One Life in Nine World Cups: Simon Kuper on Football Fever and Why the Beautiful Game Still Matters

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. As March begins to wind down, we're closer and closer to the World Cup. Many people in and out of the United States have World Cup fever, which is the title of a new book by one of football's best, most international, and perceptive writers, Simon Kuper. His new book is called World Cup Fever: A Soccer Journey in Nine Tournaments, which in some ways is a life in nine tournaments. We all define our lives, Simon, don't we? Around the World Cup, it gives a peculiar kind of — I don't know whether the word is ontology or perspective — on four-year increments, doesn't it? Our lives, for those of us who follow this crazy game, work in periods of four years.

00:01:22 Simon Kuper: Yeah. And to some degree, especially in childhood, these are the most memorable moments of your life that you can also date. So we all have our first World Cup. Mine was 1978. I was eight years old. And I still see myself sitting in the living room in the Netherlands where we were living, with my parents, my grandparents. My mother's now dead. My grandparents are long dead. And I could evoke that moment more than almost anything else from any day in my childhood, just because I can see it's June 25th, 1978. And every World Cup, you kind of remember where you were, who you watched with. And so, yeah — Nick Hornby wrote famously, "I've measured out my life in Arsenal fixtures." He's an Arsenal fan, and I've measured out my life in World Cups.

00:02:07 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And unfortunately I've measured out my life in Hornby and Tottenham humiliations. You were born four years too late, though, Simon. I mean, as a Dutchman, you missed '74. I'm guessing — and I was going to ask you this question at the end, but I'll have to think of another question to ask at the end — if there was one World Cup that you wish you'd have watched, would it have been '74?

00:02:38 Simon Kuper: Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, I'm a rootless cosmopolitan, not a Dutchman. And I was living in the Netherlands always as an immigrant, a foreigner, but I totally embrace Dutch soccer and identify with it. This summer, again, I'll be supporting Oranje, the Dutch team, and that is my football. And of course, in 1978, when I was eight years old and watching the Netherlands play their second straight World Cup final, as an eight-year-old, nothing is surprising. Everything in life, you take for granted. And so Holland was, arguably, the best football country in the world — it just seemed normal. And it's only later that I realized I'd landed in this country during this astonishing football golden age, when the Dutch had really invented the football of the twenty-first century. The football of today's Liverpool, or Barcelona, or Bayern Munich, was invented by Johan Cruyff, the great Dutchman of the seventies. And so nothing was surprising. I remember watching Holland beat Austria five–nil in a World Cup match in '78, and a friend of mine and I got bored, and we said, "Let's go out and play football — this is too easy." Whereas now, of course, you'd say, "Winning a big World Cup match five–nil against a serious country is an astonishing moment in my life."

00:03:50 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And I remember the '74 World Cup very, very clearly. I'm a generation older than you, and it was my first direct experience, I think, of injustice. We tend to politicize these things. Of course, the 1954 World Cup in Switzerland was, for those who read about the World Cup, perhaps the most unjust outcome — when the Germans won, they beat the Hungarians who were clearly the best team. But we remember the injustices, Simon, don't we, of the World Cup, in some ways more than the justices. There's more injustice in the World Cup than justice. Is that fair? Or maybe it's just the way we look at it. But certainly the Dutch defeat in '74, in the final, again against Germany of all people, is another great example of the injustice of the heavens — or at least the football heavens.

00:04:45 Simon Kuper: Yeah. And Germany in the postwar decades is the kind of still-hated and feared country — it's been called the Darth Vader of World Cups. It's the villain that destroys the beautiful teams. But the thing is, a World Cup isn't just about anointing the champion or finding the winner. There are other roles. There's the Cinderella role: Cameroon in 1990, Morocco in 2022 — the small country that has this wonderful experience. And then there's the beautiful team: Holland in the seventies, France in 1982, again crushed by Germany, Brazil in 1982 — you have two beautiful teams. So that's almost as important as winning the tournament. And for a small country like Holland, you can't really aspire to win a World Cup. It's not a realistic ambition. It might happen, but it's not something you can aim for. But you can aspire to be the beautiful team. And so, you mentioned Hungary — seventy years later, that in itself is a Hungarian victory, that they're remembered in that way.

00:05:45 Andrew Keen: The book covers nine tournaments that you yourself, as a journalist, Simon, attended. Before we went live, you noted that you were in the painful process of getting a visa to come to the US later this year for the tournament. But you've been to nine in a row, which is quite an achievement. Has it shaped your life, just going to all these tournaments? I mean, you're a very fortunate man to get somebody else to pay for you to watch football.

00:06:16 Simon Kuper: I think it's allowed me to live a kind of double life, where in daily life I write a political and society column for the Financial Times — about society, I should say, not about fashionable people. And in my other life, I write football books like this one, and I attend World Cups. So the World Cup is the moment in the four-year cycle when I totally immerse myself in football. I'm working eighteen hours a day. I'm living it and absorbing who all the players are today, the subjects of today, and then I leave it again. And for most of the four-year cycle, I don't actually do much football. So it's difficult in journalism to have one life nowadays as the industry shrinks, and I'm incredibly lucky that I have two. And I'm also happy that football is not the main one, that it's only at World Cups that I do this — because I never wanted to be the kind of journalist who, you know, it's Monday night so it's Everton–Newcastle. I didn't want to be doing that kind of work.

