As part of our ongoing exploration of how football shapes — and is shaped by — history, Football Makes History sat down with writer and journalist Simon Kuper, long-time Financial Times columnist and author of several acclaimed books on football and society, to discuss his latest work, World Cup Fever.
Simon is interviewed by Stefano Di Pietro (IMR), Creative Director of Football Makes History and a filmmaker whose work explores social, political, and cultural transformations — from education and conflict to football’s impact on society (Children of the field).
Rather than focusing on tactics or heroes, Kuper’s book traces the evolution of the World Cup as a mirror of the modern world — from its idealistic origins under Jules Rimet to today’s global spectacle. Through his lens, the tournament becomes not only a sporting event but also a chronicle of politics, migration, identity, and globalisation.
Since our platform looks at football as a bridge between past and present, we’ve chosen to proceed chronologically, offering a bird’s-eye view of key historical moments covered in the book. From the tournament’s creation in the 1920s to the moral dilemmas of Qatar 2022, the conversation below follows how football has reflected humanity’s triumphs, contradictions, and dreams across nearly a century.
Interview
Stefano Di Pietro: “You write that the World Cup bears the fingerprints of its maker, Jules Rimet — a man marked by the First World War and forced to navigate the Second, even collaborating uneasily with the Vichy regime. Could you tell us more about how those experiences shaped Rimet’s vision for FIFA and the World Cup — and what original ethos he imagined for international football?”
Simon Kuper: When World War I starts, he’s already about 40 years old, and he’s been a football administrator in France for a long time. And he goes straight into the war. He’s at the front for four years. He wins three Croix de Guerre. So he’s a very active and brave soldier. And of course, this is a completely formative experience for him, like it was for many men of that generation.
The only photograph I’ve seen of him in World War One is he’s surrounded by Black troops in a French trench. And I guess these are what the French call tirailleurs sénégalais — Senegalese riflemen, but really from all over West Africa — whom the French had brought in to help fight the war. So Rimet had a very close and intimate experience with Black colonial soldiers.
But for him, the World Cup — which is already an idea at the time (people at FIFA have been talking about the World Cup since 1904) — is going to be for white people. And after World War I, what is very important for him is peace between people. Of course, many men came back from World War I thinking the most important thing is that we have peace, and peace between especially France and Germany, the two mighty European continental powers. And so he sees football and the World Cup as a way of bringing people together.
So then in 1919, he becomes president of FIFA. And then in the ’20s they start moving towards the idea of a World Cup. And it’s going to be the white world. That’s how — just very instinctively, without really even inquiring — they think about it: European countries, the USA is in the first World Cup; and Latin America. The colonies don’t exist. They’re not thought of. And it’s going to be for peace, and it’s going to be professional.
And this is very important. This is why I say in the book that the World Cup bears his fingerprints, because you still have at the time, in the ’20s, this conflict between people like Pierre de Coubertin, who is of course very upper class and has created the modern Olympics, who believe that sport should be amateur — and Coubertin doesn’t really care about people who can’t afford to play sports if it’s amateur, who can’t afford to spend many hours learning to be good at sport because they need jobs. Coubertin is not worried about those people. And Rimet is, because Rimet came from quite humble origins, unlike most sports administrators of the time. He comes from a village in eastern France. His parents run a grocery store in Paris. He goes to night school and becomes a lawyer, and they live in quite a poor quarter in what is now the quite wealthy 7th arrondissement. So he’s around a lot of poor people, and he knows if poor people are going to play football — poor men, because nobody is thinking about women playing then — if poor men are going to play football, they have to be paid.
So in his mind, the World Cup is: all countries (white countries) play; it’s to make friends between politically different countries; and it’s professional. And this is very unlike the Olympics or professional tennis at the time, which are conceived of as amateur sports.
Stefano Di Pietro: “You quote Rimet questioning the Olympic ideal — asking whether ‘perfection is of this world’ — and denouncing amateurism as the domination of a privileged oligarchy. What does this tell us about his social vision for football, and how radical was it at the time to imagine the game as a democratic, even egalitarian, alternative to elitist sport?”
