How Osama Bin Laden and Barron Trump Explain the World: Franklin Foer on Arsenal, the MAGA World Cup and an Unlikely Theory of Globalization

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody, with the World Cup coming up. And with an interesting piece in the Atlantic last week, the quintessential Trumpian sport. Apparently, soccer, maybe the World Cup, is a clear expression of the president's politics, at least according to Franklin Foer, who knows all about soccer. He's the author of How Soccer Explains the World, an unlikely theory of globalization, which was a big hit about fifteen years ago. Frank is joining us from his book-lined home in Washington, D.C. He's wearing a piece of pornography that we won't discuss. Frank, maybe your book should have been called How the World Explains Soccer rather than the other way around, given that fifteen years ago, you wrote a book about how soccer explains globalization. Now with the demise of globalization, does soccer explain the reaction against globalization? You're having your cake and eating it, aren't you?

00:01:36 Franklin Foer: So I think my book actually is pretty consistent with the current moment because one of the prime contentions of the book was that everybody was arguing that globalization was going to — well, the Thomas Friedman version of globalization was one in which national borders and nationalism begin to melt, and there's this era of greater — right.

00:02:01 Andrew Keen: Countries with McDonald's don't go to war with each other.

00:02:06 Franklin Foer: Exactly. And one of my contentions was that one of the things that I illustrated in the book was that national identity, local identity, was much stronger than that. And that one of the things that the game illustrated was, you know, you could turn Manchester United or Barcelona into a global super club, but there would still be something fundamental about the identity that would remain. And so, you know, Barcelona can have Cruyff come in and inject Dutch DNA into the club, but it's still going to be a symbol for Catalan nationalism. No matter how much Nike, no matter if Qatar is slapped on the face of the jersey, it's still going to have that ultimately Catalan identity. And I think that's kind of the world that we live in. That's the world where globalization has come up against this pretty hard wall.

00:03:17 Andrew Keen: So in other words, football is both worlds. It's the world of — that's exactly right — tolerance, and it's also the world of ethnic hate, of celebrating other people's misfortune.

00:03:30 Franklin Foer: Exactly right. That's, I mean, that's, in a sense, the game is this kind of deeply human activity no matter how big it gets, no matter how rich it gets, and it's gonna express both sides of the human coin. And that's true as it relates to globalization — it is, you know, it's among the most globalized phenomena on the planet, and it's also one of the phenomena that shows the limits of that globalization, or maybe the ways in which tribalism and globalism work in sync.

00:04:11 Andrew Keen: Or maybe they're the same thing. Maybe we misunderstood that globalization is a form of tribalism.

00:04:17 Franklin Foer: Say more. That's interesting. I don't know if I'd —

00:04:20 Andrew Keen: Well, the globalizers are certainly tribal. We see in the reaction — the coastal reaction against Trump, or the reaction against Brexit — that isn't globalization a form of tribalism?

00:04:33 Franklin Foer: Right. I mean, in that globalization is an ideology, and the cosmopolitan pockets of the world are a tribe who mistook their tribal identity for universal identity. Yeah. I think I could buy that.

00:04:50 Andrew Keen: So let's get into Trump. You say that he likes the game, although one wonders whether he has the patience for it.

00:04:57 Franklin Foer: Well, you know, when I set that up, I mean, it's really the American right that has turned soccer over time into a small flash point in the culture war. There was this tradition extending back to the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and Coulter that believed that soccer was kind of an alien invasion that was supported by elites and immigrants, and it wasn't indigenous to this country. And the people who were pushing soccer — an agenda, is what they call it; I'm using air quotes there — are people who were, maybe, of that tribe we just described of globalists who were trying to displace indigenous cultures and customs. And I think relative to that strain of conservative right-wing thinking, Trump is somebody who grew up in New York. He kind of came of age in the nineteen seventies at a time when the North American Soccer League was new in town, and Pelé was a celebrity, and a ticket to go see the New York Cosmos — which is, by the way, short for the New York Cosmopolitan — was one of the hottest tickets in town. And so Trump does not have that kind of hostility to the game, and his son, Barron — I'm kind of gonna say in a shamefaced way right now — is an Arsenal fan.

00:06:28 Andrew Keen: Yeah. We got the photos from the London Standard. Donald Trump's son, Barron, pictured in full Arsenal kit on the White House lawn. So, for people watching this, Frank is wearing his Arsenal gear.

