Pitch Perfect?

Futebol, fussball, sakkaa, calcio, voetbal: the world’s most popular sport has arrived in North America. The twenty-third FIFA World Cup kicked off on Thursday, June 11, as Mexico faced South Africa at Estadio Azteca in Mexico City; it will conclude on Saturday, July 19, at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, the 82,500-capacity home of the New York Giants, who also play football, but mostly with their hands. Over the course of five and a half weeks, four dozen teams will meet in 104 games in cities across three countries, from Vancouver to Miami, from Toronto to Monterrey.

Roll up, roll up, for the transcontinental soccer ball jamboree. This summer’s tournament features World Cup newcomers such as Cape Verde, Uzbekistan, Jordan, and Curaçao (which with a population of 160,000 is the smallest country ever to participate), alongside some of the game’s perennial superpowers, including Germany, France, Spain, Argentina, and Brazil. Luckily for Canada, one historical powerhouse has not made the trip. Because Italy was beaten by Bosnia and Herzegovina in a playoff final penalty shootout, Canada faced the tiny Balkan nation in the group stage rather than the four-time World Cup winners. With home-field advantage, the Canadian men’s team has its best chance of progressing to the knockout rounds for the first time, emulating the success of the women’s team, which reached the quarter-finals in 2015 and the round of sixteen in 2019.

By almost all metrics, this will be the biggest World Cup ever staged. In 2017, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association voted to expand the bracket from thirty-six to forty-eight teams. By contrast, the first World Cup in Uruguay, in 1930, included thirteen, and as recently as 1982 only twenty-four teams competed in a tournament that lasted a modest four weeks. Controversially, this summer’s event will also see eight of the twelve third-placed teams progress from the group stage to the knockout rounds. In theory, more nations plus more games equals more fun, but in practice the new format means less jeopardy, as teams can afford several stumbles and still proceed to the next round. The danger is that the group stage will include a high number of low-stakes exhibition matches before the real business of knockout football begins roughly two and a half weeks into the tournament.

What the expanded format is designed to provide, of course, is more ticket sales, more live broadcasts, more advertising space, more beer and hot dog purchases, more luxury VIP packages sold. The 2026 World Cup is projected to generate over $11 billion (U.S.) in revenue, up more than 50 percent since Qatar hosted in 2022. More than $4 billion of that comes in the form of broadcasting rights, up from $3.4 billion, but the biggest increase is the $3 billion in projected ticket sales and hospitality, up an enormous 216 percent in four years. The 2026 World Cup is being marketed as the ultimate leisure-travel experience, which many in the United States tourism industry hope will bring visitors back to the country in the wake of Donald Trump’s tariffs and visa bans. Yet it will take a certain calibre of jet‑setter to be able to afford the exorbitant fees being charged. The cheapest ticket available for Canada’s opening game was $1,300, which is roughly the price of return airfare to London and a ticket to the Premier League. Admission to the final will set you back between $4,000 and $8,000. In the eyes of FIFA, the world’s most popular game is also the world’s most lucrative commercial opportunity.

This relentless drive for growth has been overseen by Gianni Infantino, who became the president of FIFA in 2016 after a corruption scandal wiped out both the previous president, Sepp Blatter, and his most likely successor, Michel Platini. Since his rather fortuitous rise to power, Infantino has amply demonstrated his credentials to lead one of the largest sporting bureaucracies in our new era of geopolitical strife and populist shamelessness. In 2019, he was awarded the Order of Friendship by Vladimir Putin for his role in bringing the World Cup to Russia the previous year. He has been a willing abettor of Gulf petro-states wishing to cleanse their reputations via the magic of “sportswashing,” overseeing the Qatar World Cup and ensuring that Saudi Arabia will host in 2034. Most notoriously of all, he has become the ever eager wingman and boon companion to Trump, who looms over this year’s World Cup like a vast dirigible. Visiting dignitaries will have to be careful not to puncture the thin skin that encloses the noxious mixture of greed and resentment that keeps the president’s lighter-than-air ego afloat.

The alacrity with which Infantino has sucked up to the Orange Lizard King has been remarkable. As soon as the decision was made to hold the tournament in America — with a handful of low-level games doled out to regional satellites Mexico and Canada for form’s sake — Infantino installed a FIFA office in Trump Tower in midtown Manhattan. In subsequent years, Trump and Infantino, or “Donny and Jonny,” as they have unfortunately been known to call each other, have often been seen together at UFC bouts and Oval Office press conferences, hatching their plans for the mother of all sporting contests in the MAGA homeland. Well versed in the finer points of global humanitarianism after his dealings with Putin and the Saudis, Infantino awarded Trump FIFA’s inaugural Peace Prize in 2025. He also graciously kicked in $1 million to the president’s gruesome performance art project, the Board of Peace. Whether Jonny’s efforts have been enough to convince Donny to pause ICE raids and refrain from threatening to invade his closest allies this summer remains to be seen.

