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Carla. I'm Carla Lally, cookbook author and snack enthusiast. Do you have a sweet tooth? Check out Sweets Unwrapped, a podcast from Ferrero and Atlantic Rethink, the Atlantic's creative marketing studio. Together, we're celebrating the traditions that make life sweet. Tune in now.
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And we're live on matchday as Doug
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reaches for a Buffalo wing.
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He's got it.
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Oh, and he's gone for a can of Pepsi, too. What a finish. There's no doubt about it.
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B
It just tastes better. Match days deserve Pepsi.
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A
Here is the arc of my own World cup experience. Like thousands of Americans, I wrestled with FIFA's over complicated and overpriced ticket schemes. I managed to get a ticket to an early match, but ended up feeling scammed anyway. I rolled my eyes when, in December, FIFA president Gianni Infantino presented Donald Trump with the wholly invented FIFA Peace Prize.
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B
This is truly one of the great honors of my life.
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A
Not even remotely the first time that that organization has cozied up to an autocrat type. And then on game day, I showed up at the stadium with my son, and it was pure fun and joy. Starting from the commute to the stadium, it unfolded like an old Coke commercial. A Haitian fan patiently explaining Haitian revolution to a wrapped Scottish history buff. And the Scottish fans, in turn, teaching the Haitians the words to one of their many chants. I'm Hana Rosen. This is Radio Atlantic. With the World cup, there is theory and experience. If you spend a lot of time thinking about soccer, you get into some dicey foreign relations territory. Gangsters, oligarchs, the long tale of colonialism. All things that my guest today, Atlantic staff writer Franklin Foer, wrote about over 20 years ago in his classic book, How Soccer Explains the World. In it, Frank uses soccer to show where the world is headed, which is towards globalization and capitalism in their most extreme forms. That book was reissued recently for the 2026 World Cup. Two decades on, money from oil and private equity has flowed into clubs with no regard for boundaries or traditional fan loyalty. So is the game revealing something different to us now about the world? Frank, welcome back to the show.
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B
Hey.
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A
So you told me you expected to hate this World cup, but you love it. Can you explain both sides of that equation to me?
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B
Well, it's almost a trope that everybody dislikes a World cup before it begins, because usually there's some overlay of autocracy. I mean, this happened in Qatar last time, when all we could dwell on, and morally, correctly so, was the fact that all this labor was abused in the construction of the stadiums. And then with Russia, right before, it was so clear that Vladimir Putin was using the word World cup in order to whitewash his reputation. And so in the run up to this World cup, all one could think of was the FIFA Peace Prize being awarded to Donald Trump. And to imagine all the ways in which Donald Trump would exploit the spectacle in order to gratify his ego or advance his agenda. And every time a World cup gets started, all of the politics tends to recede because people just focus on the spectacle. Because there really isn't anything quite like the World cup in terms of an event that completely fixates the world over an extended period of time, where it really does become kind of the lingua franca of the planet.
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A
Right. It's like a theory and experience. You know, if you think too much about the World cup, you go into bad places. But if you experience the World cup, it's amazing or interesting.
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B
Yeah, no, that's exactly right. Once it begins to unfold, it has all of its own narratives that become the narratives that we fixate on as opposed to the ones that we've conceived in our head before it begins.
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A
Right. So it's been almost 22 years since you wrote How Soccer Explains the World. We're on the sixth World cup since it came out, and yet the basic idea of it is still completely relevant, that soccer gives us a way to understand this transition from tribalism to a more global world. Can you explain your thesis for people who haven't read it?