00:06:43 Franklin Foer: My Barron Trump uniform?

00:06:46 Andrew Keen: You and Barron Trump. You stand together on the terraces, Frank?

00:06:51 Franklin Foer: I don't — yes. He is my comrade. He's a guru.

00:06:56 Andrew Keen: And you remember the story of why or how he ended up in that kit. I think it was — what's his name? The Arsenal fan, the English Arsenal fan, Piers Morgan, who bought it for him when Piers Morgan was close to Trump.

00:07:12 Franklin Foer: So you're trying to make me rip off this top, which I won't do, but you're giving me good reason to want to.

00:07:19 Andrew Keen: What is it, Frank, though? I mean, you're an Arsenal fan. I don't quite know why you're advertising it. It's not just Barron Trump who was a fan of Arsenal. So — Osama bin Laden. Lots of documents about his years as an Arsenal fan. I checked on Gemini, and Gemini, of course — Google's AI knows everything — it says yes, it reports that bin Laden was a fan of Arsenal Football Club during the nineteen nineties. So, again, it comes back to your thesis of anti-globalizers loving football as a globalizing force, because I don't remember many Sunni Muslims playing for Arsenal in the nineteen nineties.

00:07:59 Franklin Foer: I think — yeah. Well, I don't want to speculate on his rationale, but, you know, these are pretty devastating examples that you're throwing my way. And I didn't sit here and prepare for the oppo research that I needed to do on you about nefarious Spurs fans through history.

00:08:25 Andrew Keen: You know who are most famous fans? Peter Cook and A.J.

00:08:30 Franklin Foer: Ayer. Well, there you go.

00:08:31 Andrew Keen: And Salman Rushdie. We have a tradition of internationalism and tolerance. You have a tradition of Trump and bin Laden.

00:08:39 Franklin Foer: We also have the tradition of Arsène Wenger, who was the great cosmopolitan of the ranks. And also, we're not getting relegated this season. So —

00:08:50 Andrew Keen: You see, you're already degenerating, Frank, into a kind of tribalism, which I wouldn't have expected of a man of the left, senior writer at the Atlantic.

00:08:59 Franklin Foer: Listen. I, you know, I came here as your guest. I mean, admittedly in a way that was deliberately provocative with my gear, but I didn't expect to be ambushed like this. Who's the Piers Morgan now, Andrew?

00:09:13 Andrew Keen: I wish. So — we were talking before the show went live. I told Frank that someone offered me free tickets for the England-Germany game in Boston in June, and I turned them down because I couldn't face it. But I'm sure someone will offer me some tickets in San Francisco, and I'll probably show up. How awful is the World Cup gonna be this year? I had Simon Kuper on the show who has a new book out called World Cup Fever. He's been to the last nine. He's planning on coming to this one. He was a little more optimistic. I'm just —

00:09:50 Franklin Foer: You couldn't pick a more flattering picture of Simon?

00:09:54 Andrew Keen: Than that? Well, it's from the show.

00:09:59 Franklin Foer: But I shudder to think what you're gonna do with the image of me now.

00:10:02 Andrew Keen: You wait. Yeah. I mean, how awful is it gonna be? Is it gonna be better than we fear?

00:10:13 Franklin Foer: You know, I mean, here's why I have dim expectations. I think the expanded tournament was a greedy error of judgment, where the quality of the first round is gonna be poor. And then I think that we — the world will collectively live under the shadow of Trump presiding over this tournament, because he's talked about this tournament as being one of these three spectacles that are kind of tent poles to his presidency. There's the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary celebration of the United States. There's the Olympics, which is gonna be the capstone. But he says that the World Cup is going to be the biggest spectacle of his presidency, which is just a signal of his ambition to preside. And we've seen strongmen preside over World Cups since the tournament was essentially invented. You know, Putin in 2018 sat there in Moscow, kind of ominously looking on, and Trump isn't gonna be such a passive participant in this thing. I think it's gonna be an opportunity for him to act as if he is president of the world. This is the one opportunity for him to cosplay as president of the planet. And I think every strongman in history has understood that there is this bread and circuses, distracting quality of a spectacle like the World Cup. And, you know, he's gonna be rolling into the summer in a fairly precarious political position given his —

00:12:09 Andrew Keen: — mildly. I mean, one wonders, actually — I'm thinking out loud — I mean, he's likely, especially if he shows up in Boston or New York, to be loudly booed, isn't he?

