What’s in it for me? A wide-lens look at football.
What does a World Cup actually mean?
For journalist Simon Kuper, who has covered the game across five decades and several continents, it means rather more than most.
This Blink follows Kuper as he traces his own life through the sport’s biggest tournament – from arriving as a seven-year-old in the Netherlands just in time for the golden age of Total Football, to reporting from a Moscow operating under the shadow of Putin’s Russia.
Football, Kuper argues, is never just football.
This Blink looks beyond stadium spectacle to show how the sport intersects with politics, national identity, history, and emotion.
The land of “Total Football”
When journalist Simon Kuper arrived in the Netherlands in 1976, aged seven, he wasn’t moving to just any country.
He was moving to football.
In a nation of 14 million, one million people were registered at sporting clubs.
Young Kuper and his brother promptly joined the Ajax Sportsman Combinatie.
Of course they did.
The Dutch had just pioneered Totaalvoetbal – Total Football – under coach Rinus Michels and playmaker Johan Cruyff.
The idea was radical: every outfield player could play every position, pressing high, switching fluidly, never standing still.
The Brazilians – never shy with a nickname – called it the Clockwork Orange.
From the sofa, Kuper watched it all fall apart.
In Buenos Aires in 1978, the Dutch – widely considered the best team in the world – had led calls to boycott a World Cup hosted by Argentina’s military junta.
They went anyway, but without Cruyff, who had stayed home after a gunpoint kidnapping attempt on his family.
They reached the final regardless.
Then, in the dying seconds of normal time, with the score at 1–1, Rob Rensenbrink’s shot hit the post.
Five centimetres different, he later said, and the Netherlands would have been world champions.
Instead, Argentina won in extra time.
It was Kuper’s first lesson in what the World Cup does to you: it builds hope, then finds the most excruciating way to destroy it.
Four years on, Kuper watched West Germany and France produce what many still consider the greatest match ever played.
West German goalkeeper Harald Schumacher’s flying assault on French defender Patrick Battiston left the Frenchman unconscious, with cracked ribs and missing teeth.
No foul was given.
The match went to extra time, four more goals were scored, and then – for the very first time in World Cup history – penalties decided the winner.
A new kind of agony had been invented.
Then came Mexico 1986, and one of the tournament’s great forgotten classics.
The USSR against Belgium was a seven-goal thriller in which Igor Belanov – a Soviet striker so good he won the European Footballer of the Year award – still ended up on the losing side, going out 4–3 after extra time.
It was the World Cup in miniature: individual brilliance offering no guarantees whatsoever.
The World Cup, Kuper was learning from his sofa, was where football’s joy and its injustice came together in the most concentrated form imaginable.
Football unites a divided nation
In 1988, Simon Kuper arrived at Oxford to study history and German.
He couldn’t have timed it better.
At the start of his studies, Germany was divided into East and West.
Two years later, it would be reunified.
Kuper spent time in East Berlin in 1990 and was there for the electric night the Wall came down.
He was also watching the football – and noticing the role the game played in stitching two nations back together.
That year’s World Cup in Italy was West Germany’s last tournament as a divided nation.
It’s remembered for low scoring and physical play – and the rule changes it sparked, most notably the back-pass rule, introduced because goalkeepers wasted time so excessively.
But it had its human moments.
Paul Gascoigne – England’s mercurial, chaotic, brilliant young midfielder – was booked in the semi-final against West Germany.
He realised he would miss the final if England won, and burst into tears on the pitch.
Italy’s Salvatore Schillaci, a forward nobody had expected much from, finished as top scorer with six goals, his wide-eyed celebrations becoming the tournament’s defining image.
Cameroon became the first African team to reach the quarter-finals.
And Diego Maradona – the man who had conjured both the Hand of God and the Goal of the Century four years earlier – limped through the tournament a diminished figure, Argentina scraping to the final only to lose 1–0 to West Germany.
Just 49 days after German reunification on 3 October 1990, the East and West German football associations merged into one.
East German players like Matthias Sammer – a dynamic midfielder who had already joined VfB Stuttgart – were folded into the unified squad.
Around 150 players made the switch to western clubs in the first five years after reunification.
For the East German clubs that had competed in European finals, it was a painful contraction into the lower leagues.
Football, like everything else, was being reorganized on western terms.
Sammer himself would go on to become the defining player of the unified era, winning the Ballon d’Or in 1996 and captaining Germany to the European Championship that same year.
The east had lost its football institutions – but its players helped build something new.
