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Jonathan Wilson, "The Power and the Glory: The History of the World Cup" (Bold Type Books, 2025)
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Jonathan Wilson
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Dr. Andrew Pace
Welcome to the New Books Network. Soccer is not only the world's most popular sport, but its most widespread cultural practice. In an age of global interconnectedness, the history of the modern world would be incomplete without an account of soccer or football, which has become interwoven with every conceivable social identity. As the world Prepares for the 2026 edition of the World cup, the most watched sporting event on the planet, a new book offers a history of what has become the greatest celebration of humanity on earth and how the World cup has grown hand in hand with the political, economic and social forces of our time. Hello and welcome back to New Books Network. I'm Dr. Andrew Pace, the host. Our guest today is Jonathan Wilson, a writer and broadcaster who is the author of 13 books. Today we'll be talking about his most recent book, the Power and the the History of the World cup, which was published by Bold type books in 2025. Jonathan, great to have you on the show.
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Jonathan Wilson
Oh, thank you very much for having me.
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Dr. Andrew Pace
Would you mind by telling us a little bit about yourself? How did you become a football soccer writer and what led you to write this grand history of the World Cup?
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Jonathan Wilson
I basically I was a failed academic that I did my masters, I failed to get funding to do a PhD and then I was just scratching around looking for a career, trying to work out what I'd do next. So this is back in the tail end of 99 and I'd always loved football. Went to my first game in October 1982 when I was six. Yeah, I have very clear memories of watching the 1982 FA cup final when I was five, the 82 World Cup. You know, I grew up in, in Sunderland in the northeast of England and I think it's pretty hard to grow up there and, and not be profoundly influenced by football. And I sort of realized slowly as 2000s went by that I could actually turn this into a job. I'd done bits of football writing before that, but hadn't really sort of thought it was a serious or could be A serious profession and happily it was. Then my first book came out, 2006, which is behind the Curtain, which was based on research I'd done in Eastern Europe. So we've got a 20th anniversary edition of that coming out certainly in the UK later this year. And then, yeah, did various other books. But I still think the World cup is my favorite bit of football. I had a sort of wobble with that because obviously experience of covering tournaments is quite different to the experience of just sort of consuming it and enjoying it. That it's a really grueling thing to cover. And so my first World cup as a journalist where I was actually on the ground was 2006, and I was, I was based with England. To be honest, covering England is the most boring thing you can do. Well, it's because it's the same players you see every week in the Premier League. And it's not. That's not really the fun bit of a World Cup. The fun bit of a World cup is, you know, traveling around, bouncing from team to team, finding new details, new stories, new players. So I didn't really get that right as a journalist probably until Russia in 2018. But yeah, the older I get, the more I think the World cup is actually football in its most interesting, purest form. Why had I not done a World Cup? Why had I not done this history before now? Well, probably because Brian Glanville's the Story of the World cup existed. It was first published in 1993 and he kept updating at every tournament up to 2014. And that was sort of seen as the definitive work on the World Cup. And I say this, Brian died May last year and he's the great doyen of English football journalism. So I don't say this critically at all because Brian was a friend, he was a huge influence over me and was extremely helpful to me. But it's an old fashioned kind of book. It's written from a notebook. It's things he's seen or people he's talked to telling him what they've seen. Whereas now we clearly have this access to this extraordinary range of information that just wasn't available to his generation, that you can pay a small monthly fee and you have access to the national library of Argentina or Hungary or Russia or wherever. And suddenly you can get documents, you can get newspapers, you can get books. Google Translate means even if you don't speak the language, you can get at least a sense of what it says. And then if it feels relevant, you can get it translated by somebody who, who actually speaks it. So suddenly we're not just dealing in English, we're dealing. And, I mean, Brian spoke fluent Italian as well, but you're not just dealing the two or three languages you might be able to speak. You're dealing in every language. And that is an enormous boon to our generation of writers. So, yeah, I think there was a sense the World cup was due in new history, and I'm very glad nobody else really got around to doing it, doing the big, serious one before I got to it.
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Dr. Andrew Pace
It's a tremendous undertaking. You know, you talk about the languages, the archives, doing research in different places, being able to interview people from around the world. And of course, you know, the World cup is almost a century old now, so there's a lot of. There's a lot of tournaments. There's just a ton of information to cover. The World Cup's been held every four years since 1930, with the exception of the 42 and 46 tournaments that were canceled due to the Second World War. I agree with you that the World cup is not just the most important soccer football tournament in the world, but there is a kind of purity to it for. For literally hundreds of millions of people who watch or engage with the World cup in some way. I think it comes close to being a kind of spiritual experience, but it has come a long way. It didn't start out that way. What were the origins of the World Cup? How did this competition come into being?