- [04:49]
B
Right. So I wrote it in the aftermath of 9 11, and I was kind of wrestling with the decade before it, in the course of writing it, that, you know, I'd grown up in this period where history was said to end, and it felt like we were entering this era of globalization where we would be interconnected and that interconnectedness would change the way that we thought about ourselves. And then after 9 11, it was kind of clear to everyone that tribalism, nationalism, old aggressions weren't simply going to melt away, given that we were connected by the Internet, or that everybody had McDonald's, or we were all consuming the same Hollywood entertainment. And what I was really interested in was that as the game itself became this vanguard of globalization, there was no phenomenon on the planet that was more interconnected than soccer. I was interested in the way that that reshaped us as fans and the ways that we identified with the clubs and nations who we historically supported. The big takeaway of my book was that, yes, there was this rise of global capital, infiltrating the game. There was the rise of massive international super clubs like Manchester United and Real Madrid. And all of that posed a threat to people's historic affiliations and loyalties. But they didn't erase those loyalties, and in some cases, they made them even more potent. Even though we were becoming more interconnected, tribalism and nationalism were still thriving.
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A
Interesting. So is that still true? I mean, it's been two decades. Soccer is even more unbound from national borders. There's a lot of oil money in soccer. So how has that thesis held up?
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B
It's mostly held up, but things have changed. So one way in which things have changed is that there was more of an edge of violence, I think, attached to vociferous fandom in 2002. And I think because of policing, because it's become so expensive to attend games, I think a lot of that has dissipated. But the thing that hasn't dissipated is you will have teams that are supposed to represent the heart of, say, Englishness, and there might not be more than one or two English players on the pitch at any given time. The ownership of the club could be a Gulf State, or it could be an American private equity firm. Yet none of that really changes the way that fans relate to that team. The fact that it's become so globalized really doesn't diminish their tribal attachments.
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A
Now you're talking about clubs in general because club soccer has gotten so entangled with private equity and oil money. Is the World Cup a respite from that? Because the World cup is very nationalistic, like, you have to be born in the nation. It's more like the Olympics that way.
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B
It is a bit of a relief from the way in which so much of the game of soccer on an everyday basis has been maybe financialized. That it's about the buying and trading of players has become so fetishized and become so much a part of the fan experience and ownership and profit models and amortization tables. And the fact that you have nation states owning teams that make it hard for everybody else to compete, that's not there during a World Cup. And it's, frankly, I think, a relief for fans to refer to a much, much more innocent state during a World Cup. One of the big flashpoints in this World cup are the hydration breaks that FIFA has imposed. And a lot of people have denounced them as being an American intrusion to the game, that we're just looking for one more opportunity to inject a few more commercials into this thing that was inherently pure. And fans have booed, the hydration breaks, because they understand that there's some sort of gratuitous incursion into something that was pure. And I do think that, you know, we know that, that the World Cups, they have in the past gotten so entangled with massive amounts of corruption that there are these people who are making all sorts of money off of the thing. And yet there is something kind of pure about the idea of rooting for a national team where, yeah, the players are getting paid, but it's obvious that they're motivated by this desire to do something on behalf of their country, on behalf of their compatriots.
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A
That seems right. I'm remembering in the game that I saw when FIFA officials came on the screen, people loudly booed like they kind of ruined the mood. You know, FIFA was a buzzkill, cuz it's a reminder of everything that you just said, like the money, the corrupt. And it was like now back to regularly scheduled programming which was singing Scottish songs and drinking and, you know, high fiving with the Haitian competition.
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B
Yeah, I kind of love that. I mean, there are almost no villains in the world who are unifying. And to have FIFA as something that can bring us all together in shared loathing is a beautiful thing.
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A
You mentioned that political storylines fall away. What's taken their place? Like, what are you excited about with these games?
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B
I mean, we do live in a superstar economy and I am just inherently interested in the performance of the superstars at this tournament. That you have these late stage superstars in the form of Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, who may or may not be playing in their last World Cups. But there's this drive that they have to complete their careers by winning in Messi's set, that case, the second World cup or to be the the all time leading scorer in the World Cup. And for Ronaldo, who's never won a World cup, this pressure to do that. I'm always interested in England, which hasn't won a World cup since 1966. That's longer than the New York Knicks were bereft. And there's so much psychic pressure that England historically has carried where fans and media in the country inflates the sense of expectations for the team. And then those expectations are thwarted, culminating in lots of recriminations and anger. And one of the great hopes of a World cup is that the duopoly. I mean, it's always been South American teams and European teams that have won World Cups. And we keep waiting for that moment when a team from Africa or Asia or another continent can genuinely break through in a World Cup. It's almost happened in the last World cup when Morocco made it to the semifinals, which was something that really defied expectations. And we keep hoping that something unexpected will happen and the old power will give way to some sort of new power.
