S5, E7: Drama, Geopolitics, and Glory: Inside the World Cup

The World Cup is more than a soccer tournament — it’s a mirror for geopolitics, national identity, and the power of global fandom. In this episode of Unpacked, host Aislyn Greene sits down with British journalist Jonathan Wilson, author of The Power and the Glory: The History of the World Cup, to explore the drama, corruption, and beauty that have defined the tournament across a century.

Transcript

Aislyn Greene: Welcome to Unpacked by Afar, the World Cup edition. I’m your host, Aislyn Greene, here with a confession: the extent of my soccer knowledge really boils down to two things. First, there are the two years I spent as a middle school midfielder, where the highlight of my athletic achievement was winning best smile. Second, there’s everything I’ve gleaned from Ted Lasso. But despite that, even I love the energy, the camaraderie, and yes, the drama of the World Cup.

When I was researching today’s guest, British journalist Jonathan Wilson, who wrote the book The Power and the Glory: The History of the World Cup, I thought that surely 2026 would be the most bizarre and globally tenuous year for the World Cup. But as I went down the rabbit hole, I realized that drama and geopolitical unrest is honestly just par for the course when it comes to FIFA.

In this episode, Jonathan shares the historical dramas, reveals where he’ll be for this year’s World Cup, and offers trivia that might appeal to even the most sports-averse listener.

Jonathan, welcome to Unpacked. It’s so good to have you here today.

Jonathan Wilson: Oh, thank you very much for having me. Pleasure to be here.

Aislyn: Can we start with the very beginning? How did you become so interested and passionate about soccer or football?

Jonathan: Well, I grew up in Sunderland in the northeast of England, and I think if you grow up there, it’s really difficult not to become obsessed by it. I can’t remember when it wasn’t a central plank of life. In the old days, games kicked off at 3 p.m. on a Saturday, so they finished around 4:40 or 4:45. It didn’t matter where I was with my parents. My dad would always arrange it. We would buy a TV or buy a radio at 4:40 so we could be anywhere and still catch the scores. We could be in the Yorkshire Dales, visiting a country house, shopping. We would always be in the car by 4:40. You had to arrange your life around matches.

When you’re driving north towards Sunderland, you go past the offices of the Sunderland Echo, the local newspaper, and they used to have lit up on the outside this cartoon figure: a football done as a face with little legs, little arms, a little hat. On a Saturday evening it would either be smiling or frowning or neutral to tell you what the score was. So people driving home who maybe didn’t have car radios, as soon as they hit the outskirts of Sunderland, they knew the score. It was completely central to life.

And then into that came the World Cup. I turned six during the 1982 World Cup. It’s difficult to work out now just what enraptured me. But one thing was we didn’t really have very much football on TV. Then suddenly you have the World Cup, every day, two or three games every day. It was this incredible feast of incredibly exotic countries. If you’re a five-year-old kid growing up in Sunderland and suddenly you’re watching Cameroon against Peru, well, you don’t really have a sense of what Cameroon or Peru are. But I had this kid’s guide to the World Cup that I’d learned off by heart. I not only knew the score of every World Cup final, but I knew all 24 competing nations: their capital, their currency, their flag, what kit they wore.

I think I recognized the World Cup as this doorway to the world. I wouldn’t have been able to articulate it like that back then, but I recognized the exoticism. There’s this whole world out there and they all care about this thing. They all play football. And I think that was incredibly intoxicating.

Aislyn: Yeah, it opened the door to the world for you through a very specific lens. It’s so interesting. There’s a line in your book about how everyone’s favorite World Cup is their first World Cup. Would you say that’s still true for you?

Jonathan: Yeah, it’s the nostalgia of it. I’ve got a theory in football: we prioritize what happens when we’re very young, just before we fully understand things. If you get interested in football when you’re five or six, that’s what you think football should look like. Because you didn’t fully experience it, you give it a greater authority. Oh, well, it must have been great because people are still talking about it.

The aesthetic of the early ‘80s. The kits in those days were a lot of them cotton, so the sweat was really visible. The Brazil shirts, that yellow, playing in the heat of Spain in summer. Falcão scored a famous goal against Italy and runs away celebrating with his arms out, and you can see very clearly the sweat on his shirt. I thought: yes, footballers should look like that. It annoys me that we now have moisture-wicking technology and nobody really looks properly sweaty anymore.