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Jonathan Wilson
So the Olympic football in 924, 928, they were both hugely popular tournaments. They're the first Olympic tournaments where you can say it's really global, where you have the best nations from South America, the best nations from Europe, Egypt as well. So it's got the global sense, which, if you go back to 1908 and 1912, that's just not really the case. And so if you look at the total revenues taken in by the 1924 Olympics in Paris, a third of all revenues came from football tournament. So I think there was a sense then this thing's too big. It's overshadowing the rest of the Olympics. It had to be held before every other sport because it was taking up so much organizational space, so much accommodation, so many fans were coming. So it was held five weeks before the rest of the Olympics. The other problem is the Olympics back then had a very strict amateur ethos, and a lot of nations were developing professional leagues. So English football had gone professional in 1885. Then in the 1920s, you have. Well, the US sets up a professional league. In 1923, Austria had gone professional, I think in 22, Hungary goes professional. In 26, Czechoslovakia, I think, slightly earlier than Hungary, but you're getting professional leagues emerging, and even places like Argentina and Uruguay and Uruguay were the great champions here. They won the 24 and 28 Olympics. They were technically amateur, but nobody really believed they were amateur. So Argentinian football formally turns professional in 1931, but actually it's been professional for at least 10 years before that and probably longer. So, I mean, for instance, after Uruguay beat Switzerland in the final of the 24 Olympics, you have the FIFA vice president saying, well, on Switzerland, marvellous. What a great example of the amateur ideal. And it's really obvious what he means by that, which is, look, Uruguay are a better football team, but they're not amateurs. You have Eduardo Galliano with his sort of extremely romanticized version, sort of. Oh, yeah, they were ice salesmen and grocers and marble cutters. I know they weren't. That's just not true. They may have been in an earlier life, but they were, you know, they would absolutely paid professionals by the time they were playing in the Olympics. So I think there was a sense that football had outgrown the Olympics and they needed for professionalism. So Gilles Rimet, the French president of FIFA, who I think is the greatest FIFA president by a million miles, both in terms of his diplomatic skills and morally, he was very pro professionalism. He thought amateurism was too restrictive. He thought that kept sport away from the working classes. So he. He wanted football to be professional so it could be played by the widest people possible. Yeah, he. He wants tournaments for professionals. And he also has this very idealistic sense that football can be a Can, you know, can generate these bonds of fraternity between nations. I think by 1934, when Mussolini's got his hands on it, that belief has been challenged quite significantly. But certainly in 1930, you rime thinks this is just good for the world.
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Dr. Andrew Pace
And there's certainly. Well, I guess can you talk a little bit more about that vision he had of what maybe this could become? I think in hindsight, we would like to think that this was in fact his grand vision. And the way that the World cup has turned out is exactly what was, you know, envisioned in 1930, but I suspect that that's really not the case.
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Jonathan Wilson
Yeah, I mean, I think he'd be pretty surprised and probably quite appalled by what the World Cup's become, but he'd seen a functioning global tournament at the Olympics in 24 and 28 and he just wants the same thing again, but under his own. Although I say that makes it sound like he's doing it for reasons of megalomania, but under FIFA's jurisdiction, without the complications of amateurism. And he doesn't get that in Uruguay, 1930, because loads of European nations don't go. There's only four European countries make the trip across the Atlantic. He's really frustrated and upset by that. I think 38 is probably getting towards his ideal in terms of the makeup of a tournament, but obviously there was he huge political complications in 38. So, I mean, I, I, when was the first modern World Cup? I guess it's quite a difficult question to answer, but I, I think the first time when you really see a tournament that everybody, all the major nations are desperate to be involved with is 54. So, you know, none of the British nations bother to compete in 30, 34, 38. England are there in 1950, Scotland could have been, but they turned down the invitation by 54. I think the world has recognized, yeah, the World cup is a great thing. We all want to be involved in it. And obviously certain countries, for political reasons or economic reasons can't do that. But in terms of the major football nations, they're all pretty much queuing up by 54. And remay is still there in 54. So that, I guess is, is probably the culmination of his vision.
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Dr. Andrew Pace
And because the World cup has become so enormous, so profitable in a sense, or at least there's a suggestion that it is, it has attracted political figures of all types from around the world as an opportunity to showcase their national identity, to prop up their regimes, acquire legitimacy. And so the World cup, as your book, I think, really shows the tournament has been very easily and regularly politicized. Can you give some specific examples of that? How has the World cup been used as a tool of nation building?