Simon Kuper: I mean, he’s not a radical left-winger. He’s not close to communists or anything. He’s a Christian socialist. So, people should be Christian, and we must raise the poor by helping them to get educated, and sport can be part of civilising them and giving them pleasure and happiness. So he’s not a radical. And of course, there is a lot of radicalism in the 1910s and ’20s — he is not there.
And it’s also not a very original vision, because of course, in Britain, there has been professional football since the late 19th century. And in some European countries, there is professional football. In France, professional football was not legalised at the time, but he runs a club called Red Star, which seems to be recruiting players from Holland, Belgium, Germany and paying them in some ways or giving them jobs. So he is not very interested in amateurism, and he sees amateurism as a way for the rich and the upper class to exclude poor people from sport, because if it’s amateur, then poor people can’t afford to play.
Stefano Di Pietro: When FIFA voted in 1928 to create a World Cup ‘open to all nations’, that ‘all’ really meant Europe and the Americas, while colonial subjects — like the Senegalese riflemen — were excluded. How do you interpret that and when did that begin to change, and what forces finally pushed the World Cup to open up to the rest of the world — to Africa, Asia, and the formerly colonised nations?”
Simon Kuper: It takes a long time. I mean, Japan and Korea, I think, were FIFA members before World War II. But even in 1990 — I mean, in the book, I describe my nine World Cups, and my first one was Italia ’90 — and at that World Cup, there were three teams from the British Isles (England, Scotland, and Ireland). There were two teams from the whole of Asia, two from the whole of Africa. So even as late as 1990, it’s still very much a white World Cup in which Asian and African countries don’t have their place. So this is a very slow process. And 2026 — I mean, there are a lot of problems with having 48 teams — but it will be the World Cup with the most places for Africa and Asia.
I mean, the wave of decolonisation in Asia and Africa is from the ’50s and ’60s. And so by the ’70s, the newly independent countries are a big voting bloc in FIFA, and that’s where it changes. So at the start of the ’70s, the FIFA president is this very old-fashioned, racist Englishman, Stanley Rous, and he was displaced in the elections of 1974 by Havelange, the Brazilian, who won by saying, “I’m going to open FIFA much more. I’m going to give many more World Cup places to the newly independent nations of Asia and Africa.” And generally, he speaks a very — what was then called Third World — language, where he is attentive to their frustrations and their exclusion. And for Rous — like many white administrators from Rimet onwards — he had never really thought about this world at all. And so Rous is swept away. And then from the ’70s onwards, very slowly, the number of Asian and African teams in World Cups rises.
Stefano Di Pietro: “After World War II, the World Cup started reflecting decolonisation and the rise of new nations. How did teams like Brazil — and later African nations — redefine football’s centre of gravity?”
Simon Kuper: I wouldn’t say after World War II, the new nations came in — it’s really very slowly from the 1970s. So Brazil has always been there. And of course, Brazil is a country with a white upper class as well as a non-white lower class. So Brazil had been a World Cup country from the very beginning, and it became stronger and won for the first time in 1958, and for a time became the main character of the World Cup, and the hero of the World Cup. And also has this story that Brazil is so good because it unites whiteness and Blackness, which we know is an old Brazilian story that is problematic. After all, it ignores the existence of racism.
The African countries — they really marked the World Cup for the first time with Cameroon in 1990, when Cameroon did incredibly well and got very close to reaching the semi-final. And at the time, there had been a kind of cliché in football for decades: One day, an African country is going to win the World Cup. The first person to say this was the England manager Walter Winterbottom in the ’50s. Later, Pelé says that, everyone says it; and by 1990 it’s becoming an absolute truism: Of course, one day an African country will win the World Cup.
But we look back now from 1990, and really no sub-Saharan African country has done as well as Cameroon. You know, it’s nearly 40 years, and sub-Saharan African football has not got at all better. North African football is not much. And even if we take Morocco as the most successful African country in World Cup history at the 2022 World Cup, it was with a team where most of the players are European-raised. They’ve learned their football in Europe — in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, and Spain.