00:07:17 Andrew Keen: You didn't want to go to Everton–Newcastle, Simon? You've got something against one of those teams?

00:07:23 Simon Kuper: I have been warned not to use the phrase "most teams in the World Cup are worse than Everton," which, although it's true, is seen by some people as a slur on Everton — which is not intended.

00:07:35 Andrew Keen: Yeah. Everton are actually doing pretty well this year. Is the quality any good, though? Certainly this year, there'll be lots of questions about the quality because the tournament has expanded. But do you think the quality of football is any good? I mean, lots of articles — you've written them, I think — about how all the best football now is played, or used to be played at least, in the Champions League in Europe, and that Barcelona or Real Madrid or Liverpool or Manchester City could beat most national teams?

00:08:07 Simon Kuper: Yeah. That's definitely the case now. I think it's been the case for about the last twenty-five years, as the big clubs have become very rich. They recruit talent from around the world. They concentrate that talent in the top ten or fifteen or so clubs in Europe, and they also get to train together every day. National teams only gather just before the World Cup. They don't have the time to build in mechanisms, routines — you know, "I made that run, and you pull back, and he goes there." Club teams are just a lot better now. So if Real Madrid or Manchester City were in this World Cup, they would very likely win. And you're also going to have a lot of teams at this World Cup that are not just worse than the Premier League, but worse than the Championship — the second tier of English football. Jordan, Uzbekistan, Curaçao — these teams are going to be much, much worse than most teams that people are used to seeing on television. It's going to be a bit of a shock. When I was a kid, when you were a kid, the World Cup often brought together the very best players. There were only sixteen teams when I started watching. You'd discover new players, new Brazilians you'd never heard of who were brilliant. That doesn't happen anymore. The World Cup is not the best football anymore. It's just the most important football, because it matters to our nation.

00:09:25 Andrew Keen: So let's — we can't go through all the tournaments, but you've got a great story about how you had the good fortune, Simon, to not only go to the 1990 World Cup, but have somebody else pay for it. How did you end up in 1990? I know you were a student at Oxford at the time, right?

00:09:44 Simon Kuper: Yeah. So I'm a student, and I'm, like most students, wasting time in the bar. And this friend comes up to me and he says, "If you had tickets for the World Cup in Italy, would you go?" And I didn't really understand the question, because obviously I would go, but obviously I didn't have tickets. So I said, "What do you mean?" And he said, "Well, I can get as many tickets as we want." It turned out he had a friend whose dad worked for Mars, and Mars was a World Cup sponsor, a FIFA sponsor. But in 1990, American clients of Mars didn't care about the World Cup — they didn't know what it was. The Asians didn't care. And the Europeans, as you'll recall, thought the World Cup was going to be a lot of English hooligans smashing up Italian towns — which was not wrong. And so there was very little interest in the World Cup. So he and I and another friend got tickets from Mars. We paid for our own trains. We took overnight trains. We got to Milan, very dirty and shabby, and we saw three games for free. And so my first World Cup, age twenty, was — well, the stadium was not completely full. It was like a village fair. We kind of blagged our way into the country. The border guards didn't want to let us in — they thought we were English hooligans. The smallness of it, the poor organization, with hindsight seems like another world.

00:10:58 Andrew Keen: You said the border guards didn't want to let you in. It's not like 2026. Were there any English people who got turned around at the border? Was it really that paranoid in Italy in 1990?

00:11:16 Simon Kuper: It was very haphazard — there was obviously no kind of system. And a lot of English fans were gathering in Sardinia where England were playing, and there was quite a lot of violence in Sardinia. Hooligan violence completely disappeared from the World Cup after '98, but in 1990, that was probably its peak. And so we arrive at this tiny border station between France and Italy in the Alps. We have to get out of the train, and these two border guards look at our passports. And one of my friends was born in Liverpool, so his passport says birthplace: Liverpool. And these border guards look at that word in horror — "Liverpool" — because this is five years after the horrible Heysel disaster, where Liverpool fans were instrumental in the deaths of 38 Italians. And they say, "You guys are young Englishmen from Liverpool. You seem to us to be football hooligans." So they didn't want to let us in. Long arguments in Italian.

00:12:06 Andrew Keen: Did you play the Oxford card?

00:12:08 Simon Kuper: Yes. So I say this in the book — we ended up pulling out our library cards and saying "Studenti, Oxford," in our twenty words of Italian. And then they kind of thought again and said, "Wow. These chaps are Oxford students. They're probably not hooligans." So it was a very on-the-spot sociological analysis these border guards made, and they let us in. And we weren't hooligans — I'll say that in our defense.

