Geopolitics on the football pitch | Business Standard – newspaper

Behind the hype, though, it will escape no one following the money with half an eye that this most-watched global sports tournament has become not just big business but highly dubious business. We know this from the dramatic scandals that followed the award of the hosting rights to Qatar for the 2022 edition. This is the trajectory that football writer Jonathan Wilson follows in The Power and the Glory: A New History of the World Cup.

Wilson’s book lives up to its title as a new history tracing the evolution of the World Cup from its first edition in 1930 to 2022 with its unforgettable final through the lens of global politics. Like the Olympics, the World Cup, as the world’s most watched sporting event, has become what Wilson describes as a “massive soft power jamboree”. As he writes in the Prologue, “Every host has tried to use the tournament as an expression of confidence or modernity or just to prove they are relevant, a central part of a broader global community.”

This theme spans from Mussolini hijacking the tournament in 1934 to promote his ideal of a muscular successful Italy to Vladimir Putin’s efforts to showcase his irredentist dreams in 2018, and the Qatari Al Thani family’s ambitions to legitimise an authoritarian regime linked to fossil fuel wealth in 2022.