Two very big questions, so let’s separate them one at a time. Claiming that no history of the modern world is complete without football, certainly from the perspective of 2026, seems a kind of incontestable — actually an obvious truth — in the sense that the biggest collective gathering of humanity that now exists is the men’s World Cup. This is the greatest show on earth.
When Morocco won its games at the Qatar 2022 World Cup, not merely were there exuberant celebrations on the pitch and in the stadium, but in every city of the Arabic world, from Casablanca in the West to Baghdad in the East, and across the Moroccan diaspora in Belgium, the Netherlands, and France people were on the streets in tens, even hundreds of thousands. And not merely celebrating Morocco but a pan-African and pan-Arabic triumph, with the Palestinian flag and pro-Palestinian slogans a central element of it.
So, why wouldn’t you want to include that as part of the warp and weft of everyday life that you’re attempting to capture? And then, football has always been popular and symbolically important from the late nineteenth century onward. It acquired political meanings and political purposes very early on — from the initial creation of football as a sort of amateur athletic cult of the Victorian gentleman, as a subsection of the educational and political program to train the elites of the British Empire. If that’s not a political program, I don’t know what is, and football is at the heart of that.
By the 1930s, communism and fascism had arrived. Ultranationalism has arrived. They all find their niches in football, be it Mussolini at the 1934 World Cup or the Uruguayans celebrating their hundred years of democracy at the 1930 World Cup. There’s a whole shadow history, even if it’s not an accurate reflection, of course.
As to your second question, whether it’s now all about money. . . . Often what we mean when we say football is the men’s elite…
Auteur: David Goldblatt