And the noise. Everybody had air horns. That was a big thing in the early ‘80s. The Brazil fans always had drums. All of that just added to this sense of exoticism. Now everything is slightly homogenized and we all know too much. But yes, the first World Cup, I think everybody goes through that same process of: God, this thing is huge.

Aislyn: Which team do you back now?

Jonathan: I’m a Sunderland fan. I couldn’t be anything else. It would be like changing the color of my eyes. This is what I am. It’s so integral to your identity. In England, that is still true, particularly from the big post-industrial northern cities. If Sunderland gets to a cup final, or a playoff final more likely, they bring tens of thousands of fans to London, thirty or forty thousand, and they all take over Trafalgar Square or Covent Garden. The whole point is to say: remember, we’re still here. London has forgotten about us. We’re miles away. We don’t produce money anymore. The coal mines have gone. The shipyards have gone. The glass industry’s gone. There’s nothing there apart from the football. So the football is the way the city is able to project itself to the world.

Aislyn: I love that. In the intro to The Power and the Glory, you write that it is a book about the World Cup, about great players and great goals and great matches, but also about soccer as a tool for self-projection and influence peddling, about the role it has played in nation building and the role it increasingly plays as countries negotiate their positions in a globalized world. So why has the World Cup become such a complex mix of patriotism, politics, and passion?

Jonathan: Fundamentally, because everybody cares. The whole world cares about it. Every country in the world watches the World Cup. And because football is so popular, it has more power than other sports.

You can see this right at the start. The first truly international football tournament was the 1924 Olympics. That’s the first time you get European, African, and American nations competing, and Uruguay win it. Nobody knows anything about them. They turn up, they play brilliantly, at a level way beyond what anybody expects. A third of all the revenues of the 1924 Olympics came from football.

The Uruguayan government’s pro-government newspaper El Dia said that this victory was worth thousands of hours of diplomacy and thousands of dollars of investment in advertising. People now knew, first, that Uruguay is an independent nation and not just a northern province of Argentina, and second, they associated it with something very, very positive. That’s why, when the first World Cup came around in 1930, Uruguay said yes, we will host it.

There’s also this happy coincidence that 1930 fell over the hundredth anniversary of the ratification of their constitution. The big stadium they built for the tournament is the Centenario, to mark the centenary, and Uruguay, in the Centenario, just over 100 years after ratifying their constitution, win the first World Cup.

Aislyn: What would you say the host countries for this year’s World Cup are trying to project? What role does nation building play in 2026?

Jonathan: I think 2026 is a really complicated and difficult example, possibly out of line with everything we’ve seen up until now. This is only the second time we’ve had more than one country hosting at once. In 2002, we had Japan and South Korea. This time we’ve got three hosts, 104 games, 80 of them in the U.S. The U.S. are clearly the main hosts.

The nature of the World Cup changes in 2010. Up until 2006, revenues were divided between FIFA and the host nation. So even if you didn’t turn a financial profit, you could justify it: we get all this exposure, people see our cities, see our country. Right up through even Qatar in 2022, part of the point of hosting was to get people to come to your country and then go home and tell everyone it’s brilliant.

Aislyn: That seems like such a smart kind of tourism builder. What has changed since then, and do you think it’s been positive?

Jonathan: From 2010 onwards, FIFA take a much greater share of ticket revenues, broadcast revenues, and sponsorship deals. It is now almost impossible for host nations not to lose an enormous amount of money. South Africa hosted in 2010, Brazil in 2014. FIFA also demands massive tax breaks, which I believe the U.S. has not yet granted. Jacob Zuma’s line on South Africa’s experience was essentially: we made ten times less than we thought, and it cost ten times more than we thought.

Brazil is even worse. The Estadio Mané Garrincha in Brasília, which cost $900 million, the second most expensive stadium in the world when it was built, was being used as a bus depot within two years of the World Cup. A disastrous waste of an enormous amount of money.