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Jonathan Wilson
Well, I think every World cup host to an extent, has used the World cup to project an image of themselves. I think that's inevitable. And that was true of Uruguay in 1930, and it was true of England in 1966. It's been true in every tournament. Where that becomes uncomfortable is where those regimes are pretty maligned. So Mussolini in 34, I think, is the way he uses the World cup is very different to how Juan Campistegui used it in Uruguay four years earlier. And for Mussolini, there's two things going on. So on the one hand, he wants to project this image of Italy as this thrusting, muscular, masculine nation. And he's not just doing that in football, he was much more concerned with individual sports. He loved motor racing and like a lot of dictators, he was quite skeptical of football. Football is not particularly controllable. Random things happen in football, as Hitler found in 36 when he went to watch Germany play Norway and they lost 2 nil. The only game of football Hitler ever attended. And you read accounts that came. Germany were all over Norway, Norway scored twice on the break and Norway win 2 nil. And Hitler's furious. So that can happen in football. And Mussolini, I think, is aware of that, but he's also aware that football is by far the most popular sport in Italy. You see from 1926 onwards, this movement towards the National League, which clearly is nation building. Italy has only recently been unified. And so to try and get this league of 20 teams from all around the country, that gives a sense of, yes, this is a nation, we do have this thing in common. So on the one hand he's projecting this image of Italy as being sort of top nation. Sporting prowess equals success of society. But he's also very keen to host well. And he recognizes that Italy has been perceived as being quite backward, quite chaotic in years immediately after the First World War. And he wants to say, no, now we are this modern, functioning, efficient, well organized country. And he's so confident that is how people would view it that he subsidizes travel for fans. He organizes live radio broadcasts of games to all the competing European nations, plus Egypt, which is, you know, the technological limitations. But, you know, he, he does that. He also pretty much, certainly in the European context, pioneers some merchandising around sport. So you can buy your, your sort of Italy World cup tea set, which is branded with, with the Vasquez with the fascist logo and the World cup logo. Even the, the World cup poster, you know, it's, it's designed by Eugenio Marinetti. You're a futurist artist, he's a you a famous artists who does the artwork for it. And all this merchandising is produced to very high standards so that people can say, oh, look at my beautiful teapot I bought in Italy at the World Cup. Isn't it a fantastic teapot? Isn't Italy great? And you see in the Italian papers towards the end of a tournament and just afterwards, every time a foreign journalist has filed a report saying, this World cup has been incredibly well run, the trains are incredibly efficient, the stadiums are incredibly beautiful, that is faithfully reported saying, look, the rest of the world is looking at us and saying we are doing things well. Italy is this modern, sophisticated country. So Mussolini does that in a very conscious way. And then the victory in the final is portrayed as a victory for fascism, for his system. And you see Rime is clearly deeply disturbed by this. I mean, you can see it physically in the photographs when he's in the stand next to Mussolini, the body language, it's really obvious that Rime is sort of shying away from Mussolini. But he also, you know, the realistic hosts for 38 the candidates were Brazil, Germany, France. And if Germany had hosted in 38 then it would have been the Berlin Olympics. But in the football context it would have been what Mussolini did in 34 times a thousand. And Rime is determined to avoid that. So he uses all his diplomatic skill to get it to France where, you know, he, he's ahead of the French Federation. He can run it his way. And I think that's, you know, a really underrated, extraordinary achievement to, to get the World cup off Hitler and get it to, to France and paradoxically, that tournament, although you've got, you know, all this sort of global turmoil swirling around it. So you know, Austria pull out at the last minute because of the an. China don't enter because of the war with Japan. Spain don't enter because of the civil war. You've got this mounting tension everywhere. And yet in a weird way that is the least politicized of all World Cups in terms of the hosts projecting themselves because Remay really played that down. But so I think that is fairly obviously his response to 34 chronic migraine.
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Jonathan Wilson
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Jonathan Wilson
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Dr. Andrew Pace
There's also some. Well, and that's, that's interesting to mention too, because in recent iterations of the World cup, it feels like the opposite has taken place. That the FIFA chairman, FIFA president has used their influence and power to direct the World cup in other ways. And it has led to lots of accusations of what we're now calling sports washing and how the World cup has been used to build up regimes and cover many of their sins or crimes as we see them. We saw that in Qatar with the human rights abuses that we saw of migrant workers. And, you know, in spite of that, the World cup continues to be so overwhelmingly popular, which I find fascinating. But I want to come back to that point because this is a podcast about diplomatic history, international history. And I think part of what is so fascinating about the World cup and the sport as a whole is that it explains much of our world that we live in. And so having said that, for. Well, let me ask you, I guess, how do you feel that the World cup has come to reflect the world we live in, if that makes sense.
