How to Watch the World Cup (and not feel too morally compromised)
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You (which is to say: I) are (which is to say: am) going to watch (which is to say: devour) the FIFA World Cup this summer. This is in spite of the fact that the tournament — the greatest sporting show on earth, bar none — feels tainted. Tainted by FIFA’s corruption and bootlicking subservience to the Trump regime, and tainted by America’s troubling domestic and foreign policy excursions. We are, right now, 100 days away from the tournament kicking off, and calls for a boycott will grow more vociferous in the coming months. So the choice for conscientious football fans has become stark: watch the tournament, follow your team, and feel complicit in the sports-washing of America’s incipient fascism, or take a stance and miss out on the plausible possibility that England might win their first World Cup since 1966.
Of course, football fans are used to feeling compromised. The last World Cup, the 2022 edition, was in Qatar, a state with an appalling human rights record and whose back-breaking programme of construction for the tournament resulted in the deaths of a reported 6,500 migrant workers. The edition before that, 2018, was held in Russia, who are currently excluded from FIFA competitions due to their invasion of Ukraine. The last uncontroversial tournament was probably Brazil 2014 — but even there the country was on the verge of the rightward drift towards the government of Jair Bolsonaro, who is currently serving a 27-year jail term for an attempted coup. In short, modern geopolitics is sufficiently tricky to make it very hard to find an acceptable host for a tournament that represents the most global of games.
Compounding this is the fact that FIFA imposes a “cooling off period” for its confederations, consisting of two rotations. This has meant that because Russia was part of UEFA (the European confederation) at the time of the 2018 World Cup (obviously, they are not currently allowed to compete in UEFA competitions), European nations have not been able to bid for tournaments in 2022 or 2026. So the big show has to move around the globe, opening up new markets (as happened in 2010 when the tournament was hosted by South Africa, at which time there was a stricter continental rotation process). But FIFA’s rules can also help them gerrymander the situation to their own advantage. The next World Cup in 2030 will be hosted in Spain and Portugal (UEFA) and Morocco (CAF) with special “centenary” matches in Uruguay, Argentina and Paraguay (CONMEBOL). With those three confederations excluded — as well as CONCACAF, who host this year’s tournament — the decision was between bidders from Oceania (OFC) or Asia (AFC). Which has conveniently led us to the 2034 World Cup being hosted in — you guessed it! — Saudi Arabia.
This is all to say that the ethical considerations being forced on football fans aren’t going away. We’re used to it now. And in spite of the growing argument for boycotting the World Cup and the Premier League and the Champions League (even my favourite League 2 side, Crawley Town, was owned, for the last few years, by some strange crypto bros), I don’t want to surrender football, that beautiful, pure thing, to the gutter of politics. I want to watch the World Cup because I love watching the World Cup. I don’t want to watch the World Cup and, in doing so, distract from the thuggery of ICE on the streets of America. I don’t want to watch the World Cup and, in doing so, endorse America’s illegal wars and operations across the globe. I don’t want to watch the World Cup and, in doing so, amplify Donald Trump’s message of American supremacy. But I do want to watch the World Cup. So how do we do that?
The first thing is to understand why America wanted to host the World Cup (for the first time since 1994). The US is co-hosting the tournament with Canada and Mexico, two countries it is currently at ideological loggerheads with. (Though it should be noted that the US has 11 host cities while Mexico has 3 and Canada has 2, and the US will host all matches from the quarterfinals onwards ). In 2018, when the winning bid was submitted to FIFA, the then President of US Soccer, Sunil Gulati, said that the combined North American tournament would serve the purpose of “bringing our peoples together, bringing soccer countries together”. Eight years later, tariff wars and border violence would seem to have put an end to such aspirations of solidarity. Yet the US is still clearly interested in using the tournament to flex its soft power muscles. In part, this is because football is the most international of all the world’s sports, having a fanatical following on all of the non-Antarctica continents. For America, it is an export product. Even the country’s league, MLS, is basically a commodity for international distribution, with just 3.7m match-week viewers domestically (which includes Canada) but a growing international audience via partnership with AppleTV+ and the huge global appeal of stars like Lionel Messi and Son Heung-min, who are both playing in the league.
Trump has not inherited this tournament — he was the President when the bid was made. At the Club World Cup last summer, he grinned triumphantly alongside the winning players from Chelsea (a team now owned by American financiers, having been boosted into the top tier of football by Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich). The world’s cameras caught not just the moment where he handed the trophy to the Chelsea captain Reece James, but also his charmless slide into the historic trophy lift (not to mention the trophy returning, after the tournament, to the Oval Office). It went from being Chelsea’s moment to being Donald Trump’s moment. Say what you like about the man, but he knows when the eyes of the world are watching.
