Watching the World Cup with the sound off: a journalist on the strange comfort of distance

The first thing to say about the World Cup at a distance is that the distance is the point. On 18 June 2026, The Guardian published Jonathan Liew's column on the strange, slightly guilty pleasure of watching the tournament as a civilian: the smartwatch readings that show his heart rate climbing ten to twenty beats above normal during a live match, the way that professional alertness has, over years of covering the game, replaced what used to be pleasure. He falls asleep during Netherlands v Japan. He calls the half-watching "luxurious." The column is small, but it is honest in a way that most tournament writing is not.

Liew's argument, stated plainly, is that there is a particular kind of exhaustion that belongs to the working reporter at a major tournament — the press-box heart rate, the deadline that has to be filed before midnight, the player or manager you have been assigned to track whether or not they are interesting — and that watching from a sofa several thousand miles away is not a lesser form of attention. It is a different one. The ambient hum of a World Cup, he writes, is something the uninitiated hear as background noise; for someone who has been inside the machine, it is closer to silence.

The working reporter's body

Liew is specific about the cost. His smartwatch, he says, recorded a heart rate ten to twenty beats above normal while he was covering a tournament. The detail is mundane and that is what makes it land: a man whose pulse used to spike because the desk was waiting on his copy has, on this occasion, let the match drift past him. The Netherlands v Japan fixture, played earlier in this World Cup cycle, becomes the running image of the piece — a competitive group game between two credible teams, the kind of match that ought to rivet a serious football writer, watched instead with the gentle unfocus of a long-haul passenger.

The implication is not that Liew has stopped caring. It is that caring used to cost him something measurable, and that the cost has now been removed. A reporter who has filed from World Cups, European Championships, Olympic football and club internationals accumulates a particular inventory of nervous habits. Stepping back from the road allows those habits to subside, the way a muscle atrophies when the load is taken off it.

The ambient tournament

What the column quietly describes is the texture of a World Cup experienced as cultural weather rather than as a working assignment. The matches are still on. The goals are still being scored. The arguments in group chats still happen, just with a half-hour delay. The difference is that the writer is no longer the person who has to render the match into 800 words by kickoff-plus-three. Liew's framing — that the World Cup "viewed from afar is more like ambient noise" — is generous to the reader, because it acknowledges a feeling most football watchers have at some point and rarely admit to: the sense that the tournament is happening and that one is, at best, half-present for it.

There is also a small, sharp observation buried in the piece. Liew notes that he "fell asleep at some point during the Netherlands v Japan game." For a working reporter, falling asleep on the job is a small professional disgrace. For a fan on a sofa in late June, it is just a Tuesday. The column's understated pleasure is in the permission it gives: to nod off, to skim, to care less than one's job once required.

What the working press box costs

Liew does not romanticise the road. The piece makes clear that tournament work is, at its best, a series of small frictions: a press officer who schedules the wrong window, a mixed zone that empties before the player you need arrives, a flight delayed on the night before a knockout game. These are the things the smartwatch picks up. They are also, in aggregate, the thing that makes the half-watching from home feel like a recovery rather than a retreat.

A more polemical writer would have used the column to settle a score with the job. Liew does not. The piece reads as a man who has, by his own account, done the work and is now allowing himself the smaller pleasure of not doing it. The honesty is the story.

What the column does not settle

There is a question the piece leaves open, and it is worth naming. The press-box exhaustion Liew describes is the exhaustion of someone who has been trusted to send copy from major tournaments, which is a small and well-paid cohort. Most football watchers, even the devoted ones, have never had their heart rate measured against a deadline. For them, the half-watching is not a recovery from the road. It is just life: a World Cup on in the background, a child asleep, a phone face-down on the table. The column is true to the journalist's experience. It is not a portrait of the global viewing audience, which is a different and larger subject.

A second, smaller caveat: the smartwatch datum is anecdotal. It belongs to one writer, on one assignment, at one tournament. The generalisation from it is Liew's, and a reader is free to take it or leave it. The column works because the writer earns the right to make it.

The structural frame

Stripped of its football-specific colour, Liew's column is about the relationship between professional attention and ordinary attention. Reporters who cover a beat for years develop a working self that is hyper-alert, deadline-shaped, and measurable on a wearable. When they step back from the beat, the working self does not vanish. It thins. The result is the slightly uncanny experience of watching the same event that once consumed you and finding that it now moves through you, rather than the other way around.

That is a pattern, not a thesis. It happens to war correspondents when the war stops being on the front page, to political reporters when the politician they covered loses, to court reporters when the case is adjourned for a year. Liew's contribution is to notice the pattern in himself and to write it down without pretending it is generalisable. That restraint is, in a tournament press cycle stuffed with hot takes, the most useful thing the column does.

Stakes

The stakes are small and the piece knows it. A World Cup will go on with or without any one column. What is at stake is a question of craft: whether a reporter can write about not-working without sounding either smug or sentimental. Liew manages it. The column is a reminder that the most accurate thing a working journalist can sometimes report is the state of their own attention.

This piece draws on a single source — Jonathan Liew's Guardian column of 18 June 2026 — and treats it as a small, honest dispatch from the working end of the trade. Where the column reports the writer's own experience, Monexus has taken him at his word; where it gestures at a larger pattern, this publication has flagged the limit of the evidence.