Simon Cooper
speaker
334 appearances
5 recordings
4 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 10 Jul
Simon Cooper’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 4.
Appearances
Emotionally, the World Cup does tend to accentuate the divide between the Global North and the Global South.
In the group stages, France played Senegal, England played Ghana, and then just yesterday in the quarterfinal, France played Morocco.
There's a lot of exchange of players.
So many of the players in, say, the Empire nation have roots in former colonies.
And many of the players in the colonized nation grew up in the former empire.
Then you look at France's great playmaker, Michael Olise.
His mom, like Mbappe's, is French-Algerian origin.
And his dad is a Nigerian immigrant who was a Nigerian cricket international, so he came to the capital of the former empire.
Western Europe is a place in the world where there are most clubs around the corner from you.
Those clubs have good fields.
They have coaches with diplomas who can show you how to play.
Morocco had never been a great football nation, but in 2022, they got to the semis of the World Cup, which was the best performance ever by an African nation.
And I think the change is they launched a very well-organized, aggressive campaign to recruit among their Western European diaspora.
Ronaldo always lived like a monk, does hundreds of push-ups every day.
It became so serious that he pretty much went vegan during the football season.
Commentators are saying he'll be arriving in a good mood, like a hero, fresh off of a deal to end the war with Iran.
But European analysts are also noting that both the U.S.
and Iran are claiming total victory and that the U.S.
is only fixing something it had broken.
So basically the world is back to where we were before the U.S.
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