00:12:25 Franklin Foer: I don't think he's taken that into account, and that wasn't the case in the Meadowlands when he was there for the final of the Club World Cup. So I assume that's a possibility, but I don't think it's an inevitability.

00:12:45 Andrew Keen: Frank, you're, you know, most of your writings are on politics, social class, justice. Football always used to be called — I mean, people call it the beautiful game. The phrase comes from Brazil. But many progressives love the game because it was associated with the working class and with a degree of justice, in contrast — I don't know — when I was growing up, to cricket perhaps in the U.K., and maybe other sports in the U.S. But does it still have a working-class quality? You wrote about some of the paradoxes of the relationship between football and the working class in How Soccer Explains the World — both the tribalism, and the fact that it's becoming more and more of a bourgeois sport and more and more expensive. I mean, all the stories about the World Cup this year, about the price of tickets — who's actually gonna show up to these things?

00:13:41 Franklin Foer: Right. Well, I don't know if the World Cup was ever, at least in recent memory, a working-class event. Certainly, you wouldn't say Russia or Qatar were — right.

00:13:56 Andrew Keen: But this is the sort of climax of it. We've got first Russia, then Qatar, and now this.

00:14:01 Franklin Foer: Right. So, I mean, which doesn't make soccer any different from any other global spectacle. Anything that is a big business event like this gets turned into kind of an emblem of income —

00:14:25 Andrew Keen: — inequality. But who's gonna pay? Who's gonna pay hundreds, thousands, sometimes even tens of thousands of dollars for tickets for these things? Who goes to the games, or who will be going to the games? Is it high-end golf tourists? Is it wealthy Silicon Valley bros? I have no idea who goes to these things. Or is it working-class people from Los Angeles or Dallas or Houston? No.

00:14:52 Franklin Foer: It's gonna be partners at law firms. It's gonna be management consultants. It's gonna be the people who — I mean, how — when people the people who offer you tickets, Andrew, to these games, I assume it's not bus drivers and janitors who are saying, hey, Andrew, come watch a game with me in Boston. Right?

00:15:17 Andrew Keen: Right. It's for the elite. So is it gonna be — coming back to my original question — is it gonna be as distasteful? Is it gonna be — I mean, maybe the — but —

00:15:27 Franklin Foer: Just on that front, like, when I've gone to World Cups, I would have said the tickets were outrageously expensive in the past. And yet, even so, I would encounter fans who felt like they did not reek of being elites. And one of the reasons why soccer functions as this forerunner of everything in our global economy is that marketplace fandom is essentially insatiable. We'll watch however many games they throw in front of us. I just complained about how there are going to be lopsided early-phase games in this tournament, but I will watch them. You may not. But I will. And, you know, you look at the English Premier League, which jacks up ticket prices every single year, and people complain and bellyache, and yet the stadiums are full.

00:16:37 Andrew Keen: You wrote How Soccer Explains the World — well, back — when did you actually write it? Back in about 2002, 2003. So — yeah. More than twenty years ago. Since then, we've had the phenomenon of Messi and Ronaldo, leaving aside Trump. We've got Infantino, many other developments in the sport. What has happened in the twenty years? If you were writing the book now, what are the key stories? It's not really an unlikely theory of globalization anymore, is it?

00:17:11 Franklin Foer: No. And it's now, now it's kind of purely that. And I think the biggest story is the way in which you have these new power centers in the Middle East and in the United States in the form of private equity, which have invested so heavily in the game for different reasons. I think the way in which the game is now explicitly a form of reputation laundering and soft power, as well as a way for these big fossil fuel-producing countries to diversify their interests, headed into an age where they need to hedge on the future of fossil fuels. And you have American private equity coming in with kind of the arrogant attitude that American private equity always has, which is that it can do better than the people who were there before. And that's the big underlying story of the game, you know, coupled with the fact that soccer's importance to media has only grown over time. I mean, the Premier League is a creation of a new age in television. And as we move into this next phase in television, the value of having Champions League only increases for your streaming service. And so the amount of money that's going to be poured into the game is only going to continue to exponentially increase.

