There are times when I poke my head above water to take a minute to recognize what sports actually are. They’re a distraction. People have been playing games for millennia, of course, and some of those games could even be connected to a lot of the ball games we play today. But they’re a distraction. Soccer as we know it became a part of school curriculum in England in the early 19th century because school administrators felt that their students needed something constructive to do to release their nervous energy (read: hormones) rather than whatever else they were doing to release it. It’s adolescent boys so the sky’s the limit, as we all know. Those educators didn’t count on the game becoming so addictive, however.

Around that same time, the industrial revolution was happening in England also. Factories were running nearly 24 hours a day, and workers were working 12-14 hour shifts six or even seven days a week. When worker riots forced factory owners to start giving employees time off, they didn’t want them stewing around plotting their next riot, so they formed soccer teams and intra-company leagues for their workers to play in on Saturday afternoons. Then the game spread to military and police forces, and Liverpool (then one of the busiest sea ports in the world) dock workers spread the game all over the British Empire, which had homes on every continent, and the use of the game as distraction persisted. But then people who weren’t laborers or school kids picked it up, and the rest is history.

No one thought a game invented to tire out schoolboys would ever become a multibillion dollar industry with its own corruption scandals, insane player salaries, TV contracts, sponsorship deals, etc. Much less that it would be so beloved by hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people all over the world. But it did. It was embraced by cultures that might not have much else in common except they like watching really fit dudes try to kick a ball through a rectangle. And this week marks the high point of the game, with all the trappings, good and bad, that come with it: the World Cup. It’s probably the biggest distraction, which is why they only play it every four years (that, and it’s hard work bilking host countries and cities out of their own money, innit FIFA?). I can’t wait.