World
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June 17, 2026
Sovereign wealth, private equity money, and a network of oily alliances between FIFA and the world’s most reprehensible regimes have transformed the sport forever.
A member of the Otomi indigenous community in Mexico City holds a U.S. President Donald Trump latex mask during the “Anti-World Cup” rally on June 6, 2026, in Mexico City, Mexico.
(Marco Gonzalez / Eyepix Group / NurPhoto via AP)
The noise makes the first impression: a misting chorus rising off the stands. Transmitted through the TV screen, the lyrics—precise and witty on the ground—are flattened into a series of up-tempo chants about nothing: ohhhhh-ahhhh-ehhhhh, wahh-ehhh, wahh-ahhh-ehh-ehhhh, heh-ho, heh-ho, heh-ho . Quick raps of applause swarm from bay to bay, where they swell and dip like free kicks dolphining over the practice wall. The voice of the ground announcer, soft-edged but insistent, offers constant intrusion, a paternalistic music cottoning weakly into the night. Faces in the stands are indistinct, the crowd a single beery humanity punctuated by inverted exclamation marks finishing in smudges of pink, beige, brown, black. Players termite across the grass, tertiary characters in a drama of someone else’s making. The camera lurches and narrows on a single figure, impassive and suited, taking in the scene from the grandstand. The seats here are padded, the drinking minimal, the singing nonexistent; the occasional word—whether of explanation or counsel, we do not know—is exchanged between the figure and his equally stony entourage. Though the camera lingers on him, the figure does not smile, barely reacting to goals, saves, sliding tackles, or ooh-y through balls. Whenever the lens finds him again, he will remain resolutely seated and blank. Who is this man who matters so much to a spectacle that interests him so little? It’s the autocrat.
Unlike in American sports, where team owners are encouraged to seek the limelight and successful seasons often end with the spectacle of a rich suit, rather than a player, lifting the trophy, the presence of the powerful in the stands used to be a dutiful footnote of soccer on TV. Even in the bad old days of Sepp Blatter—a man whose corruption now seems positively artisanal next to the industrial-grade stuff being produced by Gianni Infantino—power’s manifestations in the stands felt benign, almost endearing: One thinks of Jacques Chirac open-mouthing with joy at the Stade de France in 1998, an unbald Prince William doing the lawnmower celebration at Villa Park, or Angela Merkel hugging Manuel Neuer after Germany’s victory in the 2014 World Cup final. At the dawn of European football’s hyper-financialization around the turn of the century, club owners still had a kind of shambling, screwball quality to them: These were men who made their fortunes off ready-mix concrete, tracksuits, and witness tampering, honest lines of business that kept them close to the little people in the stands.
Whatever shreds of approachability once kept the soccer powers tethered to the fans have now been comprehensively chopped. Since the early 2000s, sovereign wealth, private equity money, and a network of oily alliances between FIFA and the world’s most reprehensible regimes have transformed the sport, generating various distortions that have been the subject of vigorous media coverage and near-constant public contestation. Amid the thrash of these political accommodations and floods of money, the footballing autocrat—the fund-appointed club chairman, the oil-and-gas oligopolist who’s just bought the club, the would-be dictator stewing in his seat—has suddenly become ubiquitous, an inescapable presence on our screens and feeds.
Despite all the fussing over soccer’s deepening entanglements with financial and political tyranny, this figure’s style of spectatorship remains curiously under-examined. Joy, sorrow, frustration, anger, relief: The autocrats know none of the emotions experienced by the regular fan. Resistance—to feeling, to fan sentiment, to timeworn notions of who and what sport is for—is part of their power. Increasingly, it’s to men like these that the cameras turn, and it’s according to their design that soccer is being remade.
The autocrats’ rise to prominence is another consequence of the permanent tilting of the scales in favor of the rich and a society-wide fetishization of owners and ownership (Thomas Piketty’s r > g and all that), along with a general shift in attention among soccer fans from matters on the pitch to problems off it. Is soccer’s main character now the player or the owner? It’s not so easy to say. This migration of attention has produced a strange and permanently curdled reality in which fans’ delight in and anguish over the teams and players they follow mixes with unvarying contempt for the figures controlling things behind the scenes. The contemporary crisis of trust can be felt in every fuming fan post on Reddit or Twitter about sportswashing, bent referee…
Read the full article at The Nation →