Football in a warming world
“At the ’86 World Cup,” the Uruguayan novelist Eduardo Galeano wrote in Football in Sun and Shadow, perhaps the greatest book about this now omnipresent sporting event, “Valdano, Maradona and other players protested because the big matches were played at noon under a sun that fried everything it touched.” The enemy that year was the TV broadcasters, who insisted games be played under blazing Mexican skies to increase European audiences. As Germany’s goalkeeper, Harald Schumacher, said: “I sweat. My throat is dry. The grass is like dried shit: hard, strange, hostile. The sun shines straight down on the stadium and strikes us right on the head. We cast no shadows. They say this is good for television.” To which João Havelange, then president of FIFA, replied: “They should play and shut their traps.”
Today, of course, the already scorching Central and North American summer is further compounded by a changing climate. The US National Weather Service predicts that, for the duration of the tournament, every region in America will experience above average temperatures. The England team’s arrival at their training base in Kansas City has already been disrupted by tornado warnings and heavy storms.
So far, the weather hasn’t caused too many headaches. But temperatures across the continent are expected to rise in the coming days. The most visible sign of disruption so far has been the FIFA-instituted hydration breaks that come midway through the first and second halves: three minutes of momentum-sucking dead air, in which players gather on the touchline to drink water while being fed instructions by their coach. Poor Curaçao, tournament debutants, who after falling behind early to Germany drew level shortly before the mandatory break. They would lose the game 7-1.
This, however, is a small price to pay. According to the Pitches in Peril report, 14 of the 16 host cities are likely to exceed the Wet Bulb Globe Temperature threshold of 28C (82.4F) during the tournament, making them dangerous to play in. Nearly half of the tournament’s games, meanwhile, will kick off at 3pm or earlier local time. Expect the ice jackets and cooling towels to be an ever more visible presence in the next few weeks.
Three host cities—Dallas, Houston and Atlanta—have stadiums fitted with futuristic domed roofs and air conditioning. The former hosted last night's game between England and Croatia and produced the bizarre spectacle of players being forced off the pitch to rehydrate even though they were playing under artificially cooled conditions. In this context, there’s probably no need to point out that FIFA have allowed broadcasters to fill the time with even more adverts. If this is the last thing the World Cup needs, at least it will provide some distraction from the flashing green and blue LED boards proudly announcing the Saudi oil and gas firm ARAMCO as the tournament's "global energy partner" that float over the pitch.
Is this, then, the future of the World Cup: Games played in stifling and dangerous heat, sold to yet another petro-state so that a few FIFA officials can buy themselves a second yacht? Or, as with the 2022 tournament in Qatar, will the Cup perhaps be moved out of the usual summer slot to accommodate a new climate reality? If so, it’d be a shame. It's always best to avoid the call of nostalgia on these matters, but so many of the memories of my childhood are punctuated by long hazy summers of sport that losing them would be a wrench: 1994, with its garish kits and Americanised spectacle; the Ronaldo v Zidane final of 1998; 2002 and Ronaldinho’s chipped freekick over the head of David Seaman; Zidane, again, four years later, headbutting the Italian centre half Marco Materazzi.
As the FIFA™ era kicked in, I must admit that this youthful passion began to ebb, to the extent that I barely registered what happened in Qatar four years ago. Was that also because it was the first not held over the summer? Perhaps. If I'm honest, it's probably a more likely explanation than whatever ethical concerns I may have held (sorry).
If there’s a core to the modern World Cup, then it’s almost definitely orbiting somewhere in the vicinity of Gianni Infantino, FIFA’s strange control-freak of a president. In Qatar, directors were told to show him in the crowd once per match, and it doesn’t appear to be any different this time around. According to a revealing profile in the New Yorker, for Infantino, football is as much an ethical—even political—force as it is a sport. “He talks about soccer the way that other people talk about clean water or universal basic income,” writes the profile’s author, Sam Knight.
This has led to some of the more bizarre, even sinister, aspects of recent competitions. The sight of Infantino repeatedly prostrating himself in front of Donald Trump, for instance, as his regime refuses entry to Omar Artan, who was supposed to be the first Somali referee to officiate a World Cup game, is surely only the most egregious. To this, Infantino gave the astoundly glib response: “Chill, relax”, he said, “we are not kings of the world”.
Being able to “chill” is a luxury that will not be afforded to the players. Particularly not to those from Iraq and Iran, who were made to wait for hours at immigration control before they even arrived at the tournament. Eleven of the participating countries, meanwhile, all from the Global South, have faced travel restrictions or unusually high rates of visa rejections; the mother of Cape Verde’s goalkeeper, and hero of their first ever World Cup match, Vozinha, was unable to travel to watch the game due to the cost of visas. More bizarrely, Infantino seems to believe that football is the one thing that can end the conflict in Palestine, a sure sign of the planetary vastness of his ego.
World Cups are, if nothing else, a mirror held up to the world: modern life reflected in the spectacle of 22 men chasing a ball around a field every four years adorned in national flags. Infantino, the egoist in chief, solidifying his position as head of football’s governing body by ingratiating himself with despots and petro-dictators is only the most obvious symptom of this. Less on the nose, this year’s event will also be the most diasporic: a clear sign of the increasing salience of immigration in a world shaped by the global movement of people. As Rory Smith recently noted in the Observer, nearly a quarter of the players will be representing nation’s other than the one they were born in.
That the climate crisis will have a profound effect on the tournament in years to come should not then be a surprise, even if the shape this will take is still uncertain. Could the ever more visible and inescapable effects of the climate crisis, reflected back to billions of eager spectators, turn the World Cup into a vehicle for building a new consensus on the need for rapid action? To do that would mean breaking FIFA's grip on the tournament, with their determination to remove politics from football in all but its most anodyne forms. That will be hard, but not impossible. After all, as Galeano reminds us, football, whatever its form, has always been political.