Front Burner - The world’s game: politics and the World Cup

Episode Date: June 10, 2026

Even before a game has been played, this year’s World Cup has been the source of controversy. Officials and staff from countries like Iraq, Iran and Somalia have been refused entry or face lengthy interrogation by immigration officials at American airports.  FIFA President Gianni Infantino has been widely criticized for his proximity to U.S. President Donald Trump after presenting Trump with a ‘FIFA Peace Prize’ award and sitting in the front row at Trump’s inauguration. For nearly 100 years, leaders across the world have used soccer, and the World Cup specifically, as a tool of power and politics.David Goldblatt is a journalist, sociologist, professor, and the author of bestselling books such as ‘The Ball is round: A Global History of Soccer.’ He joins the program to discuss the World Cup’s political history, the failed promise of this year's tournament, and how soccer became “our great public and political theatre.” For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

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On Thursday, 48 nations from all corners of the world will begin the competition for the most vaunted title in global sport. The World Cup. On its face, this is just another sporting competition, but really, there's so much more that's going on. For nearly 100 years, leaders from all over the world have used this soccer tournament as a tool for power and politics, colonial and anti-colonial regimes, warmongers, and peacemakers. And to say that it's enormous would be a pretty incredible understatement. The last World Cup was watched on television by more than half of the world's population. Few televised events in the history of the world have had a similar purchase, not the moon landing, not the Olympics, not the Super Bowl, not state funerals. So today, we're going

to talk about the political history of this sport and this competition to understand how it's been used across time and how leaders like Donald Trump are incorporating it today. David Goldblatt is a journalist and sociologist and maybe the great living soccer historian. He's also the author of books such as The Ball is Round, a global, history of soccer. And I'm so glad to say he joins us on the program today. Hey, David. Hey, lovely to be with you. Why don't we begin with this impending World Cup, which is a joint North American project. Canada, Mexico, and USA have been selected by the FIFA Congress to host the 2026 FIFA World Cup. Thank you. You know, though there's much to discuss,

there's a lot of attention has been paid to the kind of current environment in the United States. you know, legally disputed travel bans, immigration police, extreme heat, wars abroad, kind of heading into these last few days before games are set to begin, what do you most have on your mind? Well, it's a kind of mixture on the one hand as a kind of, if I may say, connoisseur of macabre political theatre, this World Cup offers, you know, drama like no other. It makes Qatar, which I thought had been the most politicized World Cup hitherto seem like a bit of a tea party. So from that perspective, I'm completely fascinated to see what happens. I suppose

I'm most interested to see how Trump tries to play this. It's not clear to me that he's worked out actually what his role in the show is. I mean, when I think back to the time at which this North American bid was first made, I mean, it was originally kind of advertised as an exercise in continental unity, right? For sure. Canada, Mexico, and the United States would work to, quote, create a FIFA World Cup that is more inclusive and more universal than ever. Since then, of course, Donald Trump became president a second time.

He's launched a campaign of economic warfare on both nations, threatened to annex Canada outright, and he's threatened a narco war in Mexico. You've written, quote, what was once intended as a celebration of regional integration has mutated into something closer to three separate World Cups. Can you just talk to me a little bit more about that idea and, you know, I guess whether it's something that we've ever seen before. So for sure. We've only ever seen one World Cup that's been co-hosted before, which was Japan, South Korea. And at the time, you know, I think we felt there was quite frosty relationships between them. They managed to carry it off, but they kind of weren't really talking to each other.

But by comparison to this World Cup, of course, the most extraordinary close cooperation. And I think we really do have three World Cups this time with different legal regulations, different taxation regulations, a different relationship between the host and FIFA. And above all, and it's kind of feeling character. So in Mexico, you know, where we have a leftist president in charge, we see quite a lot of government money being spent on creating a grassroots festival of culture or football of art. Mexico has invested billions of dollars in this World Cup. It will stage 10 games in three cities, Guadalajara, Monterey and Mexico City, where the first game will be played on June the 11th. And, you know, some really funny and lovely kind of big art projects.

So the Mexicans have created the largest human football shirt in history. Really lovely stuff like that. So that's a very different feel to what you're getting in the United States, not that, of course, Mexico's World Cup is entirely. unproblematic. There are concerns around security. Mexico knows that when many people think of it, they think of this. During the World Cup, it wants them thinking more of this. So authorities are guaranteeing safety from the president down. We're ready for any type of situation. We're prepared. We're monitoring and everyone coming can be sure they'll be safe.

