What’s Wrong With World Football 

In its ambition to make world football truly global, FIFA is increasingly cosying up to and openly endorsing autocrats. However, it’s not just regimes that are reshaping football. Neoliberalism is also transforming the game and the relationship between fans and their clubs. We spoke to political scientist and self-confessed football – or soccer – nostalgist Cas Mudde. 

Alessio Giussani: In 2025, FIFA awarded Trump its peace prize, shortly before he started bombing Iran. FIFA’s president Gianni Infantino also showed up to the so-called “board of peace” in a Trump hat. Meanwhile, ordinary fans are being priced out. Is this still the people’s game? 

Cas Mudde: World soccer is increasingly captured by money and dubious people and regimes. FIFA is not an outlier, but an extreme case.  

The 2018 World Cup in Russia was a problematic tournament, but it didn’t get much negative publicity. In 2022, Qatar made the connection between soccer and politics impossible to ignore. Still, the Qatari regime eventually got good PR: people forgot about the human rights violations and the insane amount of money spent on useless stadiums, and thought it was a very good tournament. And this has been the case for pretty much any regime, democratic or not, that organised a World Cup. This year, I suspect, will be the first time the hosting countries receive mostly negative publicity.  

This doesn’t matter much for a country as big and powerful as the US, and it matters even less for Trump, whose base is not even interested in soccer. He will stop caring about the tournament as soon as it no longer holds value for him. But it will negatively affect how people view world soccer. 

At least on paper, this is not the “MAGA World Cup”. It is hosted by three nations – the US, Canada, and Mexico – that represent three different camps of world politics: far-right fossil fuel champions, arch-centrist liberalism, and Global South socialism. What meaning do you attribute to that? 

Mark Carney is also a defender of fossil fuels. What is interesting is that this World Cup was actually branded as “the united bid”, but within months, it effectively became the MAGA World Cup: it is all about the US and about Trump. This was a challenge but also a huge opportunity for Canada and Mexico. Canada could have shown that they’re the good kind of North America; Mexico could have shown that they are the real soccer country. The bar is so low that just doing what everyone usually does already makes you look good.  

FIFA is in many ways an incredibly colonial project, banking on all of the bad things that colonialism has left behind, including corruption and personalistic leadership.

Instead, Canada and Mexico have been silent about the peace prize, the treatment of the Iranian team, and Omar Artan, the Somali referee whose visa was denied. All they are doing is facilitating Trump and trying to smooth things out when he does something bad, so I think they will also face negative publicity. In general, I don’t get the feeling that any of the host countries is particularly enthusiastic about this World Cup. Claudia Sheinbaum has promoted some really good initiatives in Mexico, like building hundreds of community pitches, but I don’t see real momentum. 

The 2022 edition of the World Cup was one of the most global so far, with Qatar hosting and Morocco reaching the semifinals. This year’s edition has expanded to include 48 teams instead of 32. Is there any decolonial merit to Infantino’s ambition to make world football truly global?  

Infantino’s project is to get himself reelected. The more national soccer associations are represented at the World Cup, the happier they are with his leadership. If he wanted to truly decolonise soccer, he could have changed the proportional representation across continents. Instead, he just expanded the number of participants without changing the underlying criteria. This means having even more countries from Europe, because they’re rich, and that’s what the sponsors want.  

FIFA is in many ways an incredibly colonial project, banking on all of the bad things that colonialism has left behind, including corruption and personalistic leadership. Essentially, FIFA gives national soccer associations money to spend however they think is best for the advancement of soccer in their countries. Of course, many regimes simply take that money and pocket it, leaving soccer undeveloped. But FIFA doesn’t really care about that.  

FIFA’s politics are also getting worse. In 2018, they didn’t really speak up against Russia’s anti-LGBTQIA+ rights policies, but they didn’t support them either. In Qatar, team captains were banned from wearing rainbow-coloured armbands. Now, FIFA actively defends and even celebrates Trump.  

Only a fraction of nations taking part in the World Cup are democracies – let alone liberal ones – and the same applies to FIFA members at large. Are there ways to defend liberal values without civilisational posturing?  

If you want to be consistent, you should leave politics out as much as you can, because if you make FIFA and the World Cup a liberal-democratic project, then you cater to a minority of the states, and you are never going to be truly global. You could argue that being political, even if you are sometimes hypocritical or inconsistent, is better than staying out of politics. But I’m not sure that’s the case anymore because FIFA’s inclusion campaigns have become so meaningless, so vague and full of pinkwashing that the only message that comes through is that everything they say about politics is bullshit.  

