Print the Legend: Introduction to the World Cup
I’ve got World Cup fever, hope you got it too
One year from today, the 2026 FIFA World Cup will begin. It will be the 23rd edition of the tournament, and for the first time, it will be hosted in three different countries: Mexico, Canada, and mostly, in the United States. I grew up in South America, which means I grew up experiencing the unbelievable passion that arises every four years when the World Cup comes around. For context: I was back in Peru for the 2018 World Cup, which was the first time the Peruvian National Team had qualified for the tournament in 32 years (and the first time in my lifetime). My then-girlfriend (an American) and I planned to go to a watch party for Peru’s first match (a heartbreaking 0-1 defeat against Denmark). On the day of the match, it became impossible for her to find a way to get to the party. Ubers kept declining her request, and there were no taxis or public transportation on the streets. When she finally was able to hail an errant cab, the driver rolled down the window and asked her how far she was going - he had to get back home in time to watch the match! The whole country was glued to the screen. Even when Peru isn’t playing (which is most times), the whole country brims with excitement: kids fill up their World Cup sticker albums, everyone and their aunt is talking about the underdog team that surprisingly beat one of the top contenders, and every television in a public space is tuned in to the current match. The day of the final might as well be a national holiday. For a person with my background, it is inconceivable to think there are people in this country who aren’t brimming with excitement about next year’s World Cup, or even worse, people who aren’t even aware that it is happening.
I experienced the last World Cup, which took place in 2022, in New York and was able to find genuine pockets of excitement. I remember walking down the streets and seeing Croatian fans running from one business to another celebrating their team’s penalty kick victory over mighty Brazil. A different corner of my neighborhood became a total celebration as Morocco, against all odds, became the first African Nation to reach the semifinals. My favorite experience during the last World Cup was undoubtedly watching the nail-biting quarterfinal between Argentina and the Netherlands with a couple Argentinians I had met at the local tennis court. I ended up watching quite a few matches in the company of friends, acquaintances, or pretty much anyone who would wanna watch with me. It was worth it every single time. Nothing quite compared to the passion (in all senses of the word) of the Argentinians, but I find that even those who hadn’t watched much soccer before were immediately swept up in the agonizing delight of rooting for one team or another. You’ll be surprised how quickly you’ll realize if you’d rather see England or France make it to the next round, let alone how much you’ll care about it!
This is all preamble to stating the goals of this Substack: I want to make everyone reading this (which I assume will mostly be my close friends and acquaintances) to get as excited as they possible can be for the next World Cup so we can all have watch-parties, get together, and experience the most beautiful game in the world with the most intense passion!!!
We will start out with weekly posts recounting the History of the World Cup (and soccer in general), with special attention to the Trumpian idea that political tension is what fuels the world's passion for international soccer. In the process, I will hopefully also paint a clear picture of how the game is played, its intricacies, as well as recount plenty of its most colorful and controversial stories.
When we're done with that I will move on to previews in which I'll give context about the teams that are going to play in the next World Cup, their stars, their past, their present, as well as trying to predict how they will do at the tournament.
Once the cup starts, I will continue to post predictions, analysis, and whatever else is of interest. It will all culminate on July 19, 2026, when the final is played in East Rutherford, New Jersey, and we all learn which country is the next champion of the world!
Don’t worry if you don't have any previous knowledge about soccer. In fact, this substack is designed specifically for you. All terms will be explained, and even if you forget something, they’ll be explained again when they re-appear.
This is when I tell you to click the subscribe button so you can get new posts in your inbox as they’re published and share in the excitement! Again, I’m not trying to get famous here, I am trying to get you (yes, you!) to get excited about the upcoming World Cup with me! So, yes, please subscribe, but also leave comments, ask questions, if you know me IRL reach out to watch a match together! This is all completely free!!
Ready to dive into the world of international soccer? Time to subscribe!
Now, in case you’re not convinced about subscribing after all that, let me give you a taste of what’s in store as I explain…
Why is the World Cup Such a Big Deal?
The idea of a sports tournament that comes around every four years is literally ancient. You're probably familiar with the modern Olympic Games, modelled on the ancient Greek tradition, where Summer and Winter Olympics come around every four years respectively and athletes from around the globe compete in various events while representing their home countries. The FIFA World Cup works pretty much the same way, except there's only one sport being played (soccer) and only one team is crowned champion at the end of the competition (Brazil, probably). This is crucial for the popularity of the World Cup: there is a single winner! Sure, it is a big deal to be the country that wins the most medals at the Olympics, but let’s be honest, they’re handing those things left and right. Meanwhile, there is only one World Champion.