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Jonathan Wilson
Yeah, I mean, to take your point about the popularity of the World cup first, I think that is actually critical. And this was something that, I mean, this seems very simple and maybe I was just very slow to cotton onto it, but I was sort of forced to confront this in Qatar, that there was two separate things going on. So on the one hand, there was the appalling abuse of migrant workers in Qatar, which feels like because those are migrant Workers who thousands and thousands of deaths, working in terrible conditions, having their passports taken from them, building infrastructure for the World Cup. So that felt a very World cup related problem. Whereas for instance, in Russia in 2018, you could say, well, sure, the annexation of Crimea was a bad thing, but it's not specifically to do with the World Cup. It's a little bit easier to distance yourself from it. Maybe not right to distance yourself, but it's certainly easier to do. Whereas I found in Doha, every time I walked into a stadium, into a media center, into a hotel, into an apartment block, onto the metro, you, I could not but be aware of the human cost of building those facilities that I was using and enjoying. And that on the one hand made it a very disturbing and difficult World Cup. At the same time, the football was amazing. The story of Messi in what we thought was going to be his last World cup, but now, now looks like it won't be finally winning. And some. You're playing some incredible football with incredible tension. The game against the Netherlands in the quarterfinal, the final. Amazing. Those two things are both true and it's. You can't pretend that one of them isn't. You shouldn't pretend one of them isn't. But of course, the fact that the football is so engaging that almost despite yourself, even though I knew that this was a tournament drenched in blood and the football is still thrilling and by the time you're in extra time in the final. Yeah, I'm just sort of a gog. So who's going to win? What's going to happen next? But that, that's why it's so powerful, because it does drag you along, it does attract you. Yeah. I filmed a documentary in Argentina back in November and I was talking to the director and he was saying that he got offered the chance three days before the final. He got offered the chance to go to Doha to have a ticket for the final and would have cost him $15,000. And he was like, yes, I'll do it. And then his bank refused a transaction and the next day he woke up. Oh, thank God for that. What was I thinking of? But you could, you can understand that, you know, he's there in Argentina, but he, he's, he's watching Argentina who, who really on a global stage are not projected positively. The football is the thing they've got, that they're really good at. Yeah, okay, they've got Borges, but they have a couple of directors, a couple of, of actors, but they're not leading the world in, in anything Apart from football, he's watching that with his, with his friends, with his family, with. With other Argentinians. Everybody's talking about it. Everywhere you look, there's adverts, there's. There's coverage of this. And so it seems in the moment, this is an entirely rational thing to do. To spend $15,000 going to. I mean, I mean, it now turns out that $15,000 for a world cup final ticket is quite cheap, which, but certainly four years ago, you know, that seemed an extraordinary. And he was saying, you know, it had taken him years to pay off. But, yeah, in the moment, he said, yes, I'll do that. So it does drag you along, and that's why sportswashing works. So that's the first point. But to answer the question you actually asked, I think what we've seen is, as the World cup has expanded, it has taken on a different form now. I think 2026 is slightly different again, but 2010, 2014, South Africa and Brazil, I think the fact that they're BRICS countries is probably significant, that they're countries looking to promote themselves, who are seeing sort of a. They're not far from me, have leap to the next level. And they, I think they, they both saw the World cup as a, as, As a bridge to potentially doing that. But what ends up happening is FIFA land in. In South Africa and Brazil, they insist on building stadiums that just are not necessary. I mean, so unnecessary that the stadium in Brasilia, the second most expensive stadium ever built, built at a cost of $900 million, and within two years it's been used as a bus depot. I mean, the wastage is incredible. And FIFA turns up in those two countries as this almost like colonizing aliens who just land there and say, oh, by the way, your tax laws don't apply to us, so you're not going to tax any of our profits. All the cost is on you. All the building work, all the infrastructure, all the organizational costs, that's your cost. The profits. We take that, you get your little chunk, but we take the profits. Thanks very much. Bye. We'll never see you again. And it left this legacy of stadiums that are, if they're still functioning, they're a massive drain on resources and are totally inappropriate in most cases for where they are. And I think potential hosts had possibly got wise to that. And so Qatar, and also Russia and Qatar, they want the World cup for their own ends, and they almost don't care how much it costs. It's not a financial issue for them. And Qatar's expenditure was. I think it's $220 billion. It's basically more than the cost of every previous World cup put together. But obviously they're not doing it. And Namibian Qatar thought they'd make a financial profit from that. The point is, it is a sportswashing. It's to say to the rest of the world, we are here, we are an independent nation. And people have heard of Qatar in a way that they hadn't in 20 years earlier. And that makes it on the simplest possible level, it makes it very hard for, say, Saudi Arabia or Iran to potentially take it over in the way that the Saudis had previously involved themselves in Qatari politics.
