The ball smacked the net. Germany had just scored for the fourth time in 26 minutes, brutally exposing the Brazilian squad. As I watched the match in my father’s São Paulo apartment, I heard a woman outside shriek, an understandable reaction. Ours was silence. Germany would score three more times before the referee’s merciful final whistle. Brazil—the only team to have qualified for every World Cup and the sole country to have won five times—had managed a single goal in the dying minutes of the match, a stab at dignity where none remained. On that day of infamy—July 8, 2014—it was clear to all that Brazil was the hapless victim of a skilled, brutally efficient, cold-blooded sadist.

It was not supposed to go this way. When FIFA, soccer’s international governing body, chose Brazil to host the 2014 World Cup in 2007, national leaders dreamed of a global showcase that would cement the country’s image as a rising power, a land of rhythm and joy welcoming the world with competence and grace. More than 60 years had passed since Brazil hosted a World Cup. On that occasion, the home squad fell to tiny Uruguay in a heartbreaking final upset. This time would be different. Stadiums would shine, fans would flood the streets, and the national team would lift the trophy once again on domestic soil, uniting a populace long accustomed to football glory.

But those dreams frayed in the years leading up to the tournament. Construction delays and spiraling costs fueled public outrage in a country still bedeviled by gross inequalities. Promises of lasting infrastructure improvements fell short. Multiple corruption scandals tainted FIFA and Brazil’s political class alike. Indeed, some of the largest protests ever seen in Brazil occurred in 2013, targeting the country’s self-dealing elite and fueling a toxic surge of anti-political sentiment. By the time the games began, the pageantry had lost its luster for many Brazilians. Journalist Dave Zirin described a “World Cup seen through tear gas,” with regular protests fouling up the otherwise palpable ebullience. The host’s historic humiliation at German hands was the sharpest proof in a growing body of evidence that something profound was amiss in Latin America’s largest nation. The 7–1 final score would epitomize a dispiriting decade.

“World Cups don’t change the world,” according to journalist Simon Kuper, “but they do illuminate it.” In World Cup Fever: A Soccer Journey in Nine Tournaments, he tries to explain how. Kuper writes for the Financial Times and is the author of several books about soccer and other topics. He is one of the few writers who has been to every World Cup since 1990. His personal experiences with the quadrennial tournament, relayed in short vignettes, form the heart of World Cup Fever (notably, he considers the 2014 Cup in Brazil to be the best he’s attended). But this is also a historical, sociological, and political examination of the Cup’s enduring yet shifting significance since it was first held in 1930.

Founded on lofty ideals of international communion, FIFA has become a vector of corruption and cultural commodification. One review of the body’s litany of scandals concluded, “in an organization that produces a pseudo-public good and is nonprofit—yet which is run by a private entity without accountability to key stakeholders—the misaligned incentives are clear.” In many ways, FIFA’s notorious venality is of a piece with the shady state of contemporary global politics. As the games begin this summer in Mexico, Canada, and on the shaky ground of Donald Trump’s United States, the spectacle will be inseparable from the uncertain political moment. How can the United States extend a welcoming hand to the world when the current administration has balled its fists? We are all anxious to find out.

The fate of a sporting event may seem trivial in a world beset by multiple overlapping crises, of course, but soccer is no mere diversion. It is by far the most popular sport in the world, a shared language that binds billions across borders, classes, cultures, and regimes. This year’s tournament thus poses a critical question: Is a more transparent and democratic version of international soccer even imaginable in a world veering toward reactionary authoritarianism?

Soccer’s roots run deep. Unruly games referred to as folk or mob football were played across early modern Britain, often with entire villages used as playing fields. Rules for these localized affairs were standardized in the 1860s into two distinct games—rugby football and association football. At Oxford, the latter was shortened to “assoc” football. Further linguistic evolution produced a name for the game that today is really only used in the United States: soccer.

Soccer made its way out of England like a merry virus in the final decades of the nineteenth century, spreading through railways, ports, and migrant labor “not as a palliative to the grimness of industrial life,” per historian James Walvin, “but largely because industrial workers, unlike others, had free time.” The regimentation of life under industrial capitalism entailed the regimentation of leisure. Urban density created crowds, while cheap transportation allowed nascent clubs to travel and spectators to follow. The spread of the game, particularly in the so-called developing world, also benefited from its association with a host of broader modernizing efforts in areas like public health and education, as well as its democratizing promise. By the 1890s, British expatriates had helped organize teams in Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Rio de Janeiro, Shanghai, Cape Town, and Calcutta. Soccer’s global rise was thus an unmistakable product of the global industrial revolution. Kuper’s beloved Dutch team, he declares, was born of social democracy.

