Why the World Cup Can Feel Like War
Have a look at a photograph taken this past December in the Kennedy Center. There is Donald Trump, grinning from ear to ear, with a flashy gold medal around his neck. In front of him is a large, phallic gold (or perhaps gilded) trophy depicting hands holding up the globe (or perhaps a soccer ball). It was Trump’s very own “FIFA Peace Prize.” Beside him, clapping his hands, stands Gianni Infantino, the president of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), organizer of this year’s World Cup soccer tournament in North America.
Infantino, a lanky Italian-Swiss man with a ready grin, especially in the presence of autocrats, had publicly lobbied for Trump to win the Nobel Peace Prize last fall. And so, when that didn’t happen, he improvised a FIFA equivalent, with a medal to go with it. Trump will doubtless claim this year’s tournament as his own, and FIFA will not stand in his way.
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Infantino’s gesture might strike people unacquainted with World Cup history as shamelessly fawning. But FIFA’s historical mission has been to squeeze as much money as possible out of global soccer competitions. Bribing officials, milking national economies, and cozying up to corrupt politicians and dictators have long been essential features of the enterprise.
It wasn’t always like that. FIFA was founded by a number of European countries in 1904 and came into its own in the nineteen-twenties under the presidency of Jules Rimet. Rimet, a devout French Catholic, harbored lofty ambitions: to unite the world through sports, uplift the poor, and rise above sordid politics. And yet the 1934 World Cup in Italy was turned into a spectacle of adoration for the Fascist dictator Mussolini. In 1938, the Austrian soccer team dissolved after Hitler’s Germany annexed its country, and the German players greeted the stands with Nazi salutes.
A pattern was set. In 1973, FIFA inspected Chile’s national stadium, in Santiago, shortly after thousands of people had been detained and tortured there by General Augusto Pinochet’s soldiers. Its report concluded that “the grass on the pitch is in perfect condition.” In 1978, the tournament, held in Argentina, was an opportunity for the odious military junta to bask in soccer glory. Large sums of cash, lavish gifts, and other assorted inducements helped deliver the tournament to Vladimir Putin’s Russia in 2018, four years after the invasion of Crimea, and, in 2022, to Qatar, where poorly paid foreign laborers risked—and sometimes lost—their lives building vast new stadiums under a blistering sun.
Infantino’s predecessor, another Swiss operator, Sepp Blatter, was particularly skilled at the darker arts of soccer politics. Blatter has always denied such accusations. But, as Simon Kuper explains in his highly engaging “World Cup Fever: A Soccer Journey in Nine Tournaments” (Pegasus), Blatter “kept power by funneling chunks of FIFA’s income to national and continental football barons. . . . Corruption was Blatter’s system. He made sure that the people around him were corrupted. If anyone dared challenge him, then FIFA’s ethics machinery—which he controlled—would reveal the challenger’s wrongdoing.” So what’s an ad-hoc “FIFA Peace Prize” in light of World Cup history?
For all the federation’s failings, Kuper remains a passionate follower of World Cup soccer. He has attended nine of the tournaments, held every four years in different parts of the globe. His book is based on the notes he took while rushing from match to match and staying at hotels, from Tokyo to Donetsk, that all somehow looked the same. The resulting chronicle, organized around those excursions, is also an essay about history, national cultures, and politics. Kuper’s first World Cup was in 1978, which he watched on TV as an eight-year-old. The last in his chronological account of games, and the countries where they took place, was the one in Qatar. The winner that year was Argentina. The runner-up was France; Croatia placed third. The men in the V.I.P. seats were Arab billionaires. “The World Cup,” Kuper observes, “is a vision of an alternative international hierarchy, in which the US is an also-ran and China doesn’t even figure.”
Kuper clearly takes a dim view of FIFA. So why his soccer madness? “Many people love the World Cup despite the football,” he writes. I think I know what he means. In 1978, I got up early in Tokyo to watch my home team, the Netherlands, lose the final to Argentina in Buenos Aires while the generals slapped their knees in delight. Ten years later, I was up even earlier in my Hong Kong apartment to watch the Netherlands beat Germany in the semifinal of the European Championship. That weekend, more people celebrated in the streets of Amsterdam than on the day of liberation from Nazi occupation in May, 1945. We had beaten the Germans—finally! All this had much to do with memories of the war. But it was also bound up with a more recent humiliation: defeat by West Germany in the 1974 World Cup final. The Dutch team, led by the great Johan Cruyff, had been cast as long-haired, freedom-loving, antiauthoritarian rock stars, while the Germans were disdained as robotic, we-follow-orders thugs. It was a grotesque caricature, but that didn’t change how we felt.
