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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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How are you doing there? It is Tuesday. It is the beginning of the world's greatest sporting event, which is the World Cup, something that we have watched religiously in this country, a religiously, but also slightly trepidatiously, because we have only qualified World Cups, which is kind of pathetic, but that is the problem with the Republic of Ireland.
We tend to fall at not even the last hurdle, but usually the first hurdle, unfortunately. But we're going to use the World Cup as a template to talk about the economies of the teams that we'll be featuring in the World Cup. Now, not, of course, all the teams, but maybe the top six.
We're going to look at the hosts, we're going to look at the favourites, and we're going to look at one or two wild cards. So, We are bringing you a series of economic podcasts using the World Cup as our leverage or our crutch into examining the economies, the politics, the economic history of certain of the main players. I hope you enjoy the series. We are going to kick off this series with...
a general World Cup, what it means, history, politics, economics, with the brilliant Simon Cooper of the Financial Times. We're going to talk to Simon, who is in Holland, which is, again, the country. that has punched furthest above its weight in the World Cup, with the exception, I would say, of a country that's very dear to my heart, Croatia.
The Croatians, since the collapse of Yugoslavia, have been unambiguously the most successful small country when it comes to World Cup positioning and performances in the world. Oh, right. Didn't know that. Yeah, the Croats, John. The Croats have been, without a shadow of a doubt, Croatia. That's Modric, isn't it? Well, Modric is now their slightly soon-to-be-over-the-hill 40-year-old superstar.
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Chapter 2: Why do tiny social democracies excel in football?
When I was on a J1. And there I watched... Argentina win the World Cup in a Mexican World Cup. Mexico was then run by a military dictatorship. So Argentina had been run by a military dictatorship when they won it. So there's always been sort of unusual, let's say, unusual hosts, lots of fellas with dark glasses and lapels and lots of braid and all that sort of good stuff.
I also was at the 1994 World Cup when the Republic played in the World Cup. And that was the one that when we beat Italy and then gradually the whole thing came away from us. But then in 1994, In 86, there was no sense of the World Cup being played anywhere. You just had to go to Latin American bars to see it. The Americans didn't give a damn. It was in Mexico.
In 94, it was, again, they didn't really give a damn about it. But now that has changed a wee bit. But you're right. I mean, it will be a Trump fest, but nonetheless, it gives us, John, the lens through which to look at some economies. So that's what we're going to do. We're going to look at the runners and riders. We're going to look at the great teams.
We're going to look at the economics of the country. We're going to see, is there a political and economic and social dynamic which creates good football teams? If so, can it be replicated? Is there corruption? Yes, there is. Is it going to be like a Roman emperor The Circus Maximus with Caesar sitting in the middle, of course it's going to be, and Trump is going to be that emperor.
But that's part of the background noise of the World Cup. So let us kick off by putting context on the whole thing by going to talk to Simon Cooper about his book, World Cup Fever. Now, I can think of no better man to kick off this series on the economics, politics, geopolitics, corruption, money...
status, significance, implication of the World Cup than the brilliant, brilliant Simon Cooper, who has been on this show. You will know him as the FT columnist of many years. But on this area, in terms of football, you will know him as the man... who, although we knew about Dutch football and we quite liked Dutch football, we never really understood what was going on.
Simon wrote about Dutch football in the 90s. He has written books about football. He's written Soccernomics, so he's genuflected to economics. His latest book, and he's written loads. He's written about Barca. He's written about Chums, the upper class in England. But his latest book is called World Cup Fever, perfectly timed, a footballing journey into nine tournaments. Simon, lovely to see you.
How are you?
Very well. In the Netherlands, all good.
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Chapter 3: What historical context surrounds the World Cup and its hosts?
Explain to me, Simon, your love affair brought up in Netherlands with the game of football first.
I arrived in Holland 50 years ago from London with my family. And it turned out we'd landed in the middle of the golden age of Dutch football, in fact, of global football. It's the 70s, Holland are between reaching two World Cup finals. So my first World Cup, I'm eight years old.
