In his 1928 novel Nadja, French surrealism ace Andre Breton described the city of Nantes as “perhaps with Paris the only city in France where I have the impression that something worthwhile may happen to me”.
To think that he was still a good 94 years away from having the chance to wander around the bowels of his local sports arena in a vain attempt to track down the anti-doping officials at the foosball World Cup.
In another timeline, this would be day 20 of a summer FIFA World Cup, with England kicking off their quarter-final against France. Instead, The Athletic is approaching the giant, smoked-glass exercise lair that is the Palais des Sports de Beaulieu (architectural style: if the Thundercats could afford a holiday home on the Loire) for the 14th edition of the International Table Soccer Federation (ITSF) World Cup and World Championships.
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More than 30 nations are here, bringing with them nearly 1,000 players to compete on well over 100 tables in 39 championships, all across 10 categories. Six days of near-relentless foosball (aka table football, table soccer or, as our hosts call it, “baby-foot”) will reach a climax of the men’s and women’s World Cup, a nations event combining singles and doubles. Delayed by 12 months by the pandemic, the biennial search for the best foosballers on earth is back… and one bewildered correspondent is standing right in the middle of it.
Nantes — where the ITSF is headquartered — is holding its seventh edition of the last 10 tournaments. Foosball, to borrow a phrase, is coming home and the federation’s president, Farid Lounas, says “there is no other place in the world where foosball players are welcome like this”.
Lounas, a former table football player, founded the ITSF in 2002. “Something was missing. People were not speaking together. They were fighting together because of the different rules in each country, so there was no way you could understand what was happening.”
Competition and confusion has always been at the heart of foosball. Its invention has been attributed to French engineer Lucien Rosengart in the 1930s, to Alejandro Finisterre during the Spanish Civil War and, most convincingly, to Harold Searles Thornton, a Tottenham supporter, who took out the first patent in 1923. For all the energy expended on that debate, it did at least confirm that “table football” was a truly pan-continental concept right from the start. Foosball has never had to grow out of a tiny, isolated pocket while the rest of the world looks on, puzzled.
Amid its many rises and falls over the decades, the game has at least one sporting feather in its cap: there is a definitive foosball film. E.W. Swackhamer’s 1981 movie Longshot boasts one of the most no-nonsense story arcs of all time and a rating of 4.8 on IMDb (for perspective, that’s slightly better than Zoolander 2 but not quite as good as Showgirls.)
The ITSF now presides over a year-long calendar (as I quickly learned, foosball does not stop, ever) with reassuringly sporty-sounding programmes like a Master Tour, a Pro Tour and a World Series, taking in tournaments from Costa Rica to Copenhagen. The “Worlds” are its unquestionable showpiece event, though, rivalled only for prestige and strength in depth by the annual Tornado World Championships in Kentucky, which has a history stretching back to the mid-1970s, attracts the hugest names, offers six-figure sums in prize money… but with one crucial difference: they only play on one kind of table.
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Meanwhile, the ITSF has approved five different tables for competition: Tornado (USA), Leonhart (Germany), Garlando and Roberto Sport (both Italy) and Bonzini (France). What at first seems, to the foosball novice, to be an unnecessary complication is actually the great twist of the World Championships: to be the best, you have to beat the best at their best.
The cumulative effect of each table’s idiosyncrasies — the materials, dimensions, formations, surface grip, weights of the “men” and the size of their “feet”, the mechanisms of the rods — makes the Worlds rather like playing tennis on grass, clay and hard courts all in the same Grand Slam tournament. But with different rackets. And different balls.
Each player nominates their favoured table before competing and then plays “home” and “away” against each opponent. Even to a newcomer, the Bonzini immediately emerges as the clay-court outlier, its metallic figures rattling away like 22 tiny cake tins. Most amusingly, it seems like the Americans largely hate it — and it’s those varying levels of unfamiliarity and discomfort that give these World Championships their unique edge.
