Why the World Cup? For better or worse, no sporting event better embodies and reflects the world as it is now: fractured, corrupt, embattled, adrift. This year’s edition may be marred by immigration raids, visa bans, imperial threats and general chaos but it will also be, by FIFA’s projections, their most lucrative endeavor ever. For a month, it will invariably become the biggest spectacle on earth. As Eduardo Galeano, the Uruguayan writer and a spiritual medium of the sport, once explained: “The ball turns, the world turns.”

The first World Cup, held in Uruguay almost a century ago, featured 13 teams after all; 48 will play when the 2026 tournament kicks off in June. You can imagine smaller tournaments, with higher standards of quality, and larger ones — it now seems inevitable that the World Cup will soon balloon to 64 teams — that make FIFA, the tournament’s gluttonous governing body, more money. Perhaps most tantalizingly, you can imagine a World Cup without FIFA and its attendant corruption and greed. 

Soccer is increasingly a game dominated by money and power. And yet it still somehow remains the same: thrilling, spectacular, frustrating, stupid, joyous. Its moments are indelible: Emi Martinez desperately denying Randal Kolo Muani in the waning seconds of the 2022 World Cup final, Zinedine Zidane’s headbutt against Marco Materazzi in 2006, Ronaldo — the first, best one — vanishing in the 1998 final. FIFA and Donald Trump can only alter it so much because they only own a part of it. The rest of it belongs to everyone else: the players, of course, but the fans too. There is, miraculously, still the possibility of magic, of transcendence, of floating above the inevitable scandals and abuses. No other sporting or cultural event is laden with as much meaning or baggage. 

Why the World Cup? Golden Goal is a magazine about that question — about what makes the competition unique and about what its uniqueness says about the state of the wider world. Above all, it is a magazine about the tension at the center of the tournament itself, its capacity for delight and shock, for authoritarianism and corruption, for individual transcendence and entrenched nationalism.

In 2018, speaking to the press after the United States, Canada and Mexico were awarded a joint bid to host this year’s World Cup, a teary-eyed Carlos Cordero, then president of the U.S. Soccer Federation, extolled “the unity of the three nations coming together, offering something no other country, including my own, can offer.” 

The World Cup is now less than four months away. Has that sentence ever felt more deflating? Cordero’s sentiment, along with its mawkish vision of liberal multiculturalism, has curdled in eight short years. Donald Trump, with willing complicity of FIFA President Gianni Infantino, is now bent on turning the World Cup into a pageant shaped in the monstrous visage of its principal host nation. The tournament itself promises to be a kind of authoritarian debutante ball for the president, who will likely insist that it revolve around him. All the while, ICE agents will be unleashed both on citizens, immigrants, and guests. And Trump will likely continue to threaten most of the rest of the world, very much including his cohosts Mexico and Canada. Infantino, a White House fixture even during the president’s first term, has known who Trump is for a very long time. He invented a phony Peace Prize to give him anyway.

Not that the U.S. is the first state with authoritarian tendencies to host a World Cup. The last two tournaments, after all, were held in Qatar and Russia. Media coverage in the months leading up to a World Cup has lately focused primarily on the host country’s human rights record, rather than on the tournament itself. Today, that coverage is focused on the Trump administration’s increasingly bellicose foreign policy and threats to both its cohosts and its ostensible European allies; its fascistic immigration crackdown and, relatedly, fears that fans — or even players — entering the country could find themselves held for months in detention centers. 

Those scandals and abuses never fall by the wayside — though you might get that impression from media coverage. That coverage now follows a clear pattern. In the lead-up to the tournament, there is a huge swell of reporting about the problems with the World Cup’s host nation. In 2018, this focused primarily on Russia’s treatment of its LGBTQ population; four years later, it largely centered on Qatar’s abuse of the migrant workers who built its stadium (and its treatment of its LGBTQ population, women, and religious and ethnic minorities). Today that coverage understandably revolves around the fact that Donald Trump is president of the United States. 

But once the competition kicks off, much of the surrounding controversy does fall by the wayside. The World Cup is still the World Cup after all — and there’s only so much time to discuss all that other stuff when there are four matches on every day. You don’t hear much about migrant workers or human rights once the goals start coming and the group stage quickly swallows up anything outside the pitch. 

