World Cup Nausea

With the World Cup looming in North America this summer, Simon Kuper offers a compelling—and depressing—history of this unique tournament.

By Dan FriedmanMarch 3, 2026

• Sports

• Politics

IT IS A TESTAMENT to the dreadful state of the world—and the dizzying scope of Simon Kuper’s new book World Cup Fever: A Soccer Journey in Nine Tournaments—that I felt physically sick after reading it. Though nominally an anecdotal account of the last nine World Cups—all of which Kuper attended—it is, in effect, a snapshot of how history has dashed the hopes of the post–Cold War generations. As a Paris-based journalist who covers soccer (among other things) for London’s Financial Times, Kuper recounts recent social and political developments through the lens of the world’s largest sport. Though he is based in Europe, the universal appeal of “the Mundial” allows Kuper to provide a global perspective.

Generations of soccer supporters thought that the defeat of totalitarianism would mean that people could play and celebrate when, where, and how they wanted. They thought we could finally achieve the exalted vision of early enthusiasts like Jules Rimet, FIFA’s longest-serving president (1921–54), his successor Sir Stanley Rous (1961–74), and those hopeful Uruguayans of 1930, who hosted the first tournament and had to overcome complex logistics of travel and politics to mount the event. They thought that the fall of the Soviet empire would bring the sunshine of rule-of-law democracy to the world, and that the injection of compassionate capital would give people the means to build a more justly competitive global order. Instead, we got parasites thirsting for money, power, and influence, venal creeps like Sepp Blatter and Gianni Infantino, Vladimir Putin and the Emir of Qatar.

With a painstaking attention to detail, Kuper shows that our hopes for the post–Cold War world of soccer were largely misplaced, with the strong implication that we are at least as wrong about everything else. Billions around the world (including me) love soccer passionately, but as with so many things people care for deeply, the sport has been corrupted by money and politics. With the occasion for this memoir on the horizon (the 2026 World Cup will be held in Mexico, Canada, and the United States this summer), it’s hard to look at the “beautiful game” without seeing it through Kuper’s complex and loving indictment. And for anyone living in North America, it’s impossible to avoid the looming threat of FIFA Peace Prize recipient and FIFA Club World Cup party crasher Donald Trump following in the footsteps of autocratic hosts like Putin (2018) and Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani (2022) in using the competition to whitewash his policies and gild his inhumane actions.

Heading to Moscow on assignment in 2018, Kuper worried that the occasion would wind up being much like Berlin in 1936, when Adolf Hitler was able to use the Olympics to charm visitors and garner influence before embarking on global conquest and genocide. While Kuper decided at the time that the parallels were not close enough to be prohibitive, he clearly continues to harbor major doubts. For all but a couple of years surrounding its World Cup, Russia has spent the time invading its neighbor, Ukraine, who—along with Poland—co-hosted the 2012 UEFA European Football Championship. “As I write in summer 2025,” Kuper reflects, “Donetsk is under Russian occupation and Kharkiv is under Russian attack. Donetsk’s stadium hasn’t been used since 2014. The host cities of Euro 2012 arguably no longer exist.”

Kuper does not speculate about the upcoming North American tournament or any future World Cups, but the trend he traces is clear: “FIFA’s consistent willingness to embrace brutal regimes, from Argentina’s military junta of the 1970s through Vladimir Putin and Mohammed bin Salman, was baked in from the start. It was all part of ‘peace through sport.’” Even as Kuper shows why soccer execs might enjoy the simple access to wealth and favor that autocratic hosts offer, diplomats and fans can stomach taking a major sporting event to a repressive country in the hopes of encouraging positive change: global attention might work like sunshine, visitors interacting with locals may sow thoughts of freedom, and the simple joy of hosting the competition could change the way a country thinks about itself. “A World Cup is a carnival, and carnivals reverse the usual order of things,” Kuper writes. “In medieval folk carnivals, men dressed up as women and women as men. At the World Cup, Russian civilians reclaimed their streets from the security forces.”

But the hopes for 2018 had already been dashed. Russia occupied Crimea in 2014, paused for the World Cup and COVID-19, then invaded Ukraine again in 2022. “[W]hen a carnival ends,” Kuper notes,

the world returns to normal. Putin’s deepest fear was a popular revolution of the kind he had witnessed as a junior KGB agent in Dresden, East Germany in 1989. He didn’t want Russians to feel that they owned the public spaces. A video was going around of a Russian asking two policemen whether drinking in the street would be allowed after the World Cup. “Are you Russian?” was the reply. “Then no.” This tournament was going to fade like a dream.

With similar hopes and to similar effect, Amnesty International and others chose not to call for a boycott of Qatar 2022. As well as hoping for continued Qatari philanthropy, charities thought that the global party would open up the country, shining a light on the “kafala” system of what is politely called “sponsorship” labor. Despite significant noise in the Western press, including damning reports of deaths and slave labor, FIFA did little beyond issue press releases calling for the liberalization of the racist, misogynist, anti-LGBTQ+, feudal petrostate. Kuper mentions that Infantino, FIFA’s president since 2016, lived in Qatari-provided housing during the event. FIFA’s independence and power were so feeble that, under pressure from conservative Muslim forces, it couldn’t even keep the bars open as agreed for its beer sponsor.