At the same time, of course, politics is always there. Organising a World Cup is a huge opportunity for any regime, and neutrality doesn’t make the event non-political. But I do have a problem with setting high expectations and never living up to them – which is precisely what FIFA has done with its human rights agenda and grand commitments to sustainability. But there can be no such thing as a sustainable World Cup, and there are always going to be participants who don’t respect human rights. So why doesn’t FIFA introduce a less ambitious agenda but actually live up to that? 

We are living through a moment of resurgent nativism and nationalism, with the far right on the rise globally. Does a politically loaded World Cup feed those dynamics, or can football channel nationalism into something more benign, even unifying? 

British sociologist Michael Billig coined the term “banal nationalism” to describe everyday representations of a nation, which build a sense of shared national identity. It’s about, for example, national flags hanging outside public buildings. Sports nationalism falls into that category, and there are negative elements to it. In my country, the Netherlands, part of our anti-German sentiment came not from World War II but from soccer. At the same time, soccer teams in many countries are more multicultural than societies, and players of different ethnicities become heroes and role models for many – at least as long as they are winning. 

What’s peculiar about soccer is the emotion and intensity it adds to banal nationalism, making the nationalism somewhat secondary. Winning means winning a game, not your nation dominating another. As much as I dislike the flags, I think there’s a moral panic about the nationalism and the hooliganism in soccer. There are both inclusive and exclusive elements to it – it can be both good and bad.  

You teach a course on soccer and politics. How do you interpret that relationship, and how do you see it evolving? 

A lot of the attention focuses on high politics – institutions, governments, parties, and so on. I’m more interested in the “low” politics of sports, music, culture, and so on. I use soccer to teach about politics, because soccer reflects society in so many ways. Funny enough, this is one of the most radical courses that I have taught. We read about Judith Butler and performing gender, and we talk a lot about identity and globalisation.  

Think of the growing relevance of “diaspora teams”, those national teams that consist increasingly of players who are national “by blood” even if they are not born and raised in the country they represent. Senegal is a prime example of this, with almost half of the players having been born or raised outside the country – mainly in France, its former colonial ruler. Diaspora teams are somewhat the opposite of “civic teams”, which consist of minority players who are born and raised in a country, like Germans of Turkish origin. This shows that even states that are very restrictive on immigration can be very flexible when it comes to top athletes, and people who are very much anti-immigration have no problem with that.  

The EU has played a major role in shaping modern soccer, too. The Bosman ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union in 1995 shook up the European soccer transfer system to align it with the single market rules. And because Europe is so dominant in global soccer, the ruling changed the global system.  

You interpret soccer as part of civil society. What’s the rationale behind that association? 

I used to work on civil society in post-communist Europe in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and there was this positive association in the literature between a strong civil society and a healthy democracy. But the discourse had a very narrow focus on pro-Western groups, feminist groups, and so on. I was interested in so-called “uncivil” society groups that were not necessarily pro-democracy, but were very much bringing people together and being politically active. Hooligans and ultras often have two sides: they have a bad reputation, particularly in Europe, but are also active in good causes, such as helping poor people or local communities after earthquakes or other natural disasters. I like this complexity.  

How has neoliberalism changed soccer?  

I often use the club I support, PSV Eindhoven, to answer this question. PSV was founded by workers at Philips. It was, in many ways, a representation of the industrial economy, of a form of grounded capitalism. Philips had a connection with Eindhoven because it had factories in the city, and you can’t simply take factories and move them elsewhere. Now you have clubs, like Manchester City, that are a perfect reflection of global neoliberalism. A foreign regime decides to invest in a club not because it has a connection with a local community, but because that club is a global brand and it gives you access to a global audience. The connection between capitalism and soccer has always been there, but capitalism has changed, and soccer is changing with it.   

Most soccer fans do not want to sit in a sanitised and surveilled stadium. They want to sit in a place that still has the atmosphere and the authenticity without the racism and the sexism. And that is possible. 

Being a nostalgic, I have to remind myself that the good old days were not always so pure. Before investment funds, you had [Russian oligarch] Roman Abramovich buying Chelsea. In smaller contexts, you had the second-hand car dealer running the local club. The scale was smaller and more local, but that dude was also dubious and used soccer to elevate his own image.  

What worries me from a civil society point of view is that even though there was always exploitation and hierarchy, there was also a connection with the community. Philips depended on Eindhoven. Today’s capitalists don’t have that connection, and the local community has almost no say anymore. Major clubs no longer depend on ticket sales for a big chunk of their income. Now the money comes from broadcasting rights and sponsors.  

Can fans still save the game from what it has become?  