And the country I live in, the team I've come to support, is playing its second straight World Cup final against Argentina. 78th minute, Dick Nonnenka, Dutch substitute centre-forward, who is a flower seller in daily life because several of the Dutch players are semi-pros. So he has a flower stall in a small town. He heads the equaliser.
Last minute of extra time, Rob Rensenblink, brilliant, the snake, they called him, the snake man, hits the outside of the post. So the Netherlands could have won a World Cup final my first time of asking. So I grew up in Dutch football, which is obviously the highest form of football, which later became the world's form of football, played by teams like Klops Liverpool or Pep's Manchester City.
So, yeah, I have the origin story.
Now, I just want to talk to you about Dutch football, because in the book you make this very interesting observation that Franz Beckenbauer, who is the Kaiser, for those of us of a certain vintage, the man who defined how centre-halves should play, the man who defined playing it out from the back, a whole series of subsequent centre-halves played by Beckenbauer, obviously a huge man in German football.
He said he understood... how brilliant the Dutch were when he flew over Holland in a helicopter and realized that an enormous amount of public space was devoted to municipal football grounds. Explain that to us. I mean, again, this is quite nerdy. We'll get on to the economics in a minute. But this is economics. This is the culture of football, where it comes from. Explain that to me.
So the Netherlands is a social democracy, which is the best way to produce a good national football team. And that's true, of course, in most of Western Europe, France, Germany, Spain. With football, you can't see at age six who's going to be good. It's not like basketball rowing where you pick the biggest kids with the biggest parents and you put top coaches on them.
football obviously physical build doesn't really signify much look at messy so the way to produce a really good football team is to get all the six-year-olds in your country playing football and then when they're 18 you find out who's good and that means that football has to be available to everyone it has to be cheap and you have to have trained coaches so that's what my children in france have the same experience france is now the leading football country in the world
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Chapter 4: How does social democracy influence football success?
And it turned out that the Dutch way was the winning way. It later spread to Spain and Germany in particular, now to England. And those countries have bigger talent pools. So now they beat the Dutch.
Yeah, well, you'll find that football in Ireland, like in England, is a form of artillery. So the great one, I think Irish listeners will understand and will respond to the great shout from the line on the under nines and under tens in Ireland is, Get rid of her. Yeah. So the kid, right? The young fella gets the ball and he is told to hoof the ball. Up the line, right?
Up the line is the great one. And in actual fact, last week I was watching a great Irish movie called Fram the Man. If you want to understand Irish amateur football, there is a great movie called Fram the Man. A whole host of lots of comedians we know. Lots of people actually, Simon, you know, Dan at Kilkenomics starring it. But it's basically, it's a...
a very, very gentle, very soft, very loving evocation of Irish amateur football and what happens. But in contrast, to your idea. There is no Irish football manager, and I've played under many of them, who's ever said to me that football is geometry. I can tell you that for nothing. Now, let's start at the World Cup.
What I like about your book, and I think it's very brilliant, again, the book is World Cup Fever. It's our anchor book for this series. You start with this Really interesting analysis of who the guy Gilles Remy is. The man, or Gilles Remy, the man who actually's name was on the World Cup. Tell me about him and tell me about the origin of the World Cup.
Yeah, so Jules Rimet, people will know the name, and it's in the English football song, Three Lions, Football's Coming Home. Jules Rimet's still gleaming. That refers to that first World Cup trophy. It was named after him, stolen in Brazil in 1983, never seen again, and now the World Cup is a kind of less glamorous, less pretty object. So who was Julien? Nobody knew.
Nobody I ever spoke to had any sense of him. I didn't either when I started the book. And I thought, I looked for the sources. They're all in French. Okay, I live in France, speak French. So I thought, I'm going to figure out who this bloke was. And I go out and I cycle out an hour out of Paris to his grave. It was in a municipal cemetery, family grave. I go there.
It took me half an hour to find it. Obviously, nobody had been there in many years. And there's a little gold plaque on the grave. Julien May gives his dates, doesn't say what he did in his life. He's really forgotten. So if you find his memoir, which had to go to the French National Library to read, etc.,
who was this guy he's from a poor peasant family the parents move to paris they become grocers and he joins them in paris and so he lives among poor people there his family's low middle class he's a bright boy he studies law so he rises in the world but he lives among poor people and he thinks if poor men are going to play football seriously they have to be paid he was never really interested in playing football himself he just wanted to be a football administrator and very important part of his life stories in world war one for four years
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Chapter 5: What role does FIFA play in global football politics?