But industrial modernity did more than create the bases for mass athletic competition. It also created the conditions for sophisticated international sporting events. “Victorian Britons invented most modern sports,” Kuper writes, “but couldn’t see the point of playing them against foreigners.” The French could. In 1896, Baron Pierre de Coubertin organized the first modern Olympic Games. The Union Cycliste Internationale was founded in 1900 to coordinate cycling records across borders. Modern motor racing took shape under the auspices of the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile, established in 1904. That same year, a short Parisian stroll away, a man named Jules Rimet led the creation of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association—FIFA.

These were proto-global institutions designed to manage modern spectacle. In each case, mass participation and cross-border competition generated administrative frameworks that were neither public nor entirely private. Their creation reflected the ongoing consolidation of modern national identity. Imagined communities produced real-world fandoms. For idealists like Rimet, sport in the age of empires need not drive disharmony. “A pious Catholic with a social conscience, he saw the game as an instrument to uplift the poor,” Kuper explains. Playing “would give working men dignity, and a sense of solidarity.” At the time, soccer was strictly an amateurish pursuit. Elites viewed the prospect of athletic professionalization as tawdry and potentially even socially disruptive. The provincial Rimet, by contrast, pushed for professional leagues of highly trained athletes as a new meritocracy, a path of upward mobility for poor and working-class men. For his entire life, the aspiring sports mogul would insist on soccer’s salutary societal effects. But the idea that it might be monetized—to use a term also coined in the mid–nineteenth century—was never far from the mind.

In 1928, FIFA decided to create a competition open to all nations. Colonies, composed mostly of nonwhite people, were notably excluded. The first World Cup was held two years later in Uruguay, a country so keen on hosting that it agreed to cover all expenses. This set the precedent: Going forward, the host would foot the bill. The next competition occurred in Mussolini’s Italy, establishing another essential FIFA characteristic: a willingness to deal with tyrants. The charitable reading of that decision is that Rimet’s experience fighting in World War I had left him “obsessed with peace,” as Kuper writes, deepening his belief that soccer could and should bridge all people across political divides. Furthermore, the list of countries willing to bankroll a growing international competition was quite small. A skeptic, however, might see an overriding concern with narrow self-advancement. The 1934 World Cup served as a fascist showcase, carefully choreographed to advertise the vitality and virility of the black-shirted regime.

Rimet did fall out with fascists after the next World Cup, held in France in 1938. Nazis and collaborationist Vichy officials disdained professional sports and the social mobility they implied, as the British upper crust had decades before. As Kuper explains, Rimet “seemed able to live with the regime’s fascism; what he couldn’t accept was its support for his old enemy, amateurism in sport.” Rimet thus spent World War II away from FIFA, returning to lead the organization once the Allies prevailed. The first postwar World Cup, held in Brazil in 1950, was its most high-profile contest yet. Under his stewardship, FIFA had grown from 29 countries to 85. Rimet, overseeing his final World Cup, was riveted by soccer’s popularity in Brazil, vindication for his vision of a global community of professional soccer players avidly supported by fans from all walks of life. When it came to his life’s goal, Rimet had scored. He was replaced as head of FIFA in 1954 and died two years later at the age of 83.

Decolonization swelled FIFA’s ranks in the 1950s and 1960s, transforming what had been a Euro-American club into a genuinely global assembly. By the 1970s, newly independent African and Asian states formed a powerful voting bloc capable of reshaping the tournament’s structure. The ouster of the patrician English administrator Stanley Rous and the election of the Brazilian João Havelange as FIFA president in 1974 marked a decisive shift. The tournament expanded from 16 teams to 24 in 1982 and to 32 nations in 1998, leading to much greater participation for the global south (this year’s World Cup will involve 48 countries). More participants translated to greater popular investment and viewership worldwide, yielding more commercial partnerships and revenue-generating opportunities.

Television in particular remade the World Cup’s meaning. As television ownership and broadcasting networks expanded rapidly across the developing world in the 1970s and 1980s, audiences far beyond Europe and the Americas gained regular access to the tournament. What had once been a relatively elite gathering accessible mainly to the population of the country where the tournament happened to be hosted became, by the 1970s and 1980s, a far-reaching fixture of global monoculture. Kuper fondly recalls the 1978 World Cup—the first that he followed—and observes that, “even for a kid today, the tournament can be their first glimpse of beauty and greatness.”

Globalization gradually eroded older ideas of distinct national styles. Kuper has argued that before the 1990s one could readily identify the tactical grammar of Italy, Brazil, or England at a glance. The increasing movement of players around the world following the end of the Cold War—stemming as much from the easing of international tensions as from changes in the rules of international soccer—helped dissolve those distinctions. Today’s elite players are polyglot cosmopolitans, scouted and plucked away from their remote hometowns and shaped as much by club academies in Barcelona, Munich, or Manchester as by the countries on their passports. If the early World Cups reflected a reaction, in part, to the chauvinism of nineteenth-century imperialism, recent editions capture both the inclusive accessibility and the homogenizing logic of neoliberal globalization.