Fans are a bit like addicts: they have the power to destroy the system tomorrow if they stop feeding the machine. No one will put money into soccer if no one watches it. But if they do that, they lose out, too. So they have few options to push back. They can resist commodification from within the system. In Germany, for example, they successfully pushed back against Monday night games. Or they can leave the system altogether and create alternative fan-owned clubs, but these clubs can’t compete at a high level.  

I’m not particularly optimistic because I see modern football destroying itself in the same way that capitalism is. It is expanding at unsustainable levels, like a pyramid scheme where the value gets thinner and thinner. Private equity firms and regimes are pumping money into the system because they expect something in return, whether it is profit or diplomatic wins. But they can pull out just as quickly as they came in if they realise they have nothing left to gain. And when the bubble bursts, we don’t go back to where we were before, because the loyalties are gone. The generation of English who have been priced out of Premier League stadiums won’t just come back.  

Many soccer clubs are among the oldest institutions around. They have existed for more than a century, and they have given meaning to being somewhere. When a former mining town loses a soccer team, it is a major loss for the community.  

Despite everything, soccer is still capable of creating community and connection. Is there anything political parties or civil society organisations can learn from it? 

The kind of relationship you have with a club you support is deeply irrational. You can’t just recreate that relationship artificially.  

One thing you can learn is the importance of groundedness. If people keep supporting a club even when it loses or gets relegated, it is because they feel connected to it. Many local clubs run thanks to volunteers and people who don’t make money out of them. Growing professionalisation and a lack of groundedness are increasingly weaknesses of progressive movements, and I see something similar happening in modern soccer.  

If you are not recognised as part of the community, people feel like you have lost touch. Most NGOs nowadays don’t have supporters; they have professionals. And for professionals, the institution matters more than the cause. If you are primarily about a cause, you find ways to do the work even when money runs out. But if you are primarily about the institution, you’ll move on and find something else to do. Major NGOs have become businesses with very well-paid jobs held by people who move on from one organisation to another. The same is happening to soccer.  

On the bright side, hasn’t soccer also become more inclusive?  

Absolutely. In the 1980s and 1990s, women or queer people wouldn’t feel safe in a Premier League stadium, and now they do. In a way, gentrification has made soccer more accessible for some groups. Sure, it has excluded part of the white working class, but part of the white working class used to exclude other groups. I’ve been thinking about this a lot, because like any nostalgic, I had a blind spot. As a straight white dude, I am a part of the group that used to own the stadium, and so I never experienced the exclusion. 

But securitisation and pricing people out are not the only options for fighting discrimination, and wealthier fans are not necessarily less racist. A lot of the sexism, homophobia, and racism you see in stadiums is performative. So the way to go is to redefine the role of a fan. Germany shows that you can have affordable stadiums that are also more inclusive. It works better when it’s the fans themselves who control and moderate each other. Borussia Dortmund, for example, used to have a major problem with neo-Nazis in the 1980s, and by and large, managed to push them out.  

Most soccer fans do not want to sit in a sanitised and surveilled stadium. They want to sit in a place that still has the atmosphere and the authenticity without the racism and the sexism. And that is possible. 

The popularity of women’s football is exploding. Can it be a healthier alternative to the dynamics you have been describing? 

We often turn to women to solve the problems that men created. We say, men are like that, so we need more women, because women are different. But women are not necessarily better than men. If the structure pushes you in a certain direction, it doesn’t matter who you are. In the current structure, for women’s soccer to remain “pure” would also mean women continue to be paid much less than men in the name of some ideal, and I don’t think that’s fair.  

Anyways, it seems that women’s soccer is rapidly becoming more like modern soccer and heading in the same direction as men’s soccer – potentially even faster. Multi-club ownership is already a reality. In the US, a club from Columbus, Ohio, has recently paid the National Women’s Soccer League 200 million dollars to join the league in 2028. This is far more money than what is being spent on players.  

Still, many women’s soccer clubs are more politically active than men’s clubs, because the players are more outspoken. Being a female soccer player is still seen as transgressive, so you tend to be more engaged politically. But the less transgressive and more commodified women’s soccer becomes, the less political it will be. For now, it remains an escape for many fans because it is more affordable and more fun – certainly for minority groups, and particularly queer people.  

Where does women’s football stand in terms of its community and civil society dimension?  

Almost all women’s clubs have been founded by men’s clubs, so very few of them are actually an expression of a community. There are exceptions, like Turbine Potsdam in Germany, which is one of the most successful women’s teams in the country. But they have now been largely overtaken by clubs like Bayern Munich and Wolfsburg, because you can’t compete with the giants.  

However, most fans of women’s soccer have a political purpose, and in this sense, they are the expression of a community. Many fans emphasise that they’re there to support women’s sports, not a specific club. No one goes to a men’s soccer game to support the movement. So there is an element of community.