There are plenty of competitions with only one winner, so that’s clearly not the whole story. Let’s keep to the Olympics for a bit, and be real about one thing: while we all love watching curling and figure skating, few among us follow the ins-and-outs of the world of curling when the Olympic flame turns off. In the US, the sports people care about the most are football, baseball, basketball and hockey (though soccer is growing). As a general rule, the more popular the sport, the less likely we are to care about their Olympic version. When people debate the greatest basketball player of all time, nobody takes into account whether they won Olympic gold. It’s all about the championship rings. Did you know there is a basketball world cup? The reason you don’t is because the United States is so dominant that it doesn’t leave much room for competition and you’re most often left with a boring and predictable tournament. This leaves the domestic league (the NBA) as the sole barometer for greatness in the world of basketball. This is not the case with soccer.
While soccer is not the most popular sport in every country in the world (Canada loves hockey, India loves cricket, New Zealand loves rugby) it is the most widespread and popular overall. Soccer is extremely popular in Europe, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East, and its popularity in the rest of the world is only rising with globalization and mass market operations... such as the World Cup. The fact that soccer is so widespread means there are a lot of countries with enough great players to field competitive teams. And so, despite the fact that there’s only eight countries who have ever won the (men’s) World Cup (and those countries are all either European or South American), there are many, many countries full of soccer players who dream of joining that elite club.
So let’s consider these players and their dreams. Like any other professional athlete, a soccer player makes their living by being hired by a team to compete against other teams and win trophies. These teams are privately owned enterprises much like the teams that make up the NFL, the NBA and all other major American sports leagues. These teams are based in specific cities or towns, and this is often reflected in their name. So, just like you have the Los Angeles Lakers or the New York Mets, you also have Real Madrid in Spain or Bayern Munich in Germany. One minor difference is that in the world of soccer, teams are called “clubs.” Thus, if you go to any soccer player’s Wikipedia page, you will see a sub-header labelled “Club Career” where you can read all about what clubs they played for and how they did while they were there.
Again, these are privately owned clubs like most sports teams in the United States. This means that, for the most part, they can hire whoever they want to play for the team as long as they can afford it. For example, a prodigy born in Argentina by the name of Lionel Messi can be scouted when he’s only thirteen years old by Football Club Barcelona and thus spend most of his professional career playing for a Spanish club and winning the Spanish League, the Spanish Cup, and the UEFA (European) Champions League several times in the process. Players can also be bought and sold between clubs, so when FC Barcelona entered a financial crisis in the early 2020s and they could no longer afford Messi’s growing salary, they sold him to French club Paris Saint-Germain, then a few years later he transferred to Major League Soccer team Inter Miami, based on that colorful city in southern Florida, where he plays to this day. That, in a nutshell, is a summary of Messi’s “club career.”
If you scroll a little further down Messi’s Wikipedia page, however, you will find another sub-header labelled “International Career.” That’s because while every soccer player makes a living playing for a private club, there are also several international competitions which are not disputed by private clubs but by National Teams made up of the best players of any given country. So, while Messi played for clubs in Spain, France, and the United States throughout his career, when it came to international competitions, he always represented his native Argentina. As a matter of fact, a soccer player can only ever play for one National Team during his adult career. Once they’ve played for a particular country they cannot be nationalized to play for a different country.
As more money flows into professional soccer, big clubs keep getting richer and buying up all the best players and managers, making it harder (some would say impossible) for smaller clubs to compete with them. But when it comes to international soccer, the playing field evens out a little bit. It’s true that richer countries with better infrastructure and a longer soccer history tend to win more trophies than smaller and poorer countries, but every World Cup seems to reveal at least one small country that lucked out with a particularly great generation of players. This happened when Senegal surprisingly beat reigning-champion (and their former colonizer) France at the opening match of the 2002 World Cup. In 2014, Costa Rica surprised everyone by finishing first in the group stage ahead of powerhouses like England, Italy, and Uruguay. And in 2022, Morocco stunned the world when it became the first African Nation to make it to the semifinals.
A country cannot buy players to play for their National Team, instead they have to pick from what’s already available, which means a pool of every professional player who’s a citizen of said country. In general, players consider it a great honor to be called up to play for their country. It is such a point of pride that they will basically do extra work voluntarily. Think about it, their job is to play soccer, and here they are choosing to play more soccer during the time they would otherwise be on vacation. Technically, players get paid for the time they play with the National Team, but for most players this money is a pittance compared to the big bucks they make playing for their clubs. Imagine staying in the office instead of going on vacation even though you’re going to be paid less money! The reason soccer players do this is because they desperately want to play in the World Cup. They dream of it. Which brings us to the big bad reason the World Cup is such a big deal: Nationalism.
I know. Most of us don't like that word. It's no secret that countries are interested in showing the rest of the world that they’re great, stable and powerful, so it makes total sense that an incredibly popular sport like soccer would be targeted as a tool to further dubious Nationalistic projects. George Orwell, for one, looked askance at the very idea of organized sports. “There cannot be much doubt that the whole thing is bound up with the rise of nationalism – that is, with the lunatic modern habit of identifying oneself with large power units and seeing everything in terms of competitive prestige,” he wrote after the Soviet club Dynamo Kiev visited England to play London-based Arsenal in a “friendly” match that devolved into violent chaos. “Big-scale sport is itself, I think, merely another effect of the causes that have produced nationalism. Still, you do make things worse by sending forth a team of eleven men, labelled as national champions, to do battle against some rival team, and allowing it to be felt on all sides that whichever nation is defeated will ‘lose face.’”
