Episode 17: Seeking Beauty with Author Simon Kuper

00:00:06
Speaker 1: Welcome to the Way End.

00:00:07
Speaker 2: I'm Danielle Alarcon, I'm John Green and John today we're to do something a little different. We're lucky to be joined by author and journalist Simon Cooper, who has written a really wonderful new book called World Cup Fever, a Soccer Journey in nine Tournaments.

00:00:21
Speaker 1: Yeah so. Simon is the co author of the best selling book Soccer Nomics, one of my favorite soccer books. He also wrote an excellent deep dive into the chaotic workings of FC Barcelona called The Barcelona Complex. And I just don't think we could ask for a more knowledgeable guest to help us understand the origins of the World Cup, but also why it continues to have such a strange and fascinating hold on us. So welcome Simon. It is a great pleasure to have you here on the Oa End, A pleasure to be here.

00:00:48
Speaker 2: Thank you, Simon. What's your first World Cup memory?

00:00:53
Speaker 3: Nineteen seventy eight. We'd moved to the Netherlands, where my dad had a job. I'm not Dutch on source of British, but I became a Holland fan. I was eight years old in nineteen seventy eight and Holland reached the World Cup final, and of course when you're eight, this feels completely normal. Of course they were in the World Cup final. A minute from time, Rob Brenson Wing hits the Argentinian post scores level one all and so I could have been World champion my very first time. So that is a memory that hasn't gone away. But then I say in the book, everyone remembers their first World Cup.

00:01:25
Speaker 1: Yeah, mine was nineteen ninety four. I actually saw the Netherlands play as well in Orlando, Florida, Netherlands versus Morocco. And you do remember your first World Cup on a different level. I think Daniels was eighty six. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, a wonderful tournament. But I want to ask you about the heart of the book. I really loved this book. It's an extraordinary work of nonfiction. It's personal, it's global, it's really a remarkable accomplishment. And the heart of it is the twenty ten World Cup in South Africa, where you were born. You know, you later whipped in the Netherlands and in the UK. I wonder if you can talk about that and about the complexity of national identity, which is sort of been a theme on the away end.

00:02:10
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think twenty ten in South Africa was the World Cup that meant most to me. My parents had left South Africa before I was born, partly because of apartheid, partly because unhappy family is the province of the world, and they moved around. I was born in Uganda, and we used to go back to South Africa during apartheid. We'd go and visit my grandparents from the Netherlands, and then later I'd go to visit family, but also as a journalist. And so to have this World Cup sort of in my parents' backyard, you know, in these places that I knew from childhood was very weird. And it was also part of South Africa becoming or trying to become a nation because you had all these different colors and until ninety four under apartheid, only white South Africa counted as the nation. And then Nelson Mandela tries to make an partly through sport, you know, George Washington makes a nation through other means in the United States. In South Africa happens partly through sports. And so the World Cup twenty ten in parts is nation building. It's in part to tell all South Africans of all colors, you're all one country. It's not so much we have one team because the South African team wasn't good, but we can put on a World Cup and show that in the South African phrase where a world class nation. We don't have to feel inferior to the European nations. And so it was tremendously important to South Africans in a way that I think most other World Cups are not quite that meaningful to the hosts.

00:03:35
Speaker 2: So, I mean, there's something about the about what you read about So Africa that I didn't really realize, which I think is something we've talked a lot about on the show, which is the national identity of a footballing nation, the stylistic way they play, and you talk about the tension of this tiki tiki kind of showbody style of soccer that is played in Soweto, in the town that kind of has to get almost tamp down in order for South Africa to become a kind of competitive soccer nation. And even so they're still the first country to host country to go out in the first round, but there's a tension there, and I wonder if you could talk about that because you know, you said you support the Dutch who have this kind of very specific style. Let's just talk about how globalizition has kind of erased those styles.

00:04:27
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think a lot of countries they don't just want to win at a World Cup, they want to show their soccer to the world. And that's I think pre eminentlyu ture of Brazil, where there's still this fantasy of playing like in nineteen seventy, this kind of beautiful, soloistic football of dribbles played at very low pace Palais football, which doesn't exist anymore in the twenty first century. You can't play it. Defenders are tougher, harder, faster, And in South Africa there was a version of us now South Africa, it didn't have to compete with other countries because under a part side it was banned from international soccer and black South Africans had no chance of engaging with the world. So in Soto, in the townships, they developed this kind of style of soccer that's maybe analogous to jazz. It's about beauty and display and showing your individuality, and it just doesn't work in international soccer. You can't kind of stand on the ball and do tricks, but that's what they wanted to show to the world. And I grew up in the Netherlands, which invented modern soccer. So the soccer you see today of teams like Buying Munich or Palis Saint Germain or Barcelona is the soccer that was invented in Amsterdam East by Johan Crow from the Venis Mihals in the nineteen sixties. And it's the soccer that Holland played when I was a kid, and it was beautiful and we didn't have to win. You know, if you're a small country like Holland, you don't have to win the World Cup. You just have to be the most beautiful and we were sometimes. And now that soccer has become, as I say, the kind of orthodoxy at the very top, and there's a globalization of style. So when I went back to South Africa in twenty twenty four and watched some soccer, they play like the Europeans now fast one to football players running into space. Tiki ticket is gone, and so yeah, there's something lost when each all the best countries anyway play the same way and the others try to.