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Dr. Andrew Pace
I also want to talk about the expansion of the World Cup. You've talked about the major footballing nations. The tournament has always been, I guess, advertised as a global event, the World Cup. And starting in 1930, Egypt is there, as you mentioned, the United States is there, but there's only 13 nations, and that has gradually expanded. 16 nations, 24 during the 80s, 94. 1998 in France expanded to 32 nations. And now the upcoming World cup will have 48 teams, which feels enormous. If you've witnessed the previous editions that had half that number. But for most of the World Cup's history, and I think for most of sort of soccer history, there has been a kind of, I don't know, a tug of war competition, let's say, between European nations and Latin American nations. And to this day, there are only eight winners of the World Cup. Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil from South America, and then, of course, West Germany, Germany, Spain, France, Italy and England. So, I guess, is it accurate to say that the World cup has evolved from a kind of Europe and the rest event into a more global event?
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Jonathan Wilson
Oh, yeah, for sure. I mean, Egypt in 1930 actually ended up not going because they missed their connection. There was a storm in the Mediterranean. So had Egypt been there? There'd been 14 nations, but, I mean, and Egypt were very involved in the early Olympics. So, you know, they were. They were sort of African pioneers. But yes, I mean, it was fundamentally in those early days with the. I mean, you had the U.S. you had Cuba there, you had the Dutch east indies there in 38. But fundamentally it was. It was Europe and South America. And then as African nations gain their independence through the 50s and 60s, they become a more. More prominent force. And that's one of the things where, for the 58 World cup, there was supposed to be one slot for Asia plus Africa, which on the one hand sounds terrible. But it sounds like nowhere near enough. Actually, there weren't that many teams who entered, so can understand why the European and South American countries were sort of. That's probably about right. So you look at the first Africa couple nations in 1957 and there are only four entrants. One of them, South Africa, were then disqualified for refusing to feel the mixed race team. So, I mean, Europe is clearly very slow to. Or FIFA more generally is slow to react to the rise of Africa, but to some extent they're not quite as far behind or quite slow to react as it is often portrayed. That's Africa, asia, slot for 58. Did you know who got that slot?
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Dr. Andrew Pace
58.
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Jonathan Wilson
Let me put you at your misery. It's that proud African nation of Wales.
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Dr. Andrew Pace
Well, no wonder I even fies it.
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Jonathan Wilson
Yeah. So basically, because South Korea had played in 54 and it hadn't been particularly good, and South Korea got there without playing a qualifier. So FIFA instituted a regulation that you had to play at least one qualifier. And with the African Asian section in 58, Israel at the time considered part of Asia, obviously is now part of Europe in footballing terms. And nobody would play them. So it would have just been Israel would have got there as of. Right. And FIFA said, no, you have to play this qualifier. So what we'll do is we'll look at the teams who finish second in Europe and we'll randomly draw one of them. Belgium came out first. Belgium said, no, no, we're not interested in this. Then Wales came out. So Wales played this playoff against Israel, drew nil, nil in Tel Aviv, won 2 nil in Wales. And the sort of consequence of that game. And this is sort of where everything in football, in football is sort of beautifully linked. The manager of Wales was Jimmy Murphy, who is Manchester United's assistant manager. And because he was taking charge of that game, he did not travel with Manchester United to Belgrade for the European cup game against Lana Zursta, from which they were on the way home when the plane crashed at Munich. So he. So Jimmy Murphy would always sit next to Matt Busby on the plane. His seat was taken by a director called Willisatonoff, who was killed at Munich. So probably that game saved Jimmy Murphy's life. But anyway, so that's a rabbit hole. I've just taken you down. I apologize. But there was a recognition. Stanley Rows, who I think is a much maligned figure, slightly unfairly, he was the English president of FIFA through the 60s and he loses to Havalanche, Michel Havalanche, the Brazilian in 1974. And Havaland successfully portrayed him as being the sort of colonial candidate, which is, he's an Englishman of a certain age. I'm sure he did have some colonial attitudes, but he in the late 60s had said to FIFA, look, we should expand the World cup to 32 teams. There's just more countries now and we want this to be a World Cup. We want more African, more Asian teams. And he was voted down by UEFA. So Rous was very open to that. But that, yeah, that need to expand. And then the question is, how do you get the balance right between making it as global as possible, aiding development of football through the world while still making it a competition that retains quality and is fundamentally about determining who the best team in the world is. Personally, I think 32 teams did that pretty successfully. I think there's things you could have done in qualifying where you, you could have had the final round of qualifying being global, so you wouldn't have had this horse trading of, well, Africa's got five slots. Should we take one off, off UEFA to give it to Africa? You know, if, if you had a, a global final round, then you, we'd be on merit rather than on, on your capacity to, to negotiate that 48. I mean, I think there's a series of problems with it. So first problem is it means very, very few countries can host the World cup and maybe Saudi Arabia really can do it in 2034, but I think we're going to see far more co hosting arrangements, which is not necessarily a problem, but obviously just makes things a little bit more difficult, I think, in terms of how far you then have to travel within those tournaments and the, the impact of that in, I mean, in terms of your carbon footprint. But also what does it do to players when they're traveling that far? What does it do to fans when they're having to travel that far? It obviously raises costs. So there are various logistical problems with it. I do wonder, and it's, it's certainly not the only football totem going this way where you have a pretty long float clearing exercise so you suddenly get all the drama at the end, whether there will be global patience for that. I mean, I don't know how many people are going to be avidly tuning into Austria versus Jordan at 4am UK time. I suspect not many, but maybe that's not a huge problem either. But 48 teams is just a bad number for a tournament. You know, I'd almost rather they gone to 64 because 48 teams means that of the 12 groups. Eight of the best third place teams will will go through, which reduces a lot of the jeopardy in in that first round. And so you then have a lot of games between countries who maybe aren't particularly good and there's not much jeopardy on them. And I do fear that that will it's not even about diluting the quality, it's about diluting the spectacle. And that is a potential problem. But we will see how that plays out.