Russia’s case is very complicated. When Russia bid in 2009, Putin’s foreign policy was to show he was a moderate, a man with whom the West could do business. By the time 2018 arrived and the first invasion of Ukraine had happened, his foreign policy had changed. But the original aim was to say: look, we are part of the global elite, and we can show this by hosting the World Cup. And Russia at that point was genuinely wealthy. When I visited in 2018, I had this realization that if you were a middle-class Russian, you had never had it so good. They had disposable income in a way they’d never had before. It was revelatory, thinking: this is why they don’t rise up, why they don’t protest about the restrictions and lack of freedoms. Because this is actually better than they’ve ever had before. Clearly things have got much worse since the second invasion of Ukraine and the sanctions.

Aislyn: Do you think that was also true for Qatar when they hosted the 2022 World Cup?

Jonathan: Qatar, even more so. I think all their investment in sport is primarily driven by a desire to get people to know that Qatar is a sovereign nation, much like Uruguay in the 1920s. If people have heard of Qatar, if the world knows who Qatar is, it’s that much harder for potentially hostile regional powers such as Iran or Saudi Arabia to think about moving in on their natural gas. They reportedly spent $221 billion on the World Cup and associated infrastructure, more than every previous World Cup combined. And the human cost, in terms of migrant worker deaths estimated at around 6,500 by Human Rights Watch, was horrendous.

Now, I don’t think the U.S. is particularly interested in projecting an image as a great global player. That box has been ticked for quite a while. But what is being projected at the minute is Donald Trump. We saw it at the Club World Cup, hosted in the U.S. last summer: he was front and center of everything, including the medal ceremony after Chelsea beat Paris Saint-Germain. He can’t realistically have planned this as the outcome, but I think that’s the outcome we’re going to get.

And frankly, the financial picture is already fraying. Foxboro is refusing to give FIFA an entertainment license because FIFA won’t commit to underwriting the $7.8 million cost of security. Fan fest plans have been scaled back in Seattle and Boston, and the Bay Area is reconsidering its plans too, despite a daily fan fest being mandated in the bid process. These cities are right to push back, but they should have worked it out before signing on. If you’re not projecting an image of yourself and you’re not making money, what exactly are you doing?

Aislyn: Given the current news cycle, it’s going to be a very complicated year for the World Cup. Do you think only the wealthiest nations will be able to host going forward?

Jonathan: Yes. The expansion from 32 teams to 48 puts an enormous strain on host cities. With 16 teams, you could feasibly move a tournament at short notice. England, Germany, France, Italy could host and get away with it. With 48, you need a very, very wealthy host.

For 2030, we know it will be co-hosted by Spain, Portugal, and Morocco. And because it’s the hundredth anniversary of the first World Cup, Uruguay, Argentina, and Paraguay will each host one game. Expecting everyone to fly over the Atlantic for one game and then fly back is weird and bad for players, fans, and the environment.

As for 2034, the short version is: Saudi Arabia have been very keen to host for a while and provide much of the funding for Infantino, the president of FIFA. When bidding opened, Australia were considering it but needed planning permission to build new stadiums, which you cannot get in 28 days. Saudi Arabia had their complete bid document ready within 24 hours of the deadline being announced. Almost as if they knew exactly what was happening all along.

Aislyn: Wild. All of that aside, what are you actually excited about for the World Cup in North America in 2026?

Jonathan: I’ve been lobbying for years to cover the Mexican arm of it, mainly because Guadalajara is, to me, the most World Cup city of all. Mexico hosted the World Cup in 1970 and again in 1986. In England, the great game from 1970 was England’s defeat to Brazil in Guadalajara. And in 1986, France beat Brazil in the quarter-final there. Guadalajara is a word synonymous with the World Cup for me.

So I lobbied at The Guardian for four years. Last year in Germany, I spent a lot of time going around places like Stuttgart by myself, a lot of lonely brewery tours, while colleagues went to Munich and Berlin and Hamburg. But the payoff is I get to go to Guadalajara. If England and Mexico both win their groups and then win in the last 32, they would meet in Mexico City in the last 16, which would be quite something. After that I’ll fly into the U.S. and do games through to the final, though I probably won’t know the exact route until a couple of days before it happens.