00:06:10
Speaker 1: Yeah, it seems like on the world stage today, the Dutch maybe maintain that sense of national identity of football. Brazil does a little bit. But you know, we've talked on the podcast before about how different German football looks from the sort of ideal or potonic ideal of German football from the seventies or eighties. And then there's the group of nations that are you know, the United States and below, who just have to try to play very practically.

00:06:41
Speaker 3: Yeah. And I thought, you know, twenty years ago when we wrote the first editions of Soconomics, that countries like the US and Japan and China would copy the European style. They have bigger populations, larger talent pools, and they would be like US but better. But it turns out that playing like Europeans is kind of sense of where should I be at any given moment? Should I move up ten yards? Should I change positions? It's something you have to learn from the edge of five or six in quite a spontaneous way. You suck it up from the culture around you. And just like you know, basketball was made in American inn as cities, and it was very hard for people from outside there to be as good. That I think has been true of soccer and Europe and adding on bits of Argentina, Brazil.

00:07:26
Speaker 2: I mean, you talked to in your book early in the book about your childhood in the Netherlands, and I think it's really interesting because what you described is very different from the kind of suburban American sort of soccer club with orange slized at halftime culture that John and I grew up in. You said you had this remarkable stat about how there was there were there was no other like one in eight, if I remember correctly, one in eight Dutch folks were members of a club like played.

00:07:56
Speaker 3: It's it's a bit lower than that. I mean, when I was a kid, it was only boy. Girls were not really thought to play soccer, and so among boys it was something like one in seven, one in eight. I heard a stat this week that the average Dutch person now has a well kept soccer field within one mile of their home.

00:08:15
Speaker 1: Wow.

00:08:15
Speaker 3: Wow.

00:08:17
Speaker 2: So just naturally the culture is going to be one of that that's you describe it as. Just that's at what everyone did. And so obviously the talent pool is the entire nation, even if it's a small country. It just means that you're you're sort of inhaling the culture of spacing and technique and touch and movement from the time that you're able to walk.

00:08:37
Speaker 3: I think there's two things. One is social democracy is the best underlying system for soccer, because this is not basketball or rowing, where you just pick the biggest kids of the kids with the biggest parents age five and you give them special coaching. In soccer, you don't know who's going to become good. I mean, who would have thought that one point seventy one meters five foot seven inch Argentinian would be the best player of the contemporary You would never pick messy based on body type age six. So the way to have a good soccer team is you let everyone play. You let millions and millions of kids play. You don't even know at seventeen who's going to be the best. At nineteen you start to have an idea. And that's what Western European countries do. There's soccer every where. I live in Paris now the biggest talent pool in soccer, partly because every suburb of Paris, no matter how poor, is a well kept sports complex with coaches with diplomas. So that's one and the other thing is you're on krav the great Dutchman said, soccer is a game you play with your head. Soccer is about thinking all the time, and the main question you have to ask is where should I be? Because for eighty nine minutes on average, you do not have the ball as individual player, So your job is a position yourself. And in the Netherlands when I grew up, everyone understood it's a game that's about space. You open space when you have the ball, you close space when you don't have it, and so it's an intellectual pursuit as much as anything else. And so you have to learn how that works, not just from your coach, but from your t he makes, from the kids in the school, from the soccer highlights on Sunday evening. That's how you learn and what I actually had a soccer suburban soccer experience in the US when I was ten eleven. My dad, who's an academic, was touched to Stamford. We lived in Palo Alto. I played ayso soccer in California, and I saw that these kids were less good than the kids I played with in Holland because they didn't understand how to play right.

00:10:25
Speaker 1: Daniel and I went to high school together and so I saw Daniel play and he understood space and I didn't, and that was one of the differences. The other difference was that it was a difference of coordination. Co Yeah, yeah, they're both important. I had neither. I want to talk to you a little bit about something that surprised me in your book, which is that you talked about how at the highest level many pro footballers described the World Cup as a kind of torture, which I found counterintuitive. I think many of our listeners will you know that this is something you look forward to for your entire childhood and hope that will be part of your life, and yet the tournament itself can be a misery.

00:11:15
Speaker 3: I visited the Argentinian team or a friend of mine who was an assistant coach there in twenty twenty two and Qatar. They were living in these kind of barracks. It was a women's hostel at the university that had been given to them. It was guarded by security guards. It was almost impossible for them to come out. You know, it's boiling hot outside. So there you are for a month. You're stuck with about forty men. Players get bullied by teammates, players are on the bench and fear they're missing what should be the peak of their careers. Players are under an enormous stress. You know, you play badly and the whole nation is talking about it, much more than for a club. Anxiety is extreme and a lot of players, I say in the book, they don't really like soccer, you know, they're like the money. They gives you a good life. You train a couple in the morning, you're done, and you do your other things. And in a World Cup there was only soccer your lotop all day. You're training, you're watching your eat, drinking and injury drinks, and some players just can't take it. It's the cabin fever is terrible and interpersonal relations are often terrible. They just wish for it to be over, very very often.