The relationship between the narco war and football is close. than many people would like and has spilled over on a number of occasions in Mexican domestic football. And there are real concerns around gentrification around the Azteca Stadium, which fabulously has been rebuilt. But it seems to be probably at the cost of the long-term working class residents of the region who are feeling themselves pushed out. Alejandro lives a couple blocks from Azteca Stadium, along an alleyway with 50 other families. They often go days without water. But she says the owners of the stadium had their own well and they never run out.

I think it's ridiculous that a company owns a well, she says. So Mexico's got a mixture of issues going on. Canada, of course, is a whole other story. I mean, one of the things I've been looking forward to at this World Cup is to see how Canada responds, because I think this is a real moment for soccer in Canada. Instead of spending billions like Qatar did to build new World Cup venues or digging a money pit like Montreal's troubled Olympic Stadium,

Canada soccer has a different legacy in mind for this summer's tournament. We're really trying to build for the future, build for the youth in the country, build a national training center like create an infrastructure that will help the sport for the future. You know, it's never been so popular in the country. It's never had so many people playing it. Canada has hosted a very successful Women's World Cup, as well as establishing professional leagues.

And I suppose most excitingly, you know, we have a very new version of Canada on show for most of the world, where the majority, I think, of the players in the squad are players of colour and are either recent migrants, or their families of very recent migrants to Canada. My name is Afonza Davies. My parents are from Liberia and fled the Civil War. I was born in Ghana in a refugee camp. It was a hard life.

But when I was five years old, a country called Canada welcomed us in. And the boys on the football team made me feel at home. And this is a whole different kind of diverse, you know, version of the Canadian nation, really excited to see how that looks and how that plays out. Just to kind of zero in on the US for a moment here. You know, there have already been reports about staff and officials unable to travel to the US for the World Cup. A Somali referee, who was named African Referee of the Year, has been withdrawn from the

list of World Cup referees. This is after he was denied entry to the US, Oma Aten. appears to have had the correct paperwork, so it's not clear why he was blocked. Or, you know, being interrogated for hours. Iraq's vice captain, for example, was held at Chicago's O'Hare Airport and questioned by immigration officials for nearly seven hours. And had his phone inspected before he was ultimately allowed into the country. Iraq's team photographer, Talal Salah, was not so lucky.

He was denied entry to the U.S. And dozens of Iranian officials have been denied access to the U.S. as well. The backdrop here are, Trump's travel bans that have been challenged in court. But I'm wondering, you know, just in a kind of practical sense, how unusual a situation is this? And is it yet clear how players, family, staff, fans, and officials for many of these participant nations are even going to be able to get to the U.S. for these games? Sure. I mean, I should add. I heard today that Iran's ticket allocation for fans has been revoked as well. So they won't be going. In terms of World Cups, this is most

unusual. If you look at the last three World Cups, Brazil, and particularly Russia and Cato, which do not have the easiest travel and migration regulations in the world, a World Cup ticket basically served as your visa. Oh, you had to download apps and stuff. But it was if you had a ticket, it was totally unproblematic. So I would say at a World Cup, this is completely unprecedented. I mean, in the same sense, it's completely unprecedented for, you know, the host of a World Cup actually to be at war with one of the participants in the tournament. In terms of revoking or refusing visas in international sport more widely, there have been a few examples of this. Probably the most prominent is over the years Indonesia has refused Israeli athletes and

Israeli teams visas to attend various tournaments, which resulted back in the 60s in Indonesia actually being expelled from the Olympic movement. And more recently, Indonesia has had, I believe, one of the kind of Youth World Cups kind of stripped from it because of this visa issue. So it is not entirely unprecedented, but that's a very specific issue about the politics of the Middle East, whereas here we just have, you know, crazy aggressive, nativist, anti-migrant border policies, you know, going on. So it's not unprecedented. It's very rare in the World Cup, you know, never really before. Last week, I actually produced an episode of the show, which centered on Donald Trump's relationship with UFC president and CEO Dana White. And,

you know, they're kind of interesting parallels between his relationship with FIFA's president, President Gianni Infantino. Infantino last year presented Trump with a so-called FIFA Peace Prize. Mr. President, this is your price. This is your peace prize. There is also a beautiful medal for you that you can wear

everywhere you want to go. This is truly one of the great honors of my life. And beyond awards, Johnny and I were discussing this. We saved millions and millions of lives. Infantino also had a front row seat. to the president's inauguration and was part of Trump's delegation at last year's Davos conference. You've used words like obsequious and fawning to describe Infantino's, you know,

