This is Part II of our World Cup oral history. To read Part I, click here.
South Korea & Japan 2002
Jeré Longman (reporter, The New York Times): South Korea co-hosted along with Japan, its former colonial ruler. As the tournament began, South Korea seemed somewhat tentative and insecure about its place in the world. While hosting the 1988 Summer Olympics as the country emerged from military dictatorship, spectators were bused from their jobs to cheer, reluctantly, uncertainly, almost silently. But, as South Korea became the first Asian team to reach the semifinals and finished fourth in 2002, the country became united and self-confident. Its Dutch coach, Guus Hiddink, became a national hero and a corporate icon, revered for choosing his players based on performance instead of their family or educational backgrounds. Millions took to the streets to watch each match on giant television screens. The most obsessed fans, called the Red Devils, wore T-shirts that bore the logo, “Be the Reds!” and chanted a deafening, rhythmic cheer, “Tae-han Min-guk” (Republic of Korea.) The Red Devils not only cheered vociferously, they picked up their own litter. And, for a fee, South Korean fans also rooted for the other 31 teams.
Residente (rapper): I didn’t grow up watching fútbol in Puerto Rico. Over there we played baseball and watched boxing. So I was in college for my first World Cup in 2002 — it was my first year in art school and I took a bus from Georgia to New York, something like 19 hours, to visit my sister in Brooklyn. I crashed with her and would wake up to watch the games. That’s how I got to know Pablo “el payasito” Aimar and Gabriel Batistuta, and from that moment I fell in love with Argentina without imagining that 20 years later I’d have an Argentine son.
Gabriel Bump (novelist): The one moment I’ll always remember from that tournament, because of the time difference between Japan, South Korea and Chicago, was my dad waking me the morning after the semifinal between South Korea and Germany and telling me that Michael Ballack, one of my favorite players, would not play in the final because he got a stupid yellow card. I remember how pissed my dad was at the refs, sitting on my bed before he went to work. My dad—this guy who had no interest in soccer before me, was suddenly angry and passionate about this German midfielder. Our passion for the sport grew together.
Germany 2006
Fede Perelmuter (editor, Golden Goal): My father, then working at a beer company, had to travel to the tournament for work. I think he saw the most memorable game for Argentina, a 6-0 pummeling of Serbia and Montenegro which included, though we didn’t know it at the time, a certain Lio Messi’s World Cup goalscoring debut. I don’t remember Scaloni, who played in that tournament, at all—in fact, I don’t think anybody does. Argentina, directed by the brilliant José Pekerman after he spent years rebuilding its youth system, looked set to go the distance. What I remember most is watching the games in elementary school, on a projector with all the other kids. Argentina lost to Germany in the quarters, on penalties, after our star keeper, Roberto Abondanzieri, injured a rib and they tied the game with a header. Philipp Lahm, the German keeper, an extraordinarily blonde man with a puckered, smirking face, gave me nightmares for years; he had a bottle with instructions for each player on our team, and stopped two penalties. One he stopped was Roberto “Ratón” Ayala’s; he has since redeemed himself by being on Scaloni’s staff, along with other losers of that match. We kids—I was 7—were silent, heartbroken. I refused to watch anymore, not even the final.
Simon Kuper (columnist, Financial Times): A new German nationalism had emerged from the first day of the World Cup, taking everyone by surprise. German flags sold out almost at once, because nobody had anticipated much demand in a country where flag-waving had been taboo since 1945.
The team was possibly their weakest in decades, and it was easier that way: the new Germany wasn’t ‘über alles’, but just another country. It was also multicultural: there were players of Polish or African origin, and the Swiss-raised Francophone Oliver Neuville. Germans cheered them on in a merry self-deprecating way that foreigners found unthreatening. Fans painted the flag on their faces and belted out the anthem, but they wouldn’t dream of dying for Germany. It felt like a new kind of nationalism – a great big party.
Jeré Longman: Fans exuberantly wore the red, gold and black national colors on fingernails, scarves and Mohawk wigs. “The euphoria – known as sommermarchen (summer fairy tale) – continued for a month as Jurgen Klinsmann guided Germany to a third-place finish. And then the celebrative atmosphere was spoiled a day later when Zinedine Zidane of France shockingly and foolishly headbutted the chest of the Italian defender Marco Materazzi and probably cost France the World Cup.