00:12:18
Speaker 2: That's so surprising because from the outside, you know, as fans. You know, my first World Cup, I was nine years old. All I used to dream that I would take Peru to a World Cup. It's like the pinnacle. It's it's like everyone's childhood dream. And then you get there and it's and it's just awful. You know, how do players manage their emotions and how do players, you know, manage team dynamics in order to win. I mean, it's always like, you know, someone's got to win. But what separates those teams that are able to actually do it? I mean in a kind of social way.

00:12:55
Speaker 3: I mean, I think even in the teams that do it, there are guys who avail tims. So England were doing well in twenty twenty two in another concatenation might have won, but Ben White just can't handle it and he flees the camp. Nineteen seventy four, Holland, one of the great teams, Ruthreel's, the reserve striker, is bullied every single day at the lunch and dinner table by two of his teammates and always remembers it as the worst experience of his life. How do teams do it? You see people say, oh, they won because they have team spirit. No, they have team spirit because they win. In sport, in soccer, team spirit follows winning. It doesn't cause winning almost always, and so of course you're happy with your teammates when you win. So I think even the winning teams they come away with a few scars. But you know, then you're fifty five and you look back and you think those are the best days. Of my life, etc. And it's a thing that is attached to your name for the rest of your lives. So it's like Neil Armstrong. Nobody ever said to Neil Armstrong, you know, tell me what you did on Earth. There was one thing about Neil Armstrong that people cared about, and that's true of most guys who win a World Cup. It's also your meal ticket. So when I interviewed Jeff Hurst, the England strike Goo scored a hat trick in the sixty six World Cup final. He was twenty four then he'd wanted to spend the rest of his life looking forward. He found the only way he could make a living was to endlessly recount stories of that day for money.

00:14:17
Speaker 1: I think that's also true of a lot of celebrities, in addition to professional athletes, and also some novelists if we're not careful. So I was going to.

00:14:28
Speaker 3: Should draw that analogy myself. All novelists are all successful novelists happy.

00:14:34
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, it's true, we're always happy. I do want to ask you though about on the on the subject of novelists being unhappy and sometimes disliking their career. I was very interested when you said that many elite soccer players don't like soccer. That reminds me of the first line of Andre Agassi's memoir where he said I hate tennis.

00:14:59
Speaker 3: Ye.

00:15:00
Speaker 1: I think it's common but also a little counterintuitive that someone who is very, very good at something would also dislike it or not be particularly invested in it. But I wonder if you can say a little more about that.

00:15:15
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think the analogy in soccer for Agassy is Tierryli the brilliant French striker twenty years ago, possibly the best player of his generation. Like Agassy, a very bullying, domineering father who made him do it, and he happens to have the talent and only said Lacy spend a lot of his career to press. And he was asked, well, didn't you know scoring these goals and winning these trophies make you happy? And he said happy was never a consideration. That was not a question I asked myself. And it's true for a lot of players. You know you've often sacrificed your school career and there you are. Often you know you're making money not just for your family, for your parents, but for all everyone. You know. You know, your cousins, your cousin's friends, the kid in your hometown who has cancer, that kind of thing. You have to do it. Do you like it? Not really a question? And only in Agacie are these kind of you know, generational geniuses you can they do get despite everything, immense pleasure from doing these amazing things, from expressing themselves in some degree. While playing a lot of soccer players you don't express yourself. You're just marking a guy, you're kicking a guy, you're running up and down, you're delivering the ball. A lot of soccer is a bit like American football. You're kind of servicing the whole. It's not a hugely enjoyable or creative suit. And we actually we latch onto the very few players who express their creativity on the field, someone like Neymar because usually only one guy in a team is allowed to do that. MM.

00:16:43
Speaker 2: Only one guy on this podcast is allowed to do that, and that's that's John.

00:16:46
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's me. There's there's no one on AFC Wimbledon who's allowed to express their creativity immediately bench if they try.

00:16:59
Speaker 2: Exactly Before we go to a quick break, I wanted to ask you about this moment in twenty ten. Sorry, we're jumping around a lot here in the final, you describe this moment of kind of letting go of your support of the Dutch because the football is so kind of violent and aggressive and kind of anti all these ideals that Johann Crouch gave Dutch football and gave world football. Just describe that moment of transition from a kind of a journalist slash fan to just kind of this stepping back, like no, no, no, this is not who we want to be.

00:17:37
Speaker 3: I'm not sure it was the violence that put me off, because Dutch football is meant to be violent. You know, there's always some clogging going on, if you want to use that phrase. And Krag himself was quite violent when he needed to be. It was the ugliness and this stupidity. Well it wasn't even stupid. It was this ugly, canny defending and I thought, look, when I want us to win the World Cup, I wanted to be the defining transcendental moments of my life as a fan, maybe as my life. It has to be perfect and beautiful, it has to be nineteen seventy four, but you win in the end. And in twenty ten, I thought, you know, we could actually win this and in fact, I'd help prepare a penalty report on Spain which the Dutch camp were using, so for the garandce of penalties, I could have helped win it. But I thought, I don't want to win it like this, and I thought, you know, at the time, I thought this is a bit peculiar. And I was sitting extra to English colleagues who's only wish for their whole lives so that England should win the World Cup. Didn't care how if it happened, that would be enough and they would go straight to heaven and they couldn't. They thought I was bad and wrong, but actually it turned out that not just a lot of my Dutch friends also felt this way. Just thought, you know, they deserve to lose, but Crow felt that way. So Crew then gives an interview the night of the final and he said I was supporting Spain because Holland were not playing the right way. And you know, Dutch football is not about winning, because, as I say, small countries don't have to win. It's a moral mission. It's a thing of beauty.

