In the nearly centurylong history of soccer’s greatest spectacle, the World Cup has survived dictators, juntas, and a menagerie of autocrats who sought to exploit the tournament for their own glorification. Benito Mussolini turned the 1934 tournament in Italy into a fascist pageant. Argentina’s military rulers in 1978 deployed it as a propaganda weapon even as they were disappearing thousands of their own citizens. Vladimir Putin used the 2018 event to project an image of normalcy in Russia while his forces propped up a murderous regime in Syria.
Jonathan Wilson’s magnificent new history, The Power and the Glory, chronicles all of this and more with the meticulous research and elegant prose that have made him, as World Cup Fever author Simon Kuper puts it, the writer through whom “so much of what we know of football’s history we know.” This is the first serious English-language history of the World Cup since Brian Glanville’s Story of the World Cup, versions of which first came out in the 1970s, and it has arrived just in time for this year’s tournament.
In the nearly centurylong history of soccer’s greatest spectacle, the World Cup has survived dictators, juntas, and a menagerie of autocrats who sought to exploit the tournament for their own glorification. Benito Mussolini turned the 1934 tournament in Italy into a fascist pageant. Argentina’s military rulers in 1978 deployed it as a propaganda weapon even as they were disappearing thousands of their own citizens. Vladimir Putin used the 2018 event to project an image of normalcy in Russia while his forces propped up a murderous regime in Syria.
Jonathan Wilson’s magnificent new history, The Power and the Glory, chronicles all of this and more with the meticulous research and elegant prose that have made him, as World Cup Fever author Simon Kuper puts it, the writer through whom “so much of what we know of football’s history we know.” This is the first serious English-language history of the World Cup since Brian Glanville’s Story of the World Cup, versions of which first came out in the 1970s, and it has arrived just in time for this year’s tournament.
Wilson’s thesis is straightforward: From its inception in 1930, “the World Cup has been a vehicle for far more than soccer.” Wilson takes us through every tournament, showing what each host reveals about itself during the course of the games. We learn how West Germany’s triumph in 1954 “reintegrated” the country “into the global community” after World War II; how the so-called Soccer War of 1969 ignited tensions between El Salvador and Honduras that had been “piling up for years”; and how Croatia’s semifinal run in 1998 imbued the young nation with a newfound sense of confidence.
The Power and the Glory: The History of the World Cup, Jonathan Wilson, Bold Type Books, 576 pp., $35, October 2025
The book is populated with vivid characters, from the visionary idealist Jules Rimet (FIFA’s longest-serving president) to the rogues’ gallery of FIFA heads who followed. There is the Brazilian João Havelange, “the son of an arms dealer,” under whose watch “a certain financial innocence was lost.” And there is Sepp Blatter, whose reign ended in disgrace after the 2015 arrests at the Baur au Lac hotel in Zurich. Wilson is unsparing in his contempt for the corruption and mismanagement that has plagued FIFA, from the brown envelopes of the Havelange era to the more sophisticated forms of influence-peddling that secured Qatar’s 2022 bid.
But Wilson also understands that for all the venality of its organizers, the World Cup retains an extraordinary hold on the global imagination. FIFA claims 1.4 billion people watched the 2022 final. “[E]ven if the precise figure can be questioned,” Wilson notes, “it is the most-watched event in the world.” The book celebrates the moments of transcendence that have kept fans coming back: Pelé’s emergence as a 17-year-old prodigy in 1958, Diego Maradona’s revenge of the gaucho in a quarter-final game against England in 1986, Brazil’s joyous 1970 campaign that Wilson argues was “an expression of soccer in its most beautiful form.”
Time and again, the players have rescued the tournament from the disgraceful behavior of its hosts. The beauty on the pitch has redeemed the ugliness in the boardrooms and on the podiums. This is the through line that gives Wilson’s narrative its moral architecture.
Which brings us to 2026, and to the unique challenge facing soccer’s greatest show. Every autocrat who has previously exploited the World Cup—Mussolini, Argentina’s generals, Putin—had at least some genuine interest in the sport. They understood soccer’s power because they felt its pull themselves. They wanted to be associated with victory because they grasped what victory meant to their people.
