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 own winners or losers but provides its own incentive structure for corruption. There are parts of this book that very much anticipate a world—and a sport—dominated by oligarchy and greed.
Yet travel books—and books about sports, for that matter—are inevitably time capsules and Foer’s feels like one somewhat out of step with his own time, let alone ours. Published a year after the start of the Iraq War, Foer’s rosy look at globalization was already passé as the U.S. took on a more aggressive, hostile, and xenophobic posture to the rest of the world. It arrived at a pivotal moment in the rise of U.S. soccer but also one for the economic trends he describes. It was still possible to be hopeful, albeit faintly so, about globalization in 2004. In 2026, it looks considerably different.
The fact that the world’s most popular sport is a reflection of the world is neither a novel nor a particularly interesting observation on its own. Writers have been drawing political conclusions from the sport for roughly as long as it has been played, and the canon of soccer literature is full of works solely or partially devoted to its politics, notably Ryszard Kapuściński’s 1969 The Soccer War, about a conflict between El Salvador and Honduras that started during a World Cup qualifier, and Eduardo Galeano’s 1995 Soccer in Sun and Shadow, a poetic history of the sport.
Soccer in Sun and Shadow and How Soccer Explains the World are mainstays on bookstore tables during every World Cup and are both regularly featured on the dozens of lists of books to read before every tournament. They’re strange bedfellows. Indeed, How Soccer Explains the World feels in many ways like a response to Galeano’s book, which decried the commercialization and homogeneity of the post–Cold War, globalized, unipolar world.
“These are days of obligatory uniformity, in soccer and everything else,” writes Eduardo Galeano in his canonical 1995 book. “Never has the world been so unequal in the opportunities it offers and so equalizing in the habits it imposes: in this end of century, whoever does not die of hunger dies of boredom.” The 1994 World Cup, the first held in the United States, looms over Galeano’s book. Today—especially in contrast to the 2026 tournament—that tournament is largely remembered as a big, beautiful party in which the U.S., newly dominant on the global stage, welcomed the world.
For Galeano, soccer is a perfect entry point to a world dominated by U.S. hegemony—culturally, politically, and economically—as well as a vehicle for elucidating Latin American politics. If some of his commentary is inevitably dated, his larger argument—that the sport is inherently polluted by money—still resonates. “The history of soccer is a sad voyage from beauty to duty,” he writes. “When the sport became an industry, the beauty that blossoms from the joy of play got torn out by its very roots.”
How Soccer Explains the World accepts the premise—which in 2004 was hard to deny—that globalization was the world’s dominant force and that soccer “seemed much further along in the process of globalization than any other economy on the planet.” Foer, moreover, writes that he expected to find “the power of mega-brands like the clubs Manchester United and Real Madrid, backed by Nike and Adidas … prying fans away from their old allegiances” but instead found something different: Fans, players, and clubs were retaining aspects of their local or national cultures while, in many ways, using globalization to benefit in their own way.
Soccer, particularly European soccer, in the early 2000s was in the midst of a remarkable cross-cultural transformation, in which top European clubs routinely featured players from across Europe, South America, and Africa and in which playing styles that once characterized local teams or nationalities were jumping borders and fusing with each other. The era of Dutch “total football” was over. A new era had arrived, in which a Portuguese coach managed a North London team owned by a Russian oligarch with a striker from Cote D’Ivoire. Foer was clearly intoxicated by this transformation. (It was hard not to be—this was the era when I fell in love with the sport in upstate New York, where I attended a high school where I was, to the best of my knowledge, one of two fans of European soccer.) As the book progresses, it increasingly becomes an argument for globalization as soccer or soccer as globalization: that by heralding a more interconnected world, the sport can bring freedom, prosperity, and even peace where it is currently absent.
Foer, to his credit, is a reporter—and a very good one—more than a polemicist. And more than two decades on, the most interesting thing about How Soccer Explains the World is the tension between being a travelogue and an airport book. In the former category, it is almost uniformly excellent: Foer is curious and incisive, with a great eye for character and detail. As an outsider—an American and a Jew—he is able to move seamlessly between fans of Glasgow’s Catholic team—Celtic—and its Protestant outfit—Rangers—in a chapter about the persistence of sectarian rivalry in a society that had otherwise “eradicated discrimination in the public sphere.”
That chapter mixes first-person reporting among ultras—or hooligans—that is funny and self-effacing with social science and reporting to advance a fairly sophisticated argument. The bitterness and fractiousness of the rivalry, he argues, stem in part from globalization. In Scotland, public discrimination was swept away when American and Japanese firms took over Glasgow’s steel mills and shipyards after the oil shocks of 1973, opening up economic opportunity where it had previously been closed off based on religious affiliation. But in Scotland, discrimination had been ended by globalization rather than a “civil rights movement to sweep away anti-Catholicism,” which meant that it was never truly reckoned with—which is one reason why the Old Firm, even in 2026, is one of Europe’s (and arguably the world’s) most intense rivalries.
