As this issue goes to press, with Spain having won, I am surveying the 2026 men’s World Cup soccer tournament and asking, “Is this sport still an effective lens for understanding the present state of human society?”
That provocative thesis was levied in 2004 by Franklin Foer in his Pollyannaish bestseller How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization. In it, Foer celebrates soccer as a reflection of the greatness of globalization.
He also embraces New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s theory that the world is now “flat” and bringing us all closer together. This, Friedman argued in his own book in 2005, makes the world a safer, more humane, and more connected place.
Foer writes: “As a soccer fan, I [understand] exactly what [Friedman means]. It wasn’t just the ways that the Internet and satellites had made the world of soccer so much smaller and more accessible. You could see globalization on the pitch. During the 1990s, Basque teams, under the stewardship of Welsh coaches, stocked up on Dutch and Turkish players; Moldavian squads imported Nigerians. Everywhere you looked, it suddenly seemed, national borders and national identities had been swept into the dustbin of soccer history . . . . In the end, I found it hard to be too hostile toward globalization. For all its many faults, it has brought soccer to the far corners of the world and into my life.”
For Foer, anything negative about the social cost of globalization—which is really just a buzzword for unencumbered capitalism—was irrelevant because of how the system aided his personal pleasure. It did not matter that people’s lives in the Global South were being put through a thresher because folks like Foer, from their perch of luxury and privilege, were able to enjoy soccer.
Foer’s thesis was eagerly gobbled up two decades ago, and the book became a phenomenon. In that regard, his thesis was both ironically and unintentionally accurate. Yes, soccer explained the world. Through people like Foer, it explained how an intelligentsia could become so isolated that they were able to enjoy the lush pleasures of sport while choosing to ignore the damage, decay, and alienation piling up beyond the pitch.
In watching this year’s World Cup, what is striking to me is how much more sharply soccer explains the world today than it did in 2004. There is no hiding anymore—as Foer, Friedman, and their ilk were so fond of doing—from what this world is becoming.
How does soccer explain the world? You could do a lot worse to understand where we are than by looking at the way soaring temperatures wreaked havoc on the players and much of the public. You could take a gander at the repugnant treatment of the Iranian team by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the media, and the public. These are players whose country was bombed for months and then were spit upon in the nation that had been bombing them. You could also look at the rise of the African nations on the global soccer scene, whose success on the pitch was unfathomable a generation ago, given the enduring imbalance of resources that go into training and developing these teams.
Most pointedly, Foer and others like him would need to reckon with the reality that fascist nationalism and an embracing of the profiteering that comes with soccer’s globalization are in no ways contradictory. The Trump Administration spent the World Cup—which neatly coincided with his dystopian fever dream of July 4—beating the drums of nationalism, unleashing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents on people, and preventing some team officials and referees from even entering the country.
If nothing else, the 2026 World Cup exposed the fact that globalization represents no challenge to neofascism, authoritarianism, rightwing nationalism, or whatever you want to label it. It is its handmaiden. Soccer globalization only cares that the trains run on time. Dictators love soccer just as much today as they did in 1934, when Benito Mussolini hosted the World Cup, giving himself his own trophy.
The people who run FIFA, soccer’s corrupt world governing body, are craven bootlickers, and the people who run this country care only for flattery, violence, and weapons of mass distraction.
Is this what Foer meant when he wrote that soccer explains the world? Hardly. But it’s clear that his much-parroted thesis only makes sense if we use the lens of soccer to explain the current realities, rather than as an instrument to spin evermore lies and disinformation. Soccer will always be the. If only the world outside the pitch would try to reach its plateau.