In order for America’s hegemony to be consolidated, it must occupy territory in all the incumbent cultural monoliths. The America First project might hate Hollywood’s liberal elites, but rather than try to stifle them, they have embarked on an ambitious process of industrial capture (culminating right now with Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros, which will create a giant pro-Trump entertainment bloc). The MAGA crowd might be deeply suspicious of their Puerto Rican compadres, but the NFL (an organisation that has been consistently soft, shall we say, on Trump) still invited Bad Bunny to do the Super Bowl halftime show, using music to open the match up to the missing Spanish-speaking demographic. And sport is no different. In September 2017, 9 months into the first Trump presidency, Los Angeles won the right to host the 2028 Summer Olympics (the US will also host the Winter Olympics in 2034). Less than a year later, the US would win the rights to the 2026 World Cup. In doing so, the United States has staked a claim over the two most viewed sports events in global TV: 5bn people tune into the World Cup, and some 4–5bn into the Olympics. While it is upending legal and political norms — at home and abroad — the United States continues to be the greatest marketing project ever conceived; a Madison Avenue pitch-deck of such startling efficiency it would make Don Draper choke on his Old Fashioned.
But you and I both love the World Cup. I remember watching the France ’98 edition, when I was just 5-years-old. Each World Cup during my lifetime (Korea/Japan, Germany, South Africa, Brazil, Russia, Qatar) is like a small bookmark in my life. I remember being sat cross legged in the school library, watching Trevor Sinclair tearing down the wing in Osaka. I remember watching, crushed, with friends at university as England lost to Uruguay in Sao Paolo. I remember running in mindless celebration into the garden of my flat in Brixton after Eric Dier scored the winning penalty against Colombia in Moscow. And when you love the World Cup and only get to enjoy it for one month every four years (which means 47 consecutive non-World Cup months) it is very hard to walk away. Which is why I wanted to compose this handy guide to ten key ways we can all subvert the American administration’s desire to use the tournament as a propaganda exercise.
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1) Don’t travel to the tournament.
I like this tip because it accords with my current plans. But the way that America generates revenue from the tournament is almost entirely bound up with it being a major tourism opportunity (ticket sales, for example, go straight to FIFA’s coffers). Officials in the US have already said that ICE will be a “key part of security” during the tournament, which ought to make any visitors feel anxious (especially those from nations like Iran, Egypt and the many Latin American countries who have qualified). Not travelling to the United States for the tournament avoids America profiting too directly from things, and negates the chance that games will serve as a covert opportunity for immigration crackdowns.
2) Don’t watch matches on US networks
Again, this is easier to achieve for me, personally, given that I live in the UK where the games will be shown free-to-air on the BBC and ITV. But it’s important to avoid FOX, who have acquired the US rights to the tournament and who will be looking to make a lot of money from advertising during the games. US viewers can, instead, watch games on Telemundo (owned by NBC) and they may even learn some Spanish (“gol!”) words. If they require English language commentary, I suggest investing in a VPN and making a little trip to London, where they will also be greeted by commentary teams who don’t think that Clint Dempsey is a possible GOAT contender.
3) Alphabetise the host nations
It is natural that people are calling this the US World Cup or the American World Cup or USA ’26. But not only does this play into the Americacentricity of the Trump regime, it also elides the hard work of Canada and Mexico (the latter of whom will provide the most vociferous fans at the tournament). Instead, we should all start referring to it by its natural alphabetical order: the Canada, Mexico and US World Cup.
4) Call it ‘football’
There will be enormous pressure during the World Cup weeks to indulge the American nonsense of calling the game ‘soccer’. The fact that they’ve been drawn in a group with Australia — also ‘soccer’ heathens — should allows us to cauterise the wound, containing it to Group D. The US has been attemptinga process of global soccerfication for decades, and it’s never caught on. But they will undoubtedly see this tournament as another opportunity to push that agenda and make themselves seem like a major international force in the game. Whether you’re some bloke down the pub or a former player working as a pundit (I know at least one ex-pro subscribes to this newsletter), retain your integrity and call the game ‘football’.
5) Participate in ‘unvertising’
You’re already not watching on FOX — well done you — but you should also attempt the practice of ‘unvertising’, which constitutes actively punishing the companies that advertise at the World Cup. Not the ones, necessarily, who are purchasing ad space on ITV or SBS or Bell Media, but the ones who have banners and billboards in and around the stadia, who are partnered, directly, with the tournament. This revenue goes to FIFA, not the US government (mercifully), but they are still funding an organisation that, a few months ago, awarded Donald Trump the FIFA Peace Prize and which has operated as a reputational laundry for some of the worst countries in the world. Punishing these companies by actively supporting their competitors (drinking Pepsi rather than Coke, staying at a Hilton rather than a Marriott, driving a Dacia rather than a Hyundai) sends a small commercial message.