Europeans and North Americans have long enjoyed mocking each other’s differing attitudes to the beautiful game. In a classic The Simpsons episode from 1997, Homer and family decide to attend a Continental Soccer Association match between Mexico and Portugal after seeing an ad on television. “Fast kicking, low scoring, and ties? You bet!” chirps the announcer. During the game, they find themselves bored stiff by the seeming lack of action until a riot breaks out among the Springfield crowd. This is how many Americans still see football: a form of existential stasis punctuated by bouts of ultra violence. For their part, the Europeans — and their sporting brethren in Latin America — look askance at the North American demand for pre-game razzmatazz and contrived spectacle. When Todd Boehly’s BlueCo investment fund purchased Chelsea FC in 2022, the California tech billionaire proposed a series of “innovations” to enhance the commercial prospects of the already fabulously wealthy Premier League, including an all-star game and matches played in glamorous foreign locations. To fans steeped in deep regional identities and partisan allegiances — Celtic for the Catholics and Rangers for the Protestants, Barcelona for the Catalans and Real Madrid for the Castilians — Boehly’s proposed disruptions seemed both ridiculous and offensive.

Strictly speaking, it is the North Americans who are on the right side of the great linguistic divide: “football” versus “soccer.” In fact, “soccer” preceded “football” as the name given to the game that we know today to distinguish it from “rugby football” and the various other kinds of hand, foot, and ball games that were played at England’s elite public schools in the nineteenth century. The term “soccer” comes from “association football,” the rules of which were first codified by a group of former public school boys at the University of Cambridge in 1846. The Football Association, which was founded in 1863, adopted those rules at the urging of Ebenezer Cobb Morley, who, contrary to appearances, was not a character in a Charles Dickens novel but a gentleman with a passion for physical exercise and fraternal competition.

It was from these rarefied origins that the game began to spread. First it was adopted by workingmen in Britain’s industrial cities, which is where the first professional clubs were founded in the late nineteenth century. Then it was imported to South America by the Scottish engineers who worked in the ports and on the railways of Uruguay, Argentina, and Brazil. To this day in the professional leagues of South America, you will find teams such as Newell’s Old Boys, Montevideo Wanderers, and Corinthians Paulista, the last a tribute to the famous Corinthian FC, an English club founded in 1882 to preserve the spirit of gentlemanly amateurism in the face of rapid professionalization. So dedicated were the Corinthians to honourableness that whenever one of their men committed a foul, the goalkeeper would stand aside to allow the opposing side a free shot at goal. The fact that Infantino’s commercial empire can trace its origins back to the self-effacing Corinthian spirit is a historical irony of dizzying proportions.

The impulse to codify and disseminate school sports was part of the wider march of reform in the Victorian era. Organized sports grew alongside those other great liberal institutions: mass education, meritocratic professions, and an expanded democratic franchise. In elite boarding schools, sports were a way to instill the values of self-discipline and esprit de corps within the imperial ruling class. Outdoor exercise was also thought to quell the “animal spirits” and avoid outbreaks of “beastliness” when dozens of adolescent boys were crammed together in the dormitories after lights out. Mens sana in corpore sano, and all that. But the sporting ideal was not confined to the privileged sons of Eton and Harrow. For workingmen, sport was a release from the daily grind of the factory or office, a hard-won period of leisure set apart from the rigorous time discipline of modern capitalism. The athletic field was also a place where individual skill could be expressed against the backdrop of collective solidarity and where competition took place within a framework of transparent rules and an impartial referee. More than just a bit of fun, and more than just a way of disciplining wayward bodies, organized sports expressed the ethical ideal of “fair play.” Both on the pitch and in politics, it was proceeding with integrity that supposedly mattered more than who actually won.

Readers may be forgiven at this point for experiencing a certain amount of confusion. Are we talking about the same Victorians who colonized a quarter of the globe and enriched themselves at the expense of countless others? The same Victorians who pioneered laissez-faire capitalism while turning a blind eye to the slums of Manchester and the rookeries of Holborn? Surely all this high-flown talk of fair play and the amateur spirit was little more than an ideological ruse, a convenient lie told to the lower orders to conceal how the game was rigged in favour of the already successful? Isn’t fair play the white man’s term for his own power and privilege?