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Dr. Andrew Pace
While supplies last Yeah, I sort of wished they had gone to 40 teams with eight groups of five teams and still promoted the top two as they had with 32. But we'll see. As you mentioned, the World cup surprises you. You get upsets and drama and sometimes you also see Germany beat Saudi Arabia 8 nil. That happens. But I also wanted to talk a little bit more specifically about this rise of Africa and the Middle east on the world stage, because I think the World cup has sort of reflected that. There have been expectations for years that African teams would become some of these major footballing nations competitive. I think Pillay himself said that he expected an African nation to win the World cup by the end of the 20th century. That didn't happen. But we've now seen a World cup hosted in Africa, South Africa, in 2010. We've seen African quarter finalists in 1990, 2002, 2010, then the last World Cup, Morocco making it to the semi finals. That felt significant. It felt like a kind of fulfillment of these expectations. Do you see that continuing? And as an English fan, do you perhaps see some risk to sort of the traditional powers who are now competing with just a wider swath of teams?
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Jonathan Wilson
I mean, I hope there is some risk. I mean, I would like there to be more than eight World cup winners. I would like that to be 10, 12, 15. I think that would be a good thing for everybody. I would love to see an African win of the World Cup. I think we're some way off that still. But it's also, I mean, there's so many things to say there, but I'm always slightly concerned by judging a continent's football by. Has their team got to the quarterfinal? Has it got the semi final? Was the Morocco 2022 significantly better than the Cameroon of 1990, for instance? I'm not sure compared to the rest of the world, they were particularly, you know, random things happen in football. Cameroon could easily beaten England in that quarter final in 1990, arguably deserved to be England, that quarterfinal.
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Dr. Andrew Pace
In 2010.
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Jonathan Wilson
Yeah, well, but even that, that's where, it's where you see the danger of these comparisons. I mean, yes, the Asimo John's header, sorry, Dominica Dyer's header, which is punched off the line by, by Luis Suarez. And had he not done that and had Asamojan convert the penalty, Ghana would have gone through. But if Australia had been penalized for handball against Serbia in a group stage and a penalty been given and Serbia converted, that Ghana would have gone out and not a single African team would have got through the group stage. And we'd all have been saying what a disaster for African football this is. So you've got to be very careful about judging too much on one team's performance. But I think, and I've been to 12 Africa Cups nations, um, so, yeah, I was in Morocco this year and I, I think what's become apparent is, you know, for, for a long time you could see that the, the pyramid of African football was getting broader, but not necessarily higher, which I think is, is. Is maybe a necessary stage of development. But you saw teams like Angola, Togo, Mauritania, you really being able to challenge. Yes, Senegal, who we now think of as they've been in three of the last four copy nations finals. Yeah. Actually their history in African football is pretty dismal, but they were another team being added to the mix of potential challenges. I think what we've seen probably in the last two or three tournaments is that the level is getting higher and so Morocco in 2022 maybe is reflective of that. But I think you've got to ask the question of why. So there's two developments and I don't think there's necessarily a sort of. What's the word I'm looking for here? This is not sort of a moral judgment I'm making here. But what has happened in Western Europe is we've seen in the last 20 years that the Western European powers have become very good at industrializing youth production. So France did it first with Claire Fontaine, Spain did it, Germany did it, England belatedly did it. And those four nations have been extremely good at generating good young footballers. I think it's caused certain problems in the German game, but I mean, that's a side issue. That's one of the reasons why Italy has largely been left behind, because they haven't had that development for players. They have for coaches, but not for players. But actually the knock on effect of that has been very positive for Africa because of a diaspora. So if you look at the final, the couple of nations this year between Morocco and Senegal, of the 56 players in the two squads, there were