6) Introduce ‘cultural offsets’ into your diet
The world’s most polluting companies have come up with a brilliant idea to allow them to keep polluting: they purchase carbon offset credits from poorly regulated forestry projects in the developing world. Helping to fund a few trees in Indonesia keeps the oil flowing in Saudi Arabia. Genius! And we can do the same with ‘cultural offsets’ to stem the flow of American soft power. Firstly, avoid the big American blockbusters hitting cinemas during the tournament (Spider-Man: Brand New Day, for example, or Toy Story 5). Instead, for each game you watch, offset the football with a cultural product from one of the nations involved in the fixture. Find yourself watching Brazil v Morocco? Don’t stress, just go watch The Secret Agent after. Tuned into Netherlands v Japan? Wash the Arlington glare out your eyes with Shoplifters. Accidentally enjoyed 90 minutes of Belgium v Iran? Counterbalance this with 104 minutes of It Was Just an Accident.
7) Get off X
If you haven’t already left the website formerly known as Twitter, then football is probably the thing keeping you there. Try as they may, neither Bluesky nor Instagram quite gets the game like the racist weirdos on X. The World Cup has long been a major event in the lives of social media companies (the last final was a significant event in the early days of Elon Musk’s ownership of Twitter) and this tournament will be bigger than ever. It will also be undercut by a flow of AI slop and signal boosting by bot farms. Brilliant football content will be interspersed with unhinged fascist daubings, on a scale never before seen. And with Elon Musk in charge, the surge in traffic will doubtless be used to push the anti-globalisation, anti-progressive agenda which has seeped in. Leave X behind and forge your own social media community on a platform that feels fractionally less repugnant.
8) Limit your exposure pre- and post-match
For 90 minutes (barring “the interval”, as my other half calls it) the football does the talking. There might be political slogans on training jerseys, controversies over rainbow armbands or laces, and the occasional geopolitical flare-up on the pitch (the USA could well face Iran on July 3rd) but, generally speaking, the football exists in isolation. Before the games, however, there will be photo ops for local politicians and dignitaries, softball video packages about cowboy culture in Dallas and alligators in Miami, and, after the game, opportunities for everyone involved to ruminate on “what a great tournament it’s been” in front of placards bearing the logos of the sponsors who’ve made it all possible. Save yourself by exposing yourself to as little of this as possible and repeating that old schoolyard mantra: games begin and end on the referee’s whistle.
9) Use this opportunity to talk about America
Donald Trump is not going to shy away from the tournament for fear that opposing fans will boo him. He might not make it to Mexico City for the opening match, Mexico v South Africa, (though, if he does, he’ll get a hell of a reception) but he’ll be there on June 12th in LA for the USA v Paraguay. And he’ll definitely be there, on July 19th, at the MetLife Stadium to inveigle his way into the finalists’ spotlight, like Salt Bae in Doha. He wants us to talk about America, and so we should. But we should use this as an opportunity to decry the rise of authoritarianism, of nationalism and nativism, and to highlight the devastating legacy of America’s foreign excursions. If the spotlight has to be on America, then it shouldn’t be on Marvel movies or Hamilton or the double cheeseburger, it should be on the murder of Alex Pretti, the children in cages at the US border, the drones buzzing around the Middle East.
10) Accept your place in things.
Fundamentally, I intend this guide to exonerate people from a feeling of complicity. America — like Qatar and Saudi Arabia — has utilised the callowness of FIFA to colonise the world’s game. For real football fans — and critics of the Trump administration — to cede that ground would be a real error. The number of people boycotting this World Cup is never going to make a dent on the tournament’s margins, and the increasing noise from bots and AI on social media will make it impossible to ascertain the true success or failure of the event. We are not strong enough to resist the lure of football and we ought to embrace that. Make this tournament about football, about narratives on the field, the execution of power from one penalty box to the other. This is a game that offers a lingua franca for the entire world (I was taking a cab in Morocco recently where, without a shared language, I simply said to my driver “Brahim, eh?” and he shook his head and muttered obscenities in Arabic). The fact that Americans have never really understood it — even as they’ve tried to buy it or rebrand it — is because they believe in American exceptionalism, whereas football represents the world as a communal undertaking. It is borderless, it can be played at MetLife Stadium in front of a crowd of 80,000 fans and another billion watching at home, or it can be played with jumpers for goalposts in the ruins of Gaza. It can’t be stolen, and it’s not for sale.
Which is, in short, why I will be watching the World Cup when it kicks off in 100 days, and how I’ll be trying not to feel too gross about it.
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