“IT IS A TESTAMENT to the dreadful state of the world—and the dizzying scope of Simon Kuper’s new book World Cup Fever: A Soccer Journey in Nine Tournaments—that I felt physically sick after reading it”
“Though nominally an anecdotal account of the last nine World Cups—all of which Kuper attended—it is, in effect, a snapshot of how history has dashed the hopes of the post–Cold War generations”
“Generations of soccer supporters thought that the defeat of totalitarianism would mean that people could play and celebrate when, where, and how they wanted. They thought we could finally achieve the exalted vision of early enthusiasts like Jules Rimet, FIFA’s longest-serving president (1921–54), his successor Sir Stanley Rous (1961–74), and those hopeful Uruguayans of 1930, who hosted the first tournament and had to overcome complex logistics of travel and politics to mount the event”
“They thought that the fall of the Soviet empire would bring the sunshine of rule-of-law democracy to the world, and that the injection of compassionate capital would give people the means to build a more justly competitive global order. Instead, we got parasites thirsting for money, power, and influence, venal creeps like Sepp Blatter and Gianni Infantino, Vladimir Putin and the Emir of Qatar”
“the trend he traces is clear: “FIFA’s consistent willingness to embrace brutal regimes, from Argentina’s military junta of the 1970s through Vladimir Putin and Mohammed bin Salman, was baked in from the start. It was all part of ‘peace through sport.’””
“It is an account of how people’s love for soccer and their feelings for community intersect. It is a suggestion about how the politics of soccer (and especially FIFA) represent the politics of the world”
“he is, after all, a co-author of the 2009 book Soccernomics: Why England Loses, Why Germany and Brazil Win, and Why the U.S., Japan, Australia, Turkey—and Even Iraq—Are Destined to Become the Kings of the World’s Most Popular Sport, which brilliantly applied the baseball concept of “Moneyball” to soccer, and the author of Football Against the Enemy (1994), which—along with Franklin Foer’s How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization (2004)—offers the best account of how soccer, culture, and politics mix. He also wrote Ajax, the Dutch, the War: Football in Europe During the Second World War (2003), one of the finest books about soccer and the Holocaust, and The Barcelona Complex: Lionel Messi and the Making—and Unmaking—of the World’s Greatest Soccer Club (2021), an in-depth look at arguably the world’s best club and the world’s best player”
“Using the lens of the quadrennial tournament, Kuper exposes the unpleasant and depressing ways the sports-reporting sausage gets made. We hear of the ill-kept hotel rooms, lack of sleep, constant travel, boring games, and petty politics within and beyond the media centers, all of which serves to ruin the magic of the sport”
“FIFA was set up for grassroots soccer fans to connect and for the overall benefit of the game and its players. That is the story of the unassuming Jules Rimet, after whom the iconic World Cup trophy was named”
“From 1974 onward, after Rimet and Sir Stanley Rous, it became clear that the central executives of FIFA could take World Cup money to win the votes of local soccer grandees by giving them unaccountable boondoggles. These grandees would then vote for the central executives, who in turn would continue the cycle. This is the self-serving system by which host and would-be host countries pay for the enrichment of soccer executives around the world in the name of global soccer”
“The Mundial used to be a meeting of strangers and styles of play. Supporters who never otherwise met would mingle in the streets, while the unprecedented television coverage would let viewers see players who had thrilled other countries on their screens. And the event would offer an opportunity to compare national teams’ characters”
“But globalization has meant homogenization, undermining the diversity of national styles. National teams have to play in the few ways that club teams have learned to deal with the inexorable speed of contemporary soccer”
“Through soccer, we imagine a different world. For nations like Brazil or Argentina, it’s a world where their primacy is unchallenged by the United States or China. For players, it’s a world where everyone has the same chance for 100 minutes between the white lines. For Kuper and the optimistic soccer fans, it’s a world where people come together to celebrate the sport”
“There is no way for the footballers of the world to unite without FIFA and its self-interested corruption. Rimet and Rous were amateur lovers of football who served not their own self-interest but their beloved game to the best of their abilities. But once João Havelange, then Blatter, Infantino, and the corrupt Excos (executive committee members) took control, they put themselves in a position to cash in on their votes, selling their constituents down the river”
“Every four years, the world’s most popular sport holds an international competition to find out which country will be the world champion. But it would be a mistake to think of this as a sporting event, or World Cup Fever as a simple sports book. These seven-books-in-one document a massive religious pilgrimage that burgeoned during the last century”
“Over the past century, and especially over the past 70 years (let’s say since Pelé), the tournaments have been spiritual, political, and aspirational events”
“the feverish, beautiful, maddening spectacle of soccer’s greatest stage”