Aislyn: Can we talk a little more about the expansion? Forty-eight teams instead of 32. Why, and what does it mean for the tournament?

Jonathan: Unfortunately this is another FIFA political story. Gianni Infantino’s support base, much like those of his predecessors Sepp Blatter and João Havelange before him, lies in the world’s smaller and poorer nations. Havelange won the FIFA election in 1974, so we’ve had only three people in charge for fifty years, which you may have questions about.

Havelange’s father was a Belgian arms dealer who missed his Titanic connection and ended up working in São Paulo, where Havelange grew up. He was a very good sportsman in his own right, competing in water polo and swimming for Brazil at the Olympics. He was at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, where he was very impressed by the punctuality of the transport, which I think we can all agree was definitely the key takeaway from those Games. He was never afraid of associating with right-wing leaderships, but he was very good at presenting himself as the anti-colonial candidate.

He ran against Stanley Rous, a slightly old-fashioned Englishman who tends to be portrayed as a terrible tweedy colonial, which I think is actually deeply unfair. But where Rous really shot himself in the foot was over FIFA’s supposed political neutrality. In the late 1960s and early ‘70s, when Black African nations were looking to freeze out apartheid South Africa for refusing to field a mixed-race team, Rous opposed them, arguing it was an internal South African matter. His logic was defensible, but it allowed Havelange to portray him as pro-apartheid, which he categorically was not. Havelange’s base was Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, the postcolonial nexus, and it has remained so ever since.

One of the advantages of having your support base in some of the world’s poorer countries is that you find you can bribe people quite easily. Sepp Blatter set up what’s called the Goal Project, which on paper is a great idea: FIFA distributes money to football associations around the world that need to build a new pitch, upgrade their headquarters, fund a refereeing course, and so on. However, unless it’s audited well, it’s obviously very open to abuse. The very first handout went to the Liberian Football Association, whose president was Edwin Snow, the son-in-law of Charles Taylor, the notorious president of Liberia later indicted on war crimes charges. Edwin Snow used the money to go to the U.S. and do an MBA. He then returned to Liberia, quit his position as president of the Football Association, and took up a role as head of the Liberian National Oil Company. Not a penny of that went into Liberian football, but Liberia’s vote for Blatter in FIFA elections was guaranteed.

And so this distribution of revenues to secure votes is how Havelange, Blatter, and Infantino maintain their primacy. One of the things smaller nations have long lobbied for is greater access to the World Cup, and with 48 places instead of 32, there is more space. African slots have gone up from five to nine, potentially ten if DR Congo win the inter-confederation playoff.

I don’t think that’s unreasonable. The drop off from the 32nd best team in the world to the 48th isn’t particularly large. The bigger problem is the dilution of spectacle. A 32-team World Cup has 64 games, of which 55 are genuinely watchable. At 104 games, it simply isn’t possible to watch them all.

Aislyn: Aside from that dilution of spectacle, are there other structural issues you foresee?

Jonathan: With 32 teams, you have eight groups of four, top two go through, and there is genuine jeopardy on every game. With 48 teams across 12 groups, the top two plus the eight best third-place teams advance, which means there’s not very much jeopardy at all. If you win your opening game, you’re almost certainly through. Much of the group stage becomes low-stakes. And one of the great joys of the World Cup is that big teams go out early. That jeopardy is what you want to write about as a journalist, and it’s what you want to watch as a fan. If instead you’re watching mid-ranking sides drift away who you weren’t even sure had qualified in the first place, well, who cares?

Aislyn: Given all of that, which teams do you have an eye on this year?

Jonathan: The teams with a genuine chance of winning: Spain, I think, are significantly the best team in the world right now. England and France have a chance. Argentina are still world champions and still have Messi. And I think Brazil will be better than they’ve been for a while under Carlo Ancelotti, which is a very wise appointment. In a strange tactical, hereditary way, they’ve almost gone back to their roots with him. The great era of Brazilian football, 1958 through to 1970, when they won three World Cups out of four, was very heavily influenced by Hungarian emigres. Béla Guttmann won the league with São Paulo in 1955, and Vicente Feola, the 1958 Brazil coach, had worked with him. Ancelotti’s lineage traces back to that same Hungarian ethos through Nils Liedholm, who played for AC Milan and then coached both Roma and Milan, where he was a massive influence on Ancelotti. It’s as though Brazil is restoring itself to the roots that made it great.

