Summer Olympics. A little cartoon dog, Cobi was depicted everywhere in Barcelona during those Games, a shameless huckster for Olympic sponsors: Lifting a bottle of Coca Cola, holding hands with an m&m (plain) and on and on. My friend Jay envisioned Cobi having a New York agent constantly on the phone lining up endorsement deals for the little dog.

Cobi was so named as a play on COOB which, translated and unscrambled, stood for Barcelona Olympic Organizing Committee, and was created by local artist Javier Mariscal, who had caused a bit of a stir by claiming he was “enjoying the most wonderful drug” when he first drew the critter.

Anyway. Cobi was a memorable token of that event. As were the polar bears, Hidy and Howdy, at Calgary’s 1988 Winter Olympics; and Neve and Gliz, a snowball and ice cube, at the 2006 Turin Winter Games; and the kookaburra (called Olly for Olympic), platypus (Sid for Syndey) and Millie (for millennium) at the 2000 Sydney Summer Olympics.

Then there was Atlanta’s 1996 Izzy, impossible to be classified as a person, place or thing, so mysterious that its original name was Whatizit. Izzy didn’t appear to stand for anything—not the host nation, the fact that those were the Centennial Summer Olympics, nor something as relevant as the Olympic motto of “higher, swifter, stronger” that was embodied by a coyote, hare and bear at the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Games. At least with the ’84 Los Angeles Summer Olympics, the first in the United States in 52 years, organizers trotted out Sam the Eagle, an allusion to the national bird.

Up next, it recently was announced, will be a pair of anthropomorphic female caps for the 2024 Paris Games. They are Phryges—soft, generally red hats worn by freed slaves in Phrygia in an ancient Greek kingdom of what is now Turkey, but said to have a strong connection to French history because they were worn at the time of the French Revolution as a symbol of freedom.

Ultimately with these global hullaballoos, though, as the 2022 World Cup demonstrated, the main thing is showing off super-skilled players.