As I roam between the three main playing areas in the Palais des Sports — squeezing past an early-rounds men’s doubles encounter between India and Chile, dodging one of the army of purple-clad volunteers whose job is to ensure everything runs to its strict schedule — there are plenty of emphatic answers to an inevitable question: is foosball really a sport? The ITSF lose an early credibility point here for not tweeting a picture of an empty arena with the words “the calm before the storm” before the doors fly open but other boxes are swiftly ticked.
Firstly, there is enough personalised polyester on show here to fill a Sports Direct warehouse (the ITSF dress code prohibits, among other things, “tank tops, jeans of any kind, cargo shorts or flip-flops”) and a seemingly near-total commitment to wearing it at all times, even at the hotel breakfast buffet.
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The universal body language of foosball has an overwhelmingly authentic sporting tone. There are the huddles before the team events (the Bulgarians consistently edge the “most intimidating post-huddle roar” competition), the ritualistic preparation of a player’s rods, the respectful but cursory fist-bumps with the opposition before the first ball drops, the full-blooded high-fiving after decisive points (sadly, they are not officially termed “goals”), the instinctive stamps of frustration when a ball isn’t brought under control and — a personal favourite — the almost exaggerated stance a player adopts as they prepare to summon the rotational force to shoot from their front-line three-rod.
At that point, about 40 to 60 per cent of the time, the ball is slammed into the goal with a truly satisfying plastic or metallic ger-dung noise. The novelty of that sensation — aurally, like an authoritative pot in snooker; aesthetically, like a rifled finish in football that embeds itself in the corner of the goal net — does not wear off, not even as I enter my 14th hour of peering over the shoulders of lethal-wristed Austrians.
Full confirmation that this isn’t just a game for basement bars, garages and trendy media companies’ office spaces was sealed last August when the ITSF officially became a signatory of the WADA Anti-Doping Code. Their very stern-sounding, 69-page anti-doping rules document came into force this year. On the evidence of this week in Nantes, though, the foosball family only needs to worry when WADA adds Kronenbourg 1664 and inhumanly chewy baguettes to their list of banned substances.
So if it dresses like a sport, sounds like a sport and behaves likes a sport, there doesn’t seem to be much of a debate to be had. But one thing nags at my mind: how can they make foosball — a pursuit historically defined by its participants — a compelling spectator sport?
The bad news is that, in its most fundamental moments, foosball is impossible to watch — you often simply cannot see the ball going into the goal, let alone appreciate its subliminal trajectory. Fortunately, that theoretically critical disadvantage doesn’t seem to deter the fans. In the qualifying and elimination rounds, the crowds that gather around the tables range from the proverbial un homme et son chien to what can best be described as “in the background on Antiques Roadshow, when someone’s turned up with their nan’s collection of spoons that turns out to be worth £500,000″.
While everyone — players and the public — are free to wander the playing floors, the grandstands only begin to fill thanks to the age-old trick for any fringe sporting event: bussing the local kids in. (This is not as cynical as it looks: the ITSF are more engaged with bringing the game and its evident social benefits to the next generation — through their 100 Baby-foot for Schools project — than obsessing about becoming recognised by the Olympics any time soon.)
The three finals areas have a grander setting, the tables enclosed between giant screens showing the action at the best angles from overhead camera rigs, raised tableside seating for their roaring team-mates and coaches, and a huge stand for spectators to watch the climactic games unfold in front of them. Radek, a cherubic and permanently enthusiastic Czech, has the job of announcing the players and teams before they walk onto the stage to the looped soundtrack of some sub-Super Sunday guitar music. Meanwhile, digital advertising hoardings intermittently cycle back to the official tournament slogan — PETITE BALLE, GRANDES EMOTIONS — whose syntactic rhythm alone just oozes “international sporting event”.
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But the ITSF are looking far beyond the arena. The tournament is being broadcast via Twitch, in three languages, and it’s a case study in how pretty much any discernible sport can be presented in an authentic way. The commentary is light but enlightened, action replays bolster the dramatic moments and — just in case you wondered if this wasn’t all being taken super-seriously — there are post-match stats summaries. Pass completion percentages! In table football!