Kuper’s passion for the World Cup is neither treacly nor fanatical, as one might expect in a book called World Cup Fever. One might even initially find the book’s central pitch a tad gimmicky. Is there really anything to learn about, say, the 1994 World Cup—the last time it was hosted by the United States—from someone who attended every World Cup since 1990 that one could not learn from a good journalist who hadn’t? But the memoiristic elements of Kuper’s book, many of which flit across the page too quickly in just a few paragraphs, are illuminating. He sets well-observed scenes that cumulatively get at essential aspects of each tournament, weaving personal, often amusing stories in with commentary on the evolution of FIFA and the game of soccer as well as the competition’s socioeconomic and political effects.

Each tournament Kuper has covered marked a shift in the geopolitical weather: the twilight of the Cold War in Italy in 1990, America’s unipolar bravado in 1994, multicultural optimism in France in 1998, East Asian dynamism in 2002, Merkel-era stability in 2006, South Africa’s post-apartheid aspiration in 2010, Brazil’s developmentalist crest and crash in 2014, Russia’s managed democracy in 2018, and Qatar’s petro-authoritarian spectacle in 2022. On one level, World Cup Fever is a testament to the personal and professional benefits of committing oneself to a subject for a long time—in this case, a tournament that only occurs every four years.

Kuper does not suggest that soccer drives political change. Nevertheless, his vignettes demonstrate how deeply the tournament penetrates civic life, and how cynical elites milk the game for private profit. His extended treatment of soccer in South Africa, for example, is revealing. The 2010 World Cup did not dissolve enduring inequality—nobody realistically expected it to—but it briefly recast how South Africans saw themselves and how they looked to the world. Television coverage emphasizing the country’s natural beauty, not to mention the modern stadiums and colorful official festivities, projected an image of national celebration and competence that displaced familiar narratives of division and poverty. (Who could forget the buzz of the vuvuzelas?) FIFA ultimately turned a massive profit from the 2010 World Cup, largely at South Africa’s expense. The country “had few football fields for ordinary people, but it was now saddled with ten ‘world-class’ stadiums—at least eight more than it needed,” Kuper explains. It thanked the hosts by producing no tangible legacy for the poor majority of South Africans.

In an era of rising inequality and political radicalization, one wonders if FIFA’s predatory model of imposing enormous costs on host nations as it reaps unfathomable sums is sustainable. Hosting the World Cup now routinely requires billions in public spending on stadiums, infrastructure, and security, costs that democratic governments must ultimately defend to voters. Several potential hosts have balked in recent years. Montreal, for example, withdrew from the 2026 tournament after the Quebec government declined to finance required stadium upgrades, while cities such as Chicago and Minneapolis abandoned bids rather than accept FIFA’s financial conditions. FIFA maintains that a World Cup “cannot be organised without the broad support of the relevant government authorities,” meaning that host states must effectively reshape their legal and fiscal frameworks to accommodate the organization’s demands. If the expense becomes increasingly unjustifiable to democratic electorates, the tournament may gravitate toward governments more willing to ignore public opinion altogether.

It is hard to foresee any impetus for a markedly more transparent version of international soccer as governments across the world become more insular and self-serving. FIFA has long functioned as a rent-seeking engine, extracting substantial sums from host nations while offering few guarantees of public benefit, turning global sport into a spectacle that flatters authority as much as it entertains. Trump, for example, in word and deed, has made the United States utterly inhospitable to soccer fans from many countries. Yet in December FIFA president Gianni Infantino bestowed on him a hastily minted peace prize, reflecting the organization’s longstanding willingness to suck up to would-be strongmen. Such gestures betray little enthusiasm for new direction.

The World Cup has long served as a mirror, revealing with unusual clarity the shifting hierarchies of power and prestige that have shaped the modern world.

For his part, Kuper resists grand prescriptions for the future of the sport. His commitment is to observation over time, to chronicling how ordinary people experience extraordinary moments. That modesty is itself instructive. The World Cup endures not simply because rich men in boardrooms will it but also because billions of viewers earnestly believe that what unfolds on the pitch is worthy of their attention. The institutional superstructure may be compromised but the 90 minutes must remain inviolate. As Kuper suggests, spectators can live with the fact of official corruption as long as the game is pure. However, “once we start to doubt that the matches we are seeing are real, the emotion we invest in World Cups becomes pointless.” Democratic governance, of course, rests on a similar foundation of shared belief.

Jules Rimet, FIFA’s founder, imagined soccer as a force that might ennoble ordinary people, offering dignity and fellowship through honest competition. He did not intend FIFA to restrain governments or safeguard civic accountability. Its mission has always been the promotion of the game. For nearly a century, the World Cup has reflected that reality. Dazzling and galvanizing, it has also served as a mirror, revealing with unusual clarity the shifting hierarchies of power and prestige that have shaped the modern world. When global audiences watch the World Cup, they see virtuosity, emotion, and the hand of fate at work on the grandest stage in sports. They also glimpse the world as it is.