I say “we,” a pronoun I usually shun. But, as I believe Arthur Koestler once remarked, there is nationalism, and then there is football nationalism, the latter being much more deeply felt. Koestler, a British citizen raised in Budapest, remained a Hungarian soccer nationalist all his life. I was born and raised in the Netherlands, and though I left in 1975, I confess to being a staunch Dutch soccer chauvinist.
So is Simon Kuper. Born in Uganda to South African Jewish parents, raised and educated in the Netherlands and in Britain, and now a French citizen, Kuper—like Koestler, and like me—is someone Stalin might have called a “rootless cosmopolitan.” But he is an ardent supporter of the Dutch national team, whose players wear the orange colors of the Dutch royal house. He loves their free-flowing style. Kuper was, however, only four years old when his adopted team was defeated by Germany in 1974. His take on that loss is that the Dutch didn’t really mind, because, with their beautiful attacking game, they had been the moral victors. Actually, no, people did mind, deeply. To be beaten by the krauts felt like the Second World War all over again.
A stocky ex-soccer player named Rinus Michels was the Dutch coach at the time. He liked to claim that “football is something like war.” A touch hyperbolic, perhaps, but in contrast to many other sports—tennis, say, or swimming—soccer does tend to stir up primitive tribal instincts. The flag-waving, the face paint, the pugnacious songs, the banners, the bellicose taunts at the opponents, the arms flung out in unison foster a collective spirit that can turn violent at times. It also has a quasi-religious aspect. After a big international game, I once saw fans in the street kneeling on the flag of their victorious team with their arms outstretched and their heads banging the ground, like religious fanatics.
Baseball and American football doubtless inspire feelings of mad intensity as well. But the frenzy of soccer fans has resulted in an actual war. This happened in 1969, when the so-called Soccer War broke out between El Salvador and Honduras. Tensions had already been running high, over borders and other issues, but a World Cup qualifying game in Mexico (won by El Salvador) pushed the two nations over the edge.
Perhaps the nearest thing in U.S. sporting history to a political confrontation was the rematch, in 1938, of the boxers Joe Louis and Max Schmeling. The fight was touted by the Nazis as a would-be demonstration of “Aryan” racial superiority. Louis, “the Brown Bomber,” had lost the first bout, in 1936. Two years later, Louis beat Schmeling in the first round. “I knew I had to get Schmeling good,” he later wrote. “I had my own personal reasons, and the whole damned country was depending on me.” (Schmeling may have been the Nazis’ great white hope, but he wasn’t a bad man. He refused to join the Nazi Party, and he and Louis became good friends.)
Still, Americans have no memories of foreign invasions that can be displaced onto athletic contests. To get the flavor of the kind of resentments I mean, think of the ice-hockey game in Stockholm between Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union, in March, 1969, seven months after Soviet tanks crushed the Prague Spring. The Czechs refused to shake hands with their opponents on the ice. When they triumphed, after fighting like hell, Prague exploded in riotous celebrations. Vengeance was sweet that night.
There is another difference. In the U.S., hand-on-heart, support-our-veterans, flag-waving patriotism is widely regarded as legitimate, even laudable. In much of Europe, by contrast, the chauvinism that had fuelled two devastating World Wars rendered such displays largely taboo after Hitler’s defeat. The British, having escaped German occupation, could still indulge in military pomp; elsewhere in Western Europe, martial pride and overt patriotism were distasteful reminders of a dark past. European unification was meant, chiefly, to put all that behind them. Peace and prosperity were the goals.
This was particularly true, for obvious reasons, in the Federal Republic of Germany. And yet football nationalism could not be entirely repressed even there. Kuper recounts “the miracle of Bern,” when the West German team beat the formidable Hungarians in the 1954 World Cup final in Bern, Switzerland. The humiliation of wartime defeat could be forgotten in that delicious moment of victory on the soccer field. Popular feeling was expressed in the phrase “Wir sind wieder wer!”—“We’re somebody again!” Peco Bauwens, the president of the German Football Association, celebrated the victory in a Munich beer hall (of all places), praising the German players for showing what “a healthy German, who is loyal to his country, can achieve” and even extolling “the Führer Principle.”
