The Sport of Kings

This past Tuesday FIFA president Gianni Infantino shocked the world by proposing to sell off partial rights to the World Cup to private investors, creating a $20 billion company to run the tournament. It was only slightly more shocking that the probable head of the investment group would be a member of Trump’s extended family, Jared Kushner’s brother.

Back in January I blogged about the concept of neo-royalism, which was receiving a lot of discussion at that time. This concept comes from a couple of international relations scholars, Stacie E. Goddard and Abraham Newman. To summarize the concept, it is generally understood that the liberal international order is in decline. To replace it, many think that the system is falling back to what came beforehand, a “Westphalian great power system”, with each state looking out for its own interests. Goddard and Newman propose instead we are transitioning to an older analogue that they term “neo-royalism”, a system that “centers on ruling cliques, networks of political, capital, and military elites devoted to individual sovereigns, seeking to generate durable material and status hierarchies based on the extraction of financial and cultural tributes.”.

Infantino’s actions fit the neo-royalist model to a T. Infantino is trying to enter into the world of ruling cliques and be on top of his own network of tributes. He is attempting to buy agreement on the private investment plan by promising each of the 211 national football associations a one-time payment of $40 million if they vote for it. He has been ingratiating himself with Trump for a while —- this is surely the reason for presenting Trump with the “FIFA Peace Prize”. He frequently interacts with the Middle Eastern oil monarchs —- hence the 2022 Qatar World Cup and the upcoming World Cup in Saudi Arabia in 2034 —- and yesterday he met with King Mohammed VI of Morocco. Infantino is also trying to set himself up to be a power broker after his term as FIFA president ends —- he would be deeply involved with this investment group.

It is now clear that Infantino has been acting on his own accord, and the private investment proposal did not come from some upper-level FIFA cabal. Miguel Delaney writing for The Independent on Thursday reported that there are claims that Infantino’s inner circle did not even know about it, with one advisor describing this as Infantino “going rogue”. Today it was reported that FIFA’s chief operating officer said that staff were “deceived” over the project and that it has been the action of one person.

Fortunately, it looks like Infantino has overreached. The European confederation UEFA quickly opposed the proposal and in an emergency meeting on Thursday they decided that UEFA members would boycott any and all FIFA competitions until the proposal is off the table. CONCACAF (the North and Central American confederation) and AFC (the Asian confederation) have also rejected the proposal. With nations from those three confederations rejecting it, the proposal will not have the votes to pass.

Would such a network centered around Infantino and the investors be big enough to be seen as a neo-royalist power? FIFA does not generate tech giant-sized revenue but there is a lot of money flowing through it — one article says it received revenue of $13 billion over the 2023-2026 World Cup cycle. And football is the most popular sport on the planet, with the World Cup being the biggest single sporting event. This cultural capital is a tempting resource for the ruling elite.

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Update, 6:15 PM PDT 31 July 2026. Infantino has scrapped the proposal. The growing backlash may yet be large enough to sink his presidency.

Soccer Cultures of the United States

I recently watched a video on How can MLS become an elite league?. The discussion touched on the different soccer cultures in the United States. One of the discussants, Paul Tenorio, always responds to the question of “Will soccer make it in America?” with the assertion that soccer has made it in America, it is just very bifurcated, with many islands of soccer interest. This got me to try to enumerate the various soccer cultures in the United States. Researching this took me to some marketing literature which was helpful, but marketing clusters aren’t quite the same thing as cultures, which I will not very rigorously define as nexuses of activity and knowledge. Anyway, here’s my list. People can and often are members of several of these.

• Heritage soccer fans. These are subdivided into Latin American heritage soccer fans and European heritage soccer fans. These are people who grew up in environments where soccer was a dominant sport and they picked up their fandom from family, friends, or local traditions.
• World culture sponges. These are sports followers who at some point learn that soccer is the global game and start to absorb all that culture — the famous players, the teams, the geography, the history.
• Youth soccer culture. This is subdivided into children’s recreational soccer and elite youth club soccer. This includes both the youth participants and the parents who are organizing their activities.
• College soccer culture. These include both the players on college teams as well as the students and community members who go to their games.
• Local fandoms. These are people that get drawn into the fanbase for a nearby team. Think Portland Timbers or Seattle Sounders.
• Women’s soccer fans. These are people who are drawn to the dominance of US women’s soccer internationally and at the league level and appreciate its importance to youth and college women’s sports.
• Gen Z soccer fans. They tend to learn about soccer through global social media and video games (e.g. EA Sports) and often are fans of charismatic players rather than of teams.
• Multi-sports soccer fans. They follow lots of American sports but have been drawn into soccer because of events like the arrival of Lionel Messi at Inter Miami in 2023 and now the 2026 World Cup.
• Long-time American soccer inhabitants. People for whom soccer has been huge in the course of their life. They often have played or play it at an amateur or professional level, and keenly track the development of the USMNT, USWNT, MLS, NWSL, USL, and so on.

