Weekly Echo’s Illustration Created by Copilot
By Dr Rahim Said
There’s a particular kind of American grief that cannot simply mourn — it must first produce a spreadsheet. This week, as Belgium sent the United States packing from the World Cup, one self-described “free thinker” with 2.2 million followers on X decided the appropriate response to a football defeat was a GDP comparison thread.
The USA’s economy, we were informed, is 45 times larger than Belgium’s. California alone outproduces it fivefold. Texas triples it. New York City’s metro area, apparently, out-earns an entire European kingdom on its own.
Maryland — Maryland! — is four times the size. The United States has 63 national parks; Belgium has only one. And, the coup de grâce, Belgium does not even have its own currency.
One almost admires the commitment. Somewhere between the final whistle and the group chat, a man sat down, opened a browser, and built a nine-point rebuttal to a scoreline. This is not sport commentary. This is a hostage video where the hostage is dignity.
Here in Malaysia, we understand something about losing gracefully — or at least about losing loudly, which is its own art form. We’ve had our share of matches where the post-mortem outlasted the match itself, where WhatsApp groups filled with theories about referee bias, pitch conditions, and the moon’s gravitational pull on our strikers’ hamstrings.
But even our most wounded football uncles, nursing teh tarik and grievances at the mamak till 2 am, have never once pivoted to comparing Selangor’s palm oil exports to Bahrain’s just to feel better about a 3-1 loss.
Because that is, essentially, what happened here. Belgium — population roughly the size of greater Kuala Lumpur, a country you can drive across before finishing your coffee — beat America at football.
And rather than simply say “well played, we’ll get them next time,” an entire corner of the internet reached for GDP tables like a drowning man reaching for a life raft made of spreadsheets.
The irony, of course, is exquisite. Football is precisely the sport where the comparison doesn’t work. It is the great leveller — the one arena in the world where a nation’s economic output, its national park count, its currency sovereignty, mean absolutely nothing once the whistle blows.
Belgium has been quietly, unglamorously excellent at this specific thing for over a decade, producing a golden generation while America built stadiums the size of small nations. GDP does not score goals. Malls do not make midfielders.
You could annex Wallonia into Texas tomorrow, and it still wouldn’t buy you a decent left back.
What makes the whole episode so delicious is how completely it misunderstands the assignment. Nobody was arguing Belgium has a bigger economy. Nobody was suggesting Brussels should replace Washington.
The claim on the table was narrow and specific: on this day, on this pitch, with this ball, Belgium was better at football. And rather than engage with that — rather than sit in the very human, very universal discomfort of losing at the thing you were supposed to be good at — the response was to change the subject entirely and hope nobody noticed.
We should recognise the move, because we do it ourselves, just in smaller ways. It’s the parent who, when their child loses a debate competition, mentions the school’s new science lab. It’s the company that, after a product flop, releases a press statement about “long-term shareholder value.” It is, in essence, changing the scoreboard because you don’t like what’s written on it.
The tweet — and the many, many quote-tweets and think-pieces it spawned — earned its viral afterlife not because it was persuasive, but because it was such a pure specimen of the genre: sports-loss cope, weaponised with statistics, deployed with total sincerity.
It didn’t need to convince anyone. It only needed to exist long enough for the author to feel, briefly, that the scoreline had been overturned by sheer economic mass.
It hadn’t been, of course. Belgium still won. The national parks are still sitting there, unaffected by the result, indifferent to the football.
And somewhere in Brussels, someone is probably framing a screenshot of that thread, printing it out, and pinning it to a wall — not out of anger, but out of the quiet, satisfied amusement of a small country that just watched a giant lose a game and then try to win an argument nobody was having.
Sometimes the most articulate response to a loss is silence. Or, failing that, at least resist the urge to bring Maryland into it.
