Special Edition: How a French Dreamer Created the World Cup
Every four years, the planet loses its mind over a ball. Here's why and why this year's edition is both the most exciting and most controversial one yet.
Let's get one thing straight before we begin. The FIFA World Cup is not just a football tournament. It is the single largest peacetime gathering of human attention on the planet. Roughly five billion people watched the 2022 edition in Qatar which means that when the World Cup is on, more than half of all living human beings are, at some point watching the same thing. For context, that's more people than existed on earth in 1950. The whole thing started because one man from a small French village refused to think small.
His name was Jules Rimet, and he was the son of a grocer.
Jules Rimet was born in 1873 in Theuley, a village in eastern France so small that you've almost certainly never heard of it and never will. He was a devout Catholic, a trained lawyer, a man with a deep concern for the poor and crucially absolutely obsessed with football at a time when most respectable people considered it a bit undignified.
Rimet had survived the war. He had seen what nationalism unleashed could do to a continent. His big idea and it really was big was that sport could redirect that energy. That instead of countries channelling their competitive instincts into trenches and artillery, they might channel them into stadiums and goalkeepers.
In 1928, at the FIFA Congress in Amsterdam, he stood up and proposed that FIFA organise its own global football championship, entirely separate from the Olympics. The organisation agreed. Uruguay, fresh off back-to-back Olympic gold medals and generously offering to pay travel expenses for every participating nation, was selected as host. And so in the summer of 1930, Jules Rimet personally sailed to South America on a steamship called the SS Conte Verde, carrying the winner's trophy in his luggage, heading toward the first World Cup in history.
He was, by all accounts, extremely excited.
Uruguay, 1930: Thirteen Teams and a Lot of Seasickness
The first World Cup was not what you'd call a logistical triumph. Only thirteen teams participated, and several European nations declined the invitation entirely partly because the journey to Uruguay took two
weeks by boat and partly because they simply didn't feel like going. England, who had effectively invented the modern game, didn't bother showing up at all. They would maintain this tradition of spectacular self-sabotage for several more decades.
The tournament was held in Montevideo. Uruguay won it, which the locals considered the correct outcome. The trophy at this point was called "Victory" a golden figurine of Nike, the Greek goddess of victory, designed by French sculptor Abel Lafleur and crafted from gold-plated sterling silver on a lapis lazuli base. It was a beautiful object and it would have a remarkably eventful life.
What Rimet had created was small by today's standards, but it worked. Countries competed. Goals were scored. Drama unfolded. And the world, slowly, started paying attention.
The Trophy That Lived Under Someone's Bed
The Jules Rimet Trophy as it was renamed in 1946, in honour of its creator spent the next four decades travelling the world and accumulating an increasingly improbable CV.
During World War Two, Italian football official Ottorino Barassi hid it in a shoebox under his bed in Rome to stop the Nazis from getting hold of it. This is not a metaphor. He actually did this, and it actually worked.
In 1966, when England finally hosted (and won) the World Cup, the trophy was stolen before the tournament even began. It was found a week later by a dog named Pickles, who discovered it wrapped in
newspaper under a garden hedge in South London. Pickles became a national hero. The trophy was returned. England won the tournament. The dog got more fan mail than several of the players.
Brazil won the trophy outright in 1970, becoming the first nation to claim three World Cup titles at which point the rules said they could keep it permanently. They did. And then in 1983, it was stolen again from the headquarters of the Brazilian Football Confederation in Rio de Janeiro. Unlike the 1966 incident, there was no Pickles. The trophy was never recovered and is widely believed to have been melted down. Somewhere out there, an extremely valuable piece of history is probably a doorstop.
A new trophy was created the one used today, designed by Italian artist Silvio Gazzaniga, 36 centimetres tall, cast in 18-carat gold, depicting two figures holding up the earth. It debuted in 1974. It has been lifted by some of the greatest footballers who ever lived and has not, so far, been stolen by anyone.
The Tournament That Became a Religion
Through the 1950s, 60s, 70s and 80s, the World Cup grew from a charming international competition into something that didn't really have a precedent. It became, for many people, more important than elections, more anticipated than holidays, and more emotionally devastating than most relationships.
