Band of brothers tested and tried

In Boston on Thursday, Kylian Mbappe missed a penalty.

His closest friend, Achraf Hakimi watched and cheered on it being saved.

There is a particular cruelty to this tournament that has nothing to do with scorelines.

It keeps finding the people who love each other most, and placing them on opposite sides of elimination matches.

Mbappe and Hakimi have experienced this phenomenon for years.

They built their friendship at Paris Saint-Germain, beginning in 2021.

They wore each other’s jerseys after France beat Morocco in the 2022 semi-final.

They captained their respective countries again on Thursday, and France won one more time, 2-0, Mbappe scoring and then setting up Ousmane Dembele, and somewhere in the wreckage of that Moroccan dream, the two men found each other and the friendship resumed, as it always does, as if nothing had been interrupted.

Moroccan comedian Mimo Lazraq made a video about all of this before the game.

The joke was that if Mbappe was a real friend, he would have let Hakimi have his revenge.

Real friends help each other, the comedian said.

It is a joke with a bruise inside it.

Hakimi had already addressed it directly, telling fans this week that what happens between him and Mbappe off the pitch stays off the pitch.

The pitch, in the end, agreed with him.

It always does.

Now the tournament moves to Miami, and to a different kind of story.

Erling Haaland and Jude Bellingham first met in Dortmund, in the old steel communities of the Ruhr, where they arrived as teenagers.

Their friendship took the world in awe in incidents like the September 2021 Champions League night when Bellingham, still 18, crashed Haaland’s post-match interview and planted a kiss on his cheek before disappearing.

Haaland tried to suppress a grin and failed.

He described Bellingham as amazing, marvelled that he was three years younger, and could not quite locate a sentence that did justice to what he was watching.

The Valentine’s Day video they made for Dortmund’s YouTube channel — pickup lines exchanged over smooth jazz, neither of them able to deliver a single one without collapsing into laughter — has since been watched millions of times.

Dortmund themselves reshared it this week with the caption: now they’ll face each other in Saturday’s World Cup quarter-final.

When Haaland left for Manchester City in 2022, and Bellingham for Real Madrid the following year, the friendship did not dissolve.

It survived.

During the 2022 World Cup — Norway had not qualified — Haaland sent Bellingham a message before England’s opening game and another after it.

Good luck, then well done.

At a Champions League match in 2024, Bellingham was assigned to mark Haaland at a corner and briefly rested his head on the Norwegian’s chest.

The photograph became a meme within minutes, another chapter filed into what the internet has taken to calling football’s favourite bromance.

On Saturday in Miami, they face each other properly for the first time in an international match.

Haaland arrives with seven goals.

Bellingham with four and an assist.

One is the wrecking ball, the other the conductor, and those descriptions belong to FIFA but they are accurate enough.

For 90 minutes, or however long it takes, the conductor will try to stop the wrecking ball, and the wrecking ball will try to flatten everything the conductor has built.

What connects both stories is the one already settled in Boston, and the one still waiting in Miami — is the same strange truth. 

The competition is absolute.

The hurt is real.

One of them ends the tournament with their dream still alive, and the other begins the long journey home.

Following the 2022 semi-final, Mbappe and Hakimi exchanged jerseys in the tunnel.

After whatever happens on Saturday, Haaland and Bellingham will find each other, the hugs will return, and the friendship will simply pick up from where it had left off.

The World Cup keeps forcing these men to break each other’s hearts.

The friendships keep surviving anyway.

That is either a beautiful thing or a devastating one.

Probably it is both.