South Africa 2010
Sean Jacobs (founder, Africa Is a Country): Right before the 2010 World Cup, I was invited to answer audience questions following a screening of a documentary film at a local cinema in my Brooklyn neighborhood. The film critiqued South Africa’s hosting of the tournament — corruption, misplaced government priorities, “clearing out” homeless and squatters from downtowns, and all the usual FIFA scandals. I agreed with the film’s thesis, but told the audience this was nothing new to FIFA and the World Cup’s history. At the same time, for many black South Africans like my brother, a factory worker, it was the only chance to see a World Cup in person — a rare, unrepeatable moment.
The next day, I flew to South Africa with my four-year-old daughter, Rosa, for a trip to the World Cup. The atmosphere was electric: flags on cars, fans from all over the world, and especially traveling fans from the rest of Africa. Even the cynics were swept up. The sense of pan-African unity stood in stark contrast to the xenophobia now prevalent in South Africa. The country has a notorious crime problem, but for the duration of the tournament the thieves seemed to be on holiday. I took Rosa to fan parks, watched games on TV at friends’ and family’s homes, and got tickets to three matches at Cape Town Stadium with my brother. The South Africans had worked out a deal with FIFA for a two-tiered ticket price policy favoring locals. It was pure joy except for one thing: vuvuzelas.
There was nothing expressive or “traditional” about the vuvuzelas. Some broadcasters started saying they would offer vuvuzela-free audio, and hundreds of thousands joined Facebook petitions calling for a ban. Even players like Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo and French captain, Patrice Evra, complained that it affected their game. Those defending the horns insisted the vuvuzela had roots in the Shembe Church, a local denomination combining Zulu and Christian beliefs, or that it was introduced to football by a black Kaizer Chiefs fan in 1990, right as Mandela walked free and the new South Africa was being born. This made it seem like the vuvuzela was part of the energy of South Africa’s political transition. A closer look would show that the plastic horns first popped up in the Mexican league in the 1970s, that the mass-produced ones being sold during the World Cup were actually made in China, and that the only one making real money was the white South African company that held the local patent for them.
Jeré Longman: I visited Robben Island off of Cape Town, where Nelson Mandela had been held in prison for 18 years. Tours of the prison were given by former prisoners. My guide was Sedick Isaacs, a scientist and mathematician who had written an entire math book on a roll of toilet paper while incarcerated. He was also the former director of the Robben Island prisoners’ sports and recreation unit, which had its own soccer league. Soccer had begun furtively in a communal cell in 1963 with balls made from paper, rags or shirts that could quickly be pulled apart if the guards approached. The first league was dissolved, then reformed in 1969 as the Makana Football Association. Improvised goals were made at first of driftwood and fishing nets. Rubber from car tires was used to make cleats. Eventually, with the help of the Red Cross, uniforms and soccer boots were provided with money sent to the prisoners from their families.
Soccer provided relief from the brutal regimen of breaking rocks in a quarry. It gave dignity to prisoners subjected to beatings and meals of porridge fouled with worms and bird droppings. And it provided a means of resistance and unity and independence to those who fought against the apartheid regime.
“Football saved many of us,” Lizo Sitoto, who was imprisoned on Robben Island from 1963 to 1978, told me. “When you were outside playing, you felt free, as if you were at home.”
Isaacs opened the door to Mandela’s former cell, and the clang of the key turning in the lock sounded ominous on the empty cellblock. Mandela was kept in an isolation unit and not allowed to play soccer. During the closing ceremony of the World Cup, on a night when Spain won for the first time, Mandela made his final public appearance at age 91, riding into the stadium on a golf cart, waving to loud applause and the accompaniment of vuvuzuelas. Then he was gone as quickly as he arrived.
Simon Kuper: The tournament had only one great financial beneficiary: FIFA. The federation reported a profit of $631 million from the 2007–2010 World Cup cycle, having expected a loss. Sepp Blatter told me: “Interestingly, the World Cup in South Africa was a very big economic success for FIFA too, better than the World Cup in Germany.”
FIFA didn’t shower that windfall on South Africa, or on poor kids anywhere else in the world who dreamed of playing on an actual football pitch. Ken Bensinger writes in his book Red Card: “By some estimates, FIFA donated less than one-tenth of one per cent of its profits from the tournament.”