00:18:57 Andrew Keen: Until it doesn't, of course.

00:19:00 Franklin Foer: Which has also changed the way that fans behave. I mean, when I wrote about this in 2002 and I think about fan culture, the transfer market wasn't the — you know, it was obviously a big deal, but it wasn't the phenomenon that it is now. And fans have been forced to become so conversant in the ins and outs and the balance sheets of their club, and they get so upset when the club is perceived as having overpaid. And there's something — I don't know — there's something sad about that, I think, as well, that your relationship to this team has also been — it's turned the — financialized.

00:19:56 Andrew Keen: To financialize the fans, turn the fans into neoliberals. Frank, and I'm not personalizing this, of course, but how would you explain why the English Premier League has become so popular over the last twenty, twenty-five years to white American men with beards, middle-aged American men? Is it because they don't have much of a life?

00:20:23 Franklin Foer: But —

00:20:23 Andrew Keen: I'm accusing you, of course, of being a white, middle-aged American with a beard.

00:20:29 Franklin Foer: I think I didn't take that personally. No, I didn't. Of course I took that deeply personally because — I think it has to do with — I'll speak for myself because it was a deeply personal question. Like, when I fell for the game — I mean, I started watching World Cups when I was a boy. The first World Cup I watched on television was 1986, when it was all very grainy still and the coverage wasn't terribly complete. And then 1990, TBS — Turner Broadcasting — went all in on the World Cup. We were able to watch, not quite every game, but you were able to fill your days during the summer watching games. And the appeal for me was always — my particular appeal was — I looked at the passion of the fans in the stadium, and it felt incredibly authentic relative to American sports, where you needed cheerleaders and scoreboards and stadium music to create atmosphere. And here, the atmosphere was incredibly organic. And it also felt explosive in a way that was exciting relative to how I experienced American sports. And then there was just the fact that, what I wrote about in my book, there is this overlay of political forces, of tribal hatreds, of history that actually infuses rivalries and that creates the passion that I just described. And I found there's something powerful and —

00:22:28 Andrew Keen: But the thing is, in all seriousness, I think it's a fake, because now, for example, talking about our two clubs, Tottenham and Arsenal, the fans hate each other. I mean, obviously Tottenham fans hate Arsenal because of what's happened over the last year, and we're envious and all the rest of it. But there is a deep hatred between Arsenal and Tottenham. My grandfather supported Tottenham too, in the nineteen thirties, nineteen fifties. My father did as well. But they would — him and his brother, my grandfather and his brother, would go — they would have Arsenal and Tottenham season tickets, and they would go to each alternately. Before the sixties, there wasn't a great deal of tribalism. I don't think there — certainly obviously wasn't football violence, which is a modern phenomenon. And I wonder whether there's a connection between — I don't know what it is — between — what word would we use? Alienation, to use a good old Marxist term, and this love of identity, which is obviously a fake. In other words, the more globalized we are, the more we cling to these identities, which are all inventions, some of them absurd. So in other words, in the old days, Arsenal and Tottenham didn't hate each other. I mean, maybe Glasgow Rangers and Glasgow Celtic did because of the religious stuff, but most of these rivalries were much more muted than they are now.

00:24:07 Franklin Foer: But so are you saying that the attraction to the authenticity is —

00:24:13 Andrew Keen: Well, people buy it. They believe it. It's like when I go to the New York pub to watch Spurs on 14th Street — when we used to have a certain goal scorer called Harry Kane, whenever he scored, people would sing. And this was in New York, yeah, on 14th and 7th Street. We'd sing, Harry Kane, one of our own. And of course the truth was it was completely reversed. This was a global sport, watched by global supporters, most of whom have never even been to a game.

00:24:43 Franklin Foer: And the idea — he's also a graduate of the Arsenal Academy.

00:24:46 Andrew Keen: Is the attraction. Right. And he had originally come up with Arsenal, but this idea of "one of our own" has become — I mean, it comes back to your theme of identity in an increasingly globalized world.