So it's the idea of football brings peace. Everyone is welcome. It doesn't matter if your ruler is a fascist or a Democrat. We don't care. He was sort of open to everyone. He gives Mussolini the World Cup of 1934. In World War II, he collaborates a bit too much with Vichy. He gets in trouble for meeting German football officials just before France is invaded, et cetera.
So he was very much a guy who every regime is welcome, which has remained the FIFA principle.
Now, the fascinating thing is he gets this thing up off the ground. And again, because this is an economics podcast, what interests me, and we're going to talk about the economics and politics of football now, and the World Cup in particular, is the first, and it always surprises people, the first World Cup is in a... Little known for most Europeans, South American country called Uruguay.
But Uruguay in 1930 was known as the Switzerland of Latin America. It had the first universal suffrage. It had the first welfare state. It had the first free education and health system. And we are talking about a country that was unbelievably wealthy in the context of the world. And it's interesting that
The World Cup's location always suggests something interesting about what's happening in that country. Is it a symbol for the future? Is it a power play? And Uruguay, the fact that the World Cup kicked off in Uruguay tells us something about the nature of the host country. Can you maybe elucidate on that a wee bit, Simon?
Yeah, I mean, like you, I've been to Uruguay, and it struck me that, you know, the central part of the city is these 1920 skyscrapers. It looks a bit like New York, but dilapidated. So obviously there hadn't been kind of economic advance since then. But when they get the World Cup, they get it because they're the one country that's willing to pay for the whole thing. Very expensive.
The European teams, plus Rime, have to cross the ocean on a steamship paid by the Uruguayans. The Uruguayans have to put up all the players. The Uruguayans say, we'll build stadiums. They're still building the stadiums when the World Cup kicks off. I think one of them is only really completed sometime after the World Cup. And so it's immensely costly.
And the principle of the World Cup has always remained the host pays. Now, why was this so important? There was no money in football then, so FIFA was a penniless organization. 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.
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Chapter 6: How has corruption impacted FIFA and the World Cup?
Because Qatar had the bright idea, we want to host the World Cup. It seems that some FIFA delegates who voted for Qatar were nicely recompensed for this, as were some who voted for Russia to host the World Cup in 2018. But Gulf countries are the ones who want to put money into football. And then Saudi Arabia sees Qatar.
Saudi Arabia, less bright royal family, MBS, the crown prince, thinks, I would also like to buy status and world fame through football. But these damn Qataris from their tiny country got there ahead of me. So now Saudi is getting a World Cup. And Saudi also more or less paid for the whole World Club Cup, this ridiculous tournament last year won by Chelsea.
So all this money is pouring in from these ugly regimes. And FIFA says, yes, thank you, let's have some more. But then so do Western governments. They all do business with those regimes. And so do Western companies. So it's sort of hard to pinpoint FIFA as uniquely villainous.
Let's go back to the history of the World Cup, because my first World Cup that I remember, and John, you probably remember very vaguely, 1974 World Cup, it was in West Germany. Netherlands got to the final.
But also, talking to German friends of mine, Simon, I didn't realize that, and it was interesting reading Katja Hoyer's book about growing up in East Germany, how significant the World Cup was for East Germans at the time, because their team was pitted against West Germany, possibly for the first time on the global stage.
Yeah. Now, you say that East Germany was their team, but of course, a lot of East Germans were supporting West Germany. Because as you know, they got West German TV. So a lot of people would sit around watching West German footballs, that kind of comfort life. You go home, you turn off communism, and then you were watching Bayern Munich.
So in 1954, when West Germany won the World Cup, there were celebrations in East Germany. 1974, as you said, is the only time the two Germanys played each other, I think, in any match. And it's a very nervous event for the East German regime. So they send party comrades as the kind of official fan group. They hope not to be embarrassed by a very good West German team.
as it is East Germany win 1-0, JĆ¼rgen Sparwasser, who later defects to the West, I believe. So it's a very complex, you know, story in the psychodrama of East and West Germany. And this is also just after Chancellor Willy Brandt, I think, had resigned by that point because his chief aide, Gunther Guillaume, had been exposed as an East German spy, which was unfortunate.
