World Cup Fever: A Footballing Journey in Nine Tournaments by Simon Kuper
Simon Kuper, author of football classics such as Football Against the Enemy and Soccernomics, has written a personal memoir of reporting at World Cups for the Financial Times.
While he has been drawn into the whirlpool of mundiales like billions of others, you never get the sense of a man with a burning passion, but rather of a detached, if intelligent watcher, noticing themes beyond the on-field action, which makes you suspect the publishers decided to spice up the title in order to sell it.
It is a memoir made up of a string of anecdotes and observations, many of which are fascinating. But it does not quite tally with the emotional memories of most supporters, whether they travelled to the tournaments or not. Indeed, many of his memories take place over dinner in nice restaurants or hotels with football bigwigs, which is far from the real fan experience.
A supporter who has clocked up the 10,000 hours' specialism of standing on terraces, travelling to away games, spending a fortune on European away trips etc, just does not see the World Cup in the same way. An aesthete would find a lot of World Cup games turgid, but I was reminded of watching Scotland play the CIS (ex Soviet Union) at Euro '92 in Norkopping, Sweden, and spending an extraordinary day with the Tartan Army, many of whom were in the stadium but not actually watching the match. Such memories imprint themselves for life. I can barely remember the scoreline.
I have been a journalist at tournaments too so I get where he is coming from. We are in a bubble surrounded by other hacks and lots of tech, having to read between the lines of the robotic pronouncements of players and coaches and produce a verbal history. I related to the treadmill of media centres, press conferences and late night typing, the hotel room to hotel room grind, which can at times obscure the experience of the fascinating locality or the joy of the tournament that everyone else is living.
That is why I would hesitate to broadcast a journalist's viewpoint out loud. Sat at a table in a press box of a few dozen men and women concentrating earnestly in front of laptops I am always conscious of having been placed amid a cauldron of tens of thousands, whose attire, behaviour, feelings and memories are just far more colourful and visceral than mine.
As I read Kuper's recollection of a string of forgettable matches amid nonchalant and placid Japan in 2002, I could not help remembering being lucky enough to have felt the fire and ecstasy of the street celebrations in South Korea at the same time, as Guus Hiddink's Reds advanced improbably to the last four. I cannot imagine a more passionate World Cup atmosphere than that host nation in that year. Much as I adore Japan and its amazing culture, in retrospect I was glad I was not mostly there for that tournament.
The opening chapter of World Cup Fever is very good and bravo to the author for tracking down the forgotten grave and writings of the great Jules Rimet - man so important in football history it is a scandal how he is not commemorated beyond the name on the trophy.
A long section of the book is devoted to the 2010 World Cup in his native South Africa, as bizarre a location as they come and a World Cup most would prefer to forget. It was a weird one to attend, with fans spending hours in cars travelling from white enclave to white suburb, segregated from the majority of the nation, for whom football is the top sport. The thermometer fell below zero at night (we associate World Cups with summer heat) and the mind-numbing drone of plastic vuvuzelas drowned the fan culture. Plus the final was the pits.
The book does have many thought-provoking points - Qatar for instance did not reform its human rights in 2022 any more than Saudi Arabia will in 2034. We may tut and complain, but in the end we will not turn down a ticket to the circus. Football unites the world all right and the world's failings are brushed under the carpet.
Kuper interestingly claims that Holland, his national team, is not bitter but rather proud it has lost three finals and that in his opinion "the World Cup has become an inferior product" to the club game, a judgment Arsene Wenger and others have echoed. And yet, in June every four years, billions are enraptured across the world in a way no other event can match.
The aesthetics or overall quality of play is not ultimately the point, although thank God the ugly Netherlands did not win in 2010, or Argentina in 1990 for that matter. West Germany in 1954 are arguably the only 'wrong' team to have won the cup in terms of style, dashing the narrative of the Mighty Magyars and their beautiful team.
He is also on the money when it comes to the Augean stables of FIFA at the time of the notorious 2018/2022 hosting votes, neatly identifying Sepp Blatter, whom he interviews in the book, as akin to a Swiss concierge in a posh hotel who never questions his guests' wealth or characters. It was also noteworthy that players at a World Cup are often so exhausted after a punishing domestic season and cloistered away at their hotel that they are somewhat relieved to get eliminated so they can then go on a family holiday.
FIFA's folly in picking referees from as many nations as possible instead of the best from the big leagues is also well noted, although Kuper thought Byron Moreno's masterclass in bad reffing in 2002 was nothing sinister. Soon after the World Cup, Moreno was banned by his own association and later convicted of heroin smuggling as it happens.
He also repeats the evidence that a Thai betting cartel paid Ghana to lose in 2006, a startling accusation FIFA never investigated. All these observations make the book worth reading. I also enjoyed the analogies to religious experience, with a World Cup the modern version of a pilgrimage of the faithful from different corners of the earth, united by the same faith.
Kuper has always struck me as a keen observer as opposed to a fan, who by his own admission in the bio of his first book Football Against the Enemy, supports Ajax, though not that seriously. A financial journalist, he has recently produced a pair of excellent political works, Chums and Good Chaps, as well as an apposite book about his home in Paris, called The Impossible City. His book about Eddie Hamel, an Ajax player who died in Auschwitz, and the Dutch nation's awkward relationship with the past, Ajax, the Dutch, the War, is also a valuable addition to footballing literature.
Later on at his nth World Cup he accepts the fact one FIFA stadium experience feels very much like another and that large swathes of the local population, even in Brazil, can remain disinterested in the tournament. Realising he had missed out on watching the World Cup with his children at home in Paris, he had come to the realisation that:
"The emotional locus of any World Cup is more in the world's living rooms than in the host country. For the peak World Cup experience, stay home."
Maybe there you can catch the fever.
Buy World Cup Fever from Amazon USA | UK | Japan
© Sean O'Conor, Soccerphile
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