only 29 born in Africa. So 14 of them of the 28 man Morocco squad born in Europe. So I guess five in Spain, three in France, three in Germany, two in the Netherlands, one in Belgium or. Yeah, if those aren't the precise numbers, it's very close to that. Senegal, the vast majority born in. I think it was 15 from Senegal, 13 born in France. And so this is not in any way to say that they are not committed to Morocco or not fully Moroccan or not fully Senegalese. Clearly national identity is complicated in the modern world given the amount of migration. So this is not questioning their right to play for those countries or commitment to those countries. But what it is saying that their education has come in European academies and that has proved beneficial to Africa. You see it with the coaches as well. So the copper nation's just finished. All four semi finalists were coached by Africans for the first time since 1965. The last three teams to win have all been coached by Africans. But again, I think that's knowledge accrued in Europe taken back to Africa, which is globalization. Right? That's football showing how globalization functions. So I'm not saying that's a good or a bad thing, it's just that is why it's happening. It's not that, to be fair, Morocco, they have the Mohammed VI Academy just outside Rabat, which is, I think it was established in 2009. They've now got four branches across the country. It clearly is producing players again. They've looked at the French model and they've tried to develop something of their own. So of the squad that got to the semi final of the World cup for that, that squad, for that 26 man squad had come through that academy. They won the Under 20 World cup last year. They beat Argentina in the final in, in November. And you know, a significant chunk of that squad had come through that academy. Senegal have their own academy system. One of the reasons why they're the two best nations in Africa at the moment is they do have their own academy system supplementing the players who've got the, the European education. So I think that is why African football is, you know, after a period of plateauing, it does appear to be coming back again, which is a very good thing. But it is this sort of, this mix, I think, of domestic academies plus European education.
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Dr. Andrew Pace
I was going to say too, that we've also seen the sort of migrations of knowledge and talent in the other direction too, where we've seen many African players who were originally born in Africa, born in Senegal, born in Morocco or Algeria, and then have ended up playing, representing France at the World Cup. So I think you're right. There's a really interesting kind of flow going on and some complicated, I guess, migration patterns there.
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Jonathan Wilson
Well, that's not just an African issue. I mean, look at how many players could have played for Ireland and in two cases did play for Ireland. So, yeah, that is the modern world that people move and that creates these complications.
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Dr. Andrew Pace
Yeah, your book presents a history of tournament by tournament all the way from 1930 up to 2022. And I think one of the real strengths of the book is showing this politicization of the World Cup. As we've talked about the scandals, the skullduggery, the Faustian bargains that have been made. And yet, as you pointed out, despite the scandals or the corrupt bidding process, the deplorable human rights abuses, the 2022 World cup was arguably the best ever. It had the regular upsets, the great goals, the memorable performances, the sporting drama. But the final between Argentina and France was arguably the best ever. And in my opinion, the narrative and spectacle of watching Lionel Messi, maybe the greatest player of all time, leading Argentina to the World cup was just the perfect ending. A friend had asked me some months before and said, if you could witness any sporting event, past or future, what would it be? And I said, well, I would have loved to have been there in Mexico in 86 and watched Argentina and England and one day, if it ever happens, I'd love to see Lionel Messi hoist the World cup for Argentina. And then it happened. So what I'm getting at is that with all of the sort of cause for cynicism, I felt like your book ended on a really hopeful Note about the 2026 World cup, about the future of the World Cup. Why do you feel hopeful about the World cup and where it's headed?
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Jonathan Wilson
I'm not sure I do, to be honest.
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Dr. Andrew Pace
Or if you don't, then what do you feel like? The cynicism outweighs the hope, I guess.