Lounas believes opting for Twitch over a traditional TV broadcaster is the right strategy, insisting that the ITSF “can reach 3 million to 10 million just for this event”. (The 2013 tournament was given sporadic coverage on Eurosport 2, whose schedules at that time also included competitive cup stacking and speed eating, so perhaps it’s a shrewd move to distance themselves from the truly niche pursuits.)
Unlike many multi-discipline championships events, there is an impressively democratic ethos: the men’s singles is not conspicuously more trumpeted than the women’s doubles. Four nations have sent players for the quartet of wheelchair events on adapted Roberto Sport tables. Rather than an opening ceremony, the tournament takes a short break on the Friday to parade the teams and their flags: Germany seem to have brought the biggest numbers, the Italians comfortably belt out the best national anthem, Nepal have a sole representative.
The psychological face-offs of the singles events make them a magnetic spectacle but there’s a furious camaraderie to the doubles — and some argue it’s actually the bigger deal. “If you think about it, if you go to a bar, people are usually playing doubles,” says Will Hawkes, president of the British Foosball Association and one of my vital guides through the jungle of tables in Nantes. “The default way of playing table football is two-v-two.”
The qualification formats are straightforward but quickfire. The PA system booms out, seemingly every minute, the names of players running late to make it to their designated tables (three “recalls” and you forfeit the match) as the hundreds of entrants are whittled down to a manageable number for the knockouts. At that point, it’s first to five points and best of five games. If, after two games each on the nominated “home” tables, there isn’t a winner, they switch rapidly between them until someone can claim a two-point margin to progress.
If the Olympic-lite environment isn’t enough to set elite-level foosball apart from the pub-room context most of us would immediately think of, the dynamics of the play itself are a universe away from the rod-spinning chaos of the less-than-amateurs. There are occasional bouts of scrambling — much in the same way a Premier League game briefly descends into a scrap for a loose ball — but otherwise, it’s about methodical building from the back and accurate passing between the lines, a style pioneered by the legendary Gary Pfeil in the US in the 1970s and 80s.
If Pfeil is the Cruyffian figure of modern foosball, then the transcendental Frederic Collignon is its Pele: the Belgian won six of the first eight world titles but, more astonishingly, became the only non-American to cross the Atlantic and dominate there, too. He claimed the Tornado Championships six times (what was, relatively speaking, his weakest table) before effectively retiring in 2012 at the peak of his powers.
The current strength in depth in Europe and the USA suggests nobody will ever repeat that level of sheer dominance but, at least for those looking for football parallels, the France squad contains a “Robert Zamora”.
The truest sign of a flourishing sport, though, is when the rules are broken. And foosball loves its rules. The latest edition of the rulebook extends to 32 pages, including such fascinating sub-sections as 4.27.3 — Lubricating the Rods and Illegal Aerials.
The darkest of all foosball arts, however, is “jarring” — a slightly vague concept, clouded by intent and interpretation, that seems to inspire the majority of appeals to the referees. Stood quietly in their black-and-white striped shirts, looming over one of the corners of the table, these officials — often current or former players — are passive but necessary. Plaintive looks from one side of the table are rare but tense, especially when it comes to an alleged jar, when the ball is knocked from its path by an opponent slamming the side of the table with their rod.
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“Well, the question is: ‘what is a jar?’,” asks Hawkes. “In different countries, the interpretations vary. I feel sometimes, when I play in France, a butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazon and a Bonzini table moves in Micronesia, and when you jar, the other guy always looks like you shat in his coffee. It’s not like, ‘Oh, I think that was a jar — what do you think?. It’s like, ‘You are the dirtiest cheating bastard I’ve ever met in my life and I hate you.’ On the table, you’ve got some grade-A bastards, right? You’ve got some cheating bastards.”
