No sporting event better embodies and reflects the world as it is now—fractured, corrupt, embattled, adrift—than the World Cup. This year’s tournament may be marred by immigration raids, visa bans, imperial threats, and general chaos, but it will also be, by FIFA’s projections, its most lucrative endeavor ever. For a month, it will become the biggest spectacle on earth. As Eduardo Galeano, the Uruguayan writer and spiritual medium of the sport, wrote in 1995: “The ball turns, the world turns.”
The first World Cup, held in Uruguay almost a century ago, featured thirteen teams after all; forty-eight will play when the 2026 tournament kicks off in June—a figure nearly twice the size of the total number of FIFA member nations at the start of the thirty-three-year reign of the tournament’s dour founder, the Frenchman Jules Rimet. The World Cup today exists on a cultural, economic,and political scale that would be unimaginable to Rimet. So does FIFA, whose corruption and greed are now at the center of every tournament.
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 Martínez 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 against France in 1998. FIFA can only alter it so much because it only owns 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 rising above the inevitable scandals and abuses. No other sporting or cultural event is laden with as much meaning or baggage.
“The ball turns,
the world turns.”
Why the World Cup? Golden Goal is a magazine about that question—about what makes the competition unique and what that uniqueness tells us 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.”
That sentiment, along with its mawkish vision of liberal multiculturalism, has curdled in eight short years. Donald Trump is now bent on turning the World Cup into a pageant cast in the monstrous visage of the United States, its principal host nation. The tournament itself promises to be an authoritarian debutante ball for the U.S. president, who will insist that it revolve around him. All the while, ICE agents will be unleashed on citizens, immigrants, and guests. And Trump will likely continue to belligerently threaten and attack most of the rest of the world, including his co-hosts Mexico and Canada.
He will do this with the willing complicity of FIFA President Gianni Infantino. What else is an international sporting body to do in these times? Ban the U.S. for launching a war against Iran, a World Cup participant (at least as of this writing), as it did when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022? If anything, Infantino, canny operator that he is, has picked up on the winds scattering the ashes of international order—struck a death knell by global inaction in the face of Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians—and identified an opportunity to cash in. The exorbitant ticket prices for the 2026 tournament are only part of the story here. Infantino’s backroom engineering to grant Saudi Arabia, his other authoritarian darling, the 2034 World Cup helped secure a lucrative undisclosed sponsorship with Aramco, the Saudi-owned oil giant. This money is, of course, meant to be redistributed to members and to keep Infantino in power. Gone are the days of cash-stuffed envelopes: Less than a decade after a generational corruption scandal forced Sepp Blatter off the FIFA throne, self-dealing is now baked into the governing body’s legal playbook.
Trump understands this better than most: He knows he can threaten whomever in advance of the World Cup as long as the money keeps flowing. As the most unrestrained capitalistic nation to ever host the tournament by a considerable margin, the U.S. offers FIFA a tantalizing market of scalpers, suckers, and elites happy to shell out thousands to hash out business deals as players they’ve never heard of kick a ball around. Perhaps that’s why Infantino, a White House fixture even during the president’s first term, 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 the World Cup has, for understandable reasons, lately focused primarily on the host country’s human rights record rather than on the tournament itself. Those scandals and abuses never fall by the wayside—though you might get that impression from media coverage, which 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 stadiums (as well as 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 being played every day. You don’t hear much about migrant workers or human rights once the goals start coming; the chaos and magic of 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: this approach 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 have always been intertwined, 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 a 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 both different and exactly 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 them too. The tournament has followed the money from the very start, when Uruguay was selected as the host nation because it was willing to pony up the cash for it amid a global depression, 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 communion. 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.
We decided to name this magazine Golden Goal as a nod to this friction: the greed of FIFA, the gilded vanity of Trump and Infantino, the growing corruption and financialization of the beautiful game. It is also a tribute to the original “golden goal,” the thrilling, controversial “sudden death” that made the first team to score in extra time the winner. The rule was only in the books for two World Cups, 1998 and 2002, and its success was limited. In practice, it mostly discouraged attacking play because of the risk of counterattacks. Yet at a time when rule changes are proposed to wring out more money from advertisers—the introduction of mandated water breaks that will turn a game of halves into one of quarters—the nostalgia for the golden goal rule, if misguided, speaks to the undying belief that the game can always be better.
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 cliché. 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 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.
What are those things? It’s not hard, to be fair, to catch Sacchi’s drift: There are things with real stakes—you know, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, things of that nature. And then there is soccer. What happens when money and power attach themselves to soccer? What do you do when a more important thing envelops a less important one?
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, that broader considerations involving the U.S. president and Saudi Arabia’s crown prince affect decisions ranging from which countries are allowed to participate to whether you can afford to attend a game at all. 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 excluded developing nations from Asia and Africa in 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 second World Cup was hosted by Mussolini, Nazi Germany fielded a team in the next tournament, and the 1978 tournament was overseen by an Argentine 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.” When it was time for Hitler to host the 1936 Olympics, he looked to the 1934 World Cup as a model.
We aim to reflect the experience of watching the tournament, to celebrate the sport’s beauty and diversity,and investigate its growing rot.
Though 1934 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 build the infrastructure the tournament required. Instead, they would almost certainly talk about the final. It would be hard to blame them—it was a fantastic game, 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. We aim to reflect the experience, if not the emotional journey, of watching the tournament itself, to celebrate the sport’s beauty and diversity, and rigorously investigate its growing rot. We want to know what it looks like from Ghana, Haiti, Uzbekistan, and Gaza, to examine how Trump and Infantino have changed the game we love, to understand what it tells us about victory and failure, and the world around us. Most of all, though, we want to untangle a single question: Why the World Cup?