There’s nothing quite like a World Cup. An Olympics is comparable, sure, but so very different: a Games sells the human spirit, more than anything, even when it’s nationalism by other means. The Olympics are, in theory, a place of peace.
The World Cup, meanwhile, is closer to a holy war between competing sects of the same uplifting religion, run by that war’s most ruthless profiteers, and now it’s back in America as the empire starts to fall. The World Cup has landed in illiberal places before: Mussolini hosted the second World Cup in 1934, and Argentina’s military junta did so in 1978. Both nations exploited the power of the game; both faced accusations of match-fixing, amid other outrages; both nations won.
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