00:25:05 Franklin Foer: Yeah. I think that, in a world — what I was describing to you about my own story — I think reflects — I would put a less pathological spin on it than the one that you just put on it. But I think that in a world where there is so much that kind of feels like artifice, anything that reeks of authenticity is something that's incredibly appealing, and I would plead guilty to that. And I do suspect that that's part of it — but it's not just, you know, it's not just guys with beards and glasses who live in Brooklyn or San Francisco. It's true in Africa. It's true in the Middle East. It's true in Asia. These super clubs — you know, fandom becomes transcendent, and I think a lot of it has to do with the quality of the product. Right? It's another part of globalization that we talked about, and it's very powerful and successful when it relates to brands, to movies, to television, and this is just a different iteration of it, for sure. But it happens to be extremely pleasurable and extremely entertaining.

00:26:39 Andrew Keen: So what happens to geography? What happens to the people who grow up as I did, not that far from the ground, and would go every week, and everyone who lived around them would follow the same club?

00:26:51 Franklin Foer: Well, so you tell me. I mean, you're not living in North London.

00:26:54 Andrew Keen: No. And I've got one foot in each camp, probably more in your camp than in the original camp. But can the game maintain any authenticity? I mean, should we all become Millwall fans or follow some small second or third division team? I always think, you know, if I hadn't been a Spurs fan, I could have been a Norwich fan, and then I would've had no delusions of grandeur.

00:27:18 Franklin Foer: When you go to Tottenham Stadium, or when you're talking to your old friends who are Spurs fans, do they feel as if there's been an alien invasion? I know to some extent they do. I mean, you look at the stadium, and it's clear that they're — I mean, it's not a bunch of old white working-class English guys in the stadium anymore.

00:27:42 Andrew Keen: No. Especially when Son was playing for us. I mean, half the people in the stadium seem to be from Korea.

00:27:49 Franklin Foer: Right. Well, and also, I mean, London is one of the most cosmopolitan places on the planet, so it's not a surprise that its institutions would be so cosmopolitan as well. Right? And I don't think that —

00:28:00 Andrew Keen: Of course, in the old days, London clubs — whatever they claim, whatever Arsenal claim — you know, the great clubs were in the North. So —

00:28:08 Franklin Foer: Right. And it feels, to that extent, kind of organic that they've become globalized, just like their neighborhoods, just like their city.

00:28:21 Andrew Keen: So why do we all seek — I mean, this comes back to, I guess, the key theme we keep on coming back to. Why do we want this identity, even if it's a fake identity, in a globalized world? Is it just something intrinsic to us?

00:28:36 Franklin Foer: Well, I don't know if I agree that it's a fake identity.

00:28:40 Andrew Keen: So you're a genuine Arsenal fan?

00:28:43 Franklin Foer: I think so. Yes. I watch every single game. I consume, you know, four Arsenal podcasts a week. I would say yes.

00:28:55 Andrew Keen: And what becomes — we — I know you like the book, Bill Buford's book, Among the Thugs, which is kind of the classic of this kind of genre. What happens to the thugs?

00:29:09 Franklin Foer: But they're already gone.

00:29:12 Andrew Keen: But you still have English guys with beards going around fighting.

00:29:18 Franklin Foer: Not that — I mean, relative to twenty years ago, not that much. Relative to forty years ago, certainly hardly at all. Right?

00:29:29 Andrew Keen: How does sport reflect on justice, Frank? I was talking to a friend of mine. I said, if Spurs go down, there is a degree of justice. They deserve it. Could there be justice in this World Cup? I mean, obviously people would fantasize about an Iran-America final in which Iran won easily. But does sport sometimes reflect a degree of justice? Should we be hoping for some sort of justice? America maybe losing to Iran or losing to Haiti. We did a show a couple of weeks ago with a novelist who wrote a book about America's defeat of England in the 1950 World Cup, where — ironically, I didn't know the story — the American goal was scored by a Haitian who wasn't even an American citizen.

00:30:23 Franklin Foer: I think it's — I mean, given everything we know about the game, why should we expect sport to deliver justice?

00:30:40 Andrew Keen: Why shouldn't we?

00:30:42 Franklin Foer: Because there's nothing just about the way that teams are built. There are no rules that establish level playing fields in terms of how teams are composed. I mean, there are certainly rules in the refereeing, but there's no rule that says Haiti should be blessed with the resources of the United States when it comes to building a team.

00:31:24 Andrew Keen: But isn't the most interesting narrative of the World Cup always one of justice? We go back to 1954 and the German defeat of Hungary. You go back to '74, the German defeat of Holland — both brilliant teams beaten by the Germans. You go back to 1970, to '86, the first World Cup you watched, and Maradona's famous Hand of God after the Falklands War. Isn't that ultimately the most interesting thing about this game?