00:19:02
Speaker 1: I mean that.

00:19:03
Speaker 2: My abiding image of that final, aside from from Iniesta's goal, is Nigel the young studs in Tabulonzo's chest somehow wasn't wasn't called as a foul, you know. But what you're saying is that it wasn't that so much as the like the small fouls, the kind of rotational fouls, the like interrupting Spain's passing, the almost anti football football that they were playing to nullify a team that was playing kind of Croix style total football.

00:19:35
Speaker 3: Yeah. Absolutely, it was the lack of interest in attacking and being beautiful. I mean, the young actually was committed only that foul the whole match. Of course, he shouldn't have just had a red card. He should have been jailed for it, which is I think he broke the guy's ribs. But he was he was by no means the worst. But you know, I think back to oh Niskan's kicking people in the seven. That's that's how Holland play. That's good, that's that's part of it. That's also the thing about Dutch football is often there's a lack of passion. It becomes a little bit like a chess game between you know, where everyone is angry and disappointed, and I like that. Fans like that when there's a guy who is flying in and showing that he cares. But it's not enough. You also have to seek beauty, which they just didn't even try. In fact, the whole thing was about preventing Spain being useful.

00:20:26
Speaker 1: Reminds me of that great last line of Odon and Grecian Earn, the controversial last line, Beauty is truth and truth beauty. That's all you know and all you need to know. Lots of people think Keith was kidding when he wrote that, but I think he was serious. I think he was twenty three and serious.

00:20:44
Speaker 2: No one's more serious than a twenty three year old, that's true.

00:20:48
Speaker 3: He would have supported Holland Nol singlely nothing, I think.

00:20:51
Speaker 2: So let's take a quick break and believe that with more with Samber, all right, we're back on their way. And so Simon, you live in Paris. You basically moved there shortly after the ninety eight World Cup. Now, for a lot of people paying attention to World soccer, France is one of these, you know, world powers. You know, they're always in the mix for a World Cup. They produce some of the greatest players, they have, you know, the most successful currently the most successful club team in the world. The wealth of talent they could fill you know, three four five national teams and they do actually so but you you talk about how ninety eight the culture around the World Cup was, you know this kind of like French indifference towards the World Cup until kind of the end. And I was totally kind of like, I didn't realize that. I always thought of France as this kind of passionate footballing nation and Platini in eighty six and you know, all these these these great French players that I that I just said that was the culture. Could you talk about what I didn't tell me why I was wrong? I didn't I didn't realize that was the case.

00:22:08
Speaker 3: I mean, France has always had pockets of football, mostly in the industrial city, so like in Britain, it was a working class, predatarian game. But France is a mostly agricultural nation with the capital Paris, you know, which creates intellectual snobbery. So none of these places particularly conducive. So it places like Nancia and eastern France where Platini grew up, mining towns like Lance de Santechier and then the harbor port town of Marseille. That's kind of where people care about football, and so you know, the elite that makes the cultural that sets the dominant culture in Paris very strongly still didn't see football, didn't care. So in one of Torfau's films, The four Hundred Blows, you know, football is presented as this terrible thing that adults fource on children, is kind of military style punishment. Lemonde, which is the you know, neighborhood gauzette of the Paris elite, did not have a sports page daily until nineteen ninety five, and so in ninety eight when they get to the World Cup final, most French people going into the final have probably never watched an entire football match on TV, and so that final becomes the most watched TV program in French history. It's also, I think the happiest moment in the French have as a communal moment since nineteen forty four, the Liberation. The difference in ninety eight is that all the French are on the same side, and so that really starts to create a football culture. And the other thing that happens is that Paris is spreading, It's becoming a city that is dwarfed by its suburbs. These new suburbs, new buildings, often high rises, where a lot of immigrant people, people of immigrant origin live, and that's where the soccer starts to come from. So the last thirsty years or so, the great French players have mostly come from the suburbs of Paris, like Glean and Babe or bold Bombard. That's where the culture is created. That's why France becomes the best soccer country of this century. It's been in four of the last seven World Cup finals, one two and lost two onion penalties. So it's this amazing thing in this city that had always had a dominant culture that was against football. And when I arrived in Paris in two thousand and two, there wasn't even a proper football team. Patty Sounderman was horrible. And now they're the best team in the world. So my twin sons who are seventeen to them, it's normal. You know, they won the World Cup age nine. As France fans, they won the Champions League last year. They don't know that this is just so out of kills her.

00:24:36
Speaker 1: They will in time. I suspect that's the great thing about soccer, right, is that eventually you get bad again. I want to ask you about the actual football at the World Cup. You point out that the football can be quite dreary, and that's true. I always have to explain to my American friends who don't watch soccer throughout the year that the quality of soccer in the World Cup is actually lower than you expect. And I wonder if you can talk about why that is and whether that's something that could change.

