World Cup history is awash with politics — and politicians — intruding on the soccer.
For almost a century, leaders ranging from Italian dictator Benito Mussolini to Argentine military junta boss Jorge Videla to French President Jacques Chirac have sought to score political points from the tournament.
This year’s competition is also not the first to be overshadowed by conflict. North Korea tried to upstage the event in 2002 with a bloody naval assault on South Korea, and the Falklands War between Britain and Argentina loomed over the 1982 World Cup.
In 1934, Mussolini viewed a World Cup victory as a way to symbolize Italian might. Brazilian dictator Emílio Médici said that the 1970 triumph was testament to his country’s greatness. Memories of the Falklands provided fraught context to England’s clash with Argentina in 1986, one of the most famous games in the tournament’s history.
In more recent times, Chirac cast himself as a big fan of the all-conquering, racially diverse French national team in 1998. Vladimir Putin exploited the 2018 tournament to project Russian soft power, while Gulf petromonarchy Qatar used the 2022 edition as part of a major nation-building project.
And this year, it’s the the politics of MAGA — an ongoing foreign war and domestic immigration crackdown — that are coming back to bite soccer’s governing body FIFA.