For Kuper, watching all of this unfold, it was a vivid illustration of what he would spend his career exploring: that football and history are not separate things.
They move together.
By 1998, Simon Kuper was writing a daily currency report for the Financial Times and was, understandably, desperate for something else.
France catches football fever
That something else arrived in the form of a press pass to the World Cup in France.
He was more excited than most of the French.
France, famously, was not a football country – the national sport was more likely cycling or rugby depending on the region.
And yet here it was, hosting the Cup.
Defending champions Brazil, whose manager Mário Zagallo had been involved with all four previous Brazilian wins, were the favorites.
Before a ball was kicked, though, the tournament had a problem.
Around 400 England supporters were involved in pitched battles with Tunisian fans, local youths and police in Marseille – seven hours of violence that left 32 people injured.
Prime Minister Tony Blair called it a total disgrace.
England’s hooliganism had followed British fans to France.
England themselves got through the group stage, then faced Argentina in the last 16 and provided one of the tournament’s defining moments.
Manchester United midfielder David Beckham, fouled by Argentine Diego Simeone, kicked out petulantly at his opponent and was sent off.
England, reduced to ten men, lost on penalties.
Hospital admissions for heart attacks in England increased by 25 percent on the day of the defeat and the two subsequent days.
Football can, quite literally, kill you.
Group F had provided a more extraordinary kind of drama.
The match between the United States and Iran – described as the most politically charged game in World Cup history – ended 2–1 to Iran, the team’s first ever World Cup victory.
Iranian players brought white roses onto the pitch as a symbol of peace.
As one American defender put it afterwards: they’d done more in 90 minutes than the politicians managed in 20 years.
The semi-finals were extraordinary in their own right.
Brazil edged past the Netherlands on penalties – Dutch winger Marc Overmars and striker Patrick Kluivert had pushed them all the way through a pulsating 1–1 draw.
In the other semi, France met Croatia, a nation appearing at only its second World Cup.
Defender Lilian Thuram – who had never previously scored for France – hit both goals in a 2–1 comeback win, becoming a national hero overnight.
Then came the final.
Zinedine Zidane, a midfielder of Algerian descent born in the tough suburbs of Marseille, scored twice with headers as France won 3–0.
The image of Zidane was projected onto the Arc de Triomphe; the crowd chanted “Zidane for president.
” France had kindled its love of football.
And Kuper had finally found something to write about.
Usually the lead-up to a World Cup is full of anxious questions.
Germany’s friendly tournament
Will the stadiums be ready?
Will the hooligans behave?
Not in 2006.
Everyone knew the Germans would pull it off.
Two decades after reunification, Germany was respected.
The ambition for this tournament went beyond its theme – A Time to Make Friends – it was to be loved.
Covering the tournament, Simon Kuper was unsurprised by the efficiency.
Trains on time, press passes processed without fuss.
What did surprise him were the flags.
Flag-waving had been traditionally frowned upon in Germany since the Second World War – the association with nationalism made it deeply uncomfortable for most Germans.
For many, it wasn’t until 2006 that the German flag became a popular decoration – the summer of that tournament has since been remembered collectively as the Sommermärchen: the Summer Fairytale.
As one young German fan put it: “If the Brazilians, Italians, and everybody else fly their flags, why shouldn’t we be allowed to do the same?
” The German squad itself reflected how the game had changed.
Players like the Turkish-German midfielder Mehmet Scholl and young striker Lukas Podolski – born in Poland – embodied a new, multiethnic Germany.
Old rivalries, between Germany and the Netherlands for instance, felt less charged when half the players had grown up watching each other in the same Bundesliga.
Brazil, meanwhile, was supposed to provide the spectacle.
It had Ronaldinho, the world’s best player; Ronaldo, the best of the previous era; and Kaká, who would soon claim that crown.
It was the most star-studded squad since 1970.
Nike even built an entire advertising campaign around jogo bonito – the beautiful game.
But Ronaldinho went scoreless, finishing with a single assist, in what was the worst collective performance of his international career.
France eliminated Brazil in the quarter-finals, Zidane running the show almost single-handedly.
Then came the final.
Italy versus France, locked at 1–1 deep into extra time.
In the 110th minute, Zinedine Zidane – in the last match of his career – turned and headbutted Italian defender Marco Materazzi square in the chest and was sent off.
Materazzi later confirmed he had made a comment about Zidane’s sister.
Italy won on penalties.
The greatest footballer of his generation walked off the pitch not in glory, but in anger.
