Empires of Soccer
This is an edition of The Great Game, a newsletter about the 2022 World Cup—and how soccer explains the world. Sign up here.
Day six of the World Cup and it’s the United States versus England, big Satan versus little Satan in the great battle of the evil imperialists. At stake, a place in the next round of a competition that would likely never have existed without the soccer-spreading British empire, taking place in a country that is unlikely to have existed without it either. And yet the very fact that it is taking place in Qatar has become one of the great symbols of our age—not as a marker of Western cultural power, but of the challenge to its global supremacy. How’s that for irony?
In fact, I find it hard to think of a globalthan this World Cup, a tournament so deeply steeped in contradictions and challenges. Here we have a great global bonanza for a onetime British sport hosted by a onetime British protectorate that has now insured its independence by becoming the host for the new military superpower, the United States.
