Jonathan Clegg

The earliest memory, World Cup memory I have is from the 1990 World Cup.

Nine years old, England lost in heartbreaking fashion in a penalty shootout in the World Cup semifinals.

Just heartbreak.

It was just, you know, perfectly prepared me for the next, you know, 35 years where it was just more of the same.

Blatter's rise starts with the controversy of the 98 vote, and it's sort of tainted by scandal and stench of corruption right from the very beginning.

Prosecutors started poking around what was going on with this World Cup bid and what was going on with FIFA generally.

Gianni Infantino saw his role as FIFA president as essentially the man to fill FIFA's coffers with as much money as humanly possible.

Yeah, it's weird.

It's the sort of thing that I thought that I cared about until I moved here and started calling it soccer and then I realized it doesn't matter.

The game is beautiful no matter what you call it.

This was some, you know, 50 years after the sport had been invented.

They decided to host a world championship for the first time.

So they settle on Uruguay.

The boat wasn't waiting for Egypt.

Wow.

Yep, they missed it.

Right.

I mean, as with so many of our most popular sports, it's really the advent of television.

that turns it from a small event that people attended by boat and which very few people knew about into this sort of global entertainment giant that has become today.

And the World Cup is no different.