00:32:00 Franklin Foer: I totally agree. I mean, I think that is a completely wonderful thing to root for. I mean, as we watch a World Cup, the type of artificiality that you were decrying a moment ago is something that everybody in the world embraces. When you watch a matchup — most people aren't genuine neutrals. They do have preferences. And when I watch a World Cup, one of the preferences I have tends to be for underdogs, because that's incredibly satisfying, and that does, I think, reflect some sort of craving for what you call justice. And so I think that's part of the tapestry that makes these tournaments endlessly fascinating. And it's one of the ways in which we stay interested — we impose morality on games. And some of that is artificial, and some of it reflects real injustices in the world.

00:33:11 Andrew Keen: So I assume you're gonna want America to lose, won't you?

00:33:15 Franklin Foer: No. I don't. Because it's my national allegiance. It's my country.

00:33:25 Andrew Keen: But what about the Trumpian association? I mean, you just wrote this piece suggesting that Trump loves the World Cup. He wants it to become his tournament. If America wins, then it would be back to, I don't know, Hitler in 1936 or Mussolini in '34 at the World Cup in Italy.

00:33:42 Franklin Foer: Because — well, I think that, you know, we don't do this universally, and that's part of the judgments we make when we root for other teams — that we superimpose our own morality onto nations. But, you know, if you ask Jamal Khashoggi's widow, should we root against Saudi Arabia because they murdered her husband? She's actually said, no. Separate the regime from the people.

00:34:18 Andrew Keen: The football team or the country?

00:34:21 Franklin Foer: Separate the regime from the football team is what she's saying. That, you know, Americans — even if a plurality voted for Donald Trump — does not mean that America is a terrible place and everybody who has patriotic feelings towards the United States is a terrible person.

00:34:46 Andrew Keen: So what happens if that was the final between —

00:34:49 Franklin Foer: Do you believe that? Do you want the United States to —

00:34:54 Andrew Keen: Well, I'm not American, so I don't have any reason to call it one way or the other.

00:34:58 Franklin Foer: Right. No. But would you root against the United States because of the president?

00:35:06 Andrew Keen: Yes. And if there was a final — I mean, what happens if the final's between the United States and Iran?

00:35:13 Franklin Foer: Would you root for Iran?

00:35:17 Andrew Keen: I would be amused if they won.

00:35:19 Franklin Foer: Because their government killed 40,000 people, which is — if you were just doing a pure utilitarian death tally — I think greater than the number of people the United States has killed. So that's —

00:35:34 Andrew Keen: How we should be quantifying this, in terms of —

00:35:37 Franklin Foer: I don't think so. No. I don't think so. I think if we — again —

00:35:45 Andrew Keen: I mean, the Iran team will show up. I mean — who knows what the situation will be? We're talking now in mid-April. Who knows what the situation will be?

00:35:55 Franklin Foer: As it happens, I mean, the story of Iranian soccer is pretty fascinating. Right? Which is —

00:36:01 Andrew Keen: I know. Because you wrote it. I mean, ironically enough — or maybe not so ironically — you got it right in the book, written in 2000 and, you know, came out in 2004. You wrote about how the game offers hope in Iran. So how and why? And I wonder how Iranians now will view the World Cup.

00:36:19 Franklin Foer: I don't know how Iranians now will view the World Cup. Although — in the last World Cup, if you recall, there was a controversy where in the opening game — I can't remember who Iran was playing — the players didn't sing the national anthem as a protest against the government, which had just — there was a young woman who had died in custody because she hadn't worn a headscarf. And the players were protesting that because there were massive protests happening in the streets at that time. And then a lot of pressure was brought to bear on the players to sing the anthem in the next game, and they did, perhaps not enthusiastically. And in the diaspora, there was a lot of controversy over the team — there were people who felt empathy for the players, and then there were members of the diaspora that felt as if the team had betrayed the protesters by singing along. But there is — to the point of what we were talking about before — the Iranian national team represents an idea of Iran that is very different from the theocracy. It represents a kind of spirit of nationhood that has been, at various moments, totally divorced from religion. And so when Trump talked about destroying Iranian civilization, the reason that was such a terrible thing to say — in addition to implying that he might just bomb indiscriminately and commit war crimes and all those other things — the reason it was such a terrible thing to say was that it was so discouraging to people who were actually opponents of the government, because they consider themselves the true carriers of the banner of Iranian civilization, which they feel like the current government has bastardized. And so I actually, you know, for a whole variety of reasons, I think it would be great if the Iranian team could come and play in this World Cup. And I think we couldn't even guess how it would ricochet politically, but there is some chance that for the people who do yearn for freedom in the country, this team would become a symbol of their yearnings, as —