- [11:54]
A
What, What. Name a couple of scenarios where that could happen for those of us watching the games. Like, what's a. What's a potential upset like you're describing?
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B
Well, I mean, Morocco is really an extraordinary team. They play incredibly well. They don't have the same sort of depth that an Argentina or an England or a France has, but when they field their 11, there's definitely a team that is capable of plausibly winning a World Cup. I've enjoyed watching Japan in this tournament, which is a team that really doesn't have any superstars and some of its best players have been injured, but they just have a coherent identity as a team and they work incredibly hard. They have a lot of technical prowess, so they're very exciting. And then, of course, we have three host countries for the first time. And home field advantage is such a meaningful thing in a World Cup. And it really does feel implausible that any one of those three teams could win the tournament. But they've played incredibly well. They've played much better, I think, in the. The U.S. case, than people had any reason to believe that they would play. And so there is this fairy tale possibility that a host nation could go much deeper than we had imagined.
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A
So when you look out at all the teams playing 20, 26, their performance so far, like you've described, does any global political theory jump out at you, like, from a soccer explains the world perspective?
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B
Yeah, I mean, I think that the thing that I've noticed during this World cup is the evenness. And one of the reasons why I had very low expectations for this World cup is that it had been expanded to 48 teams. And so when you start having nations that are so small, like Curacao or Cape Verde, you assume that the. The results are going to be incredibly lopsided.
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A
They haven't been.
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B
They haven't. They haven't exactly.
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A
Yeah. Yeah.
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B
And there are a lot of reasons for that. I think one is that you see in a team like Cape Verde or. Or Curacao, that you have diaspora communities that have rallied around their nation, and you have players who have been born in Holland or other places who have returned to play for the country of their parents or their ancestors, and the quality of those teams has Just been exceptionally high because their players have been basically born and raised within European soccer academies. And I've just loved being surprised by that.
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A
Interesting. So the colonial powers still have the benefit of diversity in immigration, but in general, the floor is higher for. For everyone.
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B
Exactly. I mean, I think one of the strengths that the European nations have had is that they've just been able to leverage that they have these colonial past and that the centers, quote, unquote, of the empires have had all of this migration. And so they just have these incredible pools of talent to draw from. But those pools of talent have historically come at the expense of the nations that were colonized. And so I think with the example of Curacao or Cape Verde, you see kind of this return, this revenge of the colonized nation where they're able to play at a much higher level than anybody anticipated because they've leveraged their diasporas.
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A
That's kind of exciting. I mean, it just means that the matches in the future are more even. And because soccer is how it is, you could have a surprise upset.
- [15:36]
B
Exactly. And I think it's also part of the thrill of a World cup, that when I watched my first World cup in 1986, when I was a boy, there was this kind of sense of wonder about just the wideness of the world. And I love the fact that there was so much subtext to the games. In the quarterfinals of that tournament, Argentina played England, and it was right after the Falklands War. And you could just see the intensity. You could see all the lingering. It will. In that match. You didn't even need to imagine it. It was just all there. It wasn't subtext, it was text. And what I've loved about this World cup is that you have countries that you haven't spent necessarily a lot of time thinking about in a soccer context, because they've never been powerhouses. And then a country like Haiti shows up at the World cup, and they play incredibly well, despite the fact that they're up against enormous odds that Haiti hasn't played a match at home for many years because of violence and other disruptions there. And yet this group has come together and cohered, you know, whatever their historic record is in World Cups, which is kind of non existent, they're able to play at a level that puts them in competition with every nation in the world.