00:12:35 Andrew Keen: No, I'm sure you weren't — you were from Oxford. Was 1990 the last time that England had a serious chance of winning the competition? From my memory, I can still remember that Gascoigne miss in the semifinal. I mean, it wasn't a great World Cup, was it? But England were pretty good.

00:12:52 Simon Kuper: Yeah. I mean, England were a boring team, but they had some good players, and they got a bit lucky against Cameroon, against Belgium. Luck is so much a part of a World Cup. Most games are decided by one goal, and with hindsight we over-interpret and say, "Well, they won because they were the best." Often, they won because they were lucky. And yeah, England could conceivably have won a rather weak World Cup. I would actually say 2018 — England gets to the semis against Croatia. Had they played their normal game, they would have won. And they panic, retreat into their own penalty area, and throw that game away in the semifinal. So I would actually say — I've just rewritten Soccernomics, which is another book that I co-wrote with the sports economist Stefan Szymanski. And we say about England: this is the strongest they have been since 1966. This is their best chance of winning a World Cup in sixty years — since the one time they actually won, in '66. And so I reckon their chance of winning is only about one in six, but this is still the best England of my lifetime.

00:13:56 Andrew Keen: Although one could, of course, argue that even in '66, England weren't the best team. The 1990 World Cup wasn't a very good one. It's kind of instantly forgettable in some ways — wasn't it a repeat of the Argentina–Germany final, a much worse final than '86, which was the Maradona final? There's the Maradona element in 1990 as well, I guess.

00:14:22 Simon Kuper: Yeah. So Maradona had, sort of, won a World Cup single-handedly in 1986, which is —

00:14:38 Andrew Keen: Literally single-handedly. Yeah.

00:14:40 Simon Kuper: Yeah — his Hand of God against England, but then he scored the most beautiful goal in World Cup history in the same game. I think the greatest individual achievement in any World Cup is Maradona in '86. And he came back in 1990. He was injured in '86 — playing with a badly swollen ankle, which he concealed. But in 1990, he's really at the end of his tether. He's a cocaine addict, and he's also a conspiracy theorist. So he has this elaborate conspiracy theory that FIFA won't let Argentina win, et cetera. He also plays in Naples, and he appeals to Neapolitans when Italy–Argentina is played there to support Argentina against their own country, Italy, because he says — with some justification — "Italy treats you like dogs the other three hundred and sixty-four days of the year." So Maradona is very much the main character of that World Cup, and he's one of the main characters in World Cup history. I draw him out in the book because he's such a brilliant —

00:15:19 Andrew Keen: I mean, more than one of them. He's got to be one of the two — him and Pelé. Is there an argument to be made, Simon, that the World Cup should always — just as some people argue the Olympics should always be held in Greece — always be held in Mexico? Obviously, you were too young for '70. You were just too young for 1986, in terms of going. But it's arguable that certainly two of the very, very best World Cups have been held in Mexico. Partly, this year they're going to be held in Mexico, although most people seem to have forgotten that, given all the drama over the United States.

00:15:58 Simon Kuper: Yeah. I checked the fixtures in Mexico this year. By far, the best fixtures are in the US, not in Mexico or Canada.

00:16:03 Andrew Keen: Surprise, surprise. Right?

00:16:05 Simon Kuper: I mean, yes. Mexico hosted arguably the two best World Cups. Is it because of Mexico, though, or is it because of Pelé in 1970 and his great Brazilian team, and Maradona in '86? I think the latter. Also, Mexico, because of broadcasting times — for the peak markets in Europe — a lot of games kick off in the Mexican afternoon and in midsummer, so they play in this insane heat, which cannot be good for producing good soccer. So I would argue that, in terms of the fan experience, the World Cups I've been to that I'll come back to — Germany 2006 and Brazil 2014 — are the places where you're really living the World Cup the most.

00:16:46 Andrew Keen: Yeah. So you and I both attended the 1994 World Cup in the United States — I wasn't a journalist, I was living in Boston, in Cambridge. The last time it was held here before this year. Again, I had a great time and there were some interesting games, but it wasn't really much of a tournament, was it?

00:16:58 Simon Kuper: Perhaps we watched some of the same games together. I was based in Boston and went to watch a lot of games on TV in Cambridge, and then I'd go to Foxborough for every game because I had a very lowly job as a spotter for ABC TV at the Boston games. And so, yeah — my whole experience was Boston, and there were some remarkable teams and games that I saw. Maradona scored his amazing free kick goal against Greece and ran toward one of our cameras and screamed into it — this primal scream. And very soon after, he was banned for drugs. You could see why. Nigeria were wonderful. There was the Italy–Spain classic with Guardiola, I think.

00:17:54 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And I was at the other game that I really remember, which I actually attended: Bulgaria–Germany — I think it was a quarterfinal in New York — where the Germans were finally beaten by Bulgaria of all people. It wasn't a great football game, but it was a great story.

00:18:13 Simon Kuper: Yeah. And that's when Germany kind of loses this role, their power as the great unbeatable evil villain. In '94, that begins to collapse — happily.