00:25:08
Speaker 3: Well, it will get worse, it will be lower even this time. So when I was a kid in the seventies, you had only sixteen teams, and so you had really the best countries. And because not all good players played for clubs in Western Europe, you would discover great players at a World Cup. You know who played for Argentina or Brazil or later Cameroon. You think, wow, who is that guy? And now you know Western European clubs have hoovered up all the best players. The World Cup was thirty two teams until recently, so you have a lot of teams who are worse than not good enough to play Premier League football in England, and they just go there, try to play nil nil, spend the whole match defending because they don't want to be humiliated. This summer we've gone up to forty eight teams. FIFA. I think had hoped that you'd have big countries, big markets like China, India, Indonesia. Qualifying didn't happen in said Cape verdie Kurosau Jordan are here. They will already be desperate to draw nil nil. So it's not just that it's worse than the Premier League. It's probably most many teams will be worse than the Championship in England, the second tier of English football. So yeah, it's gonna be quite shocking, but with more defensive football than in the Championship.

00:26:14
Speaker 1: Well as somebody who watches a League One game every Saturday, I'm going to be absolutely delighted.

00:26:20
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean it will be like Wimbledon, but less fun. I would think, okay, let me.

00:26:25
Speaker 2: Play, let me, let me, let me argue against you. Simon, my family comes from Peru, was once one of these South America teams with real flair in style. Seventy eight.

00:26:37
Speaker 1: We did well, we.

00:26:38
Speaker 3: Will really we all remember him. He was a player we discovered in seventy eight.

00:26:42
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, eighty two Spain we were there, and then then we weren't there until twenty eighteen. Expanding the World Cup, isn't you could argue to more teams is also about creating opportunities to expand the footballing family. Of course, ow maybe isn't a great example, but there are small and middle sized countries with great footballing legacies, where football is the sport of the nation and the national passion, who are never going to get better unless they measure themselves against the truly good teams of the world. Right, isn't that the argument for expanding the World Cup?

00:27:24
Speaker 3: Yeah? I have some sympathy with that. I mean, I've spent the last week interviewing some curis out players and the coach and the head of the football association on the phone. And these are guys. They're really Dutch. They play and they've born and raised in the Netherlands of curse our origin curse, how is the Dutch territory in the Caribbean. They're kind of journeyman soccer players. The goalkeeper plays for FC Miami, which is the second team in Miami. They play, you know, tier below Leo Messi's into Miami.

00:27:50
Speaker 1: So these are.

00:27:50
Speaker 3: People and suddenly you're playing in the biggest tournament in the world and the whole Island. You know, they're gonna watch every game, and it's gonna be like that in Iraq, which is qualified I think once in Jordan. It's gonna be fantastic for those countries. I just wish we didn't all have to watch the whole thing. And if they win, it's still you know, even cynics like me. Did you see if we're at Quana World Cup match, isn't that wonderful? So yeah, there is some joy, but as a way to lower the quality, it's almost guaranteed to succeed.

00:28:20
Speaker 1: On the topic of FIFA, I understood, I think before reading your book that FIFA was always a politicized organization. It was never neutral. You know, no large non governmental organization can be. But I did not know much about those early days and about Jules Remy, and I wonder if you can introduce our listeners to the dream that Remy had for FIFA's place beyond sport.

00:28:49
Speaker 3: Yeah. So, I think most people who love socculd know the name Julie May, the guy who founded the World Cup, but only because his name was on the original trophy, which was given to Brazil in nineteen seventy and stolen from Rioderjanaira in nineteen eighty three and never seen again. Nobody knows anything about the guy. So I thought, look, I live in Paris, I speak French. The few sources about him are in French. I'm going to find out who he is. I cycled out to his grave in the suburbs of Paris, completely forgotten, and Graver probably was the first person to be there in many years. And so he was in World War One. He was a soldier at the front for four years. He won three military crosses. It's a miracle he survived. And he came home, like many people, thinking soccer brings peace, that we need peace between above all France and Germany, you know, constant wars between them, and soccer. The World Cup, which already was FIFA's dream, that's going to bring peace between nations. And so they launched in nineteen thirty and already by nineteen thirty four it's being hosted by Benito mos Mussolini in fascist Sicily, and the email is fine with that. He's fine with the fascists. He's later fine with the Nazis because he thinks, you know, it's not about politics, it's beyond politics. It's about love between nations. It's about bringing peace. And when he just before he died in fifty six, FIFA was about to nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize, which has been an obsession of FIFA president since and also sudden people close to FIFA presidents and that kind of naive belief in soccer. I don't if you saw this terrible moment a week or so ago when Infantino tried to get the Palestinian head of the Palestinian Soccer Federation to shake hands with an Israeli official, as if you know the war there is like a football match and shake hands. So this very naive belief was there from the start, and so part of that is we allow any regime. Anyone can play football, anyone can host the World Cup, doesn't matter if you're a fascist, and that has kind of remained FIFA's ethos from the start, in both well meaning and cynical ways.

