Let’s begin with a quick vocabulary lesson.
In sports betting, “chalk” means “the favorite,” a term supposedly hearkening back to horse tracks, where the day’s odds got written on a chalkboard and erased and rewritten so many times that the board wore thin in one spot. Chalk isn’t exciting; chalk is just the odds being right.
The 2026 World Cup has been, uh, chalk-forward. Despite the plucky showing from Cabo Verde and a handful of other surprises, Argentina, England, France, and Spain, the top four teams in the world, ground through the bracket the way traditional powers do. What a shock—the favorites won. Boring, correct, exactly as advertised.
Chalk.
But there’s a different kind of chalk at play as well. Call it explanatory chalk: the excuse that shows up every time you want to assign blame for your team’s loss. You’ve already seen this movie; a crushing loss can never be just a loss.
Somewhere in the wreckage, someone finds the Jews.
Exhibit A: Algeria
Nothing about Algeria’s loss to Argentina was a mystery. They lost 3-0, with Leo Messi doing us a solid and scoring all three; that’s the kind of showing that ends the tactical argument or debate about the starting XI before it starts. Messi was simply better than everyone on the field, which, yes, is still allowed to happen.
Not good enough, though, for Mustapha Mazouzi, a commentator on Algerian state TV, who went on air and explained that the hat trick was actually the work of “the Jewish lobby that runs the world,” and that FIFA’s president had it in for Algeria specifically.
Why did Algeria lose? Not because of the ref. Not because FIFA quietly preferred its biggest star advance (which we have heard relentlessly). Nope. It was the Jews, a global cabal focusing its energies on this match.
The theory does about four times more work than the situation requires. It always does.
To Algerian fans’ credit, they tore into Mazouzi, mocking him for what they called (and I’m stealing this) “analytical bankruptcy.” Make no mistake, this was not a quiet way for Algerians to express solidarity with Israel, but it was refreshing that the insanity got called out.
Exhibit B: Egypt
Egypt’s exit was closer, 3-2 to Argentina, and closer losses always produce louder aftermaths because there’s just enough real grievance in them to build something bigger on top. And the game did not lack for controversy— Egypt’s disallowed goal, a handful of arguable calls, and a shocking comeback for the defending champions. In other words, normal for a game of such high stakes.
And then it went somewhere else entirely.
Within hours, an Egyptian YouTuber with a serious following announced Egypt had “lost to Zionism,” citing Javier Milei’s (Argentina’s president) support for Israel as proof. Another commentator invented, from nothing, a story that Yair Netanyahu personally arranged Messi’s move to Inter Miami as part of the plot. An Egyptian FA board member suggested, more carefully, that the officiating was payback for the coach’s public support of Palestine, which at least had the decency to sound like a guess instead of a verdict.
Then somebody edited French referee François Letexier’s Wikipedia page to say he’d been born into an Orthodox Jewish family in Brittany, and threw in a grandfather in the French Resistance for texture.
None of it was true.
And while the entries were corrected, the screenshots had already made the rounds on the internet, and the damage was done.
I want to be precise about what this is, because it’s not new and it deserves its real name: invent a Jewish identity where none exists, then use the invention as evidence. Blood libels never needed a real dead child either; they just needed the shape of one. A fabricated Jewish grandfather for a French referee is the same move, just wearing a soccer jersey instead of a burial shroud.
Exhibit C: The Hague
The third one doesn’t even have the thin cover of a match involving Israel, which somehow makes it more revealing, not less. Morocco got eliminated by France in the quarterfinal. That night, a crowd in The Hague gathered, waving Moroccan and Palestinian flags, chanting slogans invoking Hamas and gas chambers. Similar chaos broke out the same night in London and Amsterdam.
Let’s review the facts of this game: no disallowed goal, no controversial call, just a 2-0 domination of the Atlas Lions by Les Bleus. It was as clean a loss as you could find in this tournament with nothing resembling an Israel angle to hang anything on, and the chant showed up anyway.
Your team loses? Blame the Jews. Hate on Israel. It’s the oldest bet out there, brought out the same way flares and bottles are. The occasion was losing; the target was already loaded, waiting for any occasion at all. How convenient that there are still Jews. Betting on antisemitism is as predictable as any other easy bet you can make.
In other words, chalk.
To their credit, some of the loudest pushback against all three episodes came from inside those exact communities, people who found it embarrassing and said so, loudly, in Arabic and Dutch and everything in between. But still, something in the culture reaches for this explanation with a regularity that is alarming. Why does a World Cup loss need a lobby behind it? Why does a disallowed goal need a rabbi hiding in a referee’s family tree? Why does a defeat to France still end up with “Hamas, Hamas”?
Well, you know why.
So, here we are, in the last week of this global party. The favorites have all advanced: chalk. The conspiracy theories showed up right on schedule: chalk. Everyone is hating on FIFA: chalk. And, better yet, nobody had to invent anything new this summer. They just picked up the same stick everybody always reaches for and pressed down hard enough that the outline showed up one more time.
The favorites went chalk.
So did the excuses.
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