- [16:58]
A
Yeah, I have to say I was surprisingly moved by the game that I saw, which was Haiti and Scotland, by the way everyone interacted, by the way Haiti played. I mean, it was so moving. And then There are other moments like that, like the Cape Verde goalkeeper, like where you just get these beautiful stories. Even watching the Iran team play was surprisingly moving. Like I just, I haven't interacted with the world in that way. Like the way we interact with the world now is through suffering like tariffs, wars, that kind of thing. So I just haven't seen that kind of international cooperative feeling or been around it in a long time.
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B
Right. It's so positive and that's I think been the real shock is just in this age where everything feels so miserable that you could have this global convening that actually feels so good. And then I do think it is this element of surprise that that Vizinha, the goalkeeper from Cape Verde would turn in this memorable historic performance against one of the teams that was favored to win the World cup and that his story would continue to ripple with his mother getting a visa to come watch him at this moment. And I think a lot of that happens because this is such an irregular occurrence that a lot of the temptation in the world is to just kind of keep piling things up. Oh, the World cup is so great. Let's play it every two years and we can make a lot of money and we can enjoy this thing even more. And that was my fear with making it a 48 team tournament, is that we were just piling on more. But I feel like we've been able to pile on more within the confines of this thing that still just takes place every four years. And we were able to maintain just how special it is.
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A
Soccer is known as the global game, but for a long time it's been something of a niche interest in the U.S. but not anymore. After the break, the rise of American soccer.
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To pursue music seriously, I had to craft my own way. I make my own musical instrument instruments from scratch. I kind of start to riff with various materials that are on my disposal. RPI gave me the time and space to really focus on my voice. Being exposed to a very multidisciplinary program, colleagues and faculties helped me broaden my view on this relationship between technology and art.
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A
Learn more at RPI Edu Barraisers.
- [19:43]
B
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A
Okay, I want to talk about the role of soccer in the US and how it's changing. You were an early in life soccer fan. So was I back then. It was a niche interest. What's changed?
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B
So I think we need to think about American soccer in the context of globalization. That in the United States, because we existed on the other side of the ocean and we were relatively self dependent, we had all of these indigenous sporting traditions take hold. We had all of these, these leagues and games that have developed that weren't necessarily adapted by the whole world, or sometimes they were adapted by the whole world, but we maintained our primacy in those sports. And so it wasn't interesting to think about them in an international context. But soccer, for a variety of reasons, just traveled around the world. It was one of the first globalized phenomenon spread by English railway workers. You know, balls came on ships and it took hold in, in a way that had genuine mass popularity. But the economics of soccer developed in such a way in which it conquered all of these rich parts of the world, all of these poor parts of the world. But there was this giant hole in the map, which was the United States, that clearly there was a lot of money to be made by having the game take off here. And for many years it stuttered. It felt like it was a game that was enjoyed by immigrants and it was enjoyed by coastal elites, but it just didn't have mass popularity. But gradually the game turned a corner where it's been adapted clearly by kids who play it because soccer is displaced Little League, but also by fans in a way in which it does feel like it's competing with the audiences for the World Series or maybe, you know, ultimately I think it will compete with a Super bowl level audience for the World cup finals. And maybe that's wishful thinking, but it's going to be massive. It does feel like there is this assumption now that the game is mass soccer celebrities are now celebrities.
- [22:40]
A
Okay, the super bowl was too far. That was blasphemy. But I followed you the rest of the way. What about the politics of soccer? Like reading between the lines of what you said. It's not just that it wasn't mass, it was elite, cosmopolitan. Even though among immigrants, it's, you know, all up and down the classes.
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B
Yeah, it became kind of a bizarre flashpoint in the culture wars. There's great set of quotes from conservative pundits ranging from Ann Coulter to Greg Gutfeld, the Fox News host, where they would denounce it as being kind of somehow un American. Jack Kemp, who was the congressman from Buffalo who ran for vice president, Republican, was a quarterback for the Buffalo Bills, gave this speech in 1986 on the floor of the House denouncing the game as a socialist incursion. And you kind of understood where they were coming from because we do have these American sports that are threatened in a way by the rise of soccer. And so they were what it was.