00:30:44
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's I kind of thought. I guess that Infantino, the current president of FIFA was kind of more political and weirdly like more engaged than he was at the original Guys of peace talks, and he invents this peace prize. Yes, I guess I thought that was a new thing or a kind of step beyond the original purview of the organization, and it was. It was really interesting to learn that that was actually the plan all along, to create this kind of supernational organization that is kind of above politics. And you described it a very Swiss kind of this concierge style, like we're just here to help powerful people help the game, you know, and the kind of the previous president sept letter is the one that you described that way.

00:31:32
Speaker 3: I believe. Yeah, I don't know if the aim has helped powerful people help the game, but to let powerful and which people put money into the game. So a Swiss friend of mine explained to me the kind of Swiss prototype of the hotel conciers deportier in Swiss, German and Derportier. The concierge is this guy. He's very helpful to all the guests because they must have money, because I'm staying at his hotel, and he always sends who has money? So he used to be the British, and later the Americans, and then it's the Russians, and now it's the golf Arabs. Whoever has money is at the front of the Concierra's desk, and he's very friendly to you, doesn't care about your politics. He doesn't care where you got your money, as long as you give it to his hotel or in the FIFA analogy, you put it into FIFA, you put it into football. So NBS of the Saudi Arabian Crown Prince is getting a World Cup in twenty thirty four because Saudi Arabia, like Gatar, puts a lot of money into soccer. So it's a very kind of cynical and almost a political way to think. It's not about the benefit of soccer. It's about putting money into FIFA recycles it to the national federation presidents. The presidents might stick it in their own pocket or some of them use it to build a soccer field in their country, and then they vote for the FIFA president.

00:32:47
Speaker 2: So depressing.

00:32:52
Speaker 3: At least it's only soccer, you know, I mean, the world kind of thrives despite FIFA. So every time in the Rhymes World Cup, and I've been here, you know, I've done this rodio before, people talk about FIFA and how horrible it is. It's the only time in four year cycle that most people think about FIFA. The moment the soccer starts, we think about the soccer, which is right, because the soccer is be useful and we shouldn't. FIFA isn't important enough for to spoil it.

00:33:17
Speaker 1: I want to ask you about your experience of the World Cup and what you're looking forward to this time around, because you write in the book about how you know you experienced this as a journalist, you know, and it's long days, and it's endlessly filing copy, and there's some forgettable games along the way that you have to write about. I guess the two part question one do you ever wish you could experience the World Cup as a fan the way that you know regular people get to experience it? And two are you looking forward to this World Cup or is there a measure of like, boy, here we go again.

00:33:57
Speaker 3: I will finally get to experience the World Cup for a few days like normal people do. Because my sons are doing their French end of school exams, the Buck school finishing, and so I'm staying home for the first week, and I'm already arranging with friends. You know, should we watch Germany Crusaud together? Share we watch Holland Japan together, And it's much more fun. That's how you're supposed to watch football. You're supposed to watch it with friends, possibly in the stadium, usually just in front of the TV and a bar, or at home. And that's gonna be great. That's gonna be really fun. In terms of here we go again, yes, I always feel here we go again because I'm in you know, aged cynic and journalism takes you to games that where you don't care who wins, like Paraguay Japan, and then the football was bad, and then you know, you get to sleep at five in the morning. And so yeah, I mean we wine and wine and wine. Journalists like to whine, and journalists at World Cups wine even more. But I you know, I've also reached an age of semi maturity where I'm going to tell myself enjoy some stuff. Often the best things are away from the soccer. So for example, I'm gonna be in Philadelphia, I've never been them before. I'm curious. I'm going to Mexico City, I've never been there before. It's gonna be great. So there's things like that. And then you know, holand be Germany five to four in the World Cup final. It's gonna be great.

00:35:07
Speaker 1: Is that a prediction. Can we put you on record there?

00:35:10
Speaker 3: All my predictions about World Cups are wrong. So I'm going to predict that the Germany, you know, Welch is thrower and beats everyone and wins the World Cup easy.

00:35:18
Speaker 1: That I do think that is unlikely to be fair.

00:35:22
Speaker 3: I just want to say it's to be absolutely sure it won't happen.

00:35:25
Speaker 1: I don't know that Daniel and I have them getting out of the group.

00:35:28
Speaker 3: It's impossible not to get out of a group.

00:35:31
Speaker 4: That's true, true, get out of the group. Yeah, everybody gets out of the group. I want to get to this. This is the most kind of the question that I've been trying to explain to myself.

00:35:43
Speaker 2: And I think you do a good job of it in the book. The World Cup, as you say, is kind of bloated. It's too commercialized like that. You know, FIFA adds new layers of almost trolling into every tournament just to get money out of our pockets and make the game worse. And yet it's so special. And yet every year, every four years, I turn into this little boy again, and I am trading Panini's you know, with my kids, and you know, and and it's I just feel like a little child, just excited. And I'm just wondering why you think after nine tournaments and on the cusp of the tenth term that you're going to attend, you know, you're probably better place than most of us that just say, why is it that this tournament has such a hold on us?