Kuper’s point is that Bauwens, in his boorish way, had “grasped a new truth: after 1945, football had started to replace war in Europe as a source of national pride.” What was shunned in other public venues found an outlet in soccer stadiums. That was where historical wrongs could be ritually avenged and raw nationalism celebrated, sometimes in a carnival spirit—Dutch fans in orange bearing models of fat yellow cheeses on their heads, French fans holding up live roosters (le coq gaulois), Scots in kilts, English fans dressed up like King Arthur’s knights—and sometimes in a more brutal fashion.
English soccer hooligans were especially feared. Trashing foreign towns was a common form of aggression in the nineteen-eighties and nineties. It was as though bored young Englishmen, nostalgic for their fathers’ Churchillian spirit, wanted to fight the war all over again. In matches against German teams, England’s supporters mimicked Second World War fighter planes and sang the theme song of “The Dam Busters,” a popular movie about a raid over Germany in 1943.
Club teams can be at least as tribal as national ones, often more so. In Scotland, the rivalry between the Rangers (Protestant) and Celtic F.C. (Catholic) once resembled a religious war. In cities such as London and Amsterdam, soccer clubs were long associated with particular ethnic or religious communities, varying by neighborhood. These identities often outlived any connection to social reality. Jews were once heavily represented among the North London supporters of Tottenham Hotspur, and Spurs remain “the Yids” to hostile fans of other English clubs. It scarcely matters that neither the Spurs nor any other major English club ever fielded more than a handful of Jews. Ajax, in Amsterdam, has acquired a similar reputation, prompting rival fans to chant the most offensive antisemitic slurs imaginable, often invoking gas. Ajax supporters have responded by waving Israeli flags, even though many of their players are of African, Moroccan, or even Japanese descent.
Kuper, as a man who has lived in many different countries, writes well about the cultures and foibles of soccer teams and their fans. A journalist for the Financial Times, he is one of the best sportswriters in the English language today. But he does more than analyze the skills of different squads and players (though he does this superbly); he uses his expertise to explain cultural differences, too.
Reporting on the World Cup from Japan, in 2002, he notes—quite rightly—that Japanese sports fans are disciplined and well behaved. Their comportment only heightened the anxiety when Japan, hardly a traditional soccer nation, was chosen to host the tournament: English hooligans were expected to descend. I was there, too, reporting for a London newspaper, and watching the English fans was indeed a strange experience. On the train to the stadium in Sapporo, Japanese commuters sat in visible confusion as burly Englishmen in T-shirts pounded on the windows and bellowed songs opposing the Irish Republican Army. I was bewildered as well—anti-I.R.A. chants in Sapporo?—but there was no actual violence.
Why are Japanese crowds so docile? Kuper suggests that, where English hooliganism represents a grotesque form of nostalgia, postwar Japanese civility is a pose predicated on collective amnesia about wartime atrocities. Yet Japanese crowds were well behaved long before 1945. War memories are not the issue here. Kuper is on surer ground in South Africa, where his blend of sociopolitical analysis and sports reporting is at its best. The country he knew as a child was poisoned by apartheid, and it was also sports-mad. Money and resources flowed almost entirely to sports favored by whites—cricket and rugby—while soccer was left mostly to Black South Africans, playing in substandard, ramshackle stadiums in squalid townships. They played with great panache nonetheless, and the game acquired a special importance. As Kuper explains, “Any non-white South African aspiring to power before about 1990 couldn’t find it in politics. So non-white power-seekers (almost all of them men) often became either clergymen or football officials.” His great-uncle Leo, who was a sociologist and a prominent anti-apartheid activist, observed, “Political energy, denied any other expression, is projected on the Football Association.”
Black South African soccer developed its own clubs, its own superstars, and its own rough-and-ready style. When South Africa was chosen to host the World Cup in 2010—the first African nation to receive this dubious distinction—hopes ran high that the national economy, and the Black majority, would benefit. Local businesses would flourish; the game beloved by Black South Africans would finally be played on proper pitches in modern stadiums.
None of this came to pass. Gigantic stadiums were built, but largely in white neighborhoods. Money that might have been directed toward poor Black communities was instead sunk into what became white elephants, so to speak. FIFA’s official sponsors profited handsomely, while local businesses were barred from mentioning the World Cup. As Kuper writes, “Almost all the hotels, shopping malls and official ‘fan parks’—along with the tens of thousands of security guards protecting the visitors—were in overwhelmingly white neighborhoods. The organisers didn’t want people wandering off in search of the other South Africas.” After the circus moved on, Black South African soccer remained mired in neglect, while cricket and rugby continued to thrive. Kuper’s verdict is as terse as it is just: “The federation’s screwing of South Africa became a parable for centuries of screwing of Africans by whites.”