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A
Or was it that it came from foreigners or that we weren't dominant in it? Like, what was the, what was the sort of cultural feel of that?
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B
Yeah, I do think it's like the cultural politics were that it was supported by coastal elites and that it was a game practiced by foreigners. But then it was kind of a different version of globalization, where America is being globalized by joining the international soccer community. And there is this hostility to globalization that runs through the. Right. Right. It doesn't make. It's not. It doesn't make sense. It's not rational, but it's there and it's very potent.
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A
Yeah. And yet somehow, as you recently wrote, Donald Trump is a soccer fan. How did that happen?
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B
Yeah, because Donald Trump doesn't come from the American right. He comes from New York city in the 1970s. And in the 1970s, Pele came to the United States to play for the New York Cosmos. And the New York Cosmos is short for the New York Cosmopolitans, as if to underscore the culture war valence of it all. And the New York Cosmos were a really hot ticket. When Donald Trump was coming of age, they would sell out Giant Stadium. Trump went to watch Pele play, and so he's at least open to soccer. And then his son Baron plays the game. He's a genuine maven. And when international superstars would come through Washington, Trump made a big deal of pulling Messi and Ronaldo into the West Wing, taking them to the Oval Office, I think, in order to show off to Barron. And then there's the fact that FIFA, the international governing body of soccer, is just. It's Trumpian at its core. It's kind of a corrupt patronage system. And the guy who runs FIFA, Gianni Infantino, knew how to play Trump. He knew how to speak Trump's language, and he engaged in a decade long effort to woo the guy.
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A
Although a couple of weeks in, it's hard to tell Trump's actual influence or interest in the World Cup. On the one Hand, in the beginning I was worried that his immigration policies were gonna get in the way and politicize the game. Like the referee from Somalia who was denied entry into the country or the delays for the Iranian squad. On the other hand, he is not shown up at any World cup games. So where do you think he is on the World cup now?
- [26:06]
B
I think he's, he's kind of biting his time. I think he will show up, but I think he's waiting for the games deeper into the tournament. But maybe it's also a sign of Trump derangement syndrome that we just kind of assumed. I assumed certainly that he was going to hover over these games. And it's been kind of a psychic relief that he hasn't.
- [26:27]
A
All right, I'm going to make you do some predictions. Soccer's way less predictable than other major major sports. I saw a hundred year study of English football which found that the underdog. This is kind of amazing. Won 45% of the time compared with 36% in basketball. First of all, why is that?
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B
Because the games usually are one nothing, you know, Right.
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A
It's low goals.
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B
Scoring matters so much. It's go goal scoring. And so if you're able to defend ferociously and prevent the other team from scoring, you're in with the chance. And in a World cup in these one off games, you can have a small nation that just sits in, you know, plays as if their life is depending on it and nicks a goal on a counter attack and upset. And we've seen that happen where Cape Verde just defended for their lives in that game against Spain.
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A
Yeah.
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B
And it's good enough.
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A
Yeah.
