The 2026 World Cup has been the biggest ever, with 48 teams playing 104 matches across three countries. It has also been one of the most exciting, most controversial, and most political editions of the world’s greatest football festival – overseen by two declining hegemons and stalked by the corruption of their presidents, Gianni Infantino and Donald Trump. The recipient of the inaugural FIFA Peace Prize was also the first leader in history to host the tournament while bombing one of its guest nations – and arguably also the first to spoil his own side’s campaign by securing a crooked pardon for a red-carded striker.

In the quarter century since the US hosted the 2002 Winter Olympics – a few months after the al-Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington – the world’s view of America has steadily dimmed. For those Americans alert to the reputational consequences of sponsoring genocide and launching an illegal war of aggression while ICE paramilitaries murder unarmed civilians at home, this World Cup might represent a turning point: the United States took centre stage at a global sporting event as an authoritarian bully, more like its predecessors Qatar and Russia than its co-hosts Canada and Mexico.

To survey the state of this World Cup on the eve of its final match, we naturally turned to David Goldblatt, who recently taught the first-ever Equator Seminar, a four-week online course on the politics of contemporary football.

Goldblatt is the Lionel Messi of football historians: if not the greatest of all time, certainly the greatest one still on the pitch. (And like the diminutive Argentine superstar, apparently untroubled by age, producing some of his best work 20 years after publishing the definitive global history of football, The Ball is Round).

In this conversation, adapted from an online event with Equator’s Jonathan Shainin, Goldblatt weighs FIFA’s many crimes against the game – from ‘hydration breaks’ to half-time shows – alongside the many joys of this year’s tournament, and concludes that, ultimately, even the world’s worst bureaucrats and tyrants cannot suppress football’s unpredictable genius.

Jonathan Shainin: How will this World Cup be remembered?

David Goldblatt: I think there have been three World Cups: one in Canada, one in Mexico, and one in the United States, and I think they’ll all be remembered very differently.

Canada’s World Cup has been the most low-key – but for the first time, they went deeper into the tournament – and with an overwhelmingly Afro-Caribbean version of Canada on the pitch, whereas its traditional sporting representation has been big white dudes playing ice hockey. That’s been an extraordinary moment, particularly for a country where nearly 30% of the population was born abroad.

If we’re talking about vibes and energy, Mexico won the World Cup. The Azteca has been extraordinary – one of the most beautiful, historically weighted stadiums anywhere, for all the controversy around its rebuilding. Mexico showed North America what a football game is meant to look and sound like: the atmosphere at the Mexico-England game was extraordinary; very few World Cup games can match it. And Mexico coped with mass protests, teachers’ strikes, and protests over the disappeared – all without resorting to tear gas, which, of course, was Brazil’s method in 2014. I wish I’d spent the World Cup there.

The United States is another matter. The charge sheet is very long, for both the federal government and FIFA, and for both of their presidents. It’s been ugly: eye-wateringly expensive tickets, rapacious resale sites, hydration breaks co-opted by ad breaks for Fox, the infantilising kick-off countdown, and of course the disgrace and desecration yet to come: the 30-minute half-time show scheduled for the final.

And then there’s the federal government – above all its meanness, cruelty and pettiness. Refusing entry to the Somali referee, effectively racially profiling the Senegalese and the Uzbeks at the border, forcing the Iranians to stay in Tijuana. Trump boasting about fixing the Balogun red-card – subjecting everything to the same bottomless cynicism that consumes what’s left of his soul.

When FIFA brought the World Cup to Russia in 2018 and then Qatar in 2022, there was perhaps a sense that these countries wanted to put their best face forward. But that doesn’t seem to have been a priority for Trump’s White House.

Over the last 18 months, Infantino has displayed the most extraordinary snivelling obsequiousness towards Trump: attending his inauguration, wearing the MAGA cap, showing up at the ‘Board of Peace’, plus a whole variety of Middle Eastern investment events that have nothing to do with FIFA. He even went to the premiere of a Trump-adjacent film at the Kennedy Center – that’s above and beyond the call of duty. Selfies with Ronaldo and Musk, and so on. But it’s all come to nothing. I don’t think he has any leverage over Trump whatsoever. FIFA has just wrung its hands over everything, because there’s no dealing with this man. Sure, there’s flattery, you can manoeuvre – but he has no loyalty to anything but his own ego.