00:36:25
Speaker 3: Well, I think one thing is what you say. It turns you into a kid again. So you're the same person suddenly who watched that World Cup when you were nine years old. At a World Cup. There isn't really a big distance between this World Cup and nineteen seventy eight when I was eight years old and I watched the final with my parents and my long dead grandparents. My mother's dead and I can see us all sitting there. So it's like this madeleine that takes you push muddle lean, that takes you back through your life, and there's something beautiful about that. And then you pass it on to your children and you watch the World Cup with others. That's the points of a World Cup. It's a communit all experience. You watch it with the people around you. So it's very important and if you have kids, to choose who so watch it with because they'll remember their first World Cup and then you watch it with your nation. So everyone at the bus stop at school, on social media is talking about the same TV program, which never happens nowadays except when it's something terrible involving Trump. And so the World Cup is this kind of communal moment for the nation and for the world. So we're all watching the same thing. So if a New Zealander puts the ball in the top corner in the first game, everyone in the world is going to experience that. Everyone in the world, but more people than ever experience a human event, is going to experience that together. And so it's unity of nation, unity of world, and unity of your life. There's all these things come together and nothing else can do that. So it's the magic of sport. Despite despite FIFA, despite having an ie called Coca Cola, all the all the all the advertisements, there is that feeling that you are connected to people you will never meet. I was just in here Leone and was talking to a tuberculosis survivor about tuberculosis and then immediately transferred over to football and he looked at me and said North London forever, and I was like, oh God, I hope they win the league for you, not for Daniel, but for you.

00:38:15
Speaker 4: Really, No, that's my co host, but thanks for listening. We should say the name of your book. By the way, it's called World Cup Fever.

00:38:23
Speaker 1: It is. It is brilliant and if you like football as much as Daniel and I do, you'll love this book. Thank you.

00:38:29
Speaker 3: I'll say it again just to be sure, World Cup Fever.

00:38:32
Speaker 2: There you go, Sidon, thanks so much for joining us. Man, it was real pleasure and enjoy the tournament.

00:38:37
Speaker 3: Thanks very much. Guys really enjoyed it. Nice to me.

00:38:39
Speaker 2: Thank you all right, take care for you care bye you.

00:38:55
Speaker 1: It's back at the away end. Daniel, hey, man, I really enjoyed that conversation. I didn't believe in my heart of hearts that Simon Cooper was going to squeeze in Proust's mat aligned, but I was wrong.

00:39:07
Speaker 2: Well, he's clearly been studying the pod, so he knows the tone, the tone of our conversations. Man, it really is a tremendous book. It was super fun to read. My son Eliseo, whom you know, has been bugging me to finish so that I could so that he can read it. And I really love the I don't know if you had a favorite section, but his we didn't talk too much about the Brazil World Cup. I thought that section was great and kind of like everything leads up to the cataclysm of the seven to one in Germany. He has all these really really lovely anecdotes. It's a it's a fun and fast read.

00:39:48
Speaker 1: I gotta say, yeah, my favorite was the South Africa World Cup section, just because the because I'm so interested in how we come to identify with the nation, you know, how we come to identify, like how national identity works in complicated cases. You know where you're You may be born in Uganda to South African parents and moved to the Netherlands and moved to England and moved to the United States, and you know what is what is your identity then? Or if you're you know, a curs How player of who grew up in the Netherlands but of you know, curse Ou descent, what is your connection to Cursow and what does it mean to represent that country? Right? Like I think I always think back to that line from the nineteen thirty World Cup where the Uruguayan coach said you are the motherland.

00:40:36
Speaker 3: HM hmm.

00:40:37
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's the other thing that he talks a lot about. In the South African World Cup, the use of the tournament as nation building for this brand new mortiracial country they were they were trying to to solidify. And then even in France, you know, the political use of the multi racial French team to kind of create this vision of a of a multiethnic France that previously hadn't existed around a sport that was, as he was describing, kind of ignored by the Parisian elites until they win. You know, I find all that's super fascinating.

00:41:13
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it's really it's interesting to think about also, the idea that winning breeds closeness and positivity rather than the other way around. I don't know is that your experience of I mean, I know that you've never played it at an elite level. I don't want to pretend otherwise, but is that your experience that like part of what builds the team? Is it success? Does success come from the team being closer? Does the team being close come from success? You know?

00:41:47
Speaker 3: You know what?

00:41:47
Speaker 2: It reminded me of that thing about how you know, old people fall and break their hips and then and a doctor told me that actually they break their hip and then they fall because at a certain age, your hips are just like the are just very brittle, and you they just you know. So it's actually the other way around. It's not that you trip and break your hip.

00:42:06
Speaker 1: It's that your hit so you break your hip and then you fall over because it hurts.

00:42:10
Speaker 2: So that's why I was thinking of and I got distracted by the image of being old and following and breaking my hip.

00:42:16
Speaker 1: It's coming for us, man.

00:42:17
Speaker 2: I think he's probably right. I think it's probably right. I think that, you know, nothing succeeds like success, and you know, in some ways, winning is a collective delusion. You know, you start to believe, and then your team starts to believe, and then something either pierces the bubble or you know, var intervenes and talks off a goal, and then you start to believe you could you could actually win the thing, you know, and that that creates team spirit. It is funny that way. I mean, it's not.

00:42:45
Speaker 1: That's not just true for sports. That's true of all forms of confidence, right, Like it's true of writerly confidence as well, which you have to have in order to write well. You have to you have to buy into the delusion that you're not the worst writer in the world. And confidence is so fragile and weird because when you have it, it feels natural and inevitable, and when you don't have it, it also feels natural and inevitable that you would never have it again.

