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.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 4.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

The David McWilliams Podcast · Why Social Democracies Win World Cups · 9 Jun 2026 podcast

And then you'll remember something quite significant happening economically in the autumn of 1929, which is the great crash.

Yes.

The stock market crash.

Now, the treasurer of FIFA was this Dutch stockbroker, Carl Hirschmann.

And he was holding what few funds FIFA had.

And his colleagues thought Hirschmann's obviously putting it in a bank account, obviously.

It turned out he was investing it all in the stock market.

So with the crash in 1929, Hirshman goes bankrupt and then admits that all FIFA's funds have also been lost.

So when they do this first World Cup, FIFA has 47 pence.

So Uruguay has to fund the whole thing, and it's still the way every host country has to pay for the whole thing.

I'm not sure that corrupt is the right word anymore.

In the Blatter era, yeah, I mean, you would be bribed with...

Brown envelope, so FIFA delegates would be given a brown envelope or money would go to their personal bank account and you would vote for Sepplato and you would photograph yourself voting for him.

And people, the barons within FIFA would take kickbacks and television rights.

So we sell the TV rights to this tournament to a TV station for a tenth of its value, but I personally get a few million into my bank account.

I think under Infantino it's been slightly professionalized, so it's what I call legalized

corruption, sort of the David Cameron way, where you make sure you're totally observing the law, and then you take money from ugly regimes and you spread it around your mates, but in a legal way.

So where has the money been coming into football the last decade or so?

From the Gulf.

Because Qatar had the bright idea, we want to host the World Cup.

Showing 161–180 of 334 · page 9 of 17