00:18:23 Andrew Keen: So would it be fair to say that for you, the 1998 World Cup in France — in terms of Simon Kuper's personal narrative — you end up living in Paris, you get a writing room there, it's very central to your identity. It was a good World Cup, of course, the first World Cup that the French won. But how important for you personally was the 1998 World Cup in France?

00:18:47 Simon Kuper: I mean, that World Cup changed my life. I'm coming to you from, as you say, my office in Paris with all my football photos behind me. And why did I move here? Because in 1998, I finally — I'd been to France many times, but in '98 I finally got the joy of French life: sitting on a terrace for lunch with L'Équipe sports newspaper, in the sun, the pace of French life. I went around beautiful cities like Lyon, Bordeaux. I spent time in Paris, and I thought, "Wow — this is such a brilliant country, and my life here is so much better than my life writing the currency column for the Financial Times in this office in London where the windows don't open." And a couple of years later, I discovered you could buy an apartment in Paris for almost nothing at the time. So I bought the one I'm in now, and I tried living in it — and it's now my work flat. So thank you, 1998 World Cup. It's shaped the rest of my life. I now have three Brazilian children who unfortunately support France.

00:19:45 Andrew Keen: What do you mean "unfortunately"? You're not — I mean, you must have been happy that the French won in '98, weren't you?

00:19:53 Simon Kuper: Well, I wasn't French — I'm now French, so I'm a dual British–French citizen. I wasn't in '98, so I was fairly agnostic about the French victory. Although I enjoyed celebrating it all night in cafes around the city. It was a great night. But, no — I quite like France, I should say, because otherwise they might retract my citizenship. But of course I still support Holland, and my children — they don't remember the nineteen seventies. They see Holland as a slightly pitiful team, and they feel sorry for me.

00:20:24 Andrew Keen: What about fans? You noted that Germany in 2006, and we'll come to Brazil in 2014, were great tournaments because of the fans. The French have a reputation for not really being — well, the old cliché is they're more interested in bicycling or dressing up than in football. Is that fair, Simon? Did 1998 change that — you probably wrote one of those pieces — now all these articles suggesting that the French had changed their mind about football, that it's a serious sport, they're really in love with it? Did that really happen?

00:20:56 Simon Kuper: It happened very late, maybe in the last week of the tournament. So it's true France had never had a football culture like England, Germany, or Italy. And before that World Cup, most French people had probably literally never seen a live football match on television. And they're very negative about France — which I've later learned is a national characteristic. But when France gets to the quarters and the semis, people start to get quite excited. And so the World Cup final becomes, at that point, the most-watched TV program in French history. It's the first time many people in France interact with the national team, love the national team. It's a brilliant match for France — they win three–nil, with two great goals by Zidane. And that really starts a kind of football culture in France. Especially also at that time, the suburbs of Paris are growing and filling with kids of immigrant origin. Football becomes the sport of the Paris suburbs. And what you see is that since '98, France has reached four of the last seven World Cup finals — won two, lost two others only on penalties. France is now totally a football country. And so the big games of the men's and women's national team are now watched by very large numbers of people. And when Paris Saint-Germain, our local club here, won the Champions League last year, there were a couple of million people in the Paris region out in the streets. It wasn't always peaceful, but there was an enormous passion of a kind you'd expect in an English or a German city.

00:22:16 Andrew Keen: Yeah. It's amazing — you know, my formative World Cup was 1966. The French were in the same group as England, and no one took them seriously, I think, including themselves. You went to Korea and Japan in 2002. That must have been weird, wasn't it? I mean, when I look back at that tournament, it always strikes me — was it the Koreans who got to the semifinals?

00:22:52 Simon Kuper: I do think it's very dubious how Korea got to the semifinals, especially since one of the referees — the crucial quarterfinal match against Italy — this Ecuadorian referee, Byron Moreno: a few years later, he lands at JFK Airport in New York, and the customs officials say, "What are those little things you have on your person?" He turned out to be trying to smuggle heroin into the United States, and he spent a couple of years in jail in Brooklyn. So he was clearly a crook, and he was chosen by FIFA to referee the quarterfinal. There were huge numbers of dubious decisions in Korea's victories. I've explained in the book that the choice of referees at World Cups, especially then, was extremely dubious and easily manipulated. So, yeah, I think Korea got to the semifinals with some help from referees, and it was a weird World Cup. I was in Japan the whole time. And, well, I'd never been in a country where I just had no idea what was happening. I mean, I couldn't read — you suddenly feel like you're four years old. You can't read any signs. You don't know where you are. It's very disconcerting. And then I was based in Tokyo. Most people in Tokyo didn't know there was a World Cup on, or didn't care. Just like if there's a chess tournament in Brighton and you ask people in England what they think about it — they don't have a view. They don't know it's on. So you'd take the train from Tokyo every day — the bullet train — to these cities. You'd go to the stadium. And ninety percent of your journey, you wouldn't see anything that had anything to do with the World Cup. It's one of several World Cups I've been to — France is another — where the locals just weren't into it most of the time. They didn't know, didn't care. Qatar is a similar example.

