Dan Friedman at the Los Angeles Review of Books:
Generations of soccer supporters thought that the defeat of totalitarianism would mean that people could play and celebrate when, where, and how they wanted. They thought we could finally achieve the exalted vision of early enthusiasts like Jules Rimet, FIFA’s longest-serving president (1921–54), his successor Sir Stanley Rous (1961–74), and those hopeful Uruguayans of 1930, who hosted the first tournament and had to overcome complex logistics of travel and politics to mount the event. They thought that the fall of the Soviet empire would bring the sunshine of rule-of-law democracy to the world, and that the injection of compassionate capital would give people the means to build a more justly competitive global order. Instead, we got parasites thirsting for money, power, and influence, venal creeps like Sepp Blatter and Gianni Infantino, Vladimir Putin and the Emir of Qatar.
With a painstaking attention to detail, Kuper shows that our hopes for the post–Cold War world of soccer were largely misplaced, with the strong implication that we are at least as wrong about everything else. Billions around the world (including me) love soccer passionately, but as with so many things people care for deeply, the sport has been corrupted by money and politics.
More here.
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