What exactly is it that makes the World Cup so alluring? Every four years, the tournament arrives like a massive religious feast, drawing pilgrims from across the world in what remains one of the few truly global cultural events. The star players, nationalism explain only part of the story. At the World Cup, as in life, fate can be decided in a split second. It is one of few cultural events that illuminate our world and how we understand ourselves within it.
From its very inception in 1930, the tournament has been entangled with politics and national identity, as Jonathan Wilson argues in THE POWER AND THE GLORY: The History of the World Cup (Bold Type, 567 pp., $35). Back then, Uruguay sought to host the tournament to celebrate the centenary of its independence. After its national team was crowned champions, Wilson writes, it was hard to distinguish whether the post-tournament celebrations were meant for the players, the president of the country or his FIFA counterpart, Jules Rimet.
Subsequent editions featured increasingly fraught dynamics: Mussolini brought his own trophy to Italy’s coronation at the 1934 tournament; Brazil’s military dictatorship claimed the virtuosic, “thrillingly modern” triumph of its 1970 national team, led by Pelé, as a symbol of national progress; Argentina’s military junta pressured opposing teams — and might have even fixed one of the results — to facilitate the country’s victory in 1978. In recent years, Wilson writes about the clientelism of the FIFA president João Havelange, its expansion under his successor, Sepp Blatter, and the corruption scandal that gave rise to our current era of Gianni Infantino and his embrace of modern autocrats.
Yet to describe Wilson’s book as a political history would be to do it a disservice. His is a holistic account of the World Cup — its major players, tactical innovations and indelible moments — bolstered by reams of careful research. Wilson debunks various World Cup conspiracies, including false rumors about match fixing between Hungary and Italy in 1938 and Ronaldo Nazário’s mysterious near-absence at the 1998 World Cup. His footnotes range in subject from 19th-century South American pedagogical theory to a cultural anthropologist’s take on Zinedine Zidane’s infamous head butt of Italy’s Marco Materazzi in the 2006 final. The result is a sweeping, authoritative and singular account of the tournament.
Still, the World Cup is more than a historical document to be scrutinized and re-evaluated, as evidenced in Simon Kuper’s memoir, WORLD CUP FEVER: A Soccer Journey in Nine Tournaments (Pegasus, 338 pp., $29.95). It is a deeply human experience that encompasses longing, anticipation and memory. “Like Proust’s madeleine,” he writes, “each new World Cup reminds you of past World Cups, and the people you watched them with.”
Kuper, a columnist at The Financial Times and co-author of “Soccernomics,” structures his book in the form of short, diaristic dispatches around nine World Cups, each dispatch laced with observations on the sport’s personal resonance, its evolving landscape and political entanglements.
While Wilson draws on club employment figures to argue that the 2002 tournament ushered in an era of globalization, Kuper recounts watching an exchange between Brazil’s Ronaldo and the Dutch player Boudewijn Zenden at the previous World Cup. There, he realizes that they “probably had more in common with each other than with the average Brazilian or Dutch fan back home.”
Kuper finds underlying narratives at each tournament. The Netherlands’ loss to Argentina in the 1978 final, which he watched alongside his grandparents at his family’s home in Leiden, was an early window into Dutch sporting complacency. At the 1998 World Cup, he witnesses “the mother of all games,” in which Iran stunned the United States in a tense, politically charged 2-1 victory. He calls the 2006 tournament, held in Germany 60 years after the end of World War II, “a Pan-European celebration of reconciliation” that softened Germany’s international reputation. In 2018, he ponders the moral implications of enjoying a World Cup staged in Putin’s Russia and, four years later, reflects on Persian Gulf monarchies co-opting much of the sport ahead of the competition in Qatar.
At the heart of Kuper’s book is a lengthy section on South Africa, the host of the 2010 tournament and the country where his ancestors, fleeing pogroms in Eastern Europe, settled in the 1880s. Traveling there ahead of the World Cup, Kuper realizes the importance of the sport to Black South Africans who rely on it for upward mobility. When the World Cup comes around, however, it is staged mostly in white South Africa and brings limited economic stimulus. Instead, mega stadiums leave clubs mired in payments. In the end, neither the people who ran South African soccer nor the country itself saw the benefits of the tournament. FIFA, on the other hand, left the country with over $630 million in profits.
Amid the controversy over ticket prices and Donald Trump’s restrictive visa policies, this year’s tournament has also raised tantalizing questions about the future of the sport in the United States. Though it can be difficult to parse through the cycles of boosterism and cynicism that often dominate the conversation around the U.S. men’s national team, in THE LONG GAME: U.S. Men’s Soccer and Its Savage, Four-Decade Journey to the Top, or Thereabouts (Viking, 367 pp., $33), Leander Schaerlaeckens offers some answers in his cleareyed, warts-and-all history of the sport in this country.
Soccer enjoyed a heyday in the early 20th century. In the States, players were paid wages comparable to their M.L.B. counterparts and teams attracted talent from abroad until administrative quibbles and the Great Depression killed off the sport’s future in the country. It endured decades of obscurity before it would be reintroduced, first with the North American Soccer League in the late 1960s and later in earnest during the 1990s.
Throughout much of that period, U.S. Soccer, the national governing body, worked with what little money it could count on given the sport’s relative unpopularity and the N.A.S.L.’s collapse in 1984. Schaerlaeckens recognizes the limitations of this history, but he’s also blunt in his criticism of the development system that soon sprouted, characterized by a pay-to-play model that, as he writes, has largely “frozen out generations of minority talent.” He recounts the many efforts — some misguided and occasionally quixotic, others more promising — at developing top talent. Team America, a 1980s franchise created to assemble the country’s best players, was snubbed by much of the nation’s top talent and folded after just nine months. In recent years, a policy of pursuing prospects with multiple passports has yielded better results, netting game-changing players like Jermaine Jones and Folarin Balogun.
Drawing on interviews with former players, coaches and administrators, Schaerlaeckens writes refreshingly on some of the country’s most notable successes and failures at building a competitive national team. He covers the team’s evolution from its erratic management under Alketas Panagoulias, a hands-off, eccentric Greek, and the inscrutable Bora Milutinovic; Bruce Arena, an intuitive, energetic manager; the “relentlessly competent” Bob Bradley; and Jürgen Klinsmann, who is best remembered for leading the national team on a wildly inconsistent and ultimately doomed qualifying campaign for 2018.
Each section includes a profile of a current U.S.M.N.T. player that reveals back story but also doubles as commentary on the American youth system that either spurned or saved them. In a discussion on the midfielder Tyler Adams, Schaerlaeckens notes that physical proximity to elite youth soccer clubs is largely correlated to household income. The striker Ricardo Pepi overcame the pay-to-play system thanks in part to the fact that the M.L.S. club FC Dallas had only recently begun scouting players in El Paso, his hometown.
Considering its young, spotty history, it’s difficult not to feel hopeful about the future of the sport in the United States at this World Cup. Schaerlaeckens himself maintains a cautious optimism. In just a few decades, the men’s national team has already found itself regularly among the top 20 teams in the world. Could they take things a step further this year? World Cups are fickle, Schaerlaeckens writes, but “if a few things broke right, they could make their mark on the world’s game.”
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