WANT TO SHARE THIS ARTICLE?
• World Cup Fever: A Soccer Journey in Nine Tournaments By Simon Kuper (Pegasus Books)
When I went to my first World Cup in 1990 to watch Scotland with my dad and a couple of mates, it took me half a morning to organize. I booked two weeks leave and phoned the Italian sales rep of the magazine I worked at to organize tickets. “Sure,” he said. “No problem.” At the time, the tickets didn’t seem cheap, but none of us had to sell our family heirlooms to buy them. In fact, good seats for all three group games cost us each today’s equivalent of around $230.
Italia 90 was also Simon Kuper’s first tournament, and he opens this memoir with a similar story of spontaneously jumping on a ferry from England with friends to take advantage of corporate tickets no one else wanted. Security guards at the Italian border didn’t want to let them in because, as they were coming from England, they were surely hooligans. When they explained that they were students at Oxford University, the officials relented and allowed them to enter the country. “That’s how professional the security operation for the 1990 World Cup was,” Kuper recalls, as well as empty seats in stadiums, and a “village fête” atmosphere while watching an “amateurish” U.S. team get hammered 5-0 by the Czechs.
Kuper is soon covering World Cups as a journalist, but have no fear, this excellent book does not cover games, scores and stats. “There’s nothing deader, for a writer, than a dead football match,” he says. Thank you, and will other writers of World Cup books please take note. What we have instead is a considered and personal reflection of the tournament’s evolution over the past few decades.
Enjoy free unlimited access for 30 days.
‣ Inside access to USA’s 2026 World Cup prep.
‣ Daily TV listings for U.S. and global soccer.
‣ Exclusive interviews with players and coaches.
‣ Expert analysis of all the top stories in U.S. soccer.
Cancel anytime.
“World Cups don’t change the world,” Kuper writes. “But they do illuminate it.” Tournament founder Jules Rimet wrote that during the 1934 World Cup in fascist Italy, he had “the impression … that the real President of the international football federation was Mussolini.” FIFA’s “consistent willingness to embrace brutal regimes,” says Kuper, “from Argentina’s military junta of the 1970s through Vladimir Putin and Mohammad bin Salman, was booked in from the start. It was all part of ‘peace through sport.’”
While FIFA’s facile and self-serving world view hasn’t changed, the nature of the game on the field certainly has. “In the twentieth century, each country still played its own way. A national team was the nation made flesh. You couldn’t confuse the German style with the English or the Brazilian.” Thanks to the age of instant information and multi-national domestic leagues, tactical trends are now universal, and the tournament rarely unveils surprise teams or players. If there’s a teenage genius on display, we’ve probably seen him already a dozen times in the Champions League.
In 2002 at South Korea-Japan, the writer reflects on the mundane and extended drudgery of the tournaments for both players and journalists. The book also spotlights the changing role of the fans. Sitting in the stands at Cologne watching a deadly 0-0 tie between Switzerland and Ukraine in 2006, Kuper is thinking “what I often thought at World Cups: why are so many people watching this?” As the tournament dragged on, “the football got duller and the party got better,” with fans replacing players “as the World Cup’s main characters.” He might have added that media attention now homes in with tedious repetition on which band of (mostly wealthy) fans have come the furthest, and how loudly they can cheer for the camera, scarves and glasses raised. Yay, here’s another drunken Scotsman in a kilt.
At the 2010 tournament in South Africa, the final bill for all the stadiums – five new and five renovated – “came to about $2 billion. That money, cement and construction labour could have been used to build several hundred thousand homes for people living in shacks.” Local businesses were blocked from making money by official sponsors. Kuper: “The federation’s screwing of South Africa became a parable for centuries of screwing of Africans by whites.” Asked by the writer if the World Cup has been worth it, South African journalist Ferial Haffajee replies: “I think rationally and fiscally, absolutely not. But emotionally, I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.”
This quote maybe best sums up the way a lot of us feel about the now bloated, drawn-out spectacle, burdened with endless group games, astronomical costs, insane ticket prices, and hijacked by autocrats. We resent what it’s become, and yet it’s still the World Cup, garnered with precious memories both personal and universal. In 1990 (Maradona, Matthäus, losing to Costa bloody Rica), I was young and single and having a great time in Italy with my dad and closest friends, with whom I still share the memories.
In 1994 (Stoichkov, Hagi, Brolin, Dahlin, Romario …), I was about to leave London and move to Germany, balancing a huge life change with watching games at midnight. In 1998 (Zidane, Ronaldo, Nigeria!), I was living in Switzerland, with more than half an eye on the TV while cavorting on the sofa with my two-year-old daughter. By 2002, I was living in the U.S. and my kids were mocking me for spitting cornflakes while watching games at 8 am.
And so on. Those quadrennial markers of lives and times are more significant to us than anything that happens on the field. Meanwhile, the constant political shenanigans off the field mirror the world as we approach the end times of fossil fuel-induced environmental obliteration. French President Nicholas Sarkozy leaning on compatriot and FIFA Executive Committee member Michel Platini to vote for Qatar as host of the 2018 World Cup in the interests of the French economy “was an allegory of our times,” writes Kuper. “Eastern autocracies were co-opting western elites.”
Ironically, for all the furore about sportswashing and the corrupt awarding of hosting rights, it no longer matters much where the tournaments take place. The norm for a modern World Cup is, Kuper points out, what the French anthropologist calls a ‘non-place’ – “broadly, a ‘supermodern’ site of transience, like an airport or hotel lobby, where humans barely leave their idiosyncratic marks. Most of the stadiums are new, without handed down history. They serve as film sets, or Instagram backdrops. You’re in Nizhny Novgorod but it could have been Johannesburg.”
But, somehow, it’s still the World Cup. We’ll likely all be watching this summer as the world keeps burning around us.
Soccer America rating: 9/10.
• World Cup Fever: A Soccer Journey in Nine Tournaments By Simon Kuper (Pegasus Books) Kindle | Hardback
Ian Plenderleith’s “Rock n Roll Soccer: The Short Life and Fast Times of the North American Soccer League” is still available HERE. His latest book, The Last Amateur, can be bought HERE or direct from the UK publisher, Halcyon.
• As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
WANT TO SHARE THIS ARTICLE?
Enjoy free unlimited access for 30 days.
‣ Inside access to USA’s 2026 World Cup prep.
‣ Daily TV listings for U.S. and global soccer.
‣ Exclusive interviews with players and coaches.
‣ Expert analysis of all the top stories in U.S. soccer.
Cancel anytime.
