Most teams lose the World Cup. Jesus teaches where real victory begins | Opinion

On the evening of July 6, the final whistle blew as crowds glumly filed out of FIFA Fan Fest and the Power & Light District watch party in Kansas City. U.S. men’s national team coach Mauricio Pochettino embraced his players, and everyone in the country felt it in their chest. The end of an incredible run for the host country came sooner than fans had been hoping.

That’s the strange power of the World Cup. It gathers billions of us into a single, shared experience: Most of what we love will not win.

Only one team lifts the trophy. The rest go home. And every four years, we rehearse the same lesson our culture works hard to help us forget: that life, as we’ve been taught to measure it, is mostly losing.

But what if we’ve misunderstood what winning is?

The story we tell ourselves is simple: Winning is up and to the right. More success. More recognition. More security. More than the next person. And losing is anything that interrupts that trajectory.

You can feel that logic everywhere. Not just on the pitch, but in careers, relationships, even identity. Winning means you’re seen, secure and significant. Losing means you’re slipping, replaceable or falling behind.

That’s why these moments hurt so much. Not just because a team loses, but because it feels like a verdict. But there’s an older way of seeing this.

Jesus once told a story about a landowner who hired workers throughout the day — some at sunrise, others at noon and some just before quitting time. At the end of the day, he paid all of them the same wage.

Those who worked longest were outraged. By every normal metric, they had done more. Earned more. Won more.

But the landowner wasn’t running a meritocracy. He was revealing something else entirely: that the value of a life is not established by comparison, accumulation or outcome.

“The last will be first, and the first last.”

It’s not just a comforting reversal. It’s a disruption. A challenge to the entire framework where winning means getting ahead and losing means falling behind.

Because in that framework, even winning is fragile. It depends on staying ahead, staying visible, staying better than someone else. It turns life into a constant negotiation of worth.

But Jesus pushes further. He doesn’t just say that losing isn’t failure — he suggests that the way we cling to winning may cost us the very life we’re trying to secure.

His teachings say, whoever wants to save their life will lose it. Whoever loses their life will find it. That’s not resignation. Rather, it’s an invitation.

Not all loss is the same. There is loss that diminishes us. But there is also a kind of loss that is chosen, the kind that gives itself away for others. The kind that refuses to measure worth by comparison. The kind that steps out of the anxious race to prove, secure and accumulate.

That kind of losing doesn’t hollow a life out. It fills it.

Japan fans collect trash in act of humanity

You can see glimpses of it even in this tournament. In players who run themselves empty for their teammates. In quiet acts that don’t show up on stat sheets. In the way a nation can rally not just around victory, but around shared love, effort and sacrifice. Even after Japan’s knockout round loss to Brazil in Houston, fans filled their Samurai Blue bags with trash left in the stadium — an act of humanity that hasn’t garnered the same headlines as final scores.

Those are not the metrics culture has trained us to celebrate. But they are closer to what endures. In the end, most teams lost this World Cup. The question is not how to avoid that outcome. It’s whether we can imagine a different kind of victory altogether.

One that isn’t built on being first, but on giving ourselves away.

One where losing, at least the kind rooted in love, is not the opposite of winning, but the way into it.

That’s exactly what Jesus did. He didn’t just talk about losing your life to find it. He walked that path all the way to the end, giving up his life so others could live.

By every normal measure, it looked like defeat. But the world was being offered a different kind of win. One not built on someone else’s failure, but on a selfless love big enough to hold everyone.

Perhaps the real spectacle of this World Cup isn’t just celebrating the nation that wins. Rather, it’s tens of millions of people asking themselves whether we are capable of and willing to meet loss knowing that the worth in each of us was never measured by a scoreboard to begin with.

Tyler Johnson is chief impact officer at the 501(c)(3) nonprofit Come Near, the group behind the He Gets Us campaign. He holds a doctorate in global urban transformational leadership from Bakke Graduate University.