World Review: A Look Back at the World Cup —Politics, Nationalism, and Financial Gains
A synopsis of this week's edition of World Review
Each week, I host a video podcast called World Review with Ivo Daalder where journalists from major news outlets around the world join me to discuss the latest global news stories of the week.
World Review can now be heard on Sundays, at 7:00 a.m. Central Time, on Chicago’s NPR station, WBEZ, or on the WBEZ app. We’ll still tape the show on Fridays, and post the video on YouTube and the audio version on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Now, on to this week’s show. We devoted the entire episode to the World Cup — not the football itself, so much as what it revealed about America, about national character, and about the money now sloshing through the biggest sporting event on Earth. Joining me were Edward Luce, US National Editor and columnist at the Financial Times; Bobby Ghosh, who writes the Substack Ghoshworld; and Mehreen Khan, Economics Editor of The Times of London.
While I encourage you to watch or listen to the episode (and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts!), here are a few interesting things I took away from our discussion.
A Dull Final, A Restless Nation
Spain won, and by most accounts deserved to. Mehreen made the case plainly: this was a team that played international football like it plays domestic football — the most “system-coherent” side left standing once the tournament’s individual brilliance ran its course. But nobody on the panel much enjoyed the ending. Bobby confessed to rooting against the favorites all tournament long, hoping for a Cinderella to deliver what he called “the karmic corrective” a tainted World Cup badly needed. Ed, self-described as having never before been asked his opinion on football, admitted he too wanted an underdog — and got hooked anyway, watching every match “right up to the end.”
That contradiction — bored by the outcome, gripped by the spectacle — turned out to be the story of America’s relationship with this tournament. Ed’s reporting on the ground found something genuinely surprising: not the disaster many of his political-journalist colleagues predicted, but a six-week truce. National-security wonks at the Aspen Security Forum abandoned their panels to watch the semifinals. A Kansas college town adopted Algeria’s team wholesale, learning their anthem and flying their flag — in, as Ed put it, deep MAGA country. The gap between how people behave online and how they behave standing next to each other, he argued, was “Grand Canyon wide.”
But nobody pretended this was redemptive. Mehreen’s sharpest point cut through the good feeling: the Iranian team’s treatment — logistically stranded, symbolically shamed, quietly failed by FIFA’s president when Washington asked for cover — will likely outlast Lawrence, Kansas in the global memory. Bobby went further, predicting the mood snaps back the moment ICE resumes operations at home. A World Cup, all three agreed, cannot be asked to do politics’ job.
Cinderellas, Sore Losers, and the Myth of National Character
Every World Cup produces its underdogs and its villains, and this one obliged on both counts. Bobby walked through the tournament’s breakout stars — Cabo Verde’s veteran goalkeeper chief among them — while reserving his sharpest words for Argentina, whose graceless exit he refused to treat as an aberration. “That’s how they’ve always behaved,” he said, tracing the lineage back to the 1986 trophy celebration. It won’t change, he predicted, “and I can give you that in writing.”
The more interesting argument came from Mehreen, who pushed back on drawing national lessons from football at all — while doing exactly that, brilliantly, for the length of the segment. Her point: modern squads are made of players whose biographies scramble the very idea of fixed national identity. A Cabo Verdean international who’s never set foot in Cabo Verde. A Moroccan teenager who spent his youth in the French system before switching sides. An American striker born in New York to a British mother the airline judged too pregnant to fly back to London. “Football is showing us,” Mehreen said, “that citizenship isn’t as fixed as we think.” She’s becoming more of a fan of the World Cup for precisely the reason she used to distrust it — the nationalism on display is revealed, over and over, as a story about migration wearing a jersey.
Follow the Money — It’s American Now
The final segment turned to economics, Mehreen’s home turf, and the numbers were startling: this World Cup generated roughly $15 billion above FIFA’s own projections, driven largely by uncapped dynamic ticket pricing that fans simply paid. That windfall funds the sport’s four-year cycle between men’s tournaments — and, not incidentally, buys Gianni Infantino an uncontested re-election in 2027, a “democracy,” Mehreen noted dryly, “that even Trump would envy.”
The bigger story is who now owns the game. Sovereign wealth’s sportswashing era, Mehreen argued, is already giving way to something else: American private equity, venture capital, and private credit, drawn to European clubs as wildly undervalued franchises next to NFL or MLB valuations. She’s watched it happen to her own team, Chelsea, first-hand — a club she says is now built to trade players for appreciation rather than to win. Bobby’s addition sharpened the tension: the capital is American, but the audience that makes these clubs valuable lives overwhelmingly in the Global South, and that audience shows up for a specific game, played a specific way. If Americanization changes how the sport is played and clubs are run, the fans who don’t care about balance sheets may simply leave.
Ed’s closing thought tied it back to the show’s broader preoccupations: none of this is unique to football. It’s the same story of protected, oligopolistic power we recognize from American leagues themselves — and, he allowed, from watching citizens elsewhere fail to rebel against entrenched power in politics. “You don’t see fans rebelling against power structures in football,” I said. “You don’t see citizens rebelling against power structures in politics.” Maybe, this week, that was as good a place as any to leave it.
Those are my quick takes on this week’s episode of World Review. To get the full story, please listen to the episode itself.