Simon Kuper was born in Uganda.
His parents had lived in apartheid South Africa before emigrating.
A new world for football
The 2010 World Cup, then, meant something to him that it couldn’t mean to most journalists boarding their flights to Johannesburg.
He knew this World Cup was decades in the making.
The formation of the Orlando Pirates in 1937 and the rise of football attendance in Johannesburg’s townships in the late 1930s and 1940s grew directly from a wave of Black Africans migrating to cities for work.
Football gave meaning to lives hemmed in by segregation.
The township clubs captured the imagination.
The Orlando Pirates were a source of inspiration to Black South Africans throughout the apartheid years.
When Kaizer Motaung returned from playing in the North American Soccer League and founded Kaizer Chiefs in 1970, the club’s early success coincided with the rise of the Black Consciousness Movement.
The Soweto Derby between the two clubs became the biggest fixture on the African continent – vast crowds, extraordinary atmosphere, the pop star Brenda Fassie performing at matches.
Meanwhile, thanks to pressure from African nations and their allies, apartheid South Africa was excluded from international football for 30 years.
Then came 1994, the election of Nelson Mandela, and the dismantling of the apartheid state.
At Johannesburg’s Ellis Park Stadium the following year, President Mandela appeared wearing a Springbok rugby jersey – historically the emblem of white South Africa – and the mostly Afrikaner crowd chanted his name.
It was a calculated act of reconciliation that reverberated far beyond the stadium.
In May 2004, when Sepp Blatter announced South Africa would host the 2010 World Cup, Mandela wept with joy.
The tournament itself was a wall of noise.
The vuvuzela – a long plastic horn – became so pervasive that France’s Patrice Evra blamed it for his team’s poor performance.
South Africa’s national side, Bafana Bafana – “the lads” in Zulu – drew their opening match against Mexico with a thunderous strike from Siphiwe Tshabalala.
They were eventually eliminated on goal difference, the first host nation to exit in the group stage.
At the final, a frail Nelson Mandela was wheeled onto the pitch at Soccer City and greeted with a standing ovation and a peal of vuvuzelas.
Spain beat the Netherlands 1–0.
For Kuper, it was a tournament unlike any other he had covered – history made visible.
Football meets politics in Putin’s Russia
When Russia was awarded the 2018 World Cup in 2010, it wasn’t yet on the brink of authoritarianism.
By the time Simon Kuper arrived in Moscow eight years later, it was.
Crimea had been annexed.
Opposition figures had been imprisoned or poisoned.
Human Rights Watch described it as the worst human rights crisis in Russia since the Soviet era.
The police presence on the streets was conspicuous and journalists worked with an awareness of being watched.
On the pitch, though, the tournament delivered.
The England–Belgium group game was one of football’s odder spectacles: both teams fielded significantly altered line-ups, with media openly discussing whether finishing second might be more advantageous than winning the group.
Belgium’s Adnan Januzaj curled in a gorgeous winner, and both sides got what they wanted.
Russia itself produced the tournament’s great surprise.
It entered as the lowest-ranked team in the competition but beat Spain on penalties in the round of 16 – Spain, who’d won the previous two European Championships and the 2010 World Cup.
The Russian crowd was delirious.
The team was eventually knocked out by Croatia in the quarter-finals, also on penalties, Croatia then beating England in the semi-finals before losing the final 4–2 to France.
France’s 19-year-old forward Kylian Mbappé announced himself to the world.
The tournament was spread across 11 cities and 12 venues in a country that spans 11 time zones – stadiums in Kaliningrad and Yekaterinburg, Sochi and Saransk.
The sheer scale of it was the point.
Kuper had been covering World Cups long enough to recognize the template: the Berlin Olympics of 1936 had pioneered the use of sport as international image-making, and every authoritarian host since had studied the manual carefully.
The Russian leadership created an image of a country that was safe, modern, and open – an image facilitated, paradoxically, by the very authoritarian infrastructure it was meant to obscure.
The football was real.
The joy in the stands was real.
That’s what makes these tournaments so difficult to think about clearly – and so easy to love anyway.
The main takeaway of this Blink to World Cup Fever by Simon Kuper is that football is never just football.
The World Cup has consistently served as a lens onto the wider world: German reunification, South African apartheid, Iranian-American geopolitics, the rise of authoritarian soft power.
The beauty of the game and the ugliness of the world it plays out in are inseparable.
That tension is precisely what makes it worth watching.
Okay, that’s it for this Blink.
We hope you enjoyed it.
Final summary
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