Trump charm offensive, you might call it. Can you talk to me a little bit about the relationship that has been cultivated between these two men and Infantino's capacity, kind of generally speaking, to cultivate these kinds of relationships with leaders that many would describe as authoritarian? Sure. So Infantino has got a lot of experience dealing with authoritarian leaders having been in charge at FIFA when the World Cup was staged in Russia under President Putin. He has had very close relationships, of course, with the Qataris and the 2022 World Cup. And most recently, he has established very close relationships with Mohammed bin Salomon in Saudi Arabia, who now will be hosting the 2034 World Cup.

but a whole bunch of other connections have been made along the way. So this is the kind of, this is the sea that he kind of has been swimming in over the last 10 years. And I suppose I interpreted at first his relationship with Trump as cynical and performative. You know, and not a bad decision. If you're dealing with a man child in charge of effect, you know, the most important thing that your organization does, that everything relies upon, and you see that flattery works, and we know that to be the case, then why wouldn't you go down that route?

And in that regard, all the things that you've described, he's played a blinder. I mean, I would say the most extraordinary thing of all was being one of the people who went to the Premier of Melania. Hi, Mr. President. Congratulations. Did you watch it? I did not.

Yeah, I will see it on the news. And he was there at the Premier, at the King's, Kennedy Center. I wonder whether he's now drunk the Kool-Aid, and this is no longer performative, but actually he has brought into the ideology and the norms of the global super-rich and of authoritarian oligarchs. I mean, I actually genuinely, I can't decide which one of those things is going on. Let's see if Toronto advisors know their life insurance providers, who offers whole life insurance with a whole lot of cash value. Beneva!

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At the University of Alberta, our flexible online graduate programs are built for working professionals. so you can step up without stepping away from your work, your income, from everything you've built. Explore online graduate programs at uab.ca.com. I guess more broadly now. I mean, you know, you've written some of the most definitive works on the history of soccer, much of which centers on its connections to our political, social, and cultural lives. Soccer as our greatest shared activity or even most frequented form of cultural production.

If I could just ask you as someone that has a, certain focus on history and sociology. What was it that informed your decision to choose this sport as the way you wanted to talk about some of these issues? Well, there's a good question. I mean, the moment really for me was in 1990 when I went to see Arsenal versus Charlton in the fourth round of the FA Cup at Charlton. I hadn't been to a football game for quite a long time. at this point I'm in the middle of doing a PhD in sociology and I walked out of the station to meet my friend Dan who'd invited me, he had tickets for the Arsenal the way end

and every single sociological neuron in my brain exploded simultaneously as I surveyed the invented rituals and traditions and the unspoken rules and norms and the forms of social identity and the occupation and policing of social space that were all going on in front of me in the guise of a football match. And it absolutely just blew my mind.

It was like the scales fell from my eyes. And here we are 36 years later, having gone down that particular path. We are recording this for largely Canadian audience. And while soccer is now growing in popularity here in Canada, it doesn't have the same kind of place or purchase in the national identity as hockey, baseball, or even basketball.

But it's really interesting to me, given the fact that soccer was created by the British Empire and spread through much of the world through the colonial period and given Canada's place as a former colony of the British Empire. Why do you think it is that the sport never really caught on in places like Canada in the way that it did

in much of the rest of the world? This is really interesting. There's a whole bunch of countries, particularly what we once called the white dominions of the empire, where football has not become. the most popular game. I mean, Canada, it would be true, but also Australia, also New Zealand, and other colonial

countries, Ireland. You know, India was, of course, a colony of Britain, and nowhere is football number one. So I think there is something in all of them that is a resistance to British colonial rule and a need to assert some kind of independence and separate identity. So I think that's partly what's going on in all of them. Sometimes it's a very conscious decision. So in the case of Ireland, you know, in the late 19th century, Irish nationalists are making the argument that if we keep playing English games,

we turn into Englishmen and we need to be Irish. And so we need to have Irish games and Irish sport, and thus the Gaelic Athletic Association is created. And hurling and Gaelic football are codified, and these become, in many ways, the most popular sports. Bolton Island. I think the process in somewhere like Australia and Canada is less self-conscious, but that's, you know, is underneath it. And I think, you know, there just is a meteorological issue. You know, football is less suited to the Canadian climate. And there is, you know, there are very

few places in the world that have so much access to so much ice. And, you know, let's face it, Canada spent a lot of time in the winter. It makes sense that there's a boreal game. So I think that is part of it. I mean, I don't know enough about Canada, but I wonder whether there is an element, as in the United States, where part of the country looks upon football, soccer

as in some sense as an alien game, a non-Canadian and non-American game. I mean, that's very strong in the United States, where nativist and right-wing nationalists, you know, will argue it's a game for women and third-world peasants and immigrants who don't want to integrate. And I wonder whether there's been an element of that in Canada. That's certainly a very powerful element in the United States. And also in Australia, where the game became associated, you know, in mid-century with the Croats and the Italians and the Serbs and the Greeks and was therefore considered, you know, on the border. of whiteness and definitely not Australian.