Has FIFA always deferred to power this way? Isn’t Infantino himself meant to be powerful because the organisation has so much money these days?

Absolutely not. Until recently, when FIFA said jump, you jumped. There is a remarkable story from 1994 about João Havelange, who was president of FIFA for more than 20 years, before he was succeeded by his deputy Sepp Blatter. Havelange was sitting in his box at the Rose Bowl before the final match of the USA World Cup, and Rupert Murdoch shows up and asks to come in and chat. Havelange essentially says: “Who do you think you are? I’m the president of FIFA. Make an appointment.”

What’s happened since, in keeping with the general disdain for international law and norms, is that FIFA’s moral and practical authority – always partly illusory, partly conferred – has been withdrawn by many states and politicians, Trump very much included.

This World Cup is set to bring in something like $11 billion, which for FIFA is an income of about $2.5 billion a year. To the global economy, that’s chicken feed. It matters because it’s what keeps Infantino in power at FIFA. It doesn’t make him powerful in the world. The key thing to understand is that when Infantino became president in 2016, after Blatter’s sudden resignation during a catastrophic corruption scandal, he pitched himself as a reformer. In his first speech, Infantino told the presidents of all 211 football federations: FIFA’s money is not the president’s money. It is your money.

Never has such a genuine cry of joy erupted inside the walls of FIFA. The football federations are what actually constitute FIFA. That’s where the money goes, to the national football associations. So you have an entirely transactional patronage model of politics, in which there is no ideology, no opposition, no incentive for anyone to get the dude out. He runs the most centralised FIFA presidency we’ve ever had; even Havelange and Blatter had to negotiate with others inside the organisation. Infantino does what he wants.

One of Infantino’s most significant interventions has been expanding the World Cup to 48 teams, which almost everyone seemed to feel was a terrible, money-grabbing idea before the tournament began. How do you think the expansion has gone, and has it surprised you?

I was initially a critic. But in terms of pitch performance and the football festival, it’s been unambiguously fantastic: the journeys from the football peripheries to the centre, whether Curaçao, Cape Verde, Norway, or the DR Congo – that’s what the World Cup is about. It’s brought me enormous joy.

I spoke to the technical director of Al-Nassr – Ronaldo’s club in Saudi Arabia – who previously worked at Tottenham. He said the technical level of players at this World Cup has been unprecedented. Even at the lower levels it’s still very high, and what actually differentiates the better teams and players now is barely technical ability; it’s decision-making and tactical knowledge. Why? Football is so globalised. Players, coaches, knowledge transfer move faster than ever, and coaching quality worldwide has risen enormously. That’s true even for a team like Uzbekistan, where basically everyone’s homegrown. They are still connected enough to global football that the level is raised.

But now we’re talking about further expansion, to 64 teams, and I think we have to ask ourselves a difficult question. This is by a long way the most carbon-intensive World Cup ever. Almost double the emissions of Qatar, and Qatar was double Russia’s. Given the state of the weather, and the fact that this tournament has been played alongside floods in China and wildfires all across Spain, we have to think about this. A 64-team World Cup would be even worse.

Just as in many spheres of our collective life, we have some difficult choices to make. We’ve seen a lot of crazy weather during this tournament. Summers in North America are getting hotter and wilder. Matches have been delayed due to storms, games in New York and Philadelphia have been played in something like 38°C heat – in stadiums without roofs. That’s worrying. Thank God nothing terrible has happened yet, but eventually the climate is going to catch up with the World Cup in a much bigger way. The next one is in Spain, where it’s been 42°C this summer, and there’s a super El Niño brewing over the next few years.

Going back to the pitch: were you surprised to see Spain so dominant against France in the semi-final?

I was disappointed, above all. I’ve struggled to warm to Spain, but there’s no question that was the finest display of football at the tournament. Not one for the romantics, but Spain have no obligation to the romantics, only to finding a way to win, and their way is the tightest, most technically accomplished, tactically aware modern positional football – no frills, but relentless. Their pressing completely suffocated the French, who had no response. Bravo, Spain: a team, in the end, without individual stars.