Campeones

It has been a long five weeks of watching World Cup football, but PIca and I are very happy with the final result, Spain winning the tournament with a 1-0 victory over Argentina in extra time. It was a dire final match — Spain dominated possession both sides of the pitch and Argentina falling back on their trademark dirty play. This did not help them however: by the end of regulation they had no shots either on or off goal. We were relieved when Ferran Torres finally got a goal for Spain in the 106th minute, though feared this would inspire Argentina to come back in a final flurry of action as they did against Egypt or England. But Spain held on.

The final was reminiscent of Spain’s victory in the 2010 World Cup final over the Netherlands, with Spain having a beautifully precise passing game and the Netherlands resorting to brutish fouling. Unlike Argentina, the Netherlands did manage to get some shots on goal in that game. Spain won in extra time 1-0 in that match as well.

(I was happy to read that the Netherlands were given the Fair Play Award in this year’s tournament. This is given to the team with the best disciplinary record that reaches the knockout rounds. The Netherlands only received three yellow cards all tournament. It looks like they have redeemed themselves, and I don’t mind rooting for the Oranje again. Their nation has been so important for how football developed, and the Spanish system directly evolved out of what the Dutch built in the 1970s.)

This was a tournament where the big stars predictably got all the hype — Lionel Messi, Kylian Mbappé, Erling Haaland, Jude Bellingham — but it was won by a group that played incredibly well together as a team. Spain’s biggest star, Lamine Yamal, did not dazzle but he absolutely contributed to their victory. He is only 19, and has a lot of time to grow as a player.

It has been thirty-two years since the World Cup was last in this country, and soccer has grown tremendously in the United States since then. I am hopeful this World Cup will mark another upward inflection point in the growth of the game here.

I’m looking forward to the Women’s World Cup in Brazil in 2027! Spain won the Women’s World Cup in 2023, so for the first time in history, the same country holds both the men’s and women’s titles.

This or Aquel

As the World Cup draws to a close, and as the hullabaloo around FIFA corruption doesn’t, I thought I’d go into a bit more detail about the broadcasting options available (legally) here in the United States. Fox bought the rights to broadcast the World Cup in English and hired a number of commentators for each match along with three former players (Thierry Henry, Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Alexi Lalas) for half-time and full time commentary. Several of the match commentators are Brits but many are American and they seem to have a fixation with statistics which are mostly meaningless: does it matter how many times England has made it to the quarter-finals vs. the semi-finals since 1966, in terms of predicting their performance in any given match at the World Cup in 2026? Of course not. Different players, different conditions, different coach, different. Apples and oranges. Football is just not a game of statistics, it’s more of akin to chess. But the commentators are paid to say stuff during the match and it’s so inane in English that I’ve avoided watching the Fox coverage as much as possible.

Which is where Telemundo comes in. These guys are PASSIONATE about football. They’re also knowledgeable, the kind of deep knowledge acquired by having kicked a ball about on dirt playgrounds as kids in Cali or Tucumán or San Luis Potosí and somehow having been noticed and gone on to play the sport professionally and sometimes even internationally. When they call the game, you sense they’re in there with the players. They do drop some statistics occasionally but never gratuitously. As my German friend put it, it’s more like radio commentary than TV. But lots of people who don’t even speak Spanish prefer the energy of the Telemundo coverage. Several Switzerland supporters, who’d watched the England-Norway match on Fox at a bar earlier in the day, came over to the Upper Crust café to watch Switzerland-Argentina in Spanish.

I did try to use a VPN to watch the Spanish matches on Spanish TV and was able to do so a couple of times but coverage was erratic. Telemundo has worked for me. I can’t believe Americans put up with the inanity of the Fox soccer commentary, but it’s what there is. It’s a metaphor for the state of the sport here. (Baseball commentary in the U.S. is exceptionally high on both radio and television; it’s not like it’s impossible for it to happen in soccer.)

Edited to add, 14 July 2026: Apparently 20% of the people watching the World Cup on Telemundo have English as their first language, much to the consternation of Fox.