Sepp Blatter (former FIFA President): The 2010 World Cup in South Africa will always be unforgettable for me – one of the great highlights of my career as FIFA President. Above all, my meeting with Nelson Mandela is deeply engraved in my heart. He was one of the greatest personalities I have ever had the privilege of meeting. I will never forget how he said: “One has to forgive, but never forget.”
J.M. Coetzee (novelist): Thanks for the invitation, but I’m going to decline. I do watch a lot of football (on television) but I am not emotionally invested in the game to the extent that I am invested in cricket and rugby.
Brazil 2014
Dave Zirin (sports editor, The Nation): I have been writing about the World Cup for over 20 years and the one common thread that ties all of these celebrated tournaments together—no matter the host country—is debt, displacement, and the militarization of public space. The hosting nations might be a democracy or may be an authoritarian regime, or something in between and yet the results when working with FIFA are the same: countries spend more than they allotted, the poor and unhoused are swept up, imprisoned or driven miles from where the tourists frolic, and the cities become federally armed encampments. Trump’s threats to use federal troops to “force ourselves upon” Los Angeles during the 2026 World Cup, while repellent and repugnantly rapey, is only an articulation of what is the norm. FIFA likes to say that hosting the World Cup brings a democratizing force to authoritarian countries, but that is pure, unadulterated bullshit. The reality is that the World Cup doesn’t make authoritarian regimes more democratic but democracies more authoritarian.
I saw this most acutely in the democracy of Brazil in 2014. While reporting, I covered massive demonstrations against the priorities of the World Cup as thousands marched upon stadiums to express their dissent over spending priorities and corruption while the country was mired in economic crisis. I also saw the police and army ruthlessly put these protests down using military grade tear gas, fire hoses, new age surveillance drones and concussion grenades. Not that on occasion this brutality wasn’t without some gallows humor. At one march on legendary Maracana Stadium in Rio de Janeiro, a large group of well-heeled Argentinians — in full sky-blue and white regalia — sat at a posh outdoor cafe and, as if at a match, watched and cheered as the protest get routed by police while they drank wine and laughed. (For the uninitiated, Brazil and Argentina aren’t exactly friendly neighbors on or off the pitch.)
The Argentinian contingent continued to toast and mock the protest until police fired one round of tear gas that a stiff breeze took directly onto their patio. The Argentinians then proceeded to run for cover, coughing and wiping their eyes. They had become unwilling participants in a social struggle that would end up defining Brazilian politics for the next decade as the country veered dramatically from the Workers Party government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and then Dilma Rousseff to proto-fascist Jair Bolsonaro, and now back to Lula once again.
Jeré Longman: I spent half of the World Cup exploring Brazil’s passion for soccer in the Amazon rainforest. A 15-hour overnight boat ride up the Amazon, and then another hour on a speedboat, brought me to the isolated, indigenous village of Nova Bela Horizonte. The village lacked electricity and cellphone service, so residents connected a television to a diesel generator to watch Brazil’s group match against Mexico. The television flickered on early in the match, but Mexico’s goalkeeper was impenetrable and with the score 0-0 in the final minute of regulation the screen went blank again. By then, the villagers had grown nervous and frustrated.
“The TV is mad at Brazil,” the village chief joked.
In the floating village of Catalao, I watched villagers play soccer on the floor of a buoyant community center and the deck of a restaurant, slapping at balls to retrieve them with a wooden pole when they went into the water, diving after them or chasing them down in canoes. The Amazon also held one of the world’s most eccentric sporting events – part soccer tournament, part beauty pageant. Each team entered a beauty queen in the tournament, and if the team was eliminated but its queen kept advancing in the beauty competition, the team had a chance to re-enter play. I met the reigning beauty queen champion, Brenda Pontes, who wore her crown, a sash and a leopard-print dress for our interview at a television station in Manaus.
“There are two queens in the world,” Pontes, then 19 and a college freshman said with a laugh. “Queen Elizabeth and me.”
There was considerably less joy when Brazil was humiliated 7-1 by Germany in the semifinals “We ask for forgiveness,” Luiz Felipe Scolari, Brazil’s manager said. Joachim Low, Germany’s coach, offered his condolences, as if at a funeral.