And, no, they’re not allowed to spin (“rotation should not exceed 360 degrees either before or after making contact with the ball,” says the rulebook) but it was one attempt to bend that regulation as far as it could go that changed the sport forever, arguably setting it on its modern trajectory. There is plenty of dispute over who invented the “snake shot” — performed by pinning the ball to the table with the man before using the inside of your wrist to rapidly rotate the bar anti-clockwise, right to the legal limit, to maximise the shot’s power. The USA’s Terry Moore is widely accepted as bringing it to the mainstream, having unleashed it on the way to winning the 1992 Tornado Championships. It’s now the dominant scoring method.
Gloriously, not even foosball has escaped the technological clutches of VAR. The winning point in the women’s doubles final goes to the big screen after the USA query whether Romania’s star player Ecaterina Sarbulescu had been touching the handle for long enough before shooting (in contravention of the rather fussy-sounding “sudden play” rule).
The referee stands firm, the Americans fume, and the No 1-seeded Romanians have their gold medal. Later, as the USA men’s team open up an unassailable seven-point lead in their Nations event semi-final, Germany’s Thomas Haas has to be pulled away from the officials amid a dispute over how the ball was placed back on the table after a point. It’s been a long week.
The quest to find the best foosballers in the world takes some unexpectedly early twists. Haas, the 2017 men’s singles champion and current world No 1, crashes out in the last 64. So too does Twan Hermans, the surprise winner in Murcia in 2019, who has the reasonable excuse of having virtually disappeared off the circuit to complete his architecture thesis on the proposed restoration of a 2,000-year-old Roman bathhouse, for which he was nominated for the Euregional Prize for Architecture in 2021. At least, that’s the story he’ll be giving the WADA officials when they catch up with him.
The US names aside, I was prepared to arrive in Nantes to be confronted with hordes of clean-cut central Europeans — a convention of rod-twisting, recreation-centre Rangnicks. Richard Marsh, the British No 1, sympathises with this immediately when I call him for pre-tournament inside information.
“I think that’s pretty accurate,” he tells me over Zoom from Bucharest, where he lives with his partner — and women’s world No 1 — Sarbulescu. “And that’s actually the way I explain this to most people who are going to their first international tournament.
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“Most of the people who get into foosball in Europe, and especially in the UK for some reason, tend to have science-y university backgrounds, because that’s just where we found table football. So you will have this kind of weird, nerdy vibe at a lot of European tournaments.”
Marsh himself — arriving on the back of a statement victory at the European Tornado Open in Slough — flies through qualifying, only to fall to young German Felix Droese in the last 32. It’s a blow but he remains part of Team GB’s pleasant, tightly-knit squad for the Nations event and, as a qualified referee, could be called up to officiate at a moment’s notice. It’s a voluntary job he happily does to help keep the event machine oiled and few referees seem to have his relentless glare of concentration, too.
With some of the leading contenders falling short, the way should be paved for one man to take advantage: Tony Spredeman.
Spredeman is, it’s not an exaggeration to say, a god-like figure. If the elusive, retired Collignon is foosball’s Pele, Spredeman has been its Messi and Ronaldo. He has his own website, his own range of merchandise; he’s a central figure in the definitive table soccer documentary (Joe Heslinga’s 2019 production Foosballers) and he’s widely accepted as the only player making their sole living from the sport… all without an ego to match.
As the winner of six of the last eight Tornado Championships — the epicentre of the brutally competitive US scene — Spredeman should be untouchable, unreachable. In any other individual sport, he’d be arriving at the back door of the arena, flanked by his entourage, fans happy to get a mere glimpse. Instead, this lank-haired 37-year-old, shy-looking but with a beaming grin for pretty much everybody, has none of the swagger of someone frequently described as “unbeatable”. He is, though, by most measures, the man.
But he’s not perfect. Virtually unplayable on his home turf, Spredeman has never won the multi-table assault course of the ITSF Worlds, save for a solitary doubles title in Nantes eight years ago. In 2009, he reached his one and only singles final, led two games to one, but lost to Yannick Correia of Luxembourg. (The tiny Grand Duchy punches well above its weight, it turns out, thanks in part to foosball funding from its Olympic Committee and their easy access to Europe’s four main competition tables. It’s one of this sport’s countless, charming quirks.)