00:24:36 Andrew Keen: Moving on to 2006 in Germany, another tournament you went to. Of course, the Berlin Wall came down in '89 — Fukuyama announced the end of history, or didn't really mean the end of history, but certainly the end of the debate about the best kind of system. I never really attended a profoundly optimistic World Cup before — although, sorry, 1990 in Italy, as you know, was a bit weird with all the English hooligans flooding into the country. But could one argue that the 2006 World Cup in Germany — the first tournament held in a united Germany, so in a sense a post-Berlin Wall World Cup — was, after 9/11 but before the Great Recession, the most joyful, the most optimistic, the most cheerful of tournaments?

00:25:32 Simon Kuper: I think so. And the Germans very consciously wanted it to be that. If you look at that logo — the smileys and the slogan "A Time to Make Friends" — that was how Germany cast it. Because by 2006, sixty years after the war, Germany is a respected country. It's treated by other Western countries as a reliable ally. It's a successful economy, but it's not loved — there aren't warm feelings about Germany. And in most European countries, people still associate Germany with World War Two. And Germany at this time is trying to be what they call a "Normalland" — a normal country that doesn't live under the weight of its history and isn't only interpreted through that lens. So for the 2006 World Cup, the Germans say, "Look, we're happy people. We're hosts. Come here. Have fun." And luckily, the German team at that point is quite weak, and they don't play this kind of boring, very physical football that wins. They're no longer the villain of World Cups. They're becoming the nice guy of World Cups — a joyous attacking team that loses. And so Germany has transformed its image both in football and outside, and the World Cup is an expression of that. And I remember, towards the end of that World Cup, in the last week, waiting for the final — I was at the site of the Wannsee Conference, where in 1941 senior Nazis got together and planned the Holocaust. It's now a kind of conference center. I was at a conference there about football, the Holocaust, Nazism, and racism. And it was fascinating how Germans were trying to come to terms with being able to love their country, cheer for their country. Can you stand with thousands of other Germans chanting "Deutschland, Deutschland" about a football match, or is that suspect? And a lot of Germans I met felt it was still not okay. You can't support Germany. You can't chant "Deutschland." But I went for a walk in the woods with a guy from the German Football Association whose job was to handle queries about World War Two. The German football association expected a lot of questions around the World Cup relating to World War Two and the Nazis. And I said, "How many queries did you get from journalists?" And he said, "Zero — there haven't been any all tournament." And that to me was a sign that Germany is regarded by the rest of us, by 2006, as a normal country. The war is not forgotten, but it's no longer associated with this Germany, and 2006 marks that.

00:27:59 Andrew Keen: Maybe that's why it was, again, a rather boring tournament. Did you, when you're traveling around Germany — of course, you spend a lot of time in Germany, you're based in France, you do a lot of travel — did you still see the other Germany? Did you go to Leipzig, or Dresden, or parts of Berlin, where — I wouldn't say Nazi Germany, but did you see any seeds of a new kind of nationalism, given also the multiethnic nature of Germany and some of the tensions and hostilities between immigrants and Germans?

00:28:30 Simon Kuper: I mean, I have a special relationship with Germany. My degree at university was in history and German, and the year after the wall fell, I spent in Berlin — living initially in East Berlin, then in West Berlin. So I felt very interested in and close to East Germany. I had friends who were East German. And what I felt by 2006 is that the East Germany I could see in 1990 had disappeared from the map. You can't see it anymore. In Berlin, I often didn't know anymore whether the place I was in had been part of West Berlin or East Berlin during the Cold War. You couldn't tell anymore — so much had been rebuilt and renovated. I went to Leipzig, and it looked like a smashing new city — something out of China — with some beautifully restored nineteenth-century buildings. It didn't look like a rundown post-communist city. So on the map, physically, East Germany had disappeared, but we can see that it lives on in many people's minds — especially older East Germans who vote for the far-right AfD, I think, partly because they feel removed from German memory. They feel ignored and treated as second-class citizens.

00:29:41 Andrew Keen: Why isn't Berlin a football town? This isn't really a World Cup question, but —

00:29:48 Simon Kuper: I think most capital cities are not historically massive football towns — neither Paris nor London were for many decades. No London club wins the English league until Arsenal, I think, in 1931. And as you know, for most of English history, it's the Manchester clubs and Liverpool that are dominant. It's only in the last ten or twenty years or so that London clubs — partly because money comes into London — have become competitive with the northern clubs. Paris Saint-Germain was not a serious club until the Qataris bought it.

00:30:19 Andrew Keen: You've got Madrid, you've got Lisbon, you've got Rome — and Rome is slightly different.