What do you expect from Spain versus Argentina? With Spain-France, the cliché was that the system defeated individual talent. Will we see something similar in the final?

Well for me, politically, it’s unambiguous. Javier Milei is coming to the World Cup, he’ll be sitting with Trump. The thought of them both on the podium, handing the cup to Argentina, with Milei threatening to dedicate it to Netanyahu, who’s thrown in his lot with Argentina – this is the easiest decision I’ve ever made about a football match in my life.

But Messi is Messi. I haven’t enjoyed this Argentinian team – I don’t like their vibe, and I really don’t like their president – but the man is the greatest footballer we’ve seen play on this earth, and it’s remarkable that he can still do it at 39, whereas Ronaldo looked like a plasticised mannequin who needed shipping off to a Macy’s window. Messi’s still fully alive and doing business. That is its own kind of privilege, and I take my hat off to him. But my heart will be with Spain.

Though you write with great passion about what’s gone wrong in modern football, there is an underlying message in your work that is hopeful: essentially that these people can’t ruin football, because football is ours.

Yeah – most of the time what we’re actually revelling in is ourselves: the players and the global football public. That’s the joy. Football is a joyous, amazing, mad, remarkable thing – quite why we’ve decided, in our post-religious world, to make it the ritual around which we generate meaning and identity is another matter, but here it is, it’s what we’ve got.

Much as they try to screw it up, who can stop the pleasure of watching Erling Haaland? This is a man who comes from the most joy-centred youth football culture in the world, where they don’t even keep score until you’re 13 – humble, goofy, funny, engaging, and at the same time the closest thing football has ever produced to a Marvel superhero. To watch him move that body – these are the pleasures of life, and I’ll be damned if the American government, Trump, or Infantino are going to take this from us. It’s just a game – people kicking a ball around – and if we chose not to invest it with meaning, no one would give a damn. But because we’ve made it this extraordinary form of collective cultural capital, it takes on a magical aura.

This is ours. We’ve been conditioned to think that states, rich people, and FIFA own this thing – but football has no title deeds. It’s the collective property of humanity, and we deserve better custodians for this precious cultural phenomenon. What I say to people rightly furious with FIFA is: don’t get mad, get organised. Make this the legacy of this World Cup – they’ve shown us the sinews of power more clearly than ever, and they’re ugly and rotted, but we can do something about it.

What kind of action is possible?

There’s a fabulous NGO called Fair Square, which works on football, climate, and human rights. They’ve launched a campaign called Reboot FIFA, which I’m involved with. It will be multi-pronged: policy challenges, legal challenges, but also pranking, humour, and humiliation aimed at the powerful. One thing we’re exploring is whether the European Parliament could make a difference. EU law may not reach Switzerland, where FIFA sits in its own little Mordor – but what happens in Brussels can still affect what happens in Mordor. We already have 50 MEPs backing proposals for a debate in the European Parliament, and for legislation that might bring FIFA under some form of public authority oversight. At the very least, you can make these people nervous. Right now they feel invulnerable.

Football federations are among the most undemocratic, untransparent, patronage-based political organisations in the world, and that’s exactly where energy could most usefully be directed. It doesn’t have to be like this. In Norway, if you’re a member of a football club affiliated to the federation, you get a vote in the presidential election. Simple stuff. Everywhere else, voting is allocated to club and regional-league presidents who got their positions through networking, money, and trade-offs – nobody’s actually elected. Meanwhile, Norway, literally the only football federation in the world that has a woman in charge, and with a famously child-friendly football culture, has got to the World Cup quarter-finals and given England quite a fright. What’s not to like?

These football organisations, which were created in the nineteenth century or the early twentieth century, still have systems of governance appropriate to a cultural phenomenon that is marginal, insignificant, entirely uncommercial, and without political edge. That old set of circumstances no longer applies.

In Football in Sun and Shadow, Eduardo Galeano sums it up when he says, basically, however much technocrats and bureaucrats try to schedule football down to the last detail, however much it’s colonised by money and power, football always comes back with the art of the unforeseeable. And the unforeseeable thing here is that, despite the nightmare of an authoritarian America under Trump, the man has been silenced, and the game – the thing we’ve collectively made, and our love of it – has won the day. Football 1, fascism 0.