On Local Fandom

We have eight days left in the World Cup, and already I am wondering about being bereft of football once it ends. What will I follow to get my footie fix? The end of summer is when professional clubs in many leagues start their season again — should I adopt a club? I did try that after the 2010 World Cup and started casually following Tottenham Hotspur. At the time they were consistently a 5th or 6th place side in the Premier League; since then they’ve gone through many managers (including Mauricio Pochettino, whose future as head coach of the U.S. Men’s National Team is under debate right now) and just had their worst season in a long while, barely escaping relegation.

I am thinking now that trying to be a fan of a side in a top-flight far-off league is just not a good strategy. I don’t have attachments to the places where these sides are located. (Our Davis sketching buddy Pete Scully is a huge Tottenham fan, but that is because he grew up in North London.) What if I find a local team to support? Looking into this matter has just led me into all the swirling discussion and debate over the future of soccer in the United States.

The first team that came to mind was Sacramento Republic FC. They have been around since 2012. I mention this to Pica; she says something about being interested in women’s footie. Well, there’s Bay FC, which was founded in 2023 and plays in the National Women’s Soccer League, the top women’s league in the country. But their stadium is in San Jose, which is too far for me to consider it local. (The identical logic applies to the MLS (Major League Soccer) team the San Jose Earthquakes who play in the same stadium).

I then discover the California Storm. How did I not know about the California Storm? They are an amateur women’s team that play in the Women’s Premier Soccer League. The WPSL was founded in 1998 and is the largest women’s soccer league in the world, with 150 or so teams in it. The California Storm are the winningest team in the league both in terms of number of championships and overall win-loss record. They are based in Davis, California.

But they are not the only WPSL side in Davis. There is also FC Davis. FC Davis is a semi-pro soccer club in Davis founded in 2017 with both men’s and women’s sides. Their founder in 2018 posted a fascinating account of FC Davis came to be. From its introduction:

“Start-up soccer” is a concept gaining momentum around the country as a growing number of communities are looking to break from the current mold of US Soccer and build a more intimate and organic soccer experience in their hometowns.

Due to the constraints of the US soccer pyramid (no promotion/relegation), you don’t start a semi-pro team for money or notoriety. You do it to create a vehicle for helping thousands of players in your community and to provide soccer crazy fans in your local area a team they can call their own.

The article is extremely critical of MLS and its closed system without promotion/relegation. MLS teams only exist where billionaires decide the market is big enough for them.

(Sidenote: Pete Scully has a couple of nicely illustrated blog posts about FC Davis.)

Returning to Sac Republic FC, it turns out they sit at the cusp of the debate over what direction soccer in the United States will go. They play in the USL (United Soccer League) where they have been since they were founded. The intention was that they would build a fan base and join the MLS as an expansion team. This almost came to fruition with Sac Republic FC signing an agreement to join MLS in October 2019, but 16 months later their main investor gets cold feet during the middle of the pandemic and pulls out of the agreement.

But this hasn’t deterred Sac Republic FC from continuing to build their team. They are constructing a new stadium close to downtown, and in November 2024 the Wilton Rancheria located in southern Sacramento County became the majority owner of the team, becoming the first Native American Nation to hold a majority interest in a men’s pro sports team. Meanwhile USL has their own expansion plans, and intends to start a three-tiered promotion/relegation system in 2027.

I very much like the notion of organic bottom-up growth of local teams and regional competition, which is how fandom works across most of the world. Teams remained tied to their community. To take an English example, it is virtually impossible to imagine the Bolton Wanderers up and leaving for Sheffield because they got a better stadium deal there. Relocations happen with major sports franchises in the United States with regularity, which as an East Bay native is something I am bitter about. Oakland no longer has a top-tier professional sports team, with the Oakland Raiders (football) leaving in 2019 and the Oakland Athletics (baseball) leaving in 2024. But they now have a USL team, the Oakland Roots, founded in 2018. The Oakland Roots play Sac Republic FC regularly.

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Addendum. We watched the England-Norway match today over at the Upper Crust Bakery together with a pretty large crowd. Seated in front of us was an older gentleman wearing an Oakland Roots t-shirt.

Stylist to the Stars

My niece’s ex-boyfriend’s mother was a hair stylist, who said that the major trends in men’s hairstyles are always set by futbolistas. This makes sense: these people have money, sometimes a great deal of it, and an image to project well beyond the confines of a football pitch. Many if not most have Instagram accounts. The fact that football is international with men of all races playing the sport, who often need a new look every season — has brought us to this World Cup, where a short-back-and-sides has evolved into a reverse widow’s peak for white and brown men and breathtakingly sculpted cuts and braids for African and Afro-Caribbean players.