00:30:24 Simon Kuper: Yeah. In countries ruled by fascists or communists — as Spain and Portugal were until the seventies — the capital city is where everything happens. All the money from the regime gets put into the capital. The capital club is made dominant. Clubs from the provinces, like Barcelona, are discriminated against. So in countries with a fascist or communist heritage, the capital is where the best football is. In, let's say, democratic Western countries, the capital teams are usually rubbish. So Hertha Berlin have not won a championship since the 1930s. In Holland, The Hague has a football team that's currently just got promoted to the top Dutch division. In Italy, it's the Milanese clubs and Juventus of Turin that dominate. So in democratic countries, historically, the capital city is less important. I think because capital cities don't get their pride from soccer, whereas cities like Milan, Manchester, or Barcelona do much more.

00:31:20 Andrew Keen: Moving on, the 2010 World Cup for you in South Africa was another important biographical chapter — not just in your football life, but in your life. What's your relationship with South Africa? Had you been there before 2010?

00:31:43 Simon Kuper: Yeah. So to some degree, the book charts my life lived through World Cups. And many World Cups, I have an association with the place. In '94 in the US, I was studying there, I was living there — so my association with the US was deeper than just seeing the games in the stadium. I have a very long association with South Africa since babyhood. I was born in Uganda, but my parents were South African émigrés.

00:32:09 Andrew Keen: And your dad — I think I may have told you this before — your father has actually been on this show. He's a distinguished anthropologist.

00:32:15 Simon Kuper: Indeed. Yes. So you've interviewed father and son. And he and my mother — who's now dead — were both born and raised in Johannesburg. I'd been back there visiting family my whole life. And then when I became a journalist, I began to write a lot about South Africa. So the World Cup for me was very odd — it was in my parents' backyard. I mean, I went to watch Holland train before the final at Wits University in Johannesburg, where both my parents had been to university. And there's a massive shopping center where I used to meet people, all built on the ground where my grandparents used to live. So it was — I was very interested in how South Africa was hosting the World Cup, and the false promises made by the South African government to the population: that the World Cup would make the country rich, would even create an African renaissance — all this nonsense. So I followed that very closely. The South African World Cup was very much part of the drama of South Africa.

00:33:10 Andrew Keen: And what did going to South Africa — given your lineage, the fact that both your parents were from South Africa — what did it teach you about South Africa that you didn't know before?

00:33:21 Simon Kuper: I think it helped me understand that Mandela's project, and the ANC's project from the end of apartheid, was to some degree to create South Africa as a nation where everybody felt they belonged. South Africa had been a white-run nation where only whites could be South Africans, and black people were subservient — and that was accepted until 1990. Then the ANC takes power in '94, and they say, "We're creating a nonracial country, and anyone of any color can belong and be South African." And of course creating a new nation where people feel a member of that nation takes a long time. It's very difficult. And the government did it partly through sports. There's the Rugby World Cup of 1995, which was a key moment in the creation of a South African ideal — telling white Afrikaners, "You are South African. We support you in being South African, but you have to accept the black population as South African too." And the 2010 World Cup was again a kind of nation-building moment. "Nation building" was the phrase that South Africans always used — let's have a communal project that we're all in.

00:34:26 Andrew Keen: Moving on to Brazil — still, I mean, you can argue this one way or the other, but still really the home of football, isn't it, Brazil? So, 2014. Of course, we all wish we'd been in the Maracanã in 1950 when Brazil were beaten by Uruguay. But the 2014 World Cup — like Germany in 2006 — was a joyous tournament, wasn't it?

00:34:53 Simon Kuper: It was joyous to be in a country with beaches — which Germany didn't have — with gorgeous winter weather, and also where everybody cared about football. Admittedly, most Brazilians only care about one team. It was like a Brazil exhibition where the other thirty-one countries were allowed to watch — that was how many Brazilians conceived it. But at least people were really into soccer, unlike many World Cups I've attended. South Africa, again, didn't have much popular enthusiasm for the game. And that was lovely. But then, of course, what makes this a stunning World Cup is the most surprising result in World Cup history.

00:35:31 Andrew Keen: The semifinal. Yeah.

00:35:33 Simon Kuper: Yeah. So — Brazil is to some degree the home of World Cup football. They've won five World Cups, more than any other country. The best, most glorious moments in World Cups are associated with Brazil. And then they lose one–seven to Germany in a game that tells the world an era has ended. It's a truly shocking milestone — it's hard to think of another parallel for it in sports. It's not just a one-off. The Germans are essentially saying, "You guys are history. It's over." And when the German players' bus drives out of the stadium to the airport in the town where this happens, Brazilians line the road to applaud the German bus, and they too have accepted, in a way: hail our new masters. The Brazil era is over.

00:36:42 Andrew Keen: The wall came down.

00:36:29 Simon Kuper: Yeah. I mean, the wall coming down is a joyous moment. The one–seven perhaps not so much for Brazilians, but it's equally stunning, and there is no going back from it. Brazil will never again be that impregnable country in football that it was before that day.

00:36:48 Andrew Keen: And then do you think we could say the same about the World Cup — given that the 2018 World Cup was in Russia, Putin's Russia, and then the 2022 World Cup was in Qatar? They're forever associated with lots of accusations of corruption at FIFA. Do you think the 2014 World Cup in Brazil is really the last proper World Cup before it descends into Russian and Qatari Gulf politics, and then Trumpian politics in 2026?