In fact, since finishing third in 2010, Spredeman hasn’t even troubled the singles podium at the Worlds. This post-pandemic resumption of the tournament cycle should have been the catalyst for his second wind, the missing piece of his foosball puzzle, the crowning glory for the sport’s understated ambassador. But — and this is where the ubiquitous phrase “that’s foosball” can safely be deployed — nothing is that simple in this game.
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Spredeman arrives in Nantes looking like a shell of a man. Variations of the story do the rounds inside the arena but the crux is this: he’s dragged himself to the Worlds after being in hospital for 12 days after an extreme allergic reaction to some medication. One whisper is that Spredeman — who spent years training using only his “weaker” left side to improve his overall speed and dexterity — has lost some of the feeling in his hands. If he has indeed been reduced to a mere foosball mortal, he’s doing his damndest to hide it.
As the No 3 seed, Spredeman progresses automatically to the eliminations phase, which saves him from the toil of the eight-game, first-to-eight gauntlet of the qualifiers. But that lack of match sharpness costs him in an unfortunate last-64 draw against the towering, top-knotted Austrian — and eventual semi-finalist — Raffael Hackspiel. Spredeman’s singles redemption story is over before it’s really begun.
So we (probably) invented it — but are we any good at it? The question that has plagued British football for most of its history seems to be just as relevant for its most distant of cousins. The answer comes in the form of a man who didn’t even qualify for the singles.
Rob Atha has the slightly detached air of a man who has won pretty much everything — and could probably have completed the set if he wanted to. He is a former British No 1 but now seems to care little about the rankings. He appears to be one of only three players at the entire tournament with a Wikipedia page but, like Spredeman, has never won a multi-table World Championship.
“I think I won my first UK title in the open events at 13,” says Atha. “I’d only been playing a year and then my dad, Boris, a legend of British foosball as well, gets in touch with a lot of people, trying to promote me, and they did that quite well. So I got a few shows and went on Blue Peter, which was on live at the time. I think Brian Blessed was on it…”
At the 2019 Worlds in Murcia, playing singles almost as an afterthought, Atha reached the final… only to lose to Hermans. Surely there’s a foosball fire still burning for that?
“I feel like, if I put my mind to it, I can still compete at the highest level — that’s not a problem,” he says. “And I just… for some reason, even though this is an amazing production here, there’s actually no prize money. To spend this amount of money and not give anything back to the players… I don’t agree with it.”
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Despite the overwhelmingly Olympian spirit of the event, it’s easy to see Atha’s point of view on prize money. He’s here with Team GB but has seen things far beyond any of his colleagues: two Blue Peter badges, the tag of “the wonderkid of table football” by the BBC, a teenage year spent training in the US with former Tornado champion and World Series of Poker millionaire Billy Pappas, doubles world titles alongside Collignon on all four of the European tables, and one invitation to the short-lived Foosball Master Tour.
Held, of course, in Las Vegas in 2009, this was a fleeting look at a parallel universe to what foosball has now become. Try to imagine a merger between WWE and the International Chess Federation and you’d be roughly on the right lines:
The roaring, high-fiving Atha of Vegas ‘09 is not the one sat beside me in the Palais des Sports in 2022. “Obviously, life changes,” he says. “You grow up a little bit, you put things into perspective. I probably enjoy competing a little bit more now because back then, I used to be dead serious and I probably didn’t enjoy it as much as I should have.
“I was more focused on winning and that takes a lot of mental energy, especially in tournaments. But now I’ve got a few friends here I only see in tournaments. It’s really more of a social event and I’ll play as well but I made a mistake this year of not touching a table before I came. When you get older, it’s harder to play at a higher level when you don’t do any practice at all.”