So what we’ve seen since 1990 is European football has got better, and the European-raised players are the best, partly because they play each other in the Champions League all the time — so they learn the best football — and also because we’re the only part of the world (except the US and Japan) where kids — especially boys — play football in very large numbers. So whether it’s Italy or Holland or Germany, the secret is we have football clubs everywhere, we have fields, we get all the six-year-old boys out — and now the girls as well (that took a lot longer) — and we coach them and we let them play all the time.
And it’s very hard, with football, to know at six who is going to be good, because body type is not a good indicator in football, not like in basketball or rowing. Some kids start good and they don’t progress. And so you have to have very large numbers playing. So anyway, we Western Europeans do that because we’re social democracies — we’re good at providing sport for everyone. That works in football. And so what you’ve seen in the last 35 years is Western European football has become super dominant. At one point — 2006 to 2018 — we had four World Cups in a row won by different Western European countries, and the only country in the world in the last 20-plus years that can compete with the best Western Europeans is Messi’s Argentina. So the whole rest of the world, except this one country, has just been left behind by the Europeans.
I would say it’s because of a couple of things: it’s social democracy. Wealthy social democracies provide sport. I mean, one country that’s not wealthy that does that very well is Costa Rica. I was there; there’s a football field in every village, which is paid for, maintained. Costa Rica is also very good at providing goods to poorer people — good at healthcare and good at football. Mostly in the rest of the world, that’s not the case. So if you’re a kid in India, in China, in one of the big African cities—which have been very built up—there is no way you can play football for most kids.
So there is that mix of social democracy and economics, and, yeah, culture — in that we have the best know-how of how to play football. So I grew up in the Netherlands. I learned football is a dance; it’s about space; it’s about controlling space. Italians understand that very well, in a slightly different way. And I thought, you know, 20 years ago, the US and Japan — the richer, bigger countries, US, Japan, maybe China — would learn from us, would catch up and, because they have more people, they would become better than us. But that’s not happened at all.
Growing up in the Netherlands, I realised everyone around me understood football: the big question in football is, “Where should I be now?” Which position should I be in? Because for 88–89 minutes the average player doesn’t have the ball. And we Western Europeans have mastered that better than the rest of the world. And the Champions League enhances that because our best players learn from each other all the time.
It’s also because we’re so close together, so we have different traditions. Italian football is a bit different from French football, different from German or Spanish football — but they learn from each other because they’re very close. They play against each other a lot. It’s easy to travel. So they learn from each other. So now that Spain is the best, we’re all looking at Spain and saying, “How can we learn from Spain?”
Stefano Di Pietro: “How did football mirror the ideological divisions of the Cold War — East vs West Germany, the Soviet Union, Latin America under dictatorships?”
Simon Kuper: I think Eastern Europe is not an important region in the history of the World Cup. Eastern European teams have been very disappointing, except for Poland in the ’70s and early ’80s. So these countries don’t really play a role. At the Olympics, of course, the Cold War is decisive — the Soviet Union and East Germany are extremely strong.
In football, it’s very hard for a communist country to organise a strong team, because football is a lot about individual creativity. The players make decisions on the field — they’re making decisions all the time — so it’s very hard to have a top-down system that works. And the communist countries like to select kids at age two or four to be the future boxing or rowing champions. It doesn’t work with football. Drugs are also of limited use in football. There’s a lot of evidence that Russia has used drugs in football, but of course, it helps a bit — it doesn’t help very much. So I wouldn’t say there’s that divide.
As for dictatorships, I mean the 1978 World Cup, where Argentina, under the military regim,e is the host — it’s a very shocking World Cup and there’s a lot of attention to this terrible regime. It’s a bit like the Qatar 2022 World Cup in that way: there’s a lot of media attention around that. But it doesn’t seem to me that Argentinian or Brazilian football are particularly shaped by these dictatorships. I don’t think you could talk about their national styles changing, or about Maradona or Pelé being products of the dictatorship in any way — or products of democracy. Of course, the dictatorship tries to use these guys as symbols, but it doesn’t shape football that much.
Stefano Di Pietro: “Television turned the World Cup into a shared global ritual. How did that change the emotional and political meaning of the tournament?”