00:37:23 Simon Kuper: It's true that in 2014, Brazil had a much-criticized government, but not an odious autocratic regime — or wannabe autocratic regime, as in the case of this summer. But many Brazilians were furious at the government, and it was partly to do with the World Cup — partly because Brazil had been spending all this money on glorious modern stadiums and roads, in a country that was underfunded in so many ways. And so people were waving banners in huge demonstrations before the World Cup, a year before, saying: "Build us hospitals to FIFA standards. Build our schools to FIFA standards. Why is a teacher worth less than Neymar?" And so there was great rage at the government — similar to South Africa, where you have a country where many people are desperately poor, and the government says, "We're going to spend all this money building these stadiums that we don't need." In Polokwane in South Africa, or in the Amazon in Brazil, this fantastic stadium that the day the last game is played is going to become a white elephant. And that was such an insult to very poor people. At least in the US and Canada, you don't have that — they already have great stadiums. They don't need to build anymore. And God knows the US is wasting enough money on other projects.

00:38:48 Andrew Keen: You had an essay in the FT last year — I forgot to put it up on the screen, but it's full of photos from the Russian metro of happy Croatian fans. Was the 2018 tournament in Russia — the Russians know how to put these things on, the classic Potemkin village, given Putin's Russia... I don't know where we were on the Ukraine story then. I don't know if we'd had the first invasion of Ukraine, maybe not the second. But was the 2018 tournament in Russia a brilliant marketing ploy by Putin's people, or was there something actually genuinely joyous and interesting about it?

00:39:35 Simon Kuper: It was both. They built these fabulous stadiums for literally tens of billions of dollars — I think the most expensive stadium building for a World Cup ever. And as you'd expect, a lot of the money disappeared, and the stadiums were built by Putin's cronies. So there was that. And Putin gave this sonorous speech at the opening game where I was — and the crowd then got bored and people started chatting, which was interesting to see the Russian response. But there was also joy, because it's very rare for Russians to meet foreigners, especially outside Moscow and Petersburg. These foreigners would come to the World Cup — Poles, Senegalese, Peruvians, whatever.

00:40:17 Andrew Keen: Croatians particularly, because they got to the final, of course.

00:40:20 Simon Kuper: Yeah. But in the first round there were Peruvians all over Moscow — not a scene I'd ever expected to see in my lifetime. And what do fans do? They go to the main square, and they drink, and they dance and sing and have fun. And that's a normal thing — except nobody had ever done that on Red Square before, because the Russian idea is that the streets do not belong to the people. They belong to the regime, to the security forces. So Russians saw these foreign fans partying in the streets all night, and they began to join in. And it was great — I think very exciting for many Russians to meet foreigners. I met this policeman on a plane who told me he'd never met a foreigner before, and he was hugely enjoying the World Cup, and he admired the language skills of the foreigners. It's fascinating to see the effects of foreigners on ordinary Russians — because ordinary Russians were told by Putin, "The world is the enemy. Everyone hates us and wants to destroy us." And then it became clear that these Senegalese and Peruvians didn't really want to destroy Russians. Even the English visiting fans were very respectful. I saw them on the battlefields of Stalingrad — I walked around there with them. And there was this great warmth, which in England, Germany, or France is quite normal, but for Russians was astonishing. And during the World Cup, the streets belonged to them. It was very joyous — and of course, that ended as soon as the World Cup did.

00:41:37 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And you note that about Brazil — white-elephant stadiums closing the day the tournament ended — the same in Russia. It went back to normal, back to a police state. What does that tell us about the World Cup? Has it been Disneyfied, Simon, to such an extent that it doesn't actually mean anything?

00:41:58 Simon Kuper: I think it means so much to so many people. I mean, the white elephant aspect was there from the beginning. Uruguay was still building the stadiums as the first World Cup started, in 1930. And of course none of those stadiums have hosted a World Cup or anything as massive since. So, yeah, there's a huge waste of money built in from the beginning. But of course it means so much to so many people. If you and I remember all our World Cups — you know, who we were with and how we felt. And a World Cup is also very important because it's a moment when half the country — in England or France, for instance — is watching the same television program and sharing the same emotions. Thirty years ago, it was normal for people to watch the same soap opera or something on TV. Nobody does that anymore. There's only one thing that brings so many people together: it's the national team playing at a World Cup. So in a time where we're all atomized, we're all on our own screens, and people have fewer friends than before and fewer people live in families — the World Cup is the biggest, most beautiful communal event we have. And at the end of the book, I find this Church of England vicar who says to me, "The World Cup is a kind of religious feast. It's like Easter, or Passover, or Eid, but it's for all of humanity." Everyone's allowed to join in and participate. And we celebrate our own country, our own team, but we also celebrate the whole world. So in 1990 when Cameroon does beautiful things, everyone's excited, everyone talks about it. And at World Cups, you see very little hostility between fans — you see them hugging and exchanging shirts and scarves. So it's a kind of celebration of our shared humanity. And also within a country, it's a celebration of our shared nationhood. And that's amazing. It's beautiful. Of course it means something.