So it was a very... I remember that. a very complex moment in East-West relationship. East Germany win the biggest prestige battle of the two Germanys, but then West Germany win the World Cup, which I think is the kind of story of the Cold War prefigured.
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Chapter 7: What are the geopolitical implications of hosting the World Cup?
that they should have won. They believed there was a dodgy penalty, which there was, which was a dodgy handball. They believed the referee, but I mean, I go on to the Croat mentality about football in a second, but I want to ask you, so you're touring doing geopolitics. What are the two or three big themes geopolitical that you actually take out of the World Cup, Simon?
One is everyone is welcome. FIFA doesn't discriminate against brutal regimes. So Argentina hosted in 1978, Putin in 2018, the Qataris. FIFA is totally fine with that. Secondly, people talk about the leader using the World Cup. So that's the big story now. People have, oh, Trump is going to turn the World Cup into a propaganda show. Of course, the leader tries that.
But you also have dissent in a stadium. You have opposition in a stadium. So Trump goes to an NFL game a year ago, is booed by the crowd in Washington. And that is exactly what would happen if he goes to a World Cup stadium now. All the stadiums are currently in blue America. And his popularity is a record low.
So a stadium is also a place of anonymity, even in a dictatorship like Iran, where people have some opportunity to express opposition to the leader. And then in a country like the US, you have politicians like Zohra Mamdani, big football fan, totally fluent in the language of football. And in the kind of fans view of football, he's using the affordability story of the World Cup against Trump.
So those are two key themes, dictatorships, but also the stadium as a place of opposition. And then the third thing I say is football provides this alternative global hierarchy. It's a hierarchy where China doesn't exist, where the U.S. is also ran, and where Argentina is currently number one in the world. You know, where else do you get that?
What other global hierarchy could give you that outcome?
Do you think the World Cup, this World Cup, so you've got it between Mexico, America, and Canada. The Canadians, where we've just come back from, are very, very much, this is part of Canadian pride. We're going to be better than the Americans at this because of the relationship between Carney and Trump, etc. The Mexicans, again, want to showcase Mexico, but also want to play properly.
What impact do you think this might have on the United States itself? Because, of course, the United States is the main, the absolutely main host.
Yeah, I mean, the US has three quarters of the games. It has all the good games. I would say this is a US World Cup with kind of small franchises in Canada and Mexico, which the Canadians and Mexicans are understandably very excited about because they're never in the spotlights of the world, and now they briefly will be.
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Chapter 8: How do football and politics intersect during the World Cup?
And the other moment is the first match of the 2018 World Cup. Russia, Saudi Arabia, the Petro Derby. And before the game, Vladimir Putin, the host of the World Cup, stands up and he makes this speech about football spreading love. So very much in the Julie May spirit. And the crowd gets bored.
And after a couple of minutes, people start to chat amongst themselves and watch videos on their phones. 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.
So taking that analogy before we go, we have the kind of Monroe Doctrine World Cup there. This is very, very much, if you take that geopolitical idea, this is very, very much consistent with the United States hosting the World Cup. with the North America and South America and Mesoamerica to give the Mexicans their due location, being part of Donny J's world.
I mean, this could be seen again as another moment where again, Western Europe, even though hopefully we will provide the winners of the World Cup, I hope we will, is kind of ignored or is kind of, as you say, symbolically somewhere else.
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.
Finally, the romantic in me always wants Argentina to win. I've always wanted Argentina to win. I don't know why that is, but it's just a sort of a weakness. It could be, as you said, Simon, men of a certain age with memories of Maradona, memories of Mario Kempes, all that sort of stuff, right? Who are you going for? Well, I obviously don't want Argentina to win.
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. And over 38 games in a league, the best team generally wins. World Cup is just a random walk. So most games in the knockout rounds are just by one goal or penalty shootouts. So there's an enormous amount of fluke involved.
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