I think there might be something like that going on as well. Just for the kind of benefit of the listener there, you were quoting from Anne Coulter, who was a conservative American commentator who has talked a lot about, I guess, you know, soccer's place in the national imagination in the United States. In a piece titled America's favorite national pastime,

hating soccer, she wrote, No American whose great grandfather was born here is watching soccer. Pretty definitive on her part. And also not true. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, of course. Why don't we move on now to some of the history of this storied competition that we've been talking about?

And, you know, I think it makes sense for us to begin in 1934 when the World Cup was held in Benito Mussolini's Imperial Italy. And the occasion was then used by the country's fascist leader. as a kind of advertisement to the world. Really one of the early examples of a phenomenon today popularly known as sports washing. Some might have heard of Hitler's Olympic Games, but can you talk to me about Mussolini's World Cup? So the Italians put on a really good show. They build two new stadiums. They invest money in really classy design.

Journalists from around the world are invited with free travel, subsidized hotel costs. So there's a real effort to put on a show in that regard. I would say the sports washing element is true because a message is, of course, being sent to the rest of the world. But, you know, that fascism works is the message and is mighty. But it's also the domestic audience. You know, so much of the rhetoric around the World Cup and of Mussolini's performance of the World Cup, where he shows up at the draw, he shows up for all of Italy's games. He actually makes a cup called the Copa del Duce,

three or four times the size of the Jules Rimey Trophy that is awarded to the winners. And Italian for Italian fascism, sport in general and football in particular, becomes a way of expressing the essential militaristic masculinity of the new Italian fascist man. And winning the tournament is proof positive. of that. And that's a message to a domestic as well as an international audience. So, yeah, all of that is going on in 1934 at the World Cup. Now, if you can jump forward in time a little bit, I mean, about a decade after the nominal end of apartheid, South Africa was chosen to host the World Cup in 2010, making it the first and only African country to do so. Now, the event was

supposed to be this testament to post-colonial Africa, you know, a feel-good story, but national unity and multiracialism could look like and mean for the world. And here's the official welcome. It's Africa's First World Cup. And it's the host South Africa against the Mexican side. The reality, of course, was much more complicated. Can you talk to me a little bit about South Africa's World Cup? Well, my experience of South Africa's World Cup was covering it without a press pass.

so it was very much blogging from below. I would say that at one level, it was an enormous success. In the sense, there was so much bad press. There was so much, frankly, racist, anti-African, this can't happen. People will be knived in the streets. It'll be a disaster stuff. And it all happened. And it all happened on time.

It was all functional. It was a good world cup. Was it the baller. best, that's a whole other matter. But I just think at that level, that was enormously important. And I think it had a real South African vibe to it. I personally was an enormous fan of the Vuvusela, the little plastic, you know, stadium courts, right? And a lot of people, particularly Europeans, didn't like it because it sounded like this terrible, you know, like mad bunch of bees or wasps sort of swarming. I thought it was great, and particularly inside the stadium,

where actually there was a lot of tonal variation and call and response. So I think at that level, it was a real success. I mean, did it deliver a kind of really punchy post-colonial repost in terms of the performance of African teams? Not really. Ghana, you know, went out tragically. Oh, don't remind me. Okay, to Euro-Guard. Guay.

As Samuel Jeanne has the opportunity to send Ghana into the semifinals of the World Cup and he hits the bar. Unbelievable. What a miss.

But even then I thought it was very heartening and a really important thing that the whole of Africa really did get behind Ghana at that moment and that there, you know, the World Cup

and football in general remains one of the last places where a real living pan-African identity and vibe, you know, exists and is manifested publicly. So I thought that was a really, that was a really important element of it. And if I may say, without doubt, the best music at a World Cup ever, you know, given the terrible, terrible music that we are subjected to at most World Cubs, South Africa in the pre-tournament concert that they held, and actually in the opening ceremony, absolutely different class than anything that we've had so far.

