“Trauma Südkorea”, read the headline on the homepage of German sports news website Sportschau.de, following the premature exit of Germany’s national team from the FIFA Women’s World Cup 2023 in Australia and New Zealand/Aotearoa at the hands, or rather feet, of the Taegeuk Ladies, as South Korea’s women’s team is popularly known.

Their remarkable draw against one of the tournament’s favourites and Morocco’s 1:0 win over Colombia in the other Group H match, which saw the Atlas Lionesses qualify for the knock-out stages in their first ever World Cup, further corroborates the exponential shift in power that has been occurring in global football since at least 2018, when Russia hosted the men’s World Cup and South Korea thrashed the Germans 2:0 in their final group game, sending the latter packing: the decline of traditional Western European hegemony in global sports in favour of multipolarity.

The awarding of World Cup hosting rights to federation member states outside of Europe and the Americas, the expansion of football’s most prestigious tournament to include more teams from what Western neocolonial terminology has coined the “Global South”, and the qualitative improvement of teams from said region, as evidenced at the ongoing women’s World Cup by nations South Africa, Nigeria, Morocco and Jamaica who all progressed to the round of 16 while traditional favourites Canada, Brazil, Germany and Italy were knocked out of the group stage: these have all contributed to the reshaping of established hierarchies in world football.

And no one is as resistant to this new normal that is the changing of the guard in global sports as the DFB, the German footballing federation: in trying to maintain the Eurocentrism of the game, it has not only been critical of the expansion of the women’s World Cup to its current format of 32 teams and the upcoming men’s tournament in 2026 to 48 nations, but was also vehemently opposed to holding international association football's most important competition in Qatar and Russia.

Furthermore, for reasons only known to them, German football aficionados believe that their past successes at men’s and women’s World Cups automatically bequeath a God-given right upon them to be crowned champions in perpetuity: following the South Korean women’s 1:0 lead only six minutes into the match against Germany on Thursday, public broadcaster ZDF’s white commentator said that she couldn’t wrap her head around the fact that the German squad might prematurely get kicked out of the tournament.

But yet it did. This refusal to acknowledge changing realities and the limits of one’s own capabilities is nothing new: last year at the FIFA Men’s World Cup in Qatar, German sports pundits who spent most of their airtime attacking the Gulf nation with their casual Islamophobia and disingenuous concern for human rights, were surprised that their country did not survive the group stage, despite losing to Japan, not exactly a football heavyweight, and merely drawing with a Spanish team that was only a shadow of its former self.

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Four years before that, the same Qatar-hating organised punditry left out no opportunity to denigrate host nation Russia, and an entire nation went into shock when Germany did not make it to the knock-out stages due to a disastrous performance of the then reigning champions, both on and - with regards to the racist bullying against Turkish-heritage players Mesut Özil and Ilkay Gündoğan by German fans, the national media and even their own footballing federation - off the pitch.

Add to this the abysmal performance of the DFB’s youngsters at the UEFA European Under-21 Championship in June, finishing last in their group with a measly point, and it becomes clear why these German losses are not isolated incidents, but part of a pattern that depicts the overall qualitative decline of German footballing prowess, leading to the end of decades of dominance.

Yet instead of waving a white flag in the face of defeat, footballing Germany continues to defend a losing position and keeps reiterating its claim to power: where others would be humbled by the reality-check of their steady demise, German hubris demands rigorous denialism and doubling down on efforts to regain primacy, even if it means transgressing the borders of fair play.

Instead of acknowledging the footballing quality of their opponents, German sports pundits found ways to depreciate the value of other team’s successes: following the DFB ladies’ defeat against a whirlwind-like Colombia, the German TV commentator, despite acknowledging that “the soil of German reality is Colombian today”, went on to attribute the South Americans’ victory solely to the players’ superior “physique, emotions and enthusiasm”, not their ability to play superior football.

When Banyana Banyana, as the South African women’s team is nicknamed, beat Italy 3:2 in a veritable thriller of a final group match, another German commentator highlighted the “cunning” way in which the South African players netted the ball. When a white European player scores a beautiful goal, it is seen as skillful and artistic; when a Black African player does the same, it is seen as “cunning”: the casual, yet virulent racism of German sports commentary rarely features in discussions of racism in football in my country.

In a neocolonial world where justice is often denied to the downtrodden, it is to the realm of football where the “majority world”, an anti-Eurocentric term for the Global South coined in the 1990s by Bangladeshi photojournalist Shahidul Alam, looks for retribution, vicariously living through the sports victories of Asian and African underdogs against their far more privileged Euro- Western counterparts.

In the arena of international politics, Germany might be able to get away with fanning the flames of NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine, denying former colonial subjects in present-day Namibia meaningful reparations for the genocide committed against them and cutting funding for post-coup Niger, one of the poorest nations in the world, simply because its people refuse to remain subservient to the greedy and violent dictates of the white man’s imperialism.

But on the manicured pitches of the world’s football stadiums, the days of Germany’s uncontested power are long gone. The stubborn bubble of German hubris is bursting, one World Cup at a time.