While demonstrating against the 2014 World Cup, protesters clash with police outside of Maracanã Stadium following the removal of indigenous Brazilians camped in Rio de Janeiro’s Museu do Índio.
“In 2014, on the eve of hosting the World Cup, Brazil was on fire. For several years, under the stewardship of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and his Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT), the country had been the poster child of an early-century wave of new left leadership in South America. His administration was well-liked by the general population, with President Obama of the United States famously remarking that Lula was the most popular politician in the world. In the midst of a commodities-export boom and a social restructuring that saw the diversification of universities, extension of land rights to marginalized groups, and an expansion of the social welfare system, in 2007, the country was awarded the 2014 FIFA Men’s World Cup. It was the peak of the PT’s domestic and international goodwill. …”
Africa Is a Country
Monthly Archives: June 2026
World Cup dark horses: Ecuador, Mexico, Japan, Norway and Senegal
“Every World Cup needs them, those ‘dark horse”’nations who perform well in qualifying, enjoy some success in their respective continental tournaments and then threaten to upset the heavyweights. The term itself comes from 1830s horse-racing gambling — for an unknown horse for whom it was hard to assign betting odds. In the two centuries since, it’s been slightly corrupted as a footballing term. We have surprise packages, who emerge during the tournament, and that’s what dark horse should mean based on its etymology. …”
NYT/ATH (Video)
Diverse. Complicated. United. This is what it is to be a USMNT soccer fan

“Diverse. Complicated. United. That, in three words, is U.S. soccer fandom. It’s the faithful few who travel coast to coast. It’s the millions attached to this infectious but fragmented sport, their interest divided among dozens of different leagues and teams. It’s also the soccer agnostics, the rabid sports fans who obsess over basketball or American football but ignore the world’s football for years at a time. Every fourth year, all those groups rally around the U.S. men’s national team, united by a belief that their overlooked squad — and this overlooked sport — can rise and shock the world. …”
NYT/ATH (Video)
NYT/ATH: Australia’s fans are green, gold, still here. Even if the path to acceptance has been a difficult one (Video)
NYT/ATH: Turkey fans finally feel like they have a team which represents them. They are ‘Our Guys’ (Video)
NYT/ATH: The Claw of the Guarani says it all for Paraguay, a nation fiercely protective of its identity (Video)

Boats, berets and a premature mourning: The barely believable story of the first World Cup
“King Charles III is pondering a tactical dilemma. His best player, Harry Kane, hasn’t turned up to the tournament because he didn’t deem it important enough to make the two-week voyage. … Sound familiar? Well, the names have been changed but all these things once happened in the biggest tournament that football has to offer. Welcome to the wild and wonderful story of the 1930 World Cup. There were only 13 teams in the first World Cup, or as the United States team manager called it at the time, the World’s Championship of Soccer Football….”
NYT/ATH
France’s players aboard the ship taking them to the 1930 World Cup in Uruguay.
Dima Maghreb will reverberate at Morocco matches. This is a country with belief and big ambitions

“Dima Maghreb – Always Morocco. Oussama Marhoum is the capo of Morocco fan group RossoVerde — but he does not watch the national team’s matches. He stands behind the goal, back to the pitch, dictating the rhythm of the chants and drums. … Morocco head to the World Cup this summer eighth in the FIFA world rankings, having been named, in remarkable circumstances, winners of the Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON). They were beaten 1-0 in the final by Senegal in January, having missed a stoppage-time penalty. But 57 days later the Confederation of African Football announced that they had been handed the title, due to the Senegalese players leaving the pitch in protest at the awarding of that late spot kick. …”
NYT/ATH (Video)
NYT/ATH: Brazil are five-time World Cup winners. A new generation of fans are ‘chasing the sixth’ (Video)
NYT/ATH: For years, Canadian soccer fandom was confined to message boards – not anymore (Video)
NYT/ATH: For years, Every Qatar conversation comes back to 2022. But their fans want to cheer the Maroons to a new piece of history (Video)

For years, Canadian soccer fandom was confined to message boards – not anymore

“… Life was supposed to be good, maybe even different, as a fan of Canada’s men’s team. But as day turned to night, Gauthier realized he had committed the cardinal sin of Canadian soccer fandom at the time. He had allowed himself to imagine. Two Cuban goals ended Canada’s Gold Cup hopes. They left the competition without an appearance in the knockout phase and would begin nearly a generation spent in the soccer wilderness. …”
NYT/ATH (Video)
NYT/ATH: Above Bosnia matches, the sky will burn. Their fans’ fire is love, not anger (Video)
NYT/ATH: Every Qatar conversation comes back to 2022. But their fans want to cheer the Maroons to a new piece of history (Video)
NYT/ATH: Switzerland is a country of four languages. Its ‘Nati’ will unite the people at the World Cup (Video)

The making of England’s World Cup squad video: Sweating on Toney and a Beatles song debate
“The night before England manager Thomas Tuchel named his 26-man World Cup squad was a nervous one. Not so much for the players: by then, most of them had already received the phone call telling them whether they were in or out. But for those responsible for producing the squad announcement video that the English Football Association (FA) wanted to go live at 10am the next morning. … The duo, who run creative agency Dirty Vanilla, had spent the previous three weeks working night and day on the project, from shooting the main running sequence on one of New York’s busiest streets, to tasking staff with creating hand-drawn animations and designers with computer-generated imagery (‘zero AI was used,’ Shaw points out). But there was only so much they could do without Tuchel’s final list of names, which landed with them around 7pm the night before the film was due to go live. …”
NYT/ATH (Video)
Is the World Cup vulnerable to fixers? Fears grow as ‘every sport in every continent’ faces corruption
“The World Cup promises to be the most-watched event in the history of sport. As a consequence, it will also be one of the most lucrative events on which bookmakers have ever offered odds. With huge betting markets already established in East Asia and Europe, and the astonishing rise of prediction markets in the United States, games at soccer’s most prestigious tournament will invite wagers on everything from who will score the next goal to who will emerge the overall winner. With the vast sums of money involved in these betting markets, there is the risk that the World Cup will be targeted by spot fixing, the practice of manipulating events within a game — rather than the overall result — in order to cheat the bookmakers. An example might be a player deliberately receiving a yellow card in a particular window of time in a game. …”
NYT/ATH (Video)
Cursed? Always let down? Whatever the truth, Mexican support is unconditional
“Incondicionales – Unconditional. Few countries have a knottier relationship with the World Cup than Mexico. The tournament will visit for an unprecedented third time this summer. Entire chapters of football history have been written on the turf of the Estadio Azteca, one of the sport’s holy sites. The Mexican national team, known to fans as El Tri, have missed only five World Cups. They have been ever-present since 1990, reliably contributing to the colour and fanfare of the greatest show on earth. That’s the good stuff. The consensus view, however, is that it is outweighed by the bad. …”
NYT/ATH (Video)
NYT/ATH: Czech Republic fans have spent years envying those who went to Mexico. Now it is their turn (Video)
NYT/ATH: The hope of 2010 is returning for South Africa. Their fans are all Bafana Bafana again at last (Video)
NYT/ATH: Victory Korea reflects a growing belief in the country’s global status – on and off the pitch (Video)