You know, we'll see what happens this time around. Over the course of this conversation, I mean, already, we've already talked about how the tournament has been used by leaders to burnish their reputations on the world stage. And in many ways, I think these last two World Cups are really pretty relevant containers for this as well. You have 2018 in Russia and 2021 in Qatar.

Among the reasons for controversy in Qatar were the Legion of Migrant Workers, a labor regime that some have referred to as modern-day slavery, which were responsible for building much of the infrastructure for the Cup. Russia had a number of attendant controversies as well. Can you walk me through these two competitions and, you know, what their kind of legacy ultimately was? So I think the Russian World Cup is really best understood as a Potemkin village. and, you know, Potemkin villages,

Potemkin was an aristocrat who, you know, was at the court of Catherine the Great, and she went on a tour of the kingdom, and obviously nobody wanted to see the actual miserable poverty of Russian serfdom. So a series of fake villages were built, full of rosy, happy serfs that she passed through in her coach, and that is a Potemkin village. And the whole thing was a gigantic,

digital Potemkin village. You know, the Russian police were told, you know, like, just lay off a tiny bit. Allow the foreigners and eventually Russians to participate in kind of drunken reverie in public spaces, which normally would be absolutely forbidden and totally cracked down on in Russia. At the same time, you know, the Russian state took the opportunity to publish massive transformation, of the Russian welfare state, including above all the pension system, which were massively unpopular, the World Cup law that was passed meant any kind of political process in World Cup cities was totally illegal. And so you had, led by Navalny at the time, protests going on in

hundreds of cities all over Russia that were completely invisible to the world's press, who of course were ensconced in the few World Cup cities. So that strikes me. You know, we all came away from Russia. Many people came away from Russia going, not so bad, not, you know, pretty normal. People had fun, all of those lovely Peruvians bringing Latino warmth to the steps. But the reality, I think, was a Potemkin village. Qatar is more complex.

You know, the Qataris, the Qataris, the Qataris. the Qataris didn't actually go into it thinking we've got something to hide here. On the contrary, the Qataris went into this process thinking, how can we be as well known as ever? Because we are a tiny pimple on the back of Saudi Arabia in a very unstable part of the world. And we need people to know that we exist because that is the basis of this state's security and its place in the diplomatic order. and how better to get the world to know who you are than to stage the World Cup. So at that level, the Qatari World Cup was enormously successful because everybody actually does know where Qatar was,

and they're 250 billion that they spent. They're probably thinking that was money well invested. I think they were perhaps a little naive, would be my impression, that they weren't going to get a hard time on a load of other stuff. And I think they were genuinely surprised and shocked when the global North NGOs came for them, not just on migrant workers, but also on LGBT rights, women's rights, press freedom, etc. And the Qataris, you know, having taken a position, they were letting people in and continued to do so. So that meant, whereas Russia was incredibly closed and very difficult to report on, Qatar was actually a bit easier because that is, the game that they are playing. And the migrant worker issue, yeah, it was, you know, very, very powerful

stuff. The NGOs came in as early as 2012, 2013 saying this many thousand people are going to die by the time this thing is over. This captured a lot of attention. So the Qataris, you know, in a way, was it sports washing? I mean, we know about Qatar and its issues in enormous detail. I think it's also worth remembering in this conversation that what we see as sports washing or actions we see as sports washing or problematic are not always seen in the same way in the rest of the world. So one feature of the World Cup in 2022 is the Qataris crack down on LGBT insignia a bit in the crowd but also what armbands, you know, teams could wear. And while, of course, in the Global North, people were completely outraged. There are many parts of the Global South where folks share their attitudes who are going, yeah, you tell the Global North where to get off.

You tell them what to do with their universal human rights. I mean, I don't agree and I don't approve, but I think we should understand that the same action can send different messages to different people in this world. Do you think, reputationalally speaking, it was a net positive? for both Russia and Qatar at the end of the day? I mean, I think for Russia it was, but then it's been entirely squandered by everything that's happened since. You know, Russia, in terms of reputation globally,

it's a complete basket case. And the World Cup is totally, it's just been kind of made irrelevant. The Qataris, I think on balance, as I said, I think they're very pleased with their 250 billion pound investment. I mean, it was a sensational, you know, they got in a way the most sensational, World Cup ever, without doubt the greatest World Cup final ever.

