Simon Cooper

When he's down, people are delighted and they clap.

And then Putin sits in a box with Gianni Infantino, president of FIFA, and MBS, the Saudi crown prince, and they laugh and joke while Russia wins 5-0.

And it's a vision of the world where the West is just not present.

And on the advertising boards, you have Gazprom, you have, I think, Saudi Aramco, you have KIA Motors from Korea.

You have this new economy where our people don't exist.

So the story of the World Cup, to some degree, is the loss of control by Western Europe, where FIFA was always based, over this thing that was created here.

Yeah, so until 2006, the majority of World Cups had been in Western Europe.

And then we haven't had any in 20 years.

There hasn't been one in our part of the world in 20 years.

Now, you say this is the Monroe, the Donro doctrine World Cup.

That is how it's turned out.

But the original plan for a US-Canada-Mexico World Cup is conceived under Obama.

where it's to showcase the country's cooperation and friendship.

You know, we're going to do it together.

We might even have one visa where fans can go from country to country and so on.

We're going to show how great we get on.

But then something happens in American politics.

I want Holland to win.

The thing is that you can't actually predict.

You can predict a league with reasonable confidence, usually the team with the highest salaries.