Kuper discusses how players who might otherwise have been mild activists on behalf of women or LGBTQ+ communities were disarmed by Qatari pressure. Though their objections were not systematically erased—as happened to Iranian protesters—they were threatened with yellow cards if they wore rainbow armbands, and elite players were more elegantly hamstrung when the country’s sovereign wealth fund “sponsored” FC Barcelona and bought Paris Saint-Germain after the financial crash of 2008. It was obvious that the hosts would push hard to have a Messi versus Mbappé final since those teammates from PSG were the star gladiators from the club they owned.

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World Cup Fever, though, is much richer than a mere meditation on FIFA’s corruption and the rise of international autocracy. Indeed, this relatively slim tome contains at least seven books—all of which Kuper is uniquely well qualified to write. It is a history of the World Cup, and it is a memoir of Simon Kuper. It is an account of how people’s love for soccer and their feelings for community intersect. It is a suggestion about how the politics of soccer (and especially FIFA) represent the politics of the world. It is a story of the vicissitudes of Western journalism in general—and sports journalism in particular—as money, prestige, and power have dwindled from the near-monopoly of print and network TV to the ubiquity of cheap internet content. It is a version of the book Kuper thought about writing a decade ago, tracing the story of the 2010 South African World Cup from earliest conception to abandoned white-elephant stadiums. Finally—and, ironically, perhaps least importantly—it is a history of soccer: how the game on the field and the attitudes of players have been transformed since the author first put them under his professional scrutiny.

As a narrator, Kuper wears his qualifications lightly: he is, after all, a co-author of the 2009 book Soccernomics: Why England Loses, Why Germany and Brazil Win, and Why the U.S., Japan, Australia, Turkey—and Even Iraq—Are Destined to Become the Kings of the World’s Most Popular Sport, which brilliantly applied the baseball concept of “Moneyball” to soccer, and the author of Football Against the Enemy (1994), which—along with Franklin Foer’s How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization (2004)—offers the best account of how soccer, culture, and politics mix. He also wrote Ajax, the Dutch, the War: Football in Europe During the Second World War (2003), one of the finest books about soccer and the Holocaust, and The Barcelona Complex: Lionel Messi and the Making—and Unmaking—of the World’s Greatest Soccer Club (2021), an in-depth look at arguably the world’s best club and the world’s best player. Throughout World Cup Fever, Kuper paints himself, at various stages, as optimistic naïf and as overworked hack, but by writing each of these seven books through each other (and by not overwriting any but the South African one), he is able to convey the nuances of each depressing story without making it sound like democracy, professional soccer, capitalism, and journalism are all doomed. Which is, nevertheless, the overwhelming sense one gets from the book.

Though he and I differ in many ways—Kuper was raised in Holland by South African parents and resides now in France—he shares with me some interests and educational background. Indeed, in my occasional forays into soccer journalism, he has helped connect me with sources twice in the last couple of decades. As a near-peer, I used to be envious of how he had turned a passion into a profession. But no more. Using the lens of the quadrennial tournament, Kuper exposes the unpleasant and depressing ways the sports-reporting sausage gets made. We hear of the ill-kept hotel rooms, lack of sleep, constant travel, boring games, and petty politics within and beyond the media centers, all of which serves to ruin the magic of the sport. Most distasteful in his mind, perhaps, is the way he and his fellow journalists treated the sudden death of their outspoken colleague Grant Wahl during the Netherlands-Argentina quarterfinal in 2022: “[T]o my left was someone I knew and admired, possibly dying. But in front of me was Oranje, my team, playing a thriller. I’m not proud to say this, but I spent half an hour swivelling my head between Grant and the match. So did a lot of the journalists around me.”

Surely, as he carries on about his brutal schedule and all the substandard games he has to cover, Kuper must enjoy the sport a little more than it appears. He tells us that, at the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris, he rediscovered the joy and curiosity of attending a sporting event as a fan. That joy mostly serves to highlight the loss of his love of soccer, ground down by the monthlong drudgery of reporting on its tournaments.

This Weltschmerz is also the fate of each World Cup hosting committee. For the host country, the tournament begins as a dream, an opportunity to invest in infrastructure and world-class stadiums; for FIFA, it’s a money pot. (For FIFA executives, the proposal round is where the graft is; for the organization, it’s the tournament itself.) South Africa, as Kuper testifies, is unique in having managed to unify the most divided of new countries around sport—including soccer, traditionally a Black South African pursuit. But the cost of hosting the 2010 World Cup was the destruction of the unique flavor of South African soccer culture. And, yes, the cost also included the money spent on stadiums that FIFA insisted on but South Africa didn’t need. As Kuper details, “the ground in Polokwane alone, constructed for a city without a big football club, cost more than the entire sum of $158.5 million that had been budgeted in 2004 for all new stadiums, ‘venue theming’ and FIFA headquarters combined.”