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B
So I mean, I'd say the three best teams that I've seen thus far in the tournament are Argentina. And I have to say that that surprised me because Lionel Messi has been playing in Major League Soccer. And the level of competition in Major League Soccer is, is not the highest. And it was, it was just unclear to me that he would be able to play at anything remotely like the levels that he played with four years ago. And he's four years older. And I think one of the extraordinary things about Messi is that he's adapted his game to age. Argentina as a soccer proposition is kind of a gerontocracy. It's all built around one old man who is incapable of working at the same rate as the younger players. And it exists to allow him to have these magical moments. And that's how artists work. Beethoven wrote his late string quartets adapting for the fact that his hearing had completely receded and that there is something about working as an older person that forces you to be canny and to adapt and to integrate all the wisdom of a. Of a life into a performance. And I've just been kind of blown away by the way that they've looked thus far. Then France is just. It's a. The depth of the French team is something to marvel at, especially in attack. And they've had the same manager, Didier Deschamps, over the course of several tournaments. He's won the World cup before with them. For my money, they are the overwhelming favorite. You could take away their starting lineup and place them with second lineup and they still would be highly competitive. And then I kind of think, you know, I keep waiting for England to have its moment. And England is coached by a German named Thomas Tuchel, who has coached at Chelsea psg, some of the best clubs in the world. And that is also another interesting wrinkle in this tournament, that the level of coaching is much higher at this tournament than it's been, I think, ever before. They're more top drawer legendary coaches who've decided to take on the challenge of managing national teams for whatever reason. And I think that that's true parenthetically with the United States, which coached by Mauricio Pochettino, who took Tottenham Hotspurs to the finals of the European Champions League. And he'd coached at psg. And he's a disciple of great coaches. And I think his ability to, to understand the psychology of his team, I think, and to just give them tactical soundness which the United States has never had before, has been extremely helpful.
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A
Yeah, okay, but where's your heart? Let's say the US US is at. Where's your heart?
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B
So this is a somewhat complicated question because it's actually one of the great things about a World cup is that most of us, most denizens of planet Earth, are not supporting teams that have any chance of winning the World Cup. And so we have the ability to choose a second nation to represent us. And I think that that is kind of an extraordinary act of. I don't know if it's empathy, but it's kind of identification that we don't really have in other contexts. This is a long winded answer. I have cousins in Brazil and I was kind of introduced to the game by my Brazilian cousins, but my heart really isn't in Brazil this time. My heart is probably more in England than it is, which feels like a very boring answer. But if you're a Fan of the game. You watch the English Premier League all the time because it is the most ubiquitous club product in the United States. And you just become attached to the players there who you see so often. And like the New York Knicks, they've been kind of flops for so long, even though they have everything in their power to do it. You kind of want them to break through. I kind of wanted to break through.
- [31:33]
A
Yeah.
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B
You know, we said no to vanilla.
- [31:36]
A
No, no, that's fine. That's fine. I mean, it's, you know, it's an answer. Any European answer is, is you don't get creativity points. But it's probably the truth. That's what my son's into. A lot of Americans are attached to English teams of different kinds. And so it's authentic. We've talked about this in a couple of different ways. You get your second team, this cross border identification. Just the very good feeling that one has at games. If soccer explains the world, does this good sentiment ever travel outward? Like, can this turn into a unifier or do something positive?
- [32:18]
B
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I think that the magic formula for politics encompasses both cosmopolitanism and nationalism, that we should be able to feel this sense of fierce attachment to our loyalties and to the loyalties of our country, to the loyalties of our community and. And still consider ourselves citizens of the world. And I do think that to the extent that the World cup does anything to shake us loose from our everyday politics, it's that. It's that it kind of makes us all cosmopolitan nationalists.
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A
Well, that is lovely. And so I want to end there. Frank, thank you so much for joining me today.
- [33:02]
B
Thanks, Ana.
- [33:04]
A
This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Kevin Townsend. It was edited by Claudina Baid. Sam Fentress fact checked, Miguel Carrascal del Riego engineered and Rob Smirciak provided original music. We also had music from Breakmaster Cylinder. Claudina Baid is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. And a reminder, Radio Atlantic now comes out twice a week. You'll hear my co host, Adam Harris on Mondays. You can also watch him on YouTube. Listeners, if you enjoy the show, you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to the Atlantic@theAtlantic.com listener. I'm Hanna Rosen. Thank you for listening.
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B
If you're trying to get news today, you'll find a lot of biased algorithms, rage bait and AI noise.
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A
Thanks.
- [34:03]
B
Social media, that's where impress comes in. It's a social platform. On top of factual journalism, not the other way around. Track your reading and earn points. It's like Strava for your brain. Plus you can connect with other users in your city who share your genuine curiosity. Ditch the echo chamber for reality with Impress. Download it today for iOS or Android at impress app. That's I n as in news nerd press.