That implicitly suggests that political concerns are subordinate to sporting ones — that once the action starts, concerns about human rights abuses lose some of their importance. Not only that, it suggests that politics and sports can be separated, perhaps even that they are fundamentally distinct. Most publications cover concerns about corruption, geopolitics or human rights as if they have nothing to do with on-field considerations about tactics and performance. It is almost as if there are always two World Cups happening simultaneously and independently: the political World Cup in the weeks and months before the actual tournament, and the actual World Cup. The former does occasionally butt into the latter, but only rarely. 

This is the wrong approach. Sporting questions and political ones are intertwined from the beginning, tied up with how we all experience the sport as fans and spectators. Golden Goal is a magazine about understanding and untangling this messy, chaotic jumble at the heart of the World Cup, with an internationalist vision that doesn’t shy away from the sport’s growing corruption but also resists cynicism and myopia. 

For nearly as long as human beings have been playing soccer, other human beings have insisted, as the most famous book about the sport by a U.S. author did in 2004, that the sport explains the world. If that observation is, like a lot of soccer writing, simultaneously mundane and pretentious — you mean to say the world’s most popular sport tells us something about the world? — it’s not exactly wrong either. To follow soccer in 2026 is to inevitably come into contact with the bleak state of the world: rising global authoritarianism, the power of private equity and Big Oil, and deepening inequality, among many other things. 

Every four years, the world gathers to play soccer; every four years the World Cup is different and it is also the same. You can mark the passage of your life through the World Cups, as we have, but you can chart the transformation of the world through it too. The tournament has always followed the money, which means it mirrors trends in global finance and power. But it does so while retaining its ritualistic status: Every four years, it is a global festival of conflict and coming together. It is increasingly corrupt and authoritarian, like the world, but it still holds onto something utopian too: A celebration of both what makes us unique and what we hold in common. 

Soccer, the great Italian manager Arrigo Sacchi once said, “is the most important of the least important things.” If you’re looking for a quote that gestures at the sport’s significance, sometimes you have no choice but to reach for cliche. Still, it’s hard to deny that Sacchi was onto something. Just look at the World Cup. Has there ever been a more important least important thing? Every four years, the tournament takes over our lives for a month. Its stakes are simultaneously enormous and effervescent. Its outcome has no bearing on the material circumstances of the lives of nearly everyone who devotes themselves to it and yet, in the moment, nothing matters more. For a month, nothing is more important — except, of course, the things that are. 

But what are those things? One reason why Sacchi’s quote resonates is that he doesn’t actually say what they are. Is soccer more important than family? What about politics? The World Cup — and soccer fandom more generally — is increasingly caught in that knot. There is a growing consensus that the World Cup is political. But how important are those politics? No one seems to know.

There is, again, nothing new about any of this. The World Cup has always been political, which is to say that it has always been controversial. FIFA, which puts on the tournament, excluded developing nations from the first several iterations of the World Cup and has spent the last half century cozying up to dictators while hopscotching from one corruption scandal to another. The 1978 World Cup was hosted by an Argentinian military junta that was in the midst of brutally murdering tens of thousands of unionists, journalists, students, and other dissidents.  Even though the word did not exist at the time, there are few better examples of “sportswashing.” 

Though 1978 was a long time ago, 2022 wasn’t. If you were to ask a random person to remember one moment from that tournament, they probably wouldn’t jump to, say, a report in The Guardian about Qatar’s use of slave labor to produce the infrastructure the tournament required. Instead, they would probably recount something that happened on the field. They would almost certainly talk about the final. It would be hard to blame them — it was a fantastic final, after all, perhaps the best in the history of the tournament. Soccer, it turns out, sometimes matters more than a great many things. 

Golden Goal is, ultimately, a magazine about both the least important and the most important things about the 2026 World Cup. It will celebrate the sport’s beauty and diversity and rigorously investigate its growing rot. We aim to reflect the experience, if not the emotional journey, of watching the tournament itself with pieces that are funny, raucous, depressing, and invigorating. What exactly makes this tournament so special and, increasingly, so controversial? Most of all, though, we want to untangle a single question: Why the World Cup? We hope you’ll read it.