00:43:46 Andrew Keen: Very different from Everton–Newcastle. Finally — the last tournament in the book — which to me, maybe it's because I'm just getting old and cynical... For sure. The Qatar tournament in 2022 seems to me the most — I mean, if Russia was distasteful in 2018, Qatar in 2022 — I know there were some good games. You were there again. How absurd was it? How surreal was it — or am I being unfair?

00:44:19 Simon Kuper: I think you're being a bit unfair, because there are only 300,000 Qataris, and not many of them are very interested in football. And sure, I suspect — well, there's been some proof of it — that money was paid by Qatar to host the World Cup in a country without a football culture.

00:44:31 Andrew Keen: What do you mean you suspect?

00:44:33 Simon Kuper: I mean, there's been some proof of it. Qatar wasn't the only country bribing, but certainly money was paid by Qatar to get the World Cup in a country without a football culture. And then they build these seven or eight stadiums which become pretty much obsolete immediately. But actually, I think with hindsight — having been there and enjoyed the World Cup — first, it was good that the World Cup shone a spotlight on the way Qatar treats migrants, women, and LGBT people as second-class humans, just as it did in Argentina in 1978, the military regime hosting the World Cup. So the World Cup shines a spotlight. But the other thing is, World Cups bring enormous amounts of pleasure to people around the whole world. And Qatar also feels different if you see it as the World Cup of the Arab world. Morocco were this stunning surprise team. Many of the fans came from other Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia — the neighbor who'd been a kind of enemy of Qatar very recently. And then it was also the World Cup of, to some degree, the Global South — which I feel does exist in some form that is hard to articulate. There were loads of Indians who flew in. In many games, like when Brazil played, the crowd would be all people in yellow Brazil shirts — but they were Indians, because it was the closest World Cup to India. It's easy to fly from India to the Gulf. And it was a way for people who hadn't historically been involved in World Cups to experience their first World Cup. It was actually much more — just as Qatar on the streets is much more a South Asian country than a Qatari country, with most people you see being Indian men — the World Cup stadiums were also much more Indian and broadly Arab than Qatari.

00:46:20 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And of course the politics of Qatar and of the Gulf States are complicated. Finally, let's just get a sneak preview of what's coming —

00:46:29 Simon Kuper: Beautiful picture, isn't it?

00:46:30 Andrew Keen: Yeah. A preview of the Trump–Infantino World Cup. It seems to me, Simon, the World Cup brings out the little boy in you. You seem defiantly optimistic. But are you optimistic about this? I mean, you're coming over to the US. Is it conceivable that this will be an absolute disaster, the worst World Cup in history?

00:46:55 Simon Kuper: In terms of the quality of football, quite possibly — forty-eight teams. But I would say I'm fully aware of both aspects of a World Cup. The football on the pitch is beautiful. It brings us all together. It's uplifting. It gives joy to a lot of people around the world who don't necessarily have much joy in their lives, and that's great. And we shouldn't boycott it because of Trump or Infantino. These people are so much smaller than the World Cup. But we should also be aware of all the political machinations, the bribery, the money that's being stolen, the dictator worship that so often — and in this case too — surrounds the World Cup. So I'm happy to work for a newspaper, the Financial Times, that writes about both things. Typically I'm writing about the football on the field — why are England misfiring, why is Germany's midfield brilliant, whatever it is. And my colleagues are covering all the horrors off the field. In Qatar, we had a brilliant Gulf correspondent who speaks Arabic, so I can happily leave that to him, knowing that the football also matters.

00:48:08 Andrew Keen: And in terms of the football, who should we be following? Who would you like to see in the upcoming tournament? Who's going to be the most fun to watch?

00:48:19 Simon Kuper: Spain are probably the best team in the world, but the World Cup has so many random elements that that doesn't mean they'll win. France, England — as I say, probably England's best chance since 1966. Messi is still there, and although Messi is now, what, thirty-eight — he'll be thirty-nine during the tournament — he is still the most astonishing player in the history of football. So, yes, Argentina. Brazil I'm more skeptical about. I would say one of those four — France, Spain, England, Argentina — will win, which is spreading my bets very widely.

00:48:56 Andrew Keen: And it'll be interesting — given how much the Premier League has taken off here. There's also Haiti. We have an upcoming interview with Haitian novelist Dimitri Elias Léger about Death of the Soccer God, which is a fictional recreation of the American upset of England in the 1950 World Cup, in which a Haitian-born player scored the winning goal in their one–nil victory. We also have Franklin Foer coming up. His book How Soccer Explains the World is, of course, a classic — very much in the Simon Kuper tradition. He has a new introduction for the World Cup. So lots more to talk about. Simon, as always, it's an honor and a joy to talk to you. You are always at your best when you're talking optimistically about football. Thank you so much.

00:49:45 Simon Kuper: Thank you, Andrew. Pleasure.