And yet it would be a mistake to see FIFA simply as a bastion of white European hegemony. In the twenty-first century, professional soccer has changed in several important ways. Memories of the Second World War have faded enough that most fans no longer bristle at a German victory. After watching Germany defeat Poland at home in 2006, Kuper reflected, “I’m Jewish. I studied German history. I grew up despising the German football team. But sitting on that balcony, drinking German beer, when Oliver Neuville scored their last-minute winner, I almost cheered.”
I feel the same way. Besides, the German team, like many others in Europe, has become conspicuously multiethnic, with players of Turkish, Polish, Arab, or African descent. The players for the Dutch and French national teams are now largely from nonwhite immigrant backgrounds. Spain’s most exciting young player is Lamine Yamal, whose mother is from Equatorial Guinea and whose father is Moroccan. One reason for the rise of nonwhite European players is familiar enough: sports and show business remain among the few routes to fame and immense riches for poor minorities. The other is structural. Professional soccer has become a vast international corporate enterprise.
The biggest stars from South America, East Asia, Eastern Europe, Africa, and the Maghreb are recruited by the richest European clubs. A top English team such as Manchester City fields only a handful of English players; Liverpool’s leading star is Egyptian. Foreigners and immigrants dominate clubs like Paris Saint-Germain and Bayern Munich as well. Élite players, wherever they are born, are traded among these clubs for enormous sums. They are multimillionaires, often fluent in several languages. If top-level soccer is now played by something like rootless cosmopolitans, it’s financed by billionaires who are no longer primarily European. Paris Saint-Germain is owned by a Qatari investment group; Manchester City by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan, of Abu Dhabi; Newcastle United by a Saudi sovereign fund. Arsenal belongs to an American billionaire, Stan Kroenke, and Inter Milan has recently passed from Chinese to American ownership.
The effect on the World Cup has been profound. FIFA was always corrupt, but it has grown more so. As Kuper puts it, “Qatari royals, just like Vladimir Putin, could hand out fortunes without asking anyone’s permission, whereas western leaders were hamstrung by rules and voters.” That imbalance explains how the tournament ended up in Russia in 2018 and in Qatar in 2022. Saudi Arabia is set to host it in 2034.
During the tournament in Russia, Kuper describes Putin as having “settled down in his VIP box, chatting and laughing with his companions, Mohammed bin Salman (‘MBS’) and FIFA president Gianni Infantino.” What unfolded, he suggests, was a tableau of a new, non-Western world order, reinforced by the names circling the pitch on the advertising boards: Gazprom, Qatar Airways, South Korea’s Kia Motors.
The game itself has changed, too. Club teams, stocked with the world’s best players, are now vastly superior to national teams. The more interesting consequence of soccer’s corporatization, however, has been its effect on the fans. One might have expected that, as clubs shed their ties to nation, city, or ethnic and religious communities, the old identitarian passions would fade. Skills could still be admired, but the flag-waving, face-painting, arm-thrusting, chanting, singing, and taunting might reasonably have seemed destined for extinction. That is not what happened. Clubs coached by foreigners and staffed largely by foreign players continue to inspire the same fanatical loyalties as ever. Old rivalries—between the North and the South of England, between Madrid and Barcelona, between districts of London—persist, regardless of who happens to be wearing the colors. At the same time, this endurance suggests that tribal feeling is more supple than blood-and-soil types imagine. People will cheer for their team without much concern for where the players come from.
What is true of club soccer has increasingly become true of national teams as well. Violence in European soccer has subsided; English hooligans now seem almost quaint. The fact that tickets for major matches cost more than the best seats in an opera house may help explain this. But there could be a more unsettling reason. Soccer nationalism has become largely carnivalesque— a giant costume party, a jokey, theatrical form of chauvinism. Fading historical memory may be part of the story. As Kuper observes, after the Germans charmed spectators in 2006, when it became acceptable to like the old enemies, soccer “has stopped being war. All that was sweet, but it took some of the spice out of World Cups.”
The darker tribal emotions never disappeared, though. With the rise of right-wing populism on both sides of the Atlantic, the hatred, racism, and xenophobia once confined to soccer stadiums have migrated into the political mainstream. A right-wing British politician once lamented to me that the warrior spirit had drained from the nation’s youth. When I lightly reminded him of English soccer hooligans, he replied, in all seriousness, that this was indeed “a resource to be tapped.” International soccer can now be watched in comfort and safety, if one can afford the ticket prices. But the brutishness has merely relocated, to places far more dangerous. ♦