On behalf of the defence, I would like to call the seemingly unlikely figure of C. L. R. James, the great Trinidadian historian, revolutionary Marxist, and staunch anti-imperialist, and one of history’s most eloquent apologists for the Victorian ideal of fair play. James’s true passion was cricket, the most classically elegant of British school sports, but his observations about the utopian power of athletics could apply just as easily to football, rugby, hockey, beach volleyball, tiddlywinks, or any formal system in which teams compete out of a disinterested love of the game. James was no Pollyanna. In Beyond a Boundary, his 1963 memoir about how cricket and English literature formed his character as a young scholar in Trinidad in the 1920s, he described how his colonial education had made him into “an alien in my own environment among my own people.” Everywhere in Beyond a Boundary, we see the social and psychological damage of colonialism, from the racially segregated cricket clubs to the school system geared toward the culture and values of a foreign land.

Fully aware of the broader hypocrisy, James nonetheless held true to the ideal of fair play that he first imbibed on the playing field. “This code became the moral framework of my existence,” he wrote. “It has never left me. I learnt it as a boy, I have obeyed it as a man and now I can no longer laugh at it.” The genius of Beyond a Boundary lies in its insistence that the powers that be do nothing more than honour their own stated ideals. Rather than dismissing fair play as a tool of the colonial master, James instead argued for its full implementation, presenting his lifelong campaign for West Indian independence as its logical outcome. Fair play, he suggested, was the ideal of Socrates, the Bible, and Marx, as well as of the gentleman amateurs who formed the Football Association.

In his most lyrical moments, James evoked ancient Greek philosophy and modern aesthetic theory as the only way to explain the extraordinary popularity of sport in the modern world. As he saw it, sport was the expression of an innate sense of beauty and justice that was accessible to regular people, even if they hadn’t read Plato or Kant. He would be supported in this regard by the philosopher Elaine Scarry, who has stressed the dual definition of the word “fair”: meaning beautiful as well as just or equitable. In a 1999 book, On Beauty and Being Just, about how the experience of beauty can move us toward justice, Scarry noted that ancient Greek democracy was in part inspired by the aesthetic spectacle of the trireme ships that ensured Athenian naval dominance in the Mediterranean. The harmonious order and rhythmical unity of the rowers was the model for the equitable distribution of political power among the men of Athens. Rowing, of course, became a sport in its own right, and the Greek ideal of fair play found its enduring expression in the Olympic Games, which were rejuvenated in the nineteenth century after Pierre de Coubertin made his tour of England’s public schools and witnessed the same recreational revolution that inspired the founding of the Football Association.

Today, even in the once cricket-obsessed West Indies, football is the world’s great aesthetic passion. It was in the 1950s and the era of Brazilian football dominance led by Pelé that soccer became known as the “beautiful game,” from the Portuguese phrase “o jogo bonito.” That aesthetic aspect has been expressed in various ways since, from the great Dutch side of the 1970s that gave us “total football” to the Barcelona side of the early 2000s, in which the diminutive trio of Xavi, Iniesta, and young Lionel Messi pioneered the ultra-precise tiki-taka passing style. After the incredible first leg of this year’s UEFA Champions League semifinal between Paris Saint-Germain and Bayern München — a glorious spectacle of feather-touch skill and rapier-fast wing play that ended five to four, in favour of PSG — Le Parisien declared the game a “pinnacle of art and culture” and a “museum of world wonders.” But the question remains as to whether, in our current era of hyper-commercialism and all-encompassing media distraction, the beautiful game can be said to embody any kind of ethical ideal at all.

To be a football fan today is to find oneself in the kind of cybernetic dystopia Philip K. Dick might have dreamed up. In Europe, most of the grand old stadiums, some of them dating back to the early twentieth century, have been replaced by gleaming pleasure domes filled with digital screens and overpriced food vendors that promise an “immersive” experience in a unique “retail environment.” Priced out of the grounds, most fans watch games via expensive streaming services or illegal free ones. The game itself is supplemented by endless streams of commentary, analysis, argument, and gossip. Football has ceased to be simply ninety-plus minutes played by twenty-two humans on a grassy field and has been converted into a complex array of overlapping symbolic systems. Like baseball in the early 2000s, soccer has recently undergone an analytics revolution. Statisticians break the flow of the action down into discrete movements and sequences, which are then converted into data points to be pored over by coaches and fans alike. Eager for ever more refined forms of engagement, fans turn to transfer market news, fantasy football leagues, and in-game betting apps to insert themselves into the second-order streams of information that ebb and flow around the main event.

