[MUSIC PLAYING – “Merci Kylian” by Laurent Dubois]
Ron Krabill: Good morning, I’m Ron Krabill. I’m a professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington Bothell. And I’m also the director of the Global Sport Lab in the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington Seattle. The Global Sport Lab is a new effort designed to tackle the big challenges of our global world: inequity, politics, justice, human rights, popular culture, democracy and the economy, to name just a few, through the lens of sport.
The Lab seeks to integrate research curriculum, public events, and civic engagement to become a hub of critical reflection on the role of sports in our everyday lives. We are particularly focused on the sport of football — better known as soccer in the United States — during our pilot period running up to Seattle’s hosting of the FIFA Men’s World cup in 2026. We’re really excited for our inaugural Global Sport Lab podcast featuring one of the foremost scholars of football, Professor Laurent Dubois.
Laurent is a professor at the University of Virginia, where he is the academic director of the Karsh Institute of Democracy. He is the author of seven books on Haitian and Caribbean history, music, and sport, and has been teaching a class on soccer politics for the past 15 years. His book, “Soccer Empire; the World Cup and the Future of France,” was published in 2010 with the University of California Press, and his 2018 book “The Language of the Game: How to Understand Soccer,” was published with Basic Books.
His writings on soccer have appeared in The Atlantic, the New Republic, and The New York Times, and he has translated the book “My Black Stars” by French national team star, Lilian Thuram, into English. Welcome, Laurent. I’m also pleased to have Dr. Jesús Hidalgo joining us today for the conversation. Jesús, would you introduce yourself briefly.
Jesús Hidalgo: Thank you so much for the introduction, Ron. My name is Jesús Hidalgo. I am the graduate adviser for the Jackson School, also part of the Global Sport Lab, and I teach a class about soccer and international studies once per year, sort of, so I’m very excited about the conversation today. Laurent was my professor at Duke University, so I have taken and TA’ed that soccer politics class.
Ron: Fantastic, thanks. So we’re talking the day after Laurent gave a really fascinating talk at the UW titled, “What Worlds Does Soccer Imagine?”, which was a wide ranging exploration of the politics of soccer. In that talk you described your cabinet of curiosities around soccer. Can you say a bit more about how that way of thinking through soccer, through particularly salient moments in time and memory, helps you analyze how people make meaning through the sport.
Laurent Dubois: First, thanks so much for having me and being here, it’s been a pleasure and great to be part of this conversation, and very excited about all that you’re doing here in the Global Sport Lab. I wanted to, in a way, do a talk that was also kind of an invitation to those who were listening to create their own meaning, so I said that this was maybe my cabinet of curiosities, but I think any fan could probably compose one of moments, and that that’s a way, I think, of understanding how deeply and emotively we connect to sport for various reasons.
And the way in which it intertwines between our own lives, obviously the lives of those who play, and then the communities that we’re a part of, and trying to figure out how to layer those. It was also an effort to highlight moments where what I think of as the kind of culture of possibility in soccer emerges, where precisely because it’s such a condensation of meaning, and in the cases that I was talking about, often national identity meanings, there’s also a kind of opening onto other possibilities that the nature of soccer, I think, allows and wanted to do that.
So it sounds like it hopefully will resonate as an idea — I could imagine students putting together those or anybody. And so, the other thing is that we live in such a media rich environment and are bombarded with other people’s things that we want to see, so the idea of maybe curating our own body of material that is connected to our own memories and personhood is, I think, compelling to me.
Jesús: So precisely about the talk, one of the fascinating things that you talk about was this idea of national narratives and how people who you wouldn’t expect become national heroes or heroines — for the Women’s World Cup as well. So, can you develop that idea and maybe one or two examples that come to your mind when talking about national heroes that are soccer players?
Laurent: Yeah, I think that it’s an interesting dynamic in sport, which is that, of course, to succeed in sports is very, very difficult. It’s a path that people often wouldn’t choose if they have a lot of other easier options. So in many cases, people who decide to try to succeed in sport are also because they’re absent other ways for social mobility.