FIFA was set up for grassroots soccer fans to connect and for the overall benefit of the game and its players. That is the story of the unassuming Jules Rimet, after whom the iconic World Cup trophy was named. In a metaphor for the loss of FIFA’s good intentions that is so on the nose it would be rejected from any movie script, the original Jules Rimet Trophy was stolen. From 1974 onward, after Rimet and Sir Stanley Rous, it became clear that the central executives of FIFA could take World Cup money to win the votes of local soccer grandees by giving them unaccountable boondoggles. These grandees would then vote for the central executives, who in turn would continue the cycle. This is the self-serving system by which host and would-be host countries pay for the enrichment of soccer executives around the world in the name of global soccer. “The champion milker of this system was Jack Warner,” Kuper writes, who “received at least $26 million from FIFA to build a Dr João Havelange Centre of Excellence in his home country, on land that later turned out to belong to him. (Banned from football for life in 2015, Warner still lives peacefully in Trinidad.)”

Because FIFA has only one significant moneymaking activity, the organization is extremely dependent on each host, but that host is likewise dependent on FIFA to realize its dream. Countries that have interests other than the sportswashing ideal of basking in the glamour of soccer are out of luck. That means the countries’ hopes of using the event to invest in necessary infrastructure or build sustainable stadiums are entirely unaligned with FIFA’s interests and almost never come to fruition.

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The Mundial used to be a meeting of strangers and styles of play. Supporters who never otherwise met would mingle in the streets, while the unprecedented television coverage would let viewers see players who had thrilled other countries on their screens. And the event would offer an opportunity to compare national teams’ characters: England’s brave tackling, Germany’s ruthless efficiency, Brazil’s skillful tricks and showboating. But globalization has meant homogenization, undermining the diversity of national styles. National teams have to play in the few ways that club teams have learned to deal with the inexorable speed of contemporary soccer. The best club teams of today would wipe the floor with the legendary national teams of yore. And global coverage of the sport means we can no longer be surprised—foreign wunderkinds are already playing for famous teams, their appearances streamed around the world, their tricks turning on TikTok.

Through soccer, we imagine a different world. For nations like Brazil or Argentina, it’s a world where their primacy is unchallenged by the United States or China. For players, it’s a world where everyone has the same chance for 100 minutes between the white lines. For Kuper and the optimistic soccer fans, it’s a world where people come together to celebrate the sport:

In a typical metro carriage during the first round, you might see male Saudis packed together with Iranian men and women, watched benignly by fat shaven-headed Englishmen, everyone filming everyone else, and bantering in basic English, while a group of Americans chanted, “I believe that we will win!” Women in full hijab mingled with women in shorts. Brazilians even mingled with Argentinians. People weren’t just tolerant of religious difference; they were tolerant of breathing in somebody’s body odour and listening to their terrible music on speaker at 1 a.m. in a crammed carriage after their team had lost. Maybe there was something to the old canard that if you just brought ordinary people from different countries together without politicians getting in the way they’d get along.

Meanwhile, as power and money have accrued to soccer pols, corruption has increased. Kuper quotes Henry Kissinger’s observation: “The politics of soccer make me nostalgic for the politics of the Middle East.” Sadly, the two are no longer separate, and both are infinitely grosser than they were when Kissinger made that crack in 1983. There is no way for the footballers of the world to unite without FIFA and its self-interested corruption. Rimet and Rous were amateur lovers of football who served not their own self-interest but their beloved game to the best of their abilities. But once João Havelange, then Blatter, Infantino, and the corrupt Excos (executive committee members) took control, they put themselves in a position to cash in on their votes, selling their constituents down the river.

Every four years, the world’s most popular sport holds an international competition to find out which country will be the world champion. But it would be a mistake to think of this as a sporting event, or World Cup Fever as a simple sports book. These seven-books-in-one document a massive religious pilgrimage that burgeoned during the last century. Just as the Catholic Church is not simply about prayer, World Cups are not simply about soccer. Over the past century, and especially over the past 70 years (let’s say since Pelé), the tournaments have been spiritual, political, and aspirational events. The nausea I feel at Kuper’s bearing witness comes not just from a feeling of loss but also from a sense of desecration.

Even though it is the most widely watched event on earth, most people don’t particularly care about the World Cup. But the United States loves an event, and even though this summer’s tourney is almost certain to disappoint, the nation will still be glued to the spectacle. For the American reader, then, World Cup Fever is an absorbing companion to the forthcoming tournament—a lens through which to see what lies beyond the scoreboard. And for those who approach the game as culture, as politics, as ritual, this book provides not a final answer but an invitation: to watch, to think, and above all to feel what it means to be caught up in the feverish, beautiful, maddening spectacle of soccer’s greatest stage.