Aislyn: What about an outlier, a country we might overlook?

Jonathan: Norway have been threatening to be really good for a while and somehow just not quite qualifying, and now suddenly they’re in. They’ve got Erling Haaland as a center forward alongside Alexander Sørloth: two players who, if you were a club side, you wouldn’t buy them both because they’re quite similar. But they’re both big, both physical, both quick. You go direct to them and it’s all brawn, not guile. Not sophisticated, but incredibly exciting. They’ve also got creative midfielders like Martin Ødegaard. Norway were very good in the mid-'90s, then as happens with countries of that population size, it’s very difficult to maintain consistency. But they look really good now and I think they’re a really interesting outside bet.

I’m also interested in DR Congo, if they get through the inter-confederation playoff. I’ve been to 13 Africa Cup of Nations and DR Congo are always nearly there but not quite getting over the line. They’ve got a lot of players starting to make names for themselves, not just in France and Belgium but in England too. Noha Sidev in midfield is only 21 and has a remarkable engine while also being very good at carrying the ball. Having seen DRC fall so narrowly so many times, I really hope they get to the World Cup and make their mark.

Aislyn: I’d love to wrap up with a couple of questions about stadiums, because they’re all so symbolic. What are some of the stadiums with the most interesting historical nuggets?

Jonathan: Two come to mind. The Estadio Azteca in Mexico City is the only stadium in the world to have hosted two World Cup finals. People will shout at me and say the Maracanã, but technically the last game in 1950 was a final group game, not a designated final. The Azteca is the only venue to have hosted two actual finals, and it’s also where the famous Maradona quarter-final took place. I’m told there’s a plaque to the goal. I’ve never been there before and I’m very much looking forward to it.

And then there’s MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, which I find fascinating not for the stadium itself, but for its location. It’s very close to Kearny, New Jersey, which was the original hotbed of soccer in the U.S. Two Scottish companies came over in the 1870s and brought a lot of Scottish workers with them, and football really took root there in a way it didn’t elsewhere. Three members of the U.S. squad at the 1990 World Cup came from Kearny, which for such a tiny place is remarkable. And Carli Lloyd, who scored a hat trick in the Women’s World Cup final, is from just a few miles away. I like the fact that the World Cup final will be played very close to the symbolic birthplace of U.S. soccer.

Aislyn: I didn’t realize New Jersey held that significance in the soccer world. Are there any stadiums with fun personal memories for you?

Jonathan: At the Al Bayt Stadium during the Qatar World Cup, there was a problem with my ticket in the press box: the seat didn’t actually exist, having been taken up by a camera position. I found myself at the back of the press box needing to get to the other side, with a big air conditioning vent in the way. Rather than walk all the way around, I tried to cross in front of it. As soon as I got there, this enormous blast of air came at me. It was like North by Northwest, Cary Grant clinging on desperately, stewards having to pull me back in. So: if you’re near an air conditioning vent at a World Cup stadium, do be careful. They are dangerous.

Aislyn: That is not the hot tip I was expecting from this interview. What about at home watching games, any superstitions?

Jonathan: I’m a very rational person in most walks of life, but really not in football. I hate writing about Sunderland during games. You have to file your match report as the final whistle blows, and you learn to write your intro while the game is still going on. If it’s any other team and we’re winning one-nil with 15 minutes to go, I’m writing the intro. If it’s Sunderland? No, no, no. I don’t want to tempt fate. I don’t want to look arrogant to the fates. So I’m, frankly, a terrible match reporter when it comes to Sunderland.

Aislyn: Note to self: don’t watch certain matches with Jonathan. Thank you so much for the chat today, it was so interesting and edifying. And I’m looking forward to your World Cup reporting.

Jonathan: No worries. Thanks.

Aislyn: Thank you everyone for joining this World Cup episode. But don’t leave just yet because next up, we have a little inspiration for anyone with World Cup travel dreams. In the meantime, I’ve linked to Jonathan’s website and his many books, including The Power and the Glory, in the show notes. Now on to that travel inspiration.