Simon Kuper: Television makes the World Cup much bigger, and football works very well on television. So what you see is that football surpasses other sports that are less attractive on television — baseball, sumo wrestling, or five-day cricket in England all decline relative to football, because football is great on TV. And so what we now have is: the World Cup itself, when you go there, it’s a little bit like being on a TV set — the stadiums are configured for TV cameras, and 99.9% of people watching are watching on television. So it’s a television event and it reaches the whole world.
I interview this vicar in the book — a Church of England priest — who says, you must understand the World Cup is a kind of religious feast that includes the whole world. Like Easter or like Eid in Islam, it’s a time to stop, to have fun, to have some joy, to interrupt the drudgery and difficulty of ordinary life. And whereas Easter is only for Christians, the World Cup is for everyone. And so we’re all united — whether you’re Nigerian or Italian or Brazilian — we’re all part of it. Even if your country doesn’t play: if you’re Indian, you’re part of it. So at the World Cup in Qatar, there were a lot of Indians there supporting Brazil especially.
And it’s a way for the world to be together — and you celebrate your team, but you also celebrate the world. So if you’re an Italian fan, you want Italy to win, but you also can be excited by Cameroon or Nigeria. We can all enjoy it together — and we enjoy the scandals together. So when Luis Suárez bites somebody on the field, we all share that moment, share that story.
Stefano Di Pietro: “Italia ’90 and USA ’94 seem to mark football’s transition into global entertainment. What made those editions such turning points?” “Was this the decade when football became less about nations and more about brands and markets?”
Simon Kuper: I don’t see such a sharp transition. I think there’s a slow progress of football becoming fully global. At the start of the ’90s, communism falls; we’re a much more united world in that way; China is opening to the West — but I don’t see a very sharp transition.
As for brands and markets: they have always tried to insert themselves into football, especially after it becomes a television spectacle — which really happens in the ’70s. But I still think that doesn’t spoil the World Cup for most people. Most people love the World Cup. I often hear, “Oh, commercialism has spoiled football.” That’s not what the numbers of people watching tell us. Whether it’s club football or international football, people watch and they really care.
I also don’t find the World Cup that commercialised. There’s no shirt sponsorship, and you don’t have people buying or selling players or teams. I think if Rimet saw the World Cup now, he would recognise almost all of it. I don’t see this story — that I hear a lot — of it being ruined by commerce.
Of course, FIFA is very sensitive to money: members of the Executive Committee take bribes, and then they vote for a country that bribed them. And Saudi Arabia is getting a World Cup, I think very legally, because it’s putting a lot of money into football, and so Infantino likes Saudi. So at the FIFA level, yeah, they love money. But I don’t see that in terms of how people experience the tournament itself.
Stefano Di Pietro: “France 1998 and Germany 2014 both showcased multicultural teams. What do these moments reveal about how migration reshaped football — and ideas of national belonging?”
Simon Kuper: When France won in ’98 — and I live in France now; I’ve lived here since 2002 — there was a big debate: look, this is a multicultural France that wins, and so it will reduce racism and make everyone accept immigration because this is an image of a mixed team as a mixed country that wins. That didn’t work at all. As we know, the far right in France has grown and grown in the 21st century. So it’s not that football changes society or changes its view of migration.
Rather, Les Bleus in France, especially, are a way for a country to debate migration: “Are we happy with it? Are these people really French?” — a discussion you get a lot. So when the French team goes on strike in 2010, then “they’re Muslims, they’re Arabs, they’re Black people from the suburbs who hate France.” That’s not my view, but that’s a view of the far right that is very popular then. And even when they win in ’98, about a third of the French population says in surveys that they think there are too many non-white players in the team.
So the team is the nation. When you see France play, Italy play, you feel you’re seeing your own nation; the nation is embodied by these 11 players. And of course, then you can see things that you don’t like in your country — or that you do like. So Brazilians might see a team that is creative and embodies the creativity of Brazil as opposed to the organisation of the Europeans — something positive. French people — some — might look at that team and say, “I see a France that is no longer white, and I’m angry about that.” So these migration stories are expressed in football, and football becomes a way to debate race and migration.