In this highly mediated environment, enormous pressure is placed upon the rules. Since 2016, video assistant referee technology has been used in most of the top professional leagues to adjudicate marginal offside calls, dangerous fouls, and penalty appeals. With VAR, football has entered the post-human era, as actions are scrutinized with a degree of precision that far exceeds the capacities of the unaided human eye. Instead of being welcomed as an objective judgment of last resort, VAR has opened another realm of potential grievances, as fans dispute millimetre-fine offside calls and complain about long stoppages as officials inspect grainy footage, as though they were forensic experts in a crime lab.

A similar process of minute scrutiny and endless litigation has seeped into the finances of the game. At the top end of Europe’s professional leagues, competition is skewed by severe imbalances of wealth and resources. In 2011, Paris Saint-Germain was purchased by Qatar Sports Investments, a private fund owned by the Qatari state. Before that year, the club had won two league titles in its four-decade history; in the fifteen years since, it has won every French league title except one. In 2008, Manchester City, a mid-sized regional club of no particular distinction, was purchased by the Abu Dhabi United Group, which is owned by Sheikh Mansour, a member of the Abu Dhabi royal family. Both PSG and Man City have effectively been converted into high-end public relations vehicles designed to deflect attention from the human rights and environmental records of Gulf states. Thanks to his largesse, the sheikh’s team has become one of the giants of the European game, winning more than twenty major trophies since the takeover.

As in many other sectors of the financialized global economy, regulation is often a step behind the most powerful and disruptive market actors. Over the last few decades, governing bodies have had to introduce several rounds of financial regulation in order to maintain even the semblance of a level playing field. The Union of European Football Associations implemented its “financial fair play” rules in 2011, partly in response to the munificence of Roman Abramovich, the Russian oligarch and one-time friend of Vladimir Putin who purchased Chelsea FC in 2003 and bankrolled an unprecedented period of success. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Abramovich was forced to sell the club and had £2.5 billion worth of assets frozen by the British government as part of its sanctions campaign against Putin and his associates. Further north, Manchester City currently faces 115 outstanding charges of financial misconduct that pertain to the period from 2009 to 2018. When a judgment is finally reached, the team could be issued a large points deduction and stripped of some of its titles.

What does it mean that soccer is the world’s most popular sport? Over the course of its five and a half weeks, the 2026 FIFA World Cup is projected to reach 5.8 billion viewers. No precise estimate has been made for how many will watch the final on July 19, but it will certainly be the largest audience for a single sporting event in history. In the glare of the spectacle, it is all too easy to forget what brought us here in the first place: the original sense of beauty and grace and the enjoyment of play for its own sake.

Of course, we should avoid false nostalgia about the good old days of fair play on the pitch. Professional football has been no less susceptible to corruption than any other highly competitive industry in the age of global capitalism. Likewise, the entanglement of sport and geopolitics is nothing new. Benito Mussolini used the 1934 World Cup as an extended propaganda opportunity for the Italian fascist party, reportedly hand-picking referees for Italy’s own matches and bribing FIFA officials to ensure the home nation’s progress to the final. When Argentina hosted (and won) in 1978, the military dictatorship used the tournament to deflect the attention of the world’s media and its own citizens from the violent repression of its regime’s political opponents. The combination of sporting spectacle and authoritarian politics is far from unpresidented, as Trump himself might put it.

Nevertheless, even as politicians and bureaucrats try to hijack the beautiful game for their own purposes, we would do well to remember that the roots of soccer lie with the gentleman amateurs who preached the ideal of fair play and what C. L. R. James saw as the innate wisdom of ordinary people. I have sought out recreational soccer leagues my entire adult life. Everywhere I have lived, I’ve joined a team. I’ve played alongside folks from China, Turkey, Russia, Malawi, Guatemala, Greece, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Bahrain, Sweden, and God knows where else — not that it mattered where we came from, as we all spoke the lingua franca of football: pass, shoot, goal, Messi, Ronaldo, Salah, well played, tough luck, fair enough. The very simplicity of the game — two teams, a ball, a few basic rules, and infinite variations of drama and intrigue — is the recipe for instant comradeship.

Just as James managed to see beyond the hypocrisies of the colonial system to the utopian value of sports, when I sit down to watch the World Cup final on July 19, I will be straining to see beyond the venal antics of Donald Trump and Gianni Infantino to the true meaning of the beautiful game.