There was some small consolation when Argentina, Brazil’s bitter rival, lost to Germany in the final.
Interlude: Zurich 2016
Ken Bensinger (author, Red Card): Early in the afternoon of February 26, 2016, I found myself standing outside the Hallenstadion, a hockey arena in Zurich, feeling miserable. Inside, FIFA was holding what it called an “extraordinary congress” to determine who would be its next president, a vaunted position that had opened up with the abrupt resignation of Sepp Blatter, the global soccer organization’s long time president, in the wake of the biggest scandal in the sport’s history.
It was, in fact, that scandal that had taken me in the depths of winter to Zurich— a city that is absolutely delightful in summer but at that particular moment seemed unbearably cold, damp and inhospitable. The previous summer, I’d signed a contract to write a book telling the inside story of the sprawling criminal Justice Department probe of corruption in international soccer, a case that had been revealed to the public in May 2015 with the sensational arrests of seven FIFA officials at a luxury hotel in Zurich and had since spiraled into seemingly every aspect of the sport around the world.
With limited experience covering the beautiful game, my task seemed increasingly impossible. I had no sources and no street cred with any of the sport’s illuminati, the people who were in the rooms where bribes were allegedly paid. After months of reading everything I could about the sport and its governance and fruitless and increasingly desperate attempts to make useful contacts, I decided to fly to Switzerland and hope for the best.
Soon after arrival, it became apparent that my optimism was ill-placed. Soccer officials I managed to chase down in hotel lobbies never seemed to have time to chat and FIFA’s press office declined to make anyone available for an interview. Other than some very tasty pretzel rolls washed down by stunningly expensive coffee, the trip was proving disastrous. Things got worse when FIFA’s press person called to tell me my credential to the congress had been denied. And then my phone buzzed with a Zurich phone number.
I answered. It was Sepp Blatter. The diminutive Swiss had reigned over FIFA since 1998 and had overseen tremendous growth in the sport even as it mired itself ever deeper in corruption. Although he was never charged, he announced plans to resign just weeks after the first indictment was unsealed and by year’s end he was banned by FIFA’s ethics committee from the sport entirely for eight years. I had emailed his assistant requesting an interview weeks earlier, but it was pro forma: I never expected a response.
Yet here he was, the dethroned king of world soccer, calling me. LIke a lot of Swiss people, he speaks a stunning number of languages. “Would you like,” he asked me in accented English, “to come watch the FIFA congress with me at my house?”
I couldn’t get into a taxi fast enough. Maybe, I thought, this book wasn’t going to be so insurmountable after all.
Russia 2018
Jeré Longman: I watched the opening match from a military bunker in Avdiivka, a city in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine. This was far from Moscow, where host Russia faced Saudi Arabia. It was a time of lower-level fighting between the Ukrainian military and Russian separatists, four years before Russia invaded Ukraine. There were three televisions in the bunker, two that tracked military positions and a third tuned to the soccer match.
The Ukrainian commander who, according to military rules gave his name only as Oleg A., had no intention of watching. Oleg A. took me on patrol about a mile from the Russian separatist positions. He did not expect any fighting for the two hours of the match. “Russia will be playing, everyone will be watching,” he said.
His prediction wasn’t quite accurate. As Russia steadily drew away toward a 5-0 victory, both sides traded mortar fire. Sunset was coming. The fighting would pick up at night, said Capt. Dima Shvets, as I left the front line in a military ambulance with my photographer and translator.
“Football is finished,” Capt. Shvets said. “Now we start poker.” (Russian forces captured Avdiivka in February 2024.)
For a crucial group match between Sweden and Mexico, I took a 27-hour train ride along the Trans-Siberian Railway east from Moscow to Yekaterinburg. There were about 15 to 20 fans of each team traveling on the train, which lacked a dining car and internet access but did not strictly enforce a prohibition on alcohol.
An attendant aboard the train smartly brought along children’s picture books to help with the Russian language barrier. Two Swedish friends, Hans Josefsson and Janne Hedman, had been traveling together since the 1990 World Cup. In 1994 in the United States, they apparently became among the first of Sweden’s supporters to slather their faces in team colors. They remember being photographed by a number of newspapers and by Time magazine, and one caption that said something like, “Dearth of sanity perhaps, but a lot of passion.”
