World Review: The Geopolitics and Economics of the World Cup
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 did something different this time: rather than our usual roundup of three news stories, we devoted the whole episode to a single subject — the 2026 FIFA World Cup, which had kicked off only days before we taped and was already making as much news off the pitch as on it. I was joined by Giles Whittell, deputy editor-in-chief of The Observer; Mehreen Khan, economics editor of The Times of London, making her World Review debut; and Gideon Rachman, chief foreign affairs commentator of the Financial Times.
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.
America at War With Itself
The most provocative framing of the hour came from Giles, who argued that the real war on display at this World Cup isn’t the one the United States is still technically fighting with Iran — it’s the one Washington is fighting with itself. He traced it through the visa bans, the entry bonds, and the surreal sight of an Ultimate Fighting cage erected on the White House lawn just as the World Cup kicked off. This is Fortress America against the country that once welcomed the world’s huddled masses, the contest playing out for a global television audience.
The human cost was specific and real. Fans from partially restricted countries like Algeria must post a $15,000 bond just to attend, Giles noted — and I added the story of Cape Verde’s heroic goalkeeper, the man who kept Spain off the scoreboard, whose own mother couldn’t watch him play because she couldn’t afford that same bond. A Somali referee, recently named the best official in Africa, was barred from entering the country altogether; FIFA, asked to intervene, said border policy was Washington’s call, not its own.
Mehreen pushed back on how much weight the tournament’s “internationalism” can really bear — five of the world’s six most populous countries are absent from the field — but found something genuinely valuable in the patriotism on display anyway: a healthier outlet for an old impulse than the same flags waved at Britain’s nationalist marches. Gideon, who has attended every World Cup since 1994, Qatar and Russia included, was unbothered by the moral math. FIFA keeps handing its showcase to flawed hosts; the football, somehow, survives the company it keeps.
The King of Football’s Faustian Bargain
Mehreen laid out the numbers with the precision of someone who has covered FIFA’s finances for years: this World Cup will generate roughly $17 billion in revenue, well more than double what Qatar or Russia brought in, driven less by sponsorship than by a new dynamic-pricing system that treats World Cup tickets the way airlines treat plane fares. The catch, she argued, is that almost none of it reaches the host countries. The GDP bump for the US, Mexico, and Canada is statistically invisible — and Qatar’s experience, where billions in stadium infrastructure now sit flat-packed and shipped abroad, suggests these tournaments are essentially a wealth transfer to FIFA itself rather than to the nations that stage them.
That money explains the strange new alliance at this tournament’s center. A decade ago, the FBI was arresting FIFA executives by the dozen and Sepp Blatter was forced out in disgrace. Gianni Infantino spent his early years atop FIFA trying to scrub that memory from the internet, and according to Mehreen, found his answer in Donald Trump. The relationship, dormant under Biden, was reactivated the moment Trump returned to office: Infantino has joined him on trade trips, invented a “FIFA Peace Prize” for him after failing to secure an actual Nobel, and stayed conspicuously silent as US border policy barred officials — including that same Somali referee — from the tournament he’s supposed to administer.
Mehreen’s verdict was unsparing: Infantino now governs more like a strongman than a sports administrator, and the money pouring through FIFA all but guarantees his re-election regardless of how supine he looks — fittingly, the federation has already handed Saudi Arabia the 2034 tournament unchallenged. Gideon added the structural insult clubs feel most acutely: FIFA borrows the world’s best players for free, while the clubs paying their salaries get nothing back. Brilliant business, he said dryly, if you can get away with it.
Borrowed Allegiances
Once we turned to the football itself, the conversation kept circling back to one theme: this is being played by a more genuinely globalized cast than any World Cup before it. Mehreen’s best example was the American forward Folarin Balogun, born in New York only because his pregnant mother was denied boarding on a flight home to London — an accident of immigration bureaucracy that made him eligible to play for the United States rather than England or Nigeria, where he might easily have ended up. Stories like his, she argued, quietly dilute the blood-and-soil nationalism that usually attaches itself to international football.
Gideon’s contribution was more old-fashioned World Cup romance — the pleasure of discovering a team you’ve never properly watched, the way Morocco outplayed Brazil for the tournament’s opening half-hour with the kind of fluid, interchanging football Brazil is supposed to own. Giles, never one to spare England’s captain, used the moment to relitigate his long-running case against Harry Kane as the most boring great player in the game — a claim Mehreen countered point by point, citing Kane’s prolific Bundesliga scoring record and arguing his deep buildup play makes him far more complete than Giles gives him credit for.
The bigger story may be the men picking the teams. For the first time, Gideon observed, both England and Brazil are managed by foreigners — Germany’s Thomas Tuchel and Italy’s Carlo Ancelotti — an arrangement once unthinkable for two of football’s proudest footballing nations. Mehreen thinks Tuchel’s willingness to pick a team rather than simply field England’s biggest Premier League names could be genuinely transformative, if England’s old guard lets him get away with 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.