Part of what made it so captivating was its democracy of chaos. Unlike club football, where the same wealthy teams tend to win year after year, the World Cup had a genius for producing the completely improbable. In 1950, the United States a country that barely acknowledged football as a sport beat England 1-0. England responded by pretending this hadn't happened for approximately a decade. In 1966, North Korea knocked out Italy. In 1982, a brilliant Algeria side beat West Germany in what became one of the tournament's most famous shocks. In 1990, Cameroon arrived in Italy and immediately defeated the reigning world champions Argentina, then made the quarterfinals with a 38-year-old Roger Milla coming off the bench to score goals and do a corner-flag dance that remains one of football's great images.
The pattern repeated itself every four years. Someone was supposed to win. Something else happened. The world went berserk.
Brazil, Argentina and the Weight of Expectation
Through all of this, two nations towered above the rest. Brazil and Argentina became the twin poles around which the World Cup orbited, two countries for whom football was not a sport so much as a form of national identity, emotional expression, and existential purpose rolled into one.
Brazil won it in 1958, 1962, 1970, 1994, and 2002. They produced Pelé, arguably the greatest player in history, who won three World Cups and spent the better part of two decades making everyone else look like they were playing a different, slower game. They played a style of football fluid, joyful, almost arrogant in its elegance that the rest of the world spent fifty years trying to imitate and never quite managed.
Argentina gave the world Diego Maradona, which is the kind of gift that comes with complications. In the 1986 World Cup in Mexico, Maradona produced what is still considered the greatest individual performance in the tournament's history. In one quarter-final against England, he scored two goals within minutes of each other: the first was punched in with his hand (he later said it was "a little with the head of Maradona and a little with the hand of God"), the second was a solo run from his own half in which he beat five defenders and the goalkeeper before scoring, what FIFA voters later elected the Goal of the Century. That the same man produced both in the same game tells you most of what you need to know about Maradona.
Argentina would wait until 2022 to win the World Cup again, this time with Lionel Messi a player so talented that the debate over whether he or Maradona is Argentina's greatest was genuinely impossible to settle until he finally lifted the trophy in Qatar and broke several billion people's hearts simultaneously, depending on which side you were on.
The Moments You Don't Forget
The World Cup has a habit of producing images that stay with you. Pelé crying on the pitch in 1970. Maradona's hand of God in 1986. Zinedine Zidane headbutting an Italian defender in the 2006 final in what was meant to be his retirement match, in front of a billion viewers and walking off the pitch in silence. The French team somehow winning the 2018 final while Kylian Mbappé aged 19, played as if he'd done it a hundred times before. Germany beating Brazil 7-1 on Brazilian soil in 2014 in a semi-final so catastrophically one-sided that Brazilian television cameras kept cutting away to show fans weeping in the stands, which honestly felt worse than watching the goals go in.
finals in 2022 as the first African and Arab nation ever to do so, a moment that meant something far beyond football for a huge part of the world.
The World Cup keeps producing these moments because it puts every team rich or poor, famous or unknown on the same pitch under the same pressure with everything on the line. And under those conditions, football has a magnificent tendency to ignore the script.
Then vs Now: How the Tournament Has Changed
Here is something worth sitting with: Jules Rimet's first World Cup had 13 teams, one stadium, one host city and fit inside a single month. The 2026 edition has 48 teams, 16 host cities spread across three countries, 104 matches, and runs for 39 days. If Rimet somehow came back and tried to follow it all, he would need a very large wall calendar and possibly a therapist.
The expansion to 48 teams is the biggest structural change to the tournament since 1998, when it grew from 24 to 32. For years, smaller football nations complained that qualification spots were heavily concentrated in Europe and South America, and that countries across Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and the Middle East were being shut out despite genuinely improving. The new format addresses that more nations get a seat at the table, more stories get told, and more of the world gets to feel like it belongs to the tournament.
The format change means 12 groups of four teams instead of eight, a brand new Round of 32 that has never existed before, and a winner who now needs to survive eight matches rather than seven to lift the trophy. The tournament is also, for the first time, spread across three countries simultaneously games are being played in the United States, Mexico and Canada, which means teams can find themselves flying thousands of kilometres between group-stage matches. Players who already compete in 50 or 60-match club seasons are not, it is fair to say, universally delighted about this.
The other big difference between now and before is money. Lots and lots of money. The 1930 World Cup was almost cancelled because nobody could afford the boat tickets. The 2026 edition will generate somewhere in the region of $11 billion in revenue for FIFA. The tournament has gone from a passion project kept alive by a shoestring budget and one man's idealism to the most commercially valuable sporting event on the planet. Whether that's progress or corruption dressed up as progress depends very much on who you ask and increasingly, people are asking.
Welcome to America: Now Please Fill Out This Form
And so we arrive at the part of the story that nobody quite predicted, or at least nobody wanted to think too hard about when the United States, Canada and Mexico were awarded the 2026 hosting rights back in 2018.
The United States is hosting 78 of the tournament's 104 matches. It has some of the largest stadiums in the world, extraordinary infrastructure, and a genuine appetite for big sporting events. On paper, it is an excellent host. Off paper, the 2026 World Cup has been generating controversy at a pace that has left FIFA looking increasingly uncomfortable, standing in the corner of a party that has gotten slightly out of hand.
The problems started with visas. The Trump administration's immigration policies including a travel ban covering nationals from dozens of countries collided head-on with the basic requirement of a global football tournament, which is that people from all over the globe should be able to get in.
Iran's national team, which qualified for the World Cup, has had to base itself in Mexico because many of its officials were denied US visas. The players can cross the border to play their matches, then must return to Mexico. It is a logistical arrangement that no previous World Cup has required and that says something fairly pointed about the host country's relationship with the rest of the world right now.
Then came the case of Omar Abdulkadir Artan. He was a Somali referee one of Africa's most respected officials, selected by FIFA as one of 52 referees for the tournament, and set to become the first Somali in history to officiate a World Cup match. He arrived at Miami International Airport on June 6, holding a diplomatic passport and a valid US visa.
He was pulled aside for additional screening, determined to be inadmissible due to what US Customs and Border Protection described only as "vetting concerns," and sent back to Somalia. Somalia is on the Trump administration's travel ban list. FIFA confirmed he would not be participating in the tournament. He arrived home to thousands of fans filling a stadium in Mogadishu to welcome him back.
Amnesty International published a 36-page report warning that the 2026 World Cup carries what it called "serious risks and consequences for fans, players, journalists, workers and local communities," pointing specifically to the chilling effect of ICE operations and immigration enforcement on people travelling to the United States. Human Rights Watch raised similar concerns. Reports emerged of fans being denied entry without explanation, of social media accounts being screened for evidence of what authorities described as "anti-Americanism," of the climate surrounding the tournament being unlike anything a World Cup host has created before.
There is also the small matter of the carbon footprint. Scientists for Global Responsibility calculated that the emissions generated by the 2026 World Cup, due to its sheer size and the vast distances involved in travel between host cities across three countries will be nearly double the average of the last four tournaments combined. Roughly equivalent they estimated to 6.5 million cars driven for a year. FIFA has sustainability goals. The 2026 format is not obviously compatible with them.
FIFA's position stated with the careful blankness of an organisation that has had a lot of practice at not saying anything is that host governments determine their own immigration policies and FIFA is not involved in visa decisions. Which is technically true, and also somewhat beside the point, and FIFA knows it.
Because while the football is happening, the concerns that surround it do not suddenly become less important. The matches may dominate the headlines but the political environmental and social questions remain part of the story.
The 2026 World Cup kicked off on June 11 with Mexico playing South Africa at the Estadio Azteca, one of the most historic venues in football history. Forty-eight nations are competing. The final will be played on July 19 at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey in front of 82,500 people and watched by somewhere around five billion more.
Yet even in a tournament built on the idea of bringing people together, controversy has followed the competition from the start. Iran arrived under special travel restrictions, raising concerns about unequal treatment and the influence of geopolitics on a supposedly global event.
FIFA-selected Somali referee Omar Artan, who was set to become the first Somali official to referee at a World Cup was denied entry to the United States prompting questions about the responsibilities of host nations.
Across the country, heightened immigration enforcement and security checkpoints have also created unease for some nations travelling to matches, particularly in communities where immigration remains a
sensitive political issue.
Jules Rimet, the grocer's son from Theuley who sailed to Uruguay with a trophy in his suitcase and a belief that football could make the world a slightly less violent place, was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1956. He died that same year at the age of 83. He never quite got his world peace. But he got something almost as hard to achieve: a tournament that makes the entire planet stop, watch, and feel something at exactly the same time.
Even when politics follows teams across borders.
Even when the host country is turning away the referee at the airport.
Even when the ideals of a global game collide with the realities of national borders.
The ball still goes in. The crowd erupts. Someone somewhere starts crying in a language you don't speak. And for a moment, inexplicably, it's enough.
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