So in many cases, because you have these national teams that become very, very popular, they’re often really some of the most beloved institutions, politicians try to get as close as they can to a national team that’s won because of course, everyone will love the national team always more than any politician. And for me, the examples of that that really stand out and that I talked about in the talk were from the French side, Lilian Thuram, and then Megan Rapinoe on the U.S. side, who I think have interesting parallel trajectories in that they became iconic through their success on the field right through at crucial moments — so really through their brilliance as athletes — but then also each considered that platform was then one that they should deploy, in effect, to speak on behalf of communities that they’re a part of and larger questions, and that they were able then to be simultaneously national heroes, and in some ways critics, of the structure of the nation in a certain way, or maybe just offering an opportunity to imagine their nations in different ways than the political elites that they’re talking to and talking back to. In Megan Rapinoe’s case, of course, that also involved a kind of conflict with the actual representation, the sporting structures; in Lilian Thuram’s case, less that than critiques of French politicians and of the French system in different ways.
Ron: There are two common tropes of scholars of football and scholarship of football that I’d like to explore a little bit. One is the necessity for the scholar to proclaim their passion for the sport as a kind of accreditation or credibility for studying it, and that’s a trope that Toby Miller has criticized as not only unnecessary, but sort of self-serving. And then the second trope is that studying football is often a sort of addendum or a separate kind of hobby for scholars who have built their careers on other kinds of scholarship, other kinds of research. Can you say more about both how you came to studying football and how you think about those tropes, and also just the state of football scholarship?
Laurent: I think it’s a great question, and I think it’s something that’s not only relevant to sports scholarships. So I think of an anthropological field that I’m a part of in Caribbean Studies, for instance, the question of people who write about Afro-Atlantic religions, whether some have become initiated in the religion or some are from those communities, others not. And there’s a sort of interesting dynamic debate around that too, of course, around objectivity versus being able to speak from a certain positionality. I think that in the case of sport, I think in some ways it’s kind of a false dichotomy, I think probably scholars working on anything have an enthusiasm.
I have many colleagues who are great Francophiles, and that’s why they study French literature, and no one kind of accuses them of — so it feels like — I think it’s because of the status of sport in a certain way. And one thing I think that’s always the case is that, in an American university context, the way that sports are such a vital part of American universities — and sometimes seen as a kind in conflict with maybe other projects means that I think U.S. faculty in particular have a complicated relationship to sport on their campuses and beyond. And that’s reasonable. There’s resource questions and there’s questions about the ethics of sport and student athletes, et cetera.
But I do think that, at the same time, in my case it was a very natural progression. I actually see the soccer work as completely connected to the historical work I did in that they all have to do with questions of how is the nation constructed, questions of historical memory, questions around histories and how they’re made present in the present. So those — and because I had already started to be interested in writing for broader audiences when I started writing about soccer, one way I think that helps readers understand what they’re reading is to have a little bit more of a sense of the author than is maybe classic in academic text.
And I also think that it’s perfectly reasonable to use one’s own experience, as long as one is also analyzing it in a certain way, to think about these things. So I feel like in some very — and I did this when I was writing about music too, but in some very real way, if in writing as one person fascinated by this, bringing what I can bring to it, but a kind of respectful relationship with another reader who has their own enthusiasm, not demanding that the other person have the same relationship that I have, but sharing that we both have a relationship to this object.
Ron: I really appreciate that.
Jesús: And you are part of a scholar community, as Ron said, with this. But you also interview across soccer players, especially for “Soccer Empire.” You mentioned Leon Duran. Are you still in contact with him? How is he doing? Because for the book, there are two main characters. There are Lilian Thuram, also Zinedine Zidane — I assume you might not be as close to Zidane.
