Want to Truly Understand the World Cup? Check Out These Books.

What exactly is it that makes the World Cup so alluring? Every four years, the tournament arrives like a massive religious feast, drawing pilgrims from across the world in what remains one of the few truly global cultural events. The star players, nationalism explain only part of the story. At the World Cup, as in life, fate can be decided in a split second. It is one of few cultural events that illuminate our world and how we understand ourselves within it.

From its very inception in 1930, the tournament has been entangled with politics and national identity, as Jonathan Wilson argues in THE POWER AND THE GLORY: The History of the World Cup (Bold Type, 567 pp., $35). Back then, Uruguay sought to host the tournament to celebrate the centenary of its independence. After its national team was crowned champions, Wilson writes, it was hard to distinguish whether the post-tournament celebrations were meant for the players, the president of the country or his FIFA counterpart, Jules Rimet.

Subsequent editions featured increasingly fraught dynamics: Mussolini brought his own trophy to Italy’s coronation at the 1934 tournament; Brazil’s military dictatorship claimed the virtuosic, “thrillingly modern” triumph of its 1970 national team, led by Pelé, as a symbol of national progress; Argentina’s military junta pressured opposing teams — and might have even fixed one of the results — to facilitate the country’s victory in 1978. In recent years, Wilson writes about the clientelism of the FIFA president João Havelange, its expansion under his successor, Sepp Blatter, and the corruption scandal that gave rise to our current era of Gianni Infantino and his embrace of modern autocrats.

Yet to describe Wilson’s book as a political history would be to do it a disservice. His is a holistic account of the World Cup — its major players, tactical innovations and indelible moments — bolstered by reams of careful research. Wilson debunks various World Cup conspiracies, including false rumors about match fixing between Hungary and Italy in 1938 and Ronaldo Nazário’s mysterious near-absence at the 1998 World Cup. His footnotes range in subject from 19th-century South American pedagogical theory to a cultural anthropologist’s take on Zinedine Zidane’s infamous head butt of Italy’s Marco Materazzi in the 2006 final. The result is a sweeping, authoritative and singular account of the tournament.