00:38:55 Andrew Keen: — we're so much more politicized now. Because the first World Cup I remember — in 1966 — the Cinderella team of the competition was North Korea, who famously beat Italy and got to the quarterfinals and were unlucky not to beat Portugal. I think they were three-nil up, and they ended up losing five-three. But I never read anything — maybe there was some stuff at the time, but I never read anything about the totalitarian nature of North Korea.

00:39:21 Franklin Foer: No. But if we go back and we read the accounts of that team now, we know that they were controlled in a very authoritarian sort of way and that their players were extremely constricted as they went through that tournament. But I do think that if we went back through time, it's not that hard to find the politics associated with the tournament. I think as fans, we were more disciplined at drawing distinctions between the game and all of this other political noise, perhaps, and that made the experience different.

00:40:01 Andrew Keen: I've got a better argument now for why I want Iran to win, because it's a good utilitarian one. It would give Iranians so much more pleasure than Americans, most of whom still don't really care about the game.

00:40:12 Franklin Foer: That's a good argument.

00:40:14 Andrew Keen: So we're in agreement, Frank? We want Iran to beat America in the final of the World Cup?

00:40:18 Franklin Foer: No. No. No. I just said that's a good argument. I don't subscribe to that utilitarian thinking, because as I've argued throughout, tribal identity above all. And I do think — just to kind of pull back — with questions of patriotism and cosmopolitanism, I think that one of the failures of the left is that, in its kind of quest for cosmopolitan ideals, it's somehow failed to speak a language of patriotism. Even if the impulse behind their ideas could be described as patriotic, that's been one of the things that has limited their political appeal.

00:41:06 Andrew Keen: So you're saying that Kamala Harris or Gavin Newsom should wave the flag this summer?

00:41:13 Franklin Foer: Yeah.

00:41:15 Andrew Keen: Well, very interesting, Frank. I don't suppose there will be an Iran-America final. If there was, it'd probably be forced to be played in Mexico or Canada. I mean, it's interesting — we've talked about the World Cup in America, but it's a North American competition that involves Mexico and Canada too. Is that just a footnote?

00:41:35 Franklin Foer: You know, so many more of the games are being played in the United States. I think this is one of the consequences of the way in which Trump has potentially stepped on a World Cup that could have had different contours. If you look back over the course of the last thirty years of history, the way in which North America has become more integrated — you know, Mexico was a country that was pretty distant from the United States and is now so much more deeply intertwined with the United States. It's true to some extent of Canada. And whatever cooperation, whatever sense of continental identity, whatever sense of goodwill has been trampled over the course of the last two years — I don't expect that this tournament is gonna reverse that in any way, shape, or form. I think it's gonna probably create more hard feelings.

00:42:42 Andrew Keen: Yeah. You're not convincing me to go to any of the games. And, actually, I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but — given that Osama bin Laden followed Arsenal and Donald Trump — there is an association between Trump and Al Qaeda, isn't there? Through the Arsenal.

00:43:03 Franklin Foer: I reject that.

00:43:05 Andrew Keen: Well, as always, Frank Foer, author of How Soccer Explains the World. There's a new — what have you got? A new introduction?

00:43:12 Franklin Foer: It's been rereleased for this World Cup, and I wrote a new preface for it.

00:43:18 Andrew Keen: Well, I would encourage everyone to buy it. Although, of course, Frank will only use the royalties to go over and watch Arsenal. So, we will see. I wish you all the —

00:43:27 Franklin Foer: You don't wish me all the best. No. You don't wish me all the best. That's been clear throughout this interview. No. Yeah. It's a —

00:43:33 Andrew Keen: — an unfair interview. I think you'll have to have it banned. As always, Frank Foer, thank you so much. Keep going.

00:43:40 Franklin Foer: Thank you.