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Jonathan Wilson
I think football is just an astonishing invention and I think it's got this tremendous capacity to self correct if you compare to. I mean, I realize I'm speaking from a very British context here. You compare it to cricket or hockey or rugby Union. Those are sports who are constantly having to tweak their laws because people have worked out tactics that help them win but don't help the spectacle. Football has barely needed that. Yeah, there's occasional tweaks to the offside law, but the last major change was the backpass law in, in 1992. It's a sport that somehow has this incredible internal balance. And you know, I think that to have that while also be. To be as simple as it is that, you know, a child can watch. This is why children love football. You, you don't have to understand very much to get what's going on. I think even very simple things like the idea that the penalty spot is one and a half times further from the goal than the goal is wide, turns out that's exactly right. It means that about 75% of penalties are scored and that feels the correct punishment for a foul in the box. It's not definitely a goal, but it's more than half a goal. It just feels right. And football has that balance. And I think that's one of the reasons why it does have this magic, this capacity to elevate individuals, elevate nations. That's why it's the sport that even people who don't really care about it, don't really watch it at a World Cup. They Come together and they will watch it. And again, Ben, if you're watching rugby union, I'm constantly seeing penalties being given and going, what was that for? I have no idea why that was given. And then even people that watch it regular, I don't know. Don't really know, to be honest. You can't see there's bodies on the ground. Something's happened in there. It's being given in football. It's kind of obvious. There's nothing that complicated in football. So that is the great beauty of it. And I think that will endure. I mean, I was on the Rest Is History with the hugely popular history podcast. Very early on I was on and they said to me, when will it end? And I was sort of like, oh, I hadn't really thought that it would end. And they said, well, yeah, but everything ends. Chariot racing used to draw crowds of thousands of circus maximus, but nobody goes to watch chariot racing now. It ended. What's the end for football? And it's one of those moments of like, oh, I've never. That's a really great question. I've got no answer to it. I don't know what will cause a trend. But equally, the expansion has got to stop at some point. And so there's a risk of. Of sort of being Cassandra and sort of every. Every year you say this is the moment, it's gone too far. But I do wonder whether the expansion of a tournament allied to the expense of attending the tournament allied to a sort of disgust at Infantino and the way he runs FIFA. Not just in how in the sort of the. The big picture things of the way he's constantly sucking up to authoritarian figures, the way he loves nothing better than being seen with Mohammed bin Salman or Vladimir Putin or Donald Trump, but also things like Cristiano Ronaldo having his suspension essentially annulled to allow him to play in the World Cup. And it's one of the strange things of politics that Boris Johnson, our Prime minister, he was involved in the whole. It was a great array of scandals, but the one that cut through was that he and his staff had a party during the lockdown regulations. And that was the thing that really annoyed people, that we can't even go to our mother's funeral. And yet there he is drinking cheap wine with his mates. And it's clearly not the worst scandal. It's not sort of the thing that's. That massively enriched him or allegedly massively enriched him, or it's not that one of his many alleged love children or affairs or Breaches of confidentiality or deals he's done with dodgy businessmen. It's none of that. It's a very simple thing that just annoys people because it's so obviously wrong. And the idea of one rule for them, one rule for everybody else, and there's a little bit of that with the Ronaldo decision. People just sickened by, well, he gets away with it because he's famous. How does that work? Why is that fair? So I think there is a mounting distaste for FIFA, for Infantino, in practical terms, how. I guess it's not really the end of football, but it is. How could the World cup change from its present course? And I think there's actually a really obvious route, which is UEFA Hassan Nations League, which is a semi functional. It's a functional tournament that is semi popular, but that can be a very easy basis that UEFA could go to Brazil and Argentina and Uruguay and Japan and South Korea and Senegal. Probably not Morocco for political reasons, but as in their tightness with FIFA, but they could go to leading African nations. So you come and join. You get away from this nonsense. Come and join our tournament. The revenue is great. And then if you lose those, those major nations, those World cup winning nations, those nations with the big TV markets, what's FIFA got left? It might have a load of votes in Caribbean islands, but so what? Nobody's going to watch it. But that would require a strong UEFA. And Alexander Chefin, I'm afraid, is not a strong or particularly moral leader. And I think if the present situation is to change, that is probably how it will change. But I can't see it changing under the present UEFA leadership.
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Dr. Andrew Pace
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Well, it'll be interesting to see what happens in 2026. I'm. I'm sort of balanced between this hope and cynicism. There's obviously been recent calls from some nations to boycott the World cup for various reasons, but we've also seen that in 2022 and elsewhere. But I appreciate you taking the time to be on the show today. We've taken up a lot of your time. What are you working on now or what are you working on next in terms of publishing?
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Jonathan Wilson
Well, I'm working on various book proposals. I would very much like to do something similar to the World cup book about the European Cup Champions League. Yet looking at the European cup, first edition, 1955, which clearly picks up on the spirit of the the Treaty of Paris 951, which is what leads to the establishment of what becomes the European Union. And that's sort of post war sense of reconciliation. The European cup is born in that. And how that through the 80s, changes into a much more commercial beast. And similarities of globalization and the rich getting richer and increasing financial stratification. So I think that's the project that realistically has a chance of coming off. You know, I'd love to do a history of the Africa cup of Nations. I'd love to do a history of Yugoslavia football. I'd love to do history of football under the Third Reich, but I suspect none of those are as economically viable. And so I have to do the more mainstream one. But we'll see. So I'm doing a lot of podcasts at the moment. So Libero and it was what it was. Libero is sort of general football podcast with other journalists. It was what it was as a. A football history podcast. And podcasts do seem commercially viable at the moment, so I'm told. Not that any of that money's actually found its way into my pocket yet, but if people listening to this want to go and listen to that as well, then maybe that will help. But yeah, the book publishing world for nonfiction certainly is pretty tough now, seemingly because it has been cannibalized by history podcasts of the sort I am making. So it's kind of my own fault.
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Dr. Andrew Pace
Well, we appreciate you being on the show. Thanks again and we'll talk to you another time.
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Jonathan Wilson
Absolutely. Cheers. Thank you.
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Dr. Andrew Pace
Bye. Bye. Bye.
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