Earlier this year another poet laureate, President Donald Trump, was asked about potential tension between the United States, Mexico, and Canada when the three countries co-host the 2026 World Cup. "It'll make it more exciting," was his response. Many outlets reported on this as a callous inflammation of already-growing tensions between the countries, which it probably was, but there is also truth in the President’s words. Political tension lies at the heart of what makes the World Cup so exciting. As we will learn in future posts, the tournament was enmeshed with politics from the very beginning. There are many instances where past resentment between countries turns into violence - both in or outside the soccer pitch. There's also the plain reality that several dictators have sought to use the World Cup as their political tool, such as Mussolini in Italy or Videla in Argentina. More recently, countries like Qatar and Saudi Arabia have been accused of trying to white-wash their public image by buying up international clubs and hosting worldwide competitions like the World Cup.
But despite all of the controversial, dark, and tragic moments in the history of soccer, those who love the sport keep coming back to the World Cup, and cannot help but be swept up by the undeniable romance of it all. British comedian and political commentator John Oliver has been very critical of the corruption and white-washing that went on within the ranks of FIFA when Qatar was chosen as host for the 2022 World Cup. He nevertheless remains a devoted soccer fan, and his undying passion was perfectly summarized in a recent interview where he talked about the jolt of happiness he felt when his home club Liverpool F.C. won the English Premier League: “As absurd as it is to say, football means more to me when it shouldn’t than when it should” he explains. “When Liverpool won the league during COVID, there was absolutely no reason to think that that mattered at all. Death count was spiking... it feels like the world’s falling apart and it’s bringing out the worst in us... and I can’t fully rationalize why it meant so much to watch Liverpool win the league in front of nobody other than the fact that it meant I could call my dad and say that we won the league.”
There’s an undeniable emotional power in winning, but what is the meaning of that power? For a small Nation, the World Cup can provide the opportunity to be noticed and acknowledged by the rest of the world, much like the younger sibling who yearns to beat his elders at their favorite game. The World Cup is full of underdog teams coming up against heavy favorites and emerging victorious. Of course, a heart-warming win for David is also a crushing defeat for Goliath - and both can be used to build up Nationalistic rhetoric. Small countries, after all, are not immune to feeding their Nationalistic fires. Personally, when it comes to soccer, I don't see Nationalism as a good or bad thing, but merely a reality. The history of the World Cup is the history of countries defining and reinventing the stories they tell about themselves. In a way, the World Cup is a laboratory for the creation and development of modern myths. Much like ancient societies made sense of their world through myth, modern countries have, and continue, to make sense of themselves through soccer.
The case of Uruguay, a small South American Nation that in the 1920s became the first international soccer sensation is a perfect example. After a series of underdog victories against larger countries, unwavering resilience and defiance became core values of the Uruguayan national character. Then you have Brazil, one of the largest countries in the world, whose whole identity has been shaped by soccer: first through traumatizing defeat, then by its ability to rise from the ashes and become the most iconic soccer nation in the world. And then there’s what is perhaps the most famous World Cup story of all: Diego Armando Maradona, playing for Argentina against England in the aftermath of the Falklands War, not only scoring two goals, but scoring the two most iconic goals in the history of soccer… in the same match. One of them was a goal so skillful it was later dubbed "the goal of the century," the other a sneaky gamble in which Maradona managed to fool the ref into thinking he had scored with his head when he had used his hand. That’s the spirit of the World Cup right there in those two goals: The beauty, the scandal, the brilliant, and the defiant. This is the stuff people write songs about (literally), and this is the stuff that we will be covering in this Substack.
Before I wrap things up and invite you to subscribe, I want to make a note about methodology: this is not a history of soccer, but a history of the passion for soccer. I have read many books, and tried to verify every source I encounter, but at the end of the day the history of the World Cup, like I said before, is a history of myth. Whether Maradona scored that sneaky goal with his head or his hand is not so important as the fact that it is now remembered as "the hand of God." This is not to say that my goal here is to spread lies and propaganda, but to explore what these legends and myths say about the people who tell them, and the sport we all love so much. So, my ethos here is taken from the old western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. In it, a reporter discovers that the man who's become a national hero after killing the deadly outlaw Liberty Valance wasn't actually the one who shot him. He brings the real story to his editor, who after thinking about the consequences of revealing the truth, burns the reporter's notes and simply says: "when the legend becomes fact, print the legend."
That’s all for now, but come back next week as I tackle the question on everyone’s mind: “Is it ‘Football’ or is it ‘Soccer’?
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