You know, they were able to stage the greatest, greatest drama ever at the World Cup, certainly in living memory. A breath, a heartbeat, Taram! Montiel. And as you said at the beginning with probably the greatest television audience ever. So, yeah, I think they're pleased. One of my earliest footballing memories probably came during the 1998 World Cup, which was held in France. I was like three years old and I have a peripheral memory of the French team, which ultimately went on to win the tournament.

And what was interesting about that team is that it was really one of the first times that this legacy of colonialism really started to intersect with the sport in the global north in a really linear way. You know, here you had a team of Frenchmen, so many of whom were born to parents who had fled nations that had been colonized by France. You know, you had Tierra who was from the islands of Guadalupe and Martinique. You have Patrick Vieira, who was from Senegal. That team was known as, quote, black, white, and Arab. And, you know, in a way, they ushered in a new age of sport and one that has really gone on to define the decades since then. You know, if you watch today, teams like England, Canada, the United States, Belgium, Spain, Germany, and more feature the children of immigrants in pretty large numbers. You know, the current greatest player in the world is a Spanish, well, I should say,

Who I would consider to be the current greatest player in the world is a Spanish teenager named Laminemal, whose parents are from Equatorial Guinea and Morocco. One of the other great players today, of course, is Killian Mbapé, whose parents are from Cameroon and Algeria. So can you talk to me a little bit about this phenomenon and what the response has been to it from within the game and, you know, how we've seen migration flows and colonial history help to shape this modern incarnation of the sport? I think this is one of the amazing things about this World Cup.

Although it's taking place primarily in a country or under a regime that is incredibly anti-migrant and has a very nativist and ethnic conception of the nation, the teams and the scores on display are without doubt the most diverse that we have ever seen. I think there's probably a majority teams now. that I would say are sort of civic nationalist teams where you have a significant number of players who are either migrants themselves or whose parents are migrants and as you say all across Europe you know 50 years of labour migration and more recent refugee flows have produced a French team I calculated 22 out of 26 have got migrant routes 16 out of 26 for England but you know you've also got you know Senegalese uh Spanians You've got Gambian Norwegians. You've got Albanian Germans. So that's, in a way, that's, that's incredible.

But you've also got the flip side of that is the diasporic teams. So, you know, I calculated that about a third of the teams have a significant third or more of their players who were not born at home but share the, and have probably never lived there, but share the ethnic heritage of the home. So something like Curacao or Cape Verde, you only have one or two players who actually born in Curacao or Cape Verde. And everybody else is in the diaspora. But this is true of Croatia, of Bosnia, of Congo. You know, this world has been totally so totally remade by immigration in this last 30, 40 years. And of course, it becomes a space in which the politics of the nation and the meaning of the nation. and the meaning of the nation are contested.

You know, the French example that you mentioned in 1998, I mean, it cuts both ways. On the one hand, an extraordinary utopian moment in which the French nation is reimagined so explicitly and in a celebratory fashion as this multi-ethnic post-gloanial, you know, phenomenon. And at the same time, of course, you've got the French right, you know, saying, are they really French?

Is this team French enough? Do they sing the national anthem, you know, loudly enough? And this politics plays out all the time. You know, Romolulu Lukaku put the kind of conditional membership of many minority groups in European nations in perspective when he wrote, you know, when everything's going well, I'm Romolulu Lukaku, the Belgian striker. But when things are going badly, I'm Romulukaku, the striker of Congolese origin. And Meza Ozel would say the same about his German and Turkish identities.

We've seen the same all over. So it's a really interesting space, and it works both ways. The World Cup and International Football, I think, is one of the most effective theatres of anti-racism and of challenging nativist assumptions about the nation state. But of course, it's a place where this politics is played out as well from the other side. Yeah, I mean, just to end here. I mean, you have used the language of theater there in your answer. And I've seen you use that as a framework in some of your writing, you know, football as our great public theater.

And it is, of course, as we've talked about, the vessel through which you've come to understand so much of humanity. And what I wonder is what you see most today when you watch or attend the theater of football or soccer. I feel more than anything for longing for community and connection. we live in such an unbelievably atomized, individualized world, poisoned and ruined by the pernicious ideology of neoliberalism and the utter vacuity of consumption that we have been offered, digital and real. And there is a desperate, desperate human need in this world to feel connected. And that is what I sense. At its best, that's what I sense and that's what I sense.

and that's what I experience in the football stadium. David Goldblatt, thank you so much for coming on the show today. That was excellent. It's my pleasure. Thank you so much for having them. That's all for today. I'm Matthew. I'm Hung. Thank you so much for listening.

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