Qatar 2022
Leyla Hamed (journalist): I happened to be in Tangier for a weekend when Morocco began its run, and what was meant to be a short trip slowly turned into something else entirely. The matches spilled out into the streets, into cafés, into every corner of the city, and with each victory the celebrations stretched further into the night, until time itself seemed irrelevant. Cars moved slowly through crowds waving flags, strangers embraced as if they had known each other forever, and there was this overwhelming sense that what we were witnessing belonged to everyone at once. It didn’t feel like a team winning football matches, it felt like something collective, something long carried, finally finding its way to the surface.
The Palestinian flag was always there, woven into the celebrations, carried across shoulders, lifted in the stands, not as a staged gesture or a separate message, but as something that belonged naturally to that moment. It didn’t interrupt the football, it moved with it. Morocco’s run came to mean more than results or tactics; it resonated across borders, across languages, across communities that saw themselves reflected in that team in one way or another.
Jonathan Wilson (journalist): The first I realised something was wrong was when I saw the paramedics walking briskly up the stairs. They turned into the press box, to a desk in the same row about 20 feet to my left. The word got round: a journalist had had a turn. On the pitch at Lusail, extra-time was going on. The Netherlands substitute Wout Weghorst had scored in the 89th minute and then again 11 minutes into injury-time to cancel out Argentina’s two-goal lead. It was impossibly tense. Journalists cleared chairs, making room for the paramedics. I typed away: my colour piece on the game, an adjunct to the main match report, had to be filed as the final whistle blew. I’d chosen to write about Lionel Messi and mortality.
I got a WhatsApp. “It’s Grant.” It took a moment to understand: the stricken journalist was Grant Wahl, a colleague of 12 years at Sports Illustrated. I looked at my laptop. He’d tweeted about Weghorst’s equaliser. And there he was, dying, four desks along. The penalty shoot-out was in the goal to the left; every time I looked at the action, I could see the paramedics. I saw him being carried away on a stretcher. We didn’t know, but we knew. Out of routine, not knowing what else to do, we went down to hear what Louis van Gaal and Lionel Scaloni had to say about the game. In the mixed zone, Messi snapped uncharacteristically at Weghorst: “Qué miras, bobo?” We wrote about it. What else could we do?
Then Tariq Panja of The New York Times had a thought, and went back up to the press box to collect Grant’s laptop which sat, still open, on his desk.
Martin Kazanietz (artist): I was a bit drunk while watching the penalties of that unforgettable final against France. Of course I was crazy tense and had already broken some glasses and bottles throughout the game. But when Tchouameni missed his shot, I started celebrating as if we were already champions, smashing a floor dryer. I hit the floor so hard while bending myself down that I felt my disc hit my back nerve. The pain was as intense as the happiness of being world champions.
I ended up in the hospital getting a painkiller shot in my butt and lying on my couch for a week because of the pain. I missed the biggest and most popular street celebration in my country’s history, watching it all on a screen. Two weeks later, I had my own little street celebration in revenge, on the streets of Las Grutas during New Years Eve. Everyone was still celebrating the World Cup title. I painted two scenes on big canvases the month after it all happened.
João Pedro Vala (novelist): I’ve never rooted as much for a team that wasn’t Benfica or Portugal as I did in that final four years ago. I’ve always liked Cristiano Ronaldo, of course, but Messi is another thing. I think I like him because he is a genius, sure, but I also like him because of my tendency to love what is on the other side of the trenches and, during quite a few years, Messi was seen, in Portugal, as the Other, The One Who Shall Not Be Named. To see him finally winning the World Cup and, even better, doing that against France (I still resent them for that 1998 final) was, I don’t know — it was truly beautiful.
Sergio Levinsky (journalist): During that tremendous final against France, as I watched the anguish of my young colleagues — one of whom, seated at the desk right next to me, wept ceaselessly throughout the entire match — memories of everything I had lived through came flooding back, of many moments from my youth, of that sensation of having touched the heavens with my own hands. The tears flowed once again, just as they had on that 29th of June in 1986, when, as a young lad of 23, I tried to call home from the Estadio Azteca to celebrate Argentina’s triumph, yet couldn’t utter a single word before hanging up the receiver.