The correct way of following this World Cup is to first recognise that its principal host, the United States of America, is a disordered, flailing, naked behemoth and the tournament is a small, inadequate fig leaf.

To report on the World Cup as if it isn’t being played in a politically deranged country whose president stages cage matches in the White House, has kidnapped Venezuela’s president, has repeatedly attacked Iran without any military provocation, and plunged the world into an existential crisis is a failure of the imagination, part willed, part involuntary.

Ask yourself why Russia hasn’t sent a team. It is not because it didn’t qualify; Russia was barred from participating because of its war on Ukraine. Since we’re talking about Russia, think of the 1980 Moscow Olympics boycotted by the US, China, Japan, West Germany, Egypt and many other countries because the Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan the previous year.

And yet we have the US, currently engaged in a ‘hot’ war with Iran, which it has attacked twice in the past year in concert with Israel, hosting the World Cup along with Canada and Mexico. The US is also the arch enabler of the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians on the West Bank. Even if we allow for the fact that the West thinks of Palestine as an imaginary place dreamt up by feverish radicals, it is striking that the World Cup is being co-hosted by Canada, a country that Donald Trump has repeatedly declared he wants to annex and turn into America’s 51st state. And we can be certain that if Denmark had qualified for the Cup, its team would have shown up in spite of Trump’s declared intention of annexing Greenland. Trump has repeatedly threatened to send American forces into Mexico, the Cup’s other North American host, to sort out its drug cartels.

The reason why the world’s media have persuaded themselves that this World Cup is happening in a normal place is that the US has only recently slipped from its position as the ruler of a unipolar world. The US has been so central to the geopolitical imagination of Western countries (which still make the intellectual weather) that to recognise the US for what it is now, a violent, decadent, White-supremacist state run for the benefit of ubermensch tech tycoons by an orange Nero, would undo their sense of self.

Germany or Holland would never dream of boycotting an event in the US if ICE were killing citizens in American cities or US soldiers were blowing up boats in the Caribbean or assassinating the leaders of a sovereign state, or blockading Cuba, for two reasons. First, they are the US’s military clients. Their geopolitics is entirely vicarious; they wear the US like an exoskeleton.

The second reason is even more pressing: like Trump and J.D. Vance, they see Europe as a White redoubt besieged by off-White immigrants who have to be stopped by any means possible. Among Giorgia Meloni, Friedrich Merz and Shabana Mahmood, there is no basic disagreement that the migrant populations whose children populate their football teams were a mistake, a mistake which needs to be undone. European countries may not reach for the performative cruelty of Alligator Alcatraz as a first resort, but at the level of state policy, what Trump and Elon Musk think today, Europe will think tomorrow.

It’s worth remembering that FIFA, world football’s legendarily corrupt governing body, is dominated by Europe. FIFA allowed Israel to participate in the qualifying cycle in spite of Gaza and had it qualified, it would, unlike Russia, have played the World Cup. The unctuous Gianni Infantino has fluttered about Trump like a flunky, offering up the World Cup like a shiny toy for the president’s pleasure. Trump will confer the trophy on the winner.

World Cup football is, by general consensus, not the highest form of the game. Paris St-Germain, Barcelona and Arsenal would handily beat every national team in this competition. The World Cup exists to supercharge football with nationalist feeling. Sometimes this conjunction produces sublime, larger-than-life football, especially when Argentina or Brazil is involved. More generally, World Cup football’s special spark is generated by players playing as citizens, not mercenaries (unless, of course, the team in question is Qatar).

In that context, it’s useful to recognise that the present edition of the tournament is co-hosted by a rogue state, which has violently infringed upon the sovereignty of other nation states, sanctioned ethnic cleansing and slaughter, and continues to do so through the duration of the competition. This is not to say that there aren’t great swathes of people in the US who disapprove of their state’s actions and policies. There are. It is to say, though, that to watch the football without acknowledging its context is to be mindlessly complicit in Trump and Infantino’s decadent circus.

To the standard liberal objection about keeping politics and sport apart, there is a simple answer: nation-state rivalries in sport or elsewhere are political by definition. The US government has set out to systematically harass the Iranian team for purely political reasons. The department of homeland security along with the state department has joined hands to place restrictions on the Iranian team’s travel into the US for its matches, has denied visas to its back-up staff, has forced them to relocate to Tijuana, Mexico. Iran is the only team that can’t rest and recuperate after a match because Trump’s minions insist that they fly out of the US within hours of the full-time whistle. This calculated discrimination violates a host nation’s basic commitment to impartiality — it’s the behaviour of a vindictive, lawless state.

There is something appropriate about the US hosting the World Cup at this moment in its late imperial history. Trump is our decadent Roman emperor out of Central Casting. This tournament is a hokey Hollywood movie, an interminable take on Gladiator. In the movie, the emperor is called Commodus; there’s no improving on that name. Every
football stadium in America is Trump’s arena. Unlike the movie, he’s unlikely to take to the field, so he can’t lose; all of the action is for his greater glory. The only way he loses is if Iran wins and that’s not going to happen; at the time of writing it isn’t clear if Iran will make it to the knock-out round.

When it’s over, though, they should play Gladiator’s theme on a loop. That tremulous song with its gibberish lyrics in an invented language will be the perfect end to this tournament — “Now We Are Free”.

mukulkesavan@hotmail.com