It was not supposed to go this way. When FIFA, soccer’s international governing body, chose Brazil to host the 2014 World Cup in 2007, national leaders dreamed of a global showcase that would cement the country’s image as a rising power, a land of rhythm and joy welcoming the world with competence and grace. More than 60 years had passed since Brazil hosted a World Cup. On that occasion, the home squad fell to tiny Uruguay in a heartbreaking final upset. This time would be different. Stadiums would shine, fans would flood the streets, and the national team would lift the trophy once again on domestic soil, uniting a populace long accustomed to football glory.
“World Cups don’t change the world,” according to journalist Simon Kuper, “but they do illuminate it.” In World Cup Fever: A Soccer Journey in Nine Tournaments, he tries to explain how. Kuper writes for the Financial Times and is the author of several books about soccer and other topics. He is one of the few writers who has been to every World Cup since 1990. His personal experiences with the quadrennial tournament, relayed in short vignettes, form the heart of World Cup Fever (notably, he considers the 2014 Cup in Brazil to be the best he’s attended). But this is also a historical, sociological, and political examination of the Cup’s enduring yet shifting significance since it was first held in 1930.
The fate of a sporting event may seem trivial in a world beset by multiple overlapping crises, of course, but soccer is no mere diversion. It is by far the most popular sport in the world, a shared language that binds billions across borders, classes, cultures, and regimes. This year’s tournament thus poses a critical question: Is a more transparent and democratic version of international soccer even imaginable in a world veering toward reactionary authoritarianism?
Soccer made its way out of England like a merry virus in the final decades of the nineteenth century, spreading through railways, ports, and migrant labor “not as a palliative to the grimness of industrial life,” per historian James Walvin, “but largely because industrial workers, unlike others, had free time.” The regimentation of life under industrial capitalism entailed the regimentation of leisure. Urban density created crowds, while cheap transportation allowed nascent clubs to travel and spectators to follow. The spread of the game, particularly in the so-called developing world, also benefited from its association with a host of broader modernizing efforts in areas like public health and education, as well as its democratizing promise. By the 1890s, British expatriates had helped organize teams in Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Rio de Janeiro, Shanghai, Cape Town, and Calcutta. Soccer’s global rise was thus an unmistakable product of the global industrial revolution. Kuper’s beloved Dutch team, he declares, was born of social democracy.
These were proto-global institutions designed to manage modern spectacle. In each case, mass participation and cross-border competition generated administrative frameworks that were neither public nor entirely private. Their creation reflected the ongoing consolidation of modern national identity. Imagined communities produced real-world fandoms. For idealists like Rimet, sport in the age of empires need not drive disharmony. “A pious Catholic with a social conscience, he saw the game as an instrument to uplift the poor,” Kuper explains. Playing “would give working men dignity, and a sense of solidarity.” At the time, soccer was strictly an amateurish pursuit. Elites viewed the prospect of athletic professionalization as tawdry and potentially even socially disruptive. The provincial Rimet, by contrast, pushed for professional leagues of highly trained athletes as a new meritocracy, a path of upward mobility for poor and working-class men. For his entire life, the aspiring sports mogul would insist on soccer’s salutary societal effects. But the idea that it might be monetized—to use a term also coined in the mid–nineteenth century—was never far from the mind.
Rimet did fall out with fascists after the next World Cup, held in France in 1938. Nazis and collaborationist Vichy officials disdained professional sports and the social mobility they implied, as the British upper crust had decades before. As Kuper explains, Rimet “seemed able to live with the regime’s fascism; what he couldn’t accept was its support for his old enemy, amateurism in sport.” Rimet thus spent World War II away from FIFA, returning to lead the organization once the Allies prevailed. The first postwar World Cup, held in Brazil in 1950, was its most high-profile contest yet. Under his stewardship, FIFA had grown from 29 countries to 85. Rimet, overseeing his final World Cup, was riveted by soccer’s popularity in Brazil, vindication for his vision of a global community of professional soccer players avidly supported by fans from all walks of life. When it came to his life’s goal, Rimet had scored. He was replaced as head of FIFA in 1954 and died two years later at the age of 83.
Television in particular remade the World Cup’s meaning. As television ownership and broadcasting networks expanded rapidly across the developing world in the 1970s and 1980s, audiences far beyond Europe and the Americas gained regular access to the tournament. What had once been a relatively elite gathering accessible mainly to the population of the country where the tournament happened to be hosted became, by the 1970s and 1980s, a far-reaching fixture of global monoculture. Kuper fondly recalls the 1978 World Cup—the first that he followed—and observes that, “even for a kid today, the tournament can be their first glimpse of beauty and greatness.”
Kuper’s passion for the World Cup is neither treacly nor fanatical, as one might expect in a book called World Cup Fever. One might even initially find the book’s central pitch a tad gimmicky. Is there really anything to learn about, say, the 1994 World Cup—the last time it was hosted by the United States—from someone who attended every World Cup since 1990 that one could not learn from a good journalist who hadn’t? But the memoiristic elements of Kuper’s book, many of which flit across the page too quickly in just a few paragraphs, are illuminating. He sets well-observed scenes that cumulatively get at essential aspects of each tournament, weaving personal, often amusing stories in with commentary on the evolution of FIFA and the game of soccer as well as the competition’s socioeconomic and political effects.
Kuper does not suggest that soccer drives political change. Nevertheless, his vignettes demonstrate how deeply the tournament penetrates civic life, and how cynical elites milk the game for private profit. His extended treatment of soccer in South Africa, for example, is revealing. The 2010 World Cup did not dissolve enduring inequality—nobody realistically expected it to—but it briefly recast how South Africans saw themselves and how they looked to the world. Television coverage emphasizing the country’s natural beauty, not to mention the modern stadiums and colorful official festivities, projected an image of national celebration and competence that displaced familiar narratives of division and poverty. (Who could forget the buzz of the vuvuzelas?) FIFA ultimately turned a massive profit from the 2010 World Cup, largely at South Africa’s expense. The country “had few football fields for ordinary people, but it was now saddled with ten ‘world-class’ stadiums—at least eight more than it needed,” Kuper explains. It thanked the hosts by producing no tangible legacy for the poor majority of South Africans.
It is hard to foresee any impetus for a markedly more transparent version of international soccer as governments across the world become more insular and self-serving. FIFA has long functioned as a rent-seeking engine, extracting substantial sums from host nations while offering few guarantees of public benefit, turning global sport into a spectacle that flatters authority as much as it entertains. Trump, for example, in word and deed, has made the United States utterly inhospitable to soccer fans from many countries. Yet in December FIFA president Gianni Infantino bestowed on him a hastily minted peace prize, reflecting the organization’s longstanding willingness to suck up to would-be strongmen. Such gestures betray little enthusiasm for new direction.
The World Cup has long served as a mirror, revealing with unusual clarity the shifting hierarchies of power and prestige that have shaped the modern world.Jules Rimet, FIFA’s founder, imagined soccer as a force that might ennoble ordinary people, offering dignity and fellowship through honest competition. He did not intend FIFA to restrain governments or safeguard civic accountability. Its mission has always been the promotion of the game. For nearly a century, the World Cup has reflected that reality. Dazzling and galvanizing, it has also served as a mirror, revealing with unusual clarity the shifting hierarchies of power and prestige that have shaped the modern world. When global audiences watch the World Cup, they see virtuosity, emotion, and the hand of fate at work on the grandest stage in sports. They also glimpse the world as it is.
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