Laurent: Tragically, I’ve never met Zidane. I’d be happy to if he’s listening, please write me an email. So yeah, I had the opportunity in 2006 to meet — I think that’s right — yeah 2006, to meet Lilian Thuram. And that happened because I was a big admirer of him, and I should just explain for the listeners that my dissertation was on Guadeloupe, which is a small Caribbean island in the Caribbean, the Caribbean islands, of course, but in the French Caribbean, I mean, and my dissertation and first book were the story of a kind of enslaved people and uprisings and emancipation in Guadeloupe.
Lilian Thuram is from Guadeloupe, grew up there, and I had known from reading about him that he had a strong interest in the history of slavery and of his island, and was very engaged with that question. So I knew that we had in common an interest in Guadeloupe; and a magazine called Esprit Magazine, which is an important French academic, but also broader audience, magazine did a special issue on the Caribbean, and I happened to know the editors of that issue, and they said we should really include an interview with Lilian Thuram.
And then they said, ‘Would you like to fly to Barcelona in a week to do the interview with us?’ and I said, “Yes, of course, totally reasonable.’ So [I] flew from Michigan at the time to Barcelona. From that meeting, though, we immediately connected actually around history, because he was at the time starting to work on a book called “My Black Stars,” which is a Black history book, and has often said that if he had not been a soccer player, he might have been a historian. And he later curated an exhibit on colonial representations and race at the Quai Branly. So this is, in a sense — so that was the beginning of a friendship and connection. And I did do the translation of his book into English. And we have seen each other kind of regularly in France, and it’s very funny walking around Paris with Lilian Thuram. And last year I walked down the street for a little while with Lilian Thuram and Marcus Thuram and the number of interpolations that they get. Like, I was at a taxi stand with Lilian Thuram and every taxi driving by was like, ‘Hey!’, everyone’s like his best friend. And the day before the 2018 World Cup final was — or not the day of, but maybe four or five days before — I was walking around with him in Paris. And of course it was France Croatia rematch, and he had helped defeat Croatia in 1998. So people kept talking to him about whether we were going to beat Croatia. At one point he was like, ‘I feel like they think that I’m actually going to play in the final.’
But he’s well and what he has done is to focus on anti-racist education. So he has a foundation that does a lot of work with schools on how to especially reach very young people to try to undo racist tropes and imaginaries is interesting. He came to UVA (University of Virginia) in 2022. We had a viewing party for World Cup matches and a talk with him. I would just say that my thinking on things have really been influenced, of course, by the conversations with him, the way he thinks about these things.
Jesús: One thing that is very interesting about these two characters is one goes to Barcelona and aligns with who he is socially committed, and the other one goes to Real Madrid, which also aligned like superstar enclosed in a bubble. Not really that much about politics — I mean he does politics, he does politics in his own way. But the other one like goes to Barcelona, all these things.
Lauent: Yeah, and I think you’re right. I mean, his career at Barcelona was relatively short, but I think it really aligned with it. Made sense that he ended — his last professional team was there. And I do think that one of the reasons the two of them were interesting to write about in tandem or in connection is because the way in which they were political symbols was very different.
So for Thuram, the point was, as some other athletes, to say ‘I have a platform, and as an athlete, I’m now going to speak from that platform. I’m going to use it.’ And he talks about that very compellingly. He’s like, ‘I was just lucky, in a way, to become a national icon as a young man. And I felt like I had to speak up for the things I believed in and the people that are a part of my communities.’
In his first book, which should be fun to translate — actually, it’s really interesting because he writes about growing up in a project in France outside Fontainebleau. His mother migrated with him as a child when he was like 11, 12; and the way that he describes these places is as a very beautiful place of meetings of cultures. So it’s very different than the way that most of the French media depicts it. He talks about it as a place of learning where he met people from the Congo, and his best friend was from Portugal. The first team he played on was called Les Portugues de Fontainebleau, so the Portuguese of Fontainebleau. And that was where they recruited him, and he played on that team as a local. So I would say his way of doing