The World Cup in an Age of Strongmen

But industrial modernity did more than create the bases for mass athletic competition. It also created the conditions for sophisticated international sporting events. “Victorian Britons invented most modern sports,” Kuper writes, “but couldn’t see the point of playing them against foreigners.” The French could. In 1896, Baron Pierre de Coubertin organized the first modern Olympic Games. The Union Cycliste Internationale was founded in 1900 to coordinate cycling records across borders. Modern motor racing took shape under the auspices of the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile, established in 1904. That same year, a short Parisian stroll away, a man named Jules Rimet led the creation of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association—FIFA.

These were proto-global institutions designed to manage modern spectacle. In each case, mass participation and cross-border competition generated administrative frameworks that were neither public nor entirely private. Their creation reflected the ongoing consolidation of modern national identity. Imagined communities produced real-world fandoms. For idealists like Rimet, sport in the age of empires need not drive disharmony. “A pious Catholic with a social conscience, he saw the game as an instrument to uplift the poor,” Kuper explains. Playing “would give working men dignity, and a sense of solidarity.” At the time, soccer was strictly an amateurish pursuit. Elites viewed the prospect of athletic professionalization as tawdry and potentially even socially disruptive. The provincial Rimet, by contrast, pushed for professional leagues of highly trained athletes as a new meritocracy, a path of upward mobility for poor and working-class men. For his entire life, the aspiring sports mogul would insist on soccer’s salutary societal effects. But the idea that it might be monetized—to use a term also coined in the mid–nineteenth century—was never far from the mind.

In 1928, FIFA decided to create a competition open to all nations. Colonies, composed mostly of nonwhite people, were notably excluded. The first World Cup was held two years later in Uruguay, a country so keen on hosting that it agreed to cover all expenses. This set the precedent: Going forward, the host would foot the bill. The next competition occurred in Mussolini’s Italy, establishing another essential FIFA characteristic: a willingness to deal with tyrants. The charitable reading of that decision is that Rimet’s experience fighting in World War I had left him “obsessed with peace,” as Kuper writes, deepening his belief that soccer could and should bridge all people across political divides. Furthermore, the list of countries willing to bankroll a growing international competition was quite small. A skeptic, however, might see an overriding concern with narrow self-advancement. The 1934 World Cup served as a fascist showcase, carefully choreographed to advertise the vitality and virility of the black-shirted regime.