Does Soccer Still Explain the World?

Franklin Foer’s bestselling 2004 book helped sell soccer to Americans thanks in part to a defense of globalization.

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Forget the $10,000 tickets and the travel bans and the fact that the last three World Cups have been hosted in Russia, Qatar, and Donald Trump’s United States—FIFA President Gianni Infantino is a romantic. “Football, or soccer, as it is called here, is the world’s universal language,” Infantino said in March. “It’s about hope. It’s about joy. It’s about happiness. It’s about coming together. It’s about uniting the world.”

Fair enough. Of course, Infantino said those words at a meeting of Trump’s preposterous Board of Peace—an organization ostensibly created to solve world problems but whose funds are totally controlled by its chairman (none other than Trump himself). He said them shortly before announcing that his organization would spend $50 million building soccer stadiums in war-torn Gaza and concluded his remarks by donning a Trump-branded red “USA” hat.

The World Cup has always been political—its second iteration, after all, was hosted in Benito Mussolini’s Italy. But has it ever been more political? Infantino invented the farcical “FIFA Peace Prize” for Trump to assuage his bruised ego after he lost the real one and has joined the president at his inauguration, on state visits overseas, and repeatedly in the Oval Office. He has dutifully gone along with the president’s xenophobic travel bans and said nothing as players and officials have been detained and questioned for hours, invasively searched, and even banned from entering the nation entirely. Trump may have declared victory in the Iran war shortly after the beginning of the tournament—though the war would soon restart—but the Iranian national team wasn’t allowed to stay in the country overnight—it was not even allowed to linger for an hour after playing a game in punishing heat. Football may be about hope and joy and happiness, but it’s also very much about money and power.

Russian oligarchs are out—sorry, Roman Abramovich—but American ones are in. Half of the 20 English Premier League teams are owned by residents of the 2026 World Cup’s principal host nation, many of them hedge funds. Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates all have their own teams in England and France; Qatar’s Paris Saint-Germain has won the European Champions League two years in a row. The rise of petrostate ownership means that oil prices and Middle East conflict can dictate transfer policy and often raise uncomfortable questions. What does it mean when Newcastle United—owned by Saudi Arabia—participates in a Pride event? And what does it tell us when a state-owned Saudi club massively overpays for a Brazilian striker from a Russian team owned by oil and gas giant Gazprom?  And then, of course, there’s the 2026 World Cup, which is occurring in the shadow of Donald Trump’s second, decidedly more sinister and xenophobic administration. Want to understand the world? Soccer is not a bad place to look.

That, at least ostensibly, is the premise of Franklin Foer’s 2004 book, How Soccer Explains the World, which was rereleased with a new foreword earlier this year in advance of the 2026 World Cup. It’s a bold and—for an American, at least—presumptuous title, but it’s also a somewhat misleading one. How Soccer Explains the World is really three books in one. It’s a travelogue, in which Foer, a former editor of this magazine, travels the globe to glean lessons from fans and social scientists. It’s a plea to Americans like himself—educated, erudite, indoor kids—to open themselves up to the magic of the world’s game. And it is an attempt to stitch together his reporting into a larger theory about how soccer points to the future of a globalized, interconnected world; he notes the persistence of tribalism, nationalism, and antisemitism and the fact that globalization not only creates its........

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