Stefano Di Pietro: “You often write about the dual identity of players — French but Algerian, Dutch but Surinamese, etc. Do you see football helping societies accept these layered identities, or does it expose their fragility?”
Simon Kuper: I don’t think football changes society, as I say. I don’t think football helps us accept multiculturalism. Football is a way of talking about it and understanding it.
So at the next World Cup, it’s possible we’ll have three teams of Dutch players — Holland, Suriname, and Curaçao — because Suriname and Curaçao, which could both still qualify (very small Dutch former possessions in the Caribbean; Curaçao is still, I think, legally part of Holland), all or almost all their players were born in the Netherlands and learned their football in the Netherlands. So these guys have dual identities: they’re Dutch, but they’re also of Surinamese origin; they’re proud of that. A lot of the Moroccan players have European origins. So people have these mixed identities, and we often see that at World Cups. And the French team — they feel very French, but some of them are also proud of their African origins.
This is not always accepted, of course, by nativists. If Pogba wins the World Cup and talks about also having Guinean origins, it’s not that the French far right thinks, “Oh, that’s lovely, now I accept Black people because he’s won the World Cup.” They don’t think like that.
I often think that when we debate racial issues, it actually makes people more intolerant, because I think often the best thing for minorities is for their ethnicity to be ignored by most of society. Because if you get a society like France or Italy talking about Islam or colour, that’s when a lot of racism comes out, and it’s when that question is mostly ignored that you get more integration.
For example, Britain for two years recently had a prime minister of Indian origin, Rishi Sunak, and this wasn’t really discussed. Most people were against him because they were against his party. But there was very little discussion of, “Oh, we have a prime minister of Indian origin.” And I like that absence of discussion — I like it being taken for granted. I think that’s healthier; that’s a better way to integrate. Similarly, in football, if we just say, “This guy is a footballer, and I can criticise him or praise him, but his colour is not really relevant,” I think that’s when we’re getting to a healthier place.
Stefano Di Pietro: “In your view, when did football stop being a mirror of the nation and become a mirror of globalisation itself?”
Simon Kuper: I think until the ’90s, there are national styles. So Italy — when they play, you know this is Italy; you know this is England; you know this is Brazil. They have a very clear style. And partly because we get much more international football with the Champions League from 1992, and the best players are playing internationally all the time, and from 1995 they can move to different leagues — so Manchester United is not really an English team anymore; before ’95, Manchester United is a British team, and now they’re not.
So from the ’90s the styles start to mix. You get an international style which all the best teams play, and the players are very international — often they speak four or five languages. Probably most of the best players at the World Cup do not live in their home country, and many haven’t lived in their home countries since they were 20 years old. So I think it’s from the ’90s that the game on the field becomes very international.
Stefano Di Pietro: “Qatar 2022 raised uncomfortable questions about labour, ethics, and power. Do you think this tension — between money and morality — defines the modern World Cup?”
Simon Kuper: I think it’s one aspect of the World Cup. We did talk about this a lot — and we stopped talking about it, mostly the moment the football kicked off. And when the football kicked off, we talked about, “Wow, look at Morocco,” or “Germany is very bad again,” or “Spain can’t score goals.” And so I think most people care more about the football on the field — and I’m very sympathetic to that — than they care about these issues of money and morality.
So I think the money/morality is one aspect of what a World Cup is about. But we mustn’t forget the joy and beauty and excitement of football. If nobody cared about a World Cup, we wouldn’t talk about Qatar hosting it. If there’s some boring business conference in Qatar, we don’t have a big discussion about money and morality and the kafala system. We only talk about this so much because we love football.
Stefano Di Pietro: “Given the crises of politics and climate, what role can football still play in connecting people across divisions?”
Simon Kuper: I’m very pessimistic about climate. I think we have done nothing to fight it. It’s very hard for a politician to get elected on a genuine green platform, because you’d have to tell people: for the next few years, you can’t fly, you can’t buy clothes, you can have a 20-second shower, and we will get poorer because I’m going to have to close a lot of the industries of this country — and nobody will vote for that. So I’m very pessimistic about the chances of stopping catastrophic climate change, and I don’t see that football has played any significant role there.