If Atha, for now, is happy enough to have settled into his own plateau, the rest of Team GB are grasping the Worlds nettle. As Marsh’s challenge falters, Stephen Lyall, who combines playing with his role as CEO of InsideFoos, a global on-demand foosball streaming platform, steps up. The British No 2, ranked 18 in singles by the ITSF, is not quite as open a book as his chattier team-mates but he quietly storms through his bracket, knocking out the giant Austrian and No 4 seed Matthias Schopf along the way.
A quarter-final win over the well-supported Raphael Hempel — “I’m surrounded by Germans here” — sets up a semi-final against another German. Ruben Heinrich, a 41-year-old teacher so annoyingly ripped, tall and healthy that he actually looks like a 28-year-old Oliver Bierhoff at Euro ’96, sizes Lyall up. For the first eight minutes and 49 seconds — a relative foos eternity — nobody scores a point, until Heinrich puts one past his own goalie.
But the German is ultimately too strong, too well drilled on both the Leonhart and Garlando tables. He beats Lyall 3-1 and then, in one final twist for the men’s singles, conquers the last remaining modern legend, Austria’s Kevin Hundstorfer, to take his first-ever World Championship.
My Linh Tran — one of the most rock-solid competitors I see across three days — makes it a German double by seeing off home favourite Cinderella Poidevin in the women’s singles final. This is not, the medals table confirms, any sort of coincidence.
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Like Germany’s football World Cup win in Brazil in 2014, this is a triumph of infrastructure and attitude. “They’ve got 10,000 members, they’ve got 400 clubs,” explains Hawkes. “And in Germany, table football is played very, very clean — you have to play in sports uniform, they do it in sports halls, it’s a very safe place to take your kids. You send your kids to a foosball youth camp in the summer. It’s done with training and coaches.”
With respect to the German conveyor belt of pristine machines (in 2018, Heinrich decided, at 36 years old, that he wanted to run his first-ever marathon, so he just… did) I go in search of the less gilded, rougher, more charming edges of these championships.
Rhys Roberts and Dave Ziemann have a combined age of about 130. Roberts, a joyfully vast man with a headband locked in place for most of the week, barely needs a first invitation to talk about either 1) foosball, 2) the history of foosball or 3) the history of British foosball. He shows me a picture of his shed at home in Cockfosters, the unofficial Team GB pre-tournament training camp which a passing colleague calls “his foosball chalet”.
Roberts is partnering Ziemann in two variants of the over-63s doubles (they eventually take gold and bronze) and they are each other’s perfect foil. The former’s energy is matched by the latter’s analytical steel: Ziemann recently designed some software that records foosball match-play and generates data visualisations from the video footage. The Athletic’s John Muller, frankly, should be terrified:
Graphic: David Ziemann
Their doubles business concluded, Roberts and Ziemann now find themselves back on the main stage to face each other in the over-63s singles. Team GB joke about how they will divide themselves up on the tableside benches to cheer them both on and, at this moment, it feels too easy to be flippant about niche sports and their world championships.
The two men meticulously prepare the table — wraps are applied, oil is delicately pipetted, the surface wiped as if it’s about to have dinner served straight onto it — before the first mandatory call of “ready?”. This is a discipline. This is a sport.
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But it’s a sport I haven’t — at least for a good 15 years — had a go at. In steps Steve Edwards, known exclusively as “Fast Eddie” and the nicest man I have ever met.
“Would you like to have a go?”. Fast Eddie commandeers a vacant Roberto Sport (not my strongest table, famously, but I’m happy to adapt) to run me through the basics of elite-level foosball.
Only once you realise that it’s not supposed to be the relentless, chaotic, low-percentage game of back-and-forth chance do you truly discover how bad you are at table football.
Passing it out from the back? Like threading a needle with overcooked spaghetti. Controlling the ball when you’ve miraculously managed to pass it to yourself? Like being thrown a tiny, live grenade. Shooting? Actually, my snake shot isn’t too shabby. But, like all pub-adjacent pursuits — your snookers, your darts, your “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” quiz machines — foosball is as infuriating to the rank amateur as it is alluring.
By the second day of wall-to-wall international foosing (what other sport plays for 14 — FOURTEEN — hours straight?), the concept of who’s legendary or not starts to blur.