My sister drew my attention to this article about a London hair stylist who has been traveling with the England team but who knows absolutely nothing about football. Her first ever match was seeing England play Mexico at the Azteca last weekend. (She left before the end because it was too loud and drinks were getting spilled all over the place.) Her simplicity is delightful: she asked Jordan Henderson to help her with her bags because she didn’t know he was a player. Nor did she know Lamine Yamal was, but she had a nice time hanging out with his mum…

(Spain won today. It was a good match against a worthy opponent. Tomorrow, England face Norway and Argentina face Switzerland. This will all be over soon.)

The Ire of the World

I know it’s been said elsewhere, but as soon as I heard about Trump’s interference in the FIFA suspension of Balogun’s red card, I felt Pochettino should just bench him and kill the controversy. After all, the US men’s team had shown it could win without him; why not do it again?

Instead, this talented striker played today (ineffectively) against a well-organized Belgian team that had taken the bit in its teeth to fight back against the injustice of the world’s biggest bully bending the world’s most corrupt organization to his clueless will. The U.S. team fell apart, feeling the antipathy of millions around the globe, which isn’t really fair — I mean it’s not something they asked for, after all — but it felt like setting the football world to rights.

If Belgium plays like this against Spain as it played this morning, I fear for La Roja, but there are many hours between now and Friday. Reset the counter.

Here We Go

So not only are we now close to the round of 16 in the World Cup, the Tour de France started today with a team time trial in and around Barcelona. They’ve changed the rules a bit, so now it’s not the fourth cyclist to cross the finish line but the first in each team to set the time. Jonas Vingegaard is now in yellow; not sure how long he’ll keep it.

England-Mexico tomorrow. I think it will be very tough for England, even if they don’t in their own way as usual, because of the altitude and the home crowd. We’ll see.

Modelling the World Cup

I watched a YouTube video a couple days ago about developing a probabilistic model on who would win the World Cup. This video was from before the World Cup started, and the modelers have been updating their predictions as the tournament progresses. Right now, as we are about to start the Group of 16 matches, the model gives Spain a 23.6% chance of winning the tournament, and Argentina a 22.9% of winning it all.

One of the principles the modelers point out is that there is no canonical way to build these models. Different models will have different percent likelihoods right now, though I doubt anyone is giving Canada a higher chance to win the tournament right now than Spain. The World Cup is especially difficult to model, because matches between different national teams are few and far between, especially when they are in different football confederations. Take an example from Group L in our 2026 edition of the World Cup, the teams Ghana and Panama. These two teams had never played each other before. Moreover, there are few matches between the confederation Panama is in (CONCACAF) and the confederation Ghana is in (CAF); the network of matches connecting teams Panama with teams Ghana has played is pretty sparse. What is the probability Ghana wins the group match between the two teams, Panama wins the match, or there is a draw? (Ghana ended up winning the match with Panama 1-0 by scoring in the 95th minute.)

The world of football data analytics is vast but patchy at the same time. It is a global game, and consistency in global data does not exist. It is all a bit intimidating.

Where to Watch

One of the cool (and difficult) things about the World Cup this year is that it’s basically taking place in our time zone, even during my normal waking hours. This means I’ve seen a lot of matches and, let’s be honest, it’s too much. Many of them are at home on Telemundo, which is showing all matches in Spanish through Peacock and which has eschewed advertising during the commercial breaks, also known as Hydration Breaks which get booed loudly at every match and which Fox mutes and then jumps to a commercial.

But sometimes I want to be around people other than Numenius and the cats, and watching Spain win today was no exception. I took myself over to the Upper Crust Bakery where they are showing all the matches live during their opening hours (so no Mondays) and ran into some familiar faces. Retired university professors, people taking early or late lunch breaks, that kind of thing. (FIFA’s level of corruption extends to its contract with Fox, where it is stipulated that Gianni Infantino be shown at every match, where he is absorbed by the match and not looking at his phone or picking his nose, I learned today; one of my Upper Crust compadres compared him to a Bond villain; I retorted that he looks more like an Austin Powers one.) There are at least ten venues in town regularly showing matches as well as the huge space on G Street where you bring your own chair — apparently there were about 600 people yesterday to watch the USA vs. Bosnia-Herzegovina fixture. It’s a world party.

I’ve mentioned my personal rules with regard to who I support. Mexico-England on Sunday is going to be a very tough one for me — I think Mexico will win (ecstatic home crowd plus altitude give it the equivalent of two extra players) and I’d like to support them (they’ve never won it) but if England somehow pulls it out I won’t be distraught. There. I’ve said it.