Of course, Foer also acknowledges the biggest reason for the persistence of that animosity, which is its significance in Northern Ireland, where tensions between Catholics and Protestants are not a pageant to be played out in the soccer field. It’s an acknowledgment he doesn’t shy away from, but it’s one that troubles any rosy picture of globalization. Discrimination and sectarian tension have shown themselves to easily adapt to—and in many cases transcend—economic forces.
Many of Foer’s dispatches resist pat conclusions even as Foer puts his thumb on the scale. In a section on the persistent corruption in Brazilian soccer, he argues that nepotism and cronyism have made the sport’s insular culture immune to the benefits of globalization. One on Iranian women’s quest for equality—the movement against the state’s ban on women attending soccer games was then in full force—suggests that a growing hunger for Western brands, thanks in part to pitch-side advertisements during the World Cup, would lead to a movement for economic and cultural liberalism. Chapters on the Balkan Wars and the rise of Silvio Berlusconi point to the sport’s ability to be co-opted by nationalism, oligarchy, and corruption. These forces are everywhere you look in How Soccer Explains the World and, in most cases, they show astonishing malleability in a globalized world.
There is, especially in retrospect, also a sense that a devotion to a flawed thesis means Foer is missing the bigger story. The era he is writing about was already over in 2004. In the wake of the September 11 attacks, the world was calcifying; the good feelings that—at least in the United States—followed the end of the Cold War were long gone. Roman Abramovich, the Russian oligarch, bought Chelsea in 2003, heralding a new era of financialization and oligarchic control. There was, even then, a strong sense that globalization was being used by oligarchs and elites to entrench their control, that liberalism, free trade, and cultural exchange were not antidotes to tribalism or sectarianism, and that the rosy post–Cold War projections of rising tides lifting all boats were already wrong. Soccer certainly explains that world too.
The relative absence of the September 11 attacks is one of the more curious features of How Soccer Explains the World. It isn’t until the very end of the book, in a chapter on the American culture wars, that Foer directly acknowledges the fact that the world was rapidly being remade. After 9/11, he writes “two camps in American politics have clearly emerged.” One, he writes, embraces globalization and global institutions like the U.N. and the WTO, opposes the Iraq War, and shares “cultural values with Europeans.” They “consider themselves to be part of a cosmopolitan culture that transcends national boundaries.” The other believes in “American exceptionalism,” believes the U.S. should ignore international bodies, and believes Europeans are “degraded.” To these people, soccer “isn’t exactly pernicious but it’s a symbol of the U.S. junking its tradition to ‘get with the rest of the world’s program.’”
The division largely tracks, though Foer—like many American white soccer fans—largely handwaves or ignores the sizable number of Latino fans of the sport who were present in the U.S. at the time. At least as far as white American culture in the early 2000s was concerned, soccer was European. Some people thought it was good, and some thought it was bad.
How Soccer Explains the World wasn’t just aimed at the former. It was aimed at the millions of liberal, cosmopolitan Americans who weren’t interested in the sport. Its publication should be considered a seminal moment in the off-field history of the rise of U.S. soccer. How Soccer Explains the World was the first popular, serious book about the sport written for Americans by an American.
What does soccer tell us now? Our world, to be fair, is rather different now than it was in 2004. How Soccer Explains the World was published before Obama, the global financial collapse, and the rise of global autocracy. It was published before Messi, the (near) fall of FIFA, and the emergence of petrostate and hedge fund ownership. Foer acknowledges as much in an excellent new preface included in an edition published for the 2026 World Cup, as he discusses Saudi Arabia’s purchase of Newcastle United, private equity goon Todd Boehly’s purchase of Chelsea, and the explosion of transfer fees.
When Foer acknowledges that he failed to anticipate “the day when foreign governments would own English soccer clubs,” it’s hard to blame him. Even if one criticized Abramovich’s purchase of Chelsea in 2003, as many did, few saw the explosion of transfer fees and the expansion of state-owned clubs coming. Soccer was ahead of the curve, then as now, but it’s a lousy crystal ball.
Foer insists, somewhat defensively, that soccer tells us the same thing it did in 2004. “The thesis of the book,” he writes, “was that the global game of soccer was a leading indicator of the future. Soccer was globalization—and capitalism—in its most advanced form. And the nature of both phenomena is their ever-accelerating velocity, their endless churn.”
If that is self-serving, it’s also fair. That’s more or less what the reporting in How Soccer Explains the World shows, even if the conclusions Foer draws are often different. Sniffing at the term “late-stage capitalism”—to be fair, it’s not a favorite of mine, either—Foer argues soccer tells a different story. “The logic of business can always be pushed further, into realms once thought off-limits.”
Is that a thesis for an airport book? Certainly not in 2004. But it’s hard to argue with now.