Of course, football is heavily funded by fossil-fuel producing countries and companies. But even if it wasn’t — even if Saudi Arabia and Qatar didn’t care about football — I don’t think that would make a difference. Football is not going to do anything significant to solve our problem, I’m afraid.
Stefano Di Pietro: “If the World Cup is a mirror of humanity, what do you think it reflected about us in this last decade — and what might it show in the future?”
Simon Kuper: I think it reflects a surprising amount of cosmopolitanism and internationalism. We have this tournament, and some teams lose and there are suspect refereeing decisions — but we all still… there’s no fighting. I’ve never seen any violence at any World Cup. I’ve seen people accept the result, and many — maybe most — people in the world support teams that are not their own country. If you’re Indian or Chinese or Iraqi, you almost never have a chance to support your own team at the World Cup. So most people go and support different teams — or when their own team is knocked out, they support another team — or they support Portugal because they like Ronaldo.
So I think it’s a very international festival. At the games in Qatar, on the metro, you’d see in one carriage Saudis, Iranians, women in burka, women in shorts, English, Mexicans, Americans — everyone together, everyone having fun, no tension, everybody very cheerful. And so to me, we talk about the rise of nationalism in politics over the last 20 years — and of course that has happened — but World Cups to me are much more a mirror of cosmopolitanism.
Stefano Di Pietro: In conclusion, Simon, if you could show a young reader one World Cup match to understand how football tells the story of the world — which would it be, and why?”
Simon Kuper: I would go for something like France–Germany, 1982 in Seville. France are winning 3–1. The Germans come back to 3–3 — which, of course, is the start of the story of Germany always coming back. Germany win on penalties — the start of the story that Germany always wins on penalties. And for the French nation, and for many people watching — even me, I was 12 years old — it’s also about replaying World War Two. All these memories of war are in this game. So it’s a brilliant match. It’s very sporting — except there’s this terrible foul by Schumacher on Battiston, which also expresses the anger and intensity of World Cups. Otherwise, the French accept their defeat; it’s quite sporting. And then there’s something that’s more than football in this game, because World War Two hangs over this match. And so that would be my game, where I’d say: look, World Cups are about so much more than football.
Final Remarks
Through Simon Kuper’s words, the World Cup emerges not merely as a sequence of matches, but as a century-long dialogue between peoples, ideas, and eras. His reflections remind us that football’s history is inseparable from the history of the world itself — from empire and war to migration and modernity. As Football Makes History, we seek to keep that dialogue alive: using the game’s stories to understand how football continues to shape our shared future.
Thinking points
Educators can use this interview to explore how global events and social change are reflected through football’s most visible stage — the World Cup. The questions and reflections below can help young people connect history, identity, and sport in meaningful ways.
Discussion Themes
- Football and Power: How did early FIFA leaders like Jules Rimet use football to promote ideas of peace, unity, or national prestige?
- Colonialism and Inclusion: What does the exclusion of colonised nations in the early World Cups tell us about global inequality — and how did this begin to change?
- Cold War and Ideology: How did football express political tensions during the Cold War, and what examples can we find in other sports or cultural events?
- Globalisation and Identity: How have migration and multiculturalism transformed national teams and our ideas of belonging?
- Money and Morality: What ethical dilemmas arise when football becomes a global business? How do students feel about recent World Cups in this light?
Find out more
You can find Simon Kuper’s book on all online stores, including BOL .
We recommend this interesting interview with Simon Kuper about his upcoming book.
You can also take a look at the book review by David Goldblatt.
At Football Makes History, we have articles and educational resources on various aspects of the World Cup, as addressed in the interview above, including Jurryt van de Vooren’s piece on the Dutch East Indies team in 1938, Gijsbert Oonk’s research article on diversity along various world cups, David Webber’s review of the geopolitical aspects of the 1966 tournament, Florian Taillez’s review of the changes in WC structures, Assile Toufaily’s conversation about the Morocco’s Womens World Cup successes and Augusin di Julio’s piece about the boycott of the 1978 Argentina World Cup.
Photo Gallery
Let’s review