00:43:13
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally, totally yeah. And it's also funny how how many times you can do something and still not believe that you could actually do it again.

00:43:26
Speaker 1: You know, that's certainly true for writing books. I mean, every time I write a book, I'm like, there's no way I can do this.

00:43:31
Speaker 2: No, no, for sure. And I've given this kind of glib line before, which I sort of believe in that if a book doesn't feel impossible, like what's the point of writing it, what's the point of trying? You know, it's supposed to feel impossible, you know. I do think that's a debilitating way to, you know, earn a living, like psychologically debilitating, Like I don't feel like other jobs.

00:43:55
Speaker 1: You go to work and.

00:43:56
Speaker 2: You're like, it's impossible, this is impossible.

00:43:58
Speaker 1: I'm going to die.

00:43:59
Speaker 2: I'll never be able to do this.

00:44:01
Speaker 3: Ye know.

00:44:02
Speaker 2: Other people sort of like enter their workplaces with a sense of their own competence that allows them to, like, you know, go through the work day without multiple emotional crises. But writers, I think good ones at least are crippled by self doubt to the point that you know, it's a miracle they're able to clock out at the end of the day.

00:44:21
Speaker 1: I think it's really important to be crippled by self doubt. I think that's an important part of it to be good. That's why I found my way into writing rather than professional football, because there, if you're crippled by self doubt, you're in big trouble.

00:44:35
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:44:36
Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure.

00:44:38
Speaker 1: That was the main thing standing between me and a life a life in football. Yeah.

00:44:43
Speaker 2: Yeah, you were like, I'm going to embrace this crippling self doubt and make a career out of it.

00:44:47
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, I'm going to turn it into a job. And it's worked out well for me. I've I've managed to be able to hold onto that crippling self doubt well into my forties. Yeah.

00:44:56
Speaker 3: It's good.

00:44:57
Speaker 2: You can put that at the top of your resume and sort of the skills crippling self doubt monetizable crippling self doubt.

00:45:06
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's a great thing. Yeah, go for YouTubers too.

00:45:11
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:45:12
Speaker 2: Uh, as usual, we veered away from football in this episode. Uh, I just want to say how funny it was to speak with Simon. We're down, we're getting close to the World Cup now very close, like it's it's happening. And I just want to briefly tell you one thing that it's not a story. This is we're outside of the regular. But yesterday we went to a family friend's house to trade paninie stickers. And it was remarkable because his family friend, he's a little bit older. He walked with a cane and it was me and my wife and my mother in law and another uncle of Carolina's and and uh, you know, we're all there drinking coffee and we sit around the table and to watch this man sort of become a kid, like speaking the same language as a e sale, the same words, the same the same sort of like, oh I got an imbappe, I got this, you know, like I'll trade you this for that, you know, and then you know, kind of going through the book and it was exactly what Simon was talking about. It was this this kind of child childish wonder and for this entirely and absurdly pointless exercise of collecting stickers of players. In fact, there's many stickers of players who are definitely not going to be at the World Cup, either because they won't be selected or because they're injured and won't even be there, you know, right. But you know, I got a Rodrigo sticker and I was like, oh, you know, he's good, you know, or he.

00:46:32
Speaker 1: Was yeah, yeah, yeah, that's cool because he's good.

00:46:35
Speaker 2: Yeah, And it was a beautiful It was really.

00:46:38
Speaker 1: Beautiful, and you feel like a kid collecting baseball cards again. And it goes across all the divides, right, all the divides of age and gender and any other divide that you can imagine, and you're all just collecting stickers. It's magic that this, this, this wonderful thing about the World Cup, these Panini stickers that have been around for decades. That Panini has lost the battle to hold on to this and FIFA has given the sticker license to another company starting in twenty thirty. So, you know, thanks FIFA. That's awful news. John.

00:47:22
Speaker 2: You could have just held that until the end of the tournament.

00:47:25
Speaker 1: That's brutal.

00:47:26
Speaker 2: Let me say this, you know, here in Colombia, in Boda like Eliso school has a club just for like after school club meetup for stickiers for trades. Yeah, he goes to a chess club on Saturday mornings and after chess club there's a pennini meetup to trade. There are plazas all over town where people gather just to trade panninis. It's a it's it's it's It's one of those rituals that I think it might be my favorite, almost my favorite part of the tournament because it's really sort of making that you said that, I talk a lot about the tournament, get excited about it, and and it reminds me one thing that Simon said that I think is worth ending on, which is FIFA is a terrible organization, but even they can't ruin the sport. Even FIFA can't ruin the World Cup, although they seem to be trying really hard, they can't.

00:48:14
Speaker 1: Nobody can. Nobody can because ultimately it's ours.

00:48:18
Speaker 2: Yeah, don fun to talk to you as always.

00:48:21
Speaker 3: Man.

00:48:22
Speaker 2: We'll see you next week, and of course, if you have any emails, we're planning another mailbag episode, so please drop us a line at away nPOD at gmail dot com.

00:48:30
Speaker 1: See next week. I see you next week,