I told you Cheeto dust was the anti-fairy dust. I did not expect FIFA to run the field trial.

The final was supposed to be a futbol match. Somewhere along the line it turned into a corporate entertainment convention with a soccer match trapped in the middle, and I’m fairly sure I know what got sprinkled on the itinerary.

Start with the lines.

Getting into the stadium required the kind of security theater usually reserved for a nuclear facility, except the ticket scanners kept jamming and nobody in a yellow vest could tell you why, so eighty thousand people baked outside MetLife for the privilege of paying more than a monthly mortgage to watch a game most of them couldn’t actually see because they were still in line for the first half.

That’s Cheeto dust working exactly as designed: apply it to crowd management and you don’t get a smoother experience, you get a bottleneck with a metal detector and heat stroke.

Then came the pregame ceremony, ninety minutes of it, because somebody decided the World Cup needed the pacing of a Super Bowl halftime show stretched across an entire evening. Tom Cruise stood alone on the pitch in his all-black promo-tour outfit and told eighty thousand soccer fans that football is a language spoken without words, which is a fine sentiment for a movie trailer and a strange one to deliver, out loud, with words, for several minutes, while a man tries to sell you his fall release. I don’t doubt he meant it. I just don’t know what it had to do with Spain and Argentina.

The politics were the part that actually stung.

Clever organizers handed out red cards so the crowd could hold them up in protest of a phone call the sitting president made to get a suspended player back on the field, which is either the most on-brand thing I’ve ever heard or performance art nobody asked for. Security confiscated a chunk of them before kickoff, which is its own small miracle of irony: silencing a protest about interference with an actual act of interference in a country that is supposed to guarantee speech with a President that claims his free speech rights are violated on an hourly basis.

And then he walked out onto the pitch anyway to hand over the trophy, got booed twice on camera, and lingered on stage well past the point anyone wanted him there, because leaving gracefully has never once been in the formula.

That’s the tell with Cheeto dust — it is hard to get rid of and stays on far longer than anyone wants.

Ticket prices, meanwhile, had drifted somewhere past reasonable and landed in “you’d need a Manhattan penthouse and a guy named Chip” territory, which meant the people actually filling those seats were less “die-hard fans who’ve followed this team for decades” and more “whoever’s publicist got the good suite.” Somewhere in the nosebleeds there were probably real supporters. I hope they enjoyed the view of Tom Cruise’s ceremony.

And the game. My God, the game. After all that buildup, Argentina — the defending champions, with Messi playing what may be his last World Cup match — could not manage a single shot on goal in ninety minutes of actual football. Not one. Spain, playing with the calm precision of a team that had clearly practiced this exact scenario, still somehow looked like they’d learned the offside rule that morning, stringing together technically flawless sequences that led nowhere in particular until, eventually, they found the one they needed. One goal. A whole tournament, a nine-figure production budget, a Louis Vuitton trunk for the trophy, and the soccer itself was the least memorable part of the night.

So here’s the diagnosis: apply fairy dust to a World Cup and you get a tournament. Apply Cheeto dust and you get a red carpet event that occasionally pauses for a match, security lines that could radicalize a monk, a movie star’s earnest monologue standing in for a kickoff whistle, and a president who can’t resist being the story even when the story was supposed to be about two nations who’ve waited a combined near-century for this exact final.

So here is the diagnosis: fairy dust turns a football match into something magical. Cheeto dust turns it into a branded content opportunity with armed security, dynamic pricing and a celebrity explaining the meaning of football to people who crossed continents to watch it.

It gives you ticket prices calculated by private-equity consultants, security lines designed by the DMV, a halftime show nobody requested and a president wandering onto the field like a wedding guest who heard there might be cameras near the cake.

And after all the speeches, fireworks, confiscated protest cards, luxury trunks and corporate hosannas, the actual football arrived almost as an administrative afterthought. Ninety minutes, no Argentine shot on goal and just enough excitement to remind everyone what the evening might have been had FIFA remembered it was staging a match rather than launching a streaming service.

Somewhere, my father is shaking his head and asking the obvious question: why didn’t somebody just fix it?

The answer, sadly, is that nobody involved thought it was broken. The lines were full, the suites were sold, the sponsors were photographed and the most powerful man in the stadium successfully made himself part of a story that had absolutely nothing to do with him.