U.S. President Donald Trump places the FIFA Peace Prize around his neck after receiving it from FIFA President Gianni Infantino at the World Cup draw at the Kennedy Center in Washington on Dec. 5, 2025. Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
Donald Trump is something altogether different. He has demonstrated no genuine feeling for the sport or its traditions. What he has is an inexhaustible appetite for attention, a compulsion to insert himself into any spectacle that draws eyeballs. He is, in this sense, less Mussolini than the man known online as Salt Bae—the celebrity chef who crashed Argentina’s celebration after the 2022 cup final in Doha, pestering Lionel Messi for photos and pawing at the trophy while the actual champions tried to enjoy their moment.
The footage from Doha was excruciatingly awkward: Messi clearly trying to escape Salt Bae’s clutches, players’ faces registering their annoyance at this interloper who had contributed nothing to their triumph but demanded to share in its glory. It was, everyone agreed, a perfect encapsulation of the social-media age’s confusion of proximity with achievement.
Chef Salt Bae (center, in suit) tries to take a selfie with Argentina’s Lionel Messi after the World Cup final in Lusail, Qatar, on Dec. 18, 2022. Matthias Hangst/Getty Images
Now imagine that dynamic scaled up to the level of a head of state, with all the resources of the U.S. government at his disposal. That is what soccer faces in 2026.
We have already had a preview. In December, FIFA president Gianni Infantino bestowed upon Trump the inaugural FIFA Peace Prize—an award that did not exist until Infantino invented it, apparently as a consolation prize after Trump failed to win the Nobel. The ceremony was staggering in its sycophancy: Infantino lauded Trump’s “unwavering commitment to advancing peace and unity” less than 24 hours after the Trump administration had conducted another deadly airstrike in the Caribbean.
In Infantino, the sport has found a leader of remarkable invertebracy. He has not merely accommodated Trump; he has debased himself and his organization in pursuit of Trump’s favor. He gave Trump a replica of the Club World Cup trophy to display in the Oval Office. He stayed on the podium with Trump after the Club World Cup final, letting the U.S. president bask in the fireworks alongside the actual winners. He reportedly spent more face-to-face time with Trump in 2025 than any world leader.
Wilson’s book reminds us that FIFA has always been an organization “rooted in expediency.” But even by the standards of Havelange and Blatter, Infantino’s courtship of Trump represents a new low. The men who ran FIFA in the past may have been corrupt, but they at least maintained the pretense of institutional dignity. Infantino has traded that dignity for access and attention.
The 2026 tournament will be played against a backdrop of Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, blistering heat made worse by climate change, and a host whose leader will treat every match as an opportunity for self-promotion. Fans from some countries are unable to attend because of visa restrictions. Others may stay away out of choice, deterred by the political toxicity of Trump’s United States.
Messi celebrates after Argentina’s victory over France in Lusail on Dec. 18, 2022. David Ramos/FIFA via Getty Images
And yet, if Wilson’s history teaches us anything, it is that the players will find a way to redeem the tournament. They always have. The magic of Messi’s Argentina in Qatar survived both the Qatari regime’s human rights abuses and Salt Bae’s attention seeking. In 1978, the magical Argentine players Mario Kempes and Osvaldo Ardiles overshadowed the violent dictator of their country, Jorge Rafael Videla—at least for 90 minutes at a time.
In 2026, the players will carry an even greater burden than usual. They will have to compete not merely against their opponents on the pitch but against the circus of ego and spectacle that Trump will inevitably create around them. They will have to remind us why we fell in love with this game in the first place—and why it matters more than the charlatans who seek to exploit it.
Wilson ends his book with a note of battered optimism. The World Cup “survived Mussolini and the Argentinian junta, it survived British indifference and João Havelange, it survived the scandals of Russia and Qatar, and it will survive also Mohammed bin Salman and Gianni Infantino.”
One hopes he is right—and that the beautiful game will again prove more durable than the grotesque ambitions of the men who would claim it as their own.