I accompany Hawkes and his Team GB men’s doubles partner Joe Jennings-Bundy to their opening qualification match against Peru. Hawkes is the defensive specialist of the pair while Jennings-Bundy is a clinical finisher (can you have “finishing” in foosball? I keep saying it and nobody seems to mind) and the Peruvians are beaten 8-6 on their chosen Tornado. A duo from Finland are also despatched by the same scoreline but these are mere sharpeners. Somewhere between all this, an entire class of primary school children line up for the autographs of two men ranked 839th and 1,173rd in the world in men’s doubles.
Next up, though… is “The Duke”.
Todd Loffredo essentially is foosball. One player describes him as “a foosball hobo”, others have dubbed him “the Michael Jordan of foosball”. Either way, his permanently philosophical “Ah, what can you do?” facial expression belies the status of a man who has been there from the very start: from when foosball was so huge in the US that they held million-dollar nationwide tours, Porsches were being put up as prizes and manufacturers were shipping 5,000 tables a month.
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Loffredo truly has been there and done it. As well as a couple of Tornado singles in the 1980s, he won the doubles championship 19 times across four decades. “I really loved foosball”, Loffredo says in Heslinga’s documentary. “I mean it, I loved the game like a woman.”
Forty years deep into the game, “The Duke” looks effortless compared to the aggressive, fast-twitch units of modern foos. Others punch, force and squirt the ball through gaps and along the walls, but Loffredo is more of a Pirlo, threading the ball gently but swiftly between the lines.
His partner Michael Stahl, though, brings the fire: soon after passive-aggressively calling for a jar by Hawkes (the Team GB man shrugs it off with a “nah”, Stahl doesn’t budge and Hawkes relents with a sigh before the US score immediately), Stahl unleashes the lesser-seen “slingshot” to bring the US to match point. It’s a brilliant flourish, the ball pinged between two of the front three, then off the wall, and then thwacked, first time, into the near side of the goal. It happens in a blur but my Powerleague five-a-side brain still recognises enough authority in the shot to let out a “phwoof” of appreciation.
The US win 8-4, without breaking sweat, and Loffredo — the student of the game turned professor — offers up a post-match clinic to the Team GB pair, the foosball equivalent of being invited up to Alex Ferguson’s office for a post-match glass of red. The lessons don’t quite sink in: Hawkes and Jennings-Bundy lose their next six games in a row, including another clinic in lethal finishing by a policeman from Luxembourg called Steve.
Over in another corner of the greenhouse-like overspill arena that houses the sprawling round-robins of the qualifiers, a guttural roar pierces the hubbub.
“You said my feet were slow! MY HANDS AREN’T.”
That is the sound of Traci “The Beast” Brubaker. That’s not her official nickname, thankfully, but her Team USA doubles partner Amy Powers is later happy to throw it out there. The 52-year-old mother from Colorado is a mountainous in-game presence, her face racing through each humanly possible shade of red as the points are racked up at either end. Sarbulescu, the serene top seed of the women’s singles, is blown away in the last 32 by this tornado of the Tornado. Is she always like this?
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“This is how Jesus made me,” replies Brubaker, with a huge take-it-or-leave-it grin. “I don’t like to be argumentative at all but I don’t like to get pushed around and if I’m sure about something, then we’re going to have to discuss it. But I’ve been instructed to stop caving in so easily in the name of peace. That’s hard for me because I’m a lover and a mum… and a fighter.”
If the “foosball family” is a thing — and it’s certainly making a far more compelling case than the football equivalent — then the wonderfully warm Brubaker could easily be its matriarch.
“If it paid millions, it’d be a great profession — and I’d definitely have somebody else do the laundry.”
Blood ties run through the tournament. Team USA are underpinned by the Rue clan from Lousiana — branded, brilliantly, “the First Family of Foos” — but there are no passengers here. Dad Terry (a chief anaesthetist by trade, so his nickname is sorted if foosball does ever go full darts one day, and a former backing dancer for Marky Mark) is playing in five events and is a cornerstone of the men’s Nations squad.
His wife (and, handily, mixed doubles partner) Keisha is also competing across the board. Younger daughter Arden Rue takes fifth place in the under-13 singles, while 19-year-old Sullivan is the rising star of US foosball, with a swagger to match. Between table-switches, she twirls her wraps in the air before fixing her opponent with an icy glare. “Ready?”
The Rues may win the battles but Team GB have the Warrs: Darren, Matt and Alice, from Darlington. (Dad Darren calls it the “hotbed” of UK foosball, a fraction of a second before I plan to ask him, semi-seriously, if Darlington is the “hotbed” of UK foosball.)
Darren is a football coach and talks like one as he reflects on the psychological challenges Alice has to conquer stepping up from the UK regional scene to the Worlds, where few prisoners are taken. Her under-19s singles semi-final against Germany’s Helena Lach is delayed by an oddly protracted argument over a coin-toss. Warr’s rhythm abandons her and she ultimately settles for fourth — the main women’s draw is the aim for the next Worlds.
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As the other 30-odd finals are ticked off, one by one, the weekend is reserved for the Nations event to take centre stage. Iran’s withdrawal hands Team GB what turns out to be a crucial walkover victory in the group stages: despite finishing bottom below Switzerland and Bulgaria, the Brits advance to the knockouts with the best goal difference of the also-rans. In the last 16, it’s the Americans.
The format of the Nations event is broadly comparable to the Davis Cup in tennis: two singles and two doubles matches play to a total of 40 points, only switching to the next combination when one team hits 10, 20 and 30.
Team GB captain Callum Oakes — fresh from his first Master Tour victory in Zagreb earlier in the month — takes down the simmering Stahl 10-9 in game one. Atha teams up with Lyall for the doubles leg, but Team USA edge ahead 20-19. Spredeman summons whatever energy he has against Marsh to extend the lead to 30-26. For every goal Team GB claw back, Team USA fire one in response.
My foosball addiction status at this point: have actually paid £6.99 to watch a live stream. My investment — in every sense — does not pay off: Stephen Lyall and Jon May are kept at bay by Rue and Loffredo, losing 40-36, and the Americans will march on to the final.
“Again begins the ridiculous, terrible waiting, in which we do not know which object to move, which gesture to repeat — what to do in order to make what we are waiting for happen.”
Back in 1928, our friend Andre Breton could easily have been forecasting the excruciatingly tense wait for Loffredo’s trademark pause on his three-bar, “The Duke” not moving a millimetre, before shooting. Personally, after 48 hours of staccato foosball (even in my sleep, I hear that ger-dung), I am spent.
Team spirit is such a hackneyed concept in professional sport but it’s here in abundance in Nantes: on the tables, at the bar, on the comically-proportioned, 25-foot Bonzini table in the entrance hall, up in the commentary gantry and down in the furthest-flung corner of the qualification arena.
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With all 39 podiums complete, Lounas finally brings down the curtain on Nantes 2022. The venue for 2024 will soon be ready to announce, he says, suggesting that it could be on its travels again. How about London, and a tribute to foosball’s disputed creator, Harold Searles Thornton?
“I would love to do it in the UK one year and we are an obvious candidate,” says Hawkes. “But our federation is much smaller and less mature than the others, and the most important thing is to be able to mobilise a huge crew of excellent people to make it happen.”
This is not a minor point. Foosball has the numbers, it has the quality, it has the organisation, the presentation and the history, and yet most of the people who play it, watch it and govern it seem reassuringly… normal.
Maybe it does need more egos and more trash-talking, some more pyrotechnics and the odd upturned table, but it would be a shame to leave the people behind. As Atha deliberates about heading to Kentucky and the $100,000 Tornado Championships in September, turning his back on all of this for another couple of years, he concedes that it will be inconceivable to jack it in altogether.
“Everyone comes in and out,” he says. “No one ever retires.”
(Photos: Getty Images; design: Sam Richardson)