Heroes and Villains in the World Cup of Soccer

By Joe Emersberger  –  Jul 22, 2026

I cast Argentina as heroes, as problematic as that is, because the Cup is rigged for Europeans

I have always loved soccer, especially the FIFA World Cup.[1] Playing organized soccer (badly) as a teenager only intensified my appreciation for the skills and conditioning that all professional soccer players, not just the top stars, display on the field.

Irrationality and make believe
As a small child my uncles took me to some Ecuadorian league games in Guayaquil, and indoctrinated me into loving a local team, Barcelona SC. I did not wonder if Barcelona’s players were any better or worse as human beings than their opponents. And I was also too little to wonder who paid the players’ salaries, so I happily cheered for the employees of some local oligarch.

But cheering a soccer team is no more irrational than cheering the characters played by actors (also known as players who also work for oligarchs) in a TV show or play. The audience pretends as much as the players that nobody is acting. In the case of soccer, getting emotionally invested in the outcome of a game is, in a way, less irrational because not even the players can be completely sure how a game will end before it is played.

But is caring about the fortunes of a soccer club inherently reactionary? No. It depends, as with a play or TV show, on how it is interpreted. Who, in our minds, do we cast as villains or heroes, and why?

Interpreting the World Cup
In the 2026 World Cup, as in every World Cup I’ve ever watched, I cast the South American teams as heroes. As my friend Justin Podur puts it, international sports are generally humiliation rituals where the rich and powerful countries use their many advantages to reinforce their supremacist assumptions. But the World Cup has often bucked that general trend.

The very first World Cup in 1930 was won by a poor country with a very small population: Uruguay. Ten of the twenty-three World Cup winners to date (43 percent) have been from South America, the rest from Europe. None from Asia. None from Africa. And that is despite the fact that soccer is a game beloved around the world. With Argentina’s win in 1978, a small majority of the winners (55 percent), had been from South America. But since 2002, seven of the last nine winners have been European. FIFA is obscuring the trend of increasing European domination by allowing more teams to participate in the tournament.

The trend towards European World Cup domination correlates with the increase in global inequality since the 1980s. Big South American stars like Pele, Zico and Socrates either didn’t play club soccer in Europe or barely did after their best years were over. Not anymore. The best soccer players from around the world invariably get big contracts with clubs in Europe. Messi moved to Spain as a thirteen year old to sign with FC Barcelona – in 2000 as Argentina was going through a massive economic crisis-  so he was not even fully developed as a player in Argentina.

Strengths and weaknesses in my interpretation
Does increased European domination of soccer matter? It does to the extent it bolsters supremacist assumptions in Europeans, and feeds the inferiority complex that comprador elites in poor countries try to instill in their people, often with significant success. I’ve always interpreted the World Cup as a battle against that inferiority complex.

Some reactions to Spain’s win over Argentina support my interpretation. The New Yorker said that Spain’s win was a victory of method over madness. Part of the madness the New Yorker sees in Argentina is that it considers some islands off the coast of Argentina (the Malvinas) as Argentinian, not British territory. That’s not madness at all. Madness would be Argentina claiming that London belongs to Argentina. But Argentina is still forced to respect British colonial madness. If Malvinas residents want to be British they should move thousands of miles north.

After Argentina lost to Spain, the genocide-inciting Zionist cretin Piers Morgan made no secret of his hatred for Argentinians which he directed at its players. His bigoted rage was partly fueled by Argentina’s come from behind victory over England in the semi-final. After that win several Argentinian players unfurled a banner saying the Malvinas belong to Argentina.

The president of The Nation magazine, who is also a founding editor of Jocabin, joined Piers Morgan to attack Argentinian players from an insufferably ignorant fake “left” perspective.

But I’ll concede that there are problems with my interpretation of the World Cup. First of all, casting any type of sports or entertainment celebrity as a hero has very obvious problems. Just look at how all the players of Inter-Miami, including Messi, applauded Trump during a visit to the White House. Ali Abunimah’s assessment of the disgusting spectacle was more than fair.

To be even one of the marginal players on Inter-Miami who met Trump that day required years of intense focus on soccer. On top of that, their ultimate goal is to play for the oligarchs who own soccer teams. Hard to expect many Marxists, or even politically aware people, to emerge from that pursuit.

But that’s hardly a problem unique to Argentinian players. The captain of the English team, Harry Kane, happily told reporters about a golf date he had with Trump. Pele coddled Brazil’s military dictatorship while he was winning world cups.

There are exceptions of course, notably the Argentinian soccer legend Diego Maradona who was an outspoken supporter of left wing governments and of the Palestinian cause. But I never knew Maradona as a person any more than I knew any of the Ecuadorian players I cheered for when I was a small child. I can admire Maradona’s soccer skills and applaud the political stances he took but that isn’t enough to tell me if he was actually a good person.

I didn’t cheer for Argentina based on an utterly unknowable assumption that its players were on average better as people than any other team’s. Nevertheless, cheering a team for any reason requires suspending common sense the way you do when you pretend actors are not acting in order to enjoy their work.

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Argentinian Zionism and whiteness
Argentina presently has an odious rightwing government that is also fanatically Zionist. [2] Easy to see why Netanyahu said he was cheering for Argentina’s team. The white supremacist Nick Fuentes said that Argentina’s victory over Egypt was a triumph of “white excellence”.

So it is not like there aren’t understandable reasons for some people having enjoyed the World Cup by casting Argentina’s team as villains. But doing so fed a very ugly spectacle online of Europeans effectively whitewashing their own genocidal societies by vilifying Argentina.

The majority of Argentinians dislike “Israel” and only 5% share the Zionist views of its current president. In 2018 the Argentinian team canceled an exhibition game in “Israel”.

Argentinians are not “white” when being seized by the ICE Nazis. Whatever they claim, Argentinians clearly aren’t white to Piers Morgan or the New Yorker. Worth remembering that the Irish were not even white to English rulers for hundreds of years   – nor was the English working class as explained by Marx. They were regarded as inferior and disposable races. They were granted whiteness to perpetrate genocide all over the world.

Fuentes praising Argentina for defeating Egypt reminds me of white bigots who cheered Joe Frazier the first time he boxed Mohamed Ali. White supremacists can have temporary (and disposable) non-white champions. That’s why so many black and brown athletes are allowed to represent teams based in the imperial core. Never mind athletes, the U.S. had a black president and the UK had a brown Prime Minister (Rishi Sunak). A little diversity in prominent places gives western imperialism a modern progressive facade.

Addressing Argentina hate
Some of the wackiest rationalizations I encountered for hating Argentina was declaring them “Europeans”, “colonizers”, who are not part of the Global South. I suspect many of these geniuses would have told Fidel Castro and Che Guevara to “go back to Europe” because they both looked European.

Of course the history of all Latin America includes genocide and racism. Argentina’s population looks more European than others due to mass migration from Europe over a century ago, but the whiteness of its population and its team, notably the legendary Maradona, has been exaggerated, explained historian Erika Edwards.

Having roots in one of the less European-looking countries in Latin America, Ecuador, I can say that some of the most racist attitudes I’ve encountered have been expressed by people who could never pass for white in Canada. Those racist attitudes typically coexist with feelings of inferiority towards the imperial core – an ache to be gringo. There is no reason to single out Argentina as being more racist and servile towards gringos than the rest of Latin America based on how Argentinians look.

About FIFA and the referees
FIFA is corrupt and recently gave the genocidal maniac Trump a peace prize. You can’t hate FIFA enough. But a theory spread that FIFA – that openly bootlicks the most powerful governments – was rigging the tournament for Argentina using the referees. The theory attracted some supporters that surprised me.

This theory is very stupid. Referees don’t score goals. Argentina was the third highest scoring team in the tournament. It was barely nudged out of first place for goals scored by England and France because of their ten-goal third place game that was like a training session, not a serious game. None of the goals scored by Argentina in the entire tournament were penalty shots. Penalty shots are awarded by referees.

The theory was sparked by a foul Messi perpetrated in a group-stage match against Algeria. Argentina won the game easily and Messi scored three goals, but his detractors claimed that any other player would have received a red card for that foul. Messi inadvertently scraped a player’s calf with his boot. If you look at a replay of the foul, as opposed to a still photo, you’ll see that Messi pulled back from putting his full weight on the players calf. The fouled player did not leave the game.

It is clearly false that any other player would have been expelled because a much worse foul was perpetrated against Argentinian player Nico Fernandez by a Swiss player in the quarter finals. I could give other examples of very hard fouls that did not lead to red cards, but this one best illustrates how absurd the theory is that the referees were trying to help Argentina.

Nico Gonzalez was very heavily stepped on twice in the same play. It was minute 103 of the game,near the end of the first half of extra time. The game was tied. If the game remained tied for another seventeen minutes then penalty kicks would have decided it. A foul was not even called on the Swiss player who stepped on Gonzalez. A red card would have put the Swiss team two men down and hugely increased Argentina’s chances of avoiding a penalty shootout.

Argentina beat the Swiss thanks to a spectacular goal by Julian Alvarez, a blistering shot from about 20 yards out that picked the top left corner of the net. Again, referees don’t score goals. Argentina scored 3 goals in 13 minutes against Egypt and none of them were penalties.

The announcers calling the games repeatedly stated that FIFA officials were instructed to not call fouls excessively in order to keep games flowing as much as possible. But anyone who watches soccer regularly or who has ever played knows that referees are not always consistent within a game, never mind within different games.

The two best teams made the final
Spain was the strongest team in the tournament but Argentina was the only team to force them into extra time. Spain’s only weakness is that it sometimes struggles to score. Without a goal late into extra time the final would have gone to penalties which would have been a disastrous outcome from Spain’s perspective.  In the dying minutes, a Spaniard blocked a Messi shot with his face that might have tied it.  A game Spain dominated came close to being decided by a proverbial coin flip. And Spain was also helped by being a man up after the referee gave Argentina’s Enzo Fernandez a red card very late in the second half.

Of course, as Iran has shown us, the Global South will be liberated by its military capacity, not its soccer capacity. But I will never join the likes of Piers Morgan to give Europeans even greater advantages on the soccer field than they already have. When western imperial rule is abolished its domination of soccer will also end. FIFA will end, but international soccer will thrive.

NOTES:
[1] Even using the word “soccer” is contentious. “Football” is obviously a better name for a sport played by kicking a ball around than “soccer” – as it is called in the U.S., Canada and Australia. Equally, NFL “football” seems ridiculously misnamed since the ball is carried or thrown much more often than it is kicked. But the term “soccer” did not originate in the U.S. as I had always assumed. It originated in England as an abbreviation for “association football”. When I learned that (only a few years ago) I stopped fussing about which British-invented term is used as its name.

[2] In an X post, President Milei seemed to harshly attack the players for displaying the Malvinas banner but he later said their actions were understandable. He also claimed to be working to recover the Malvinas diplomatically. Milei did not help his case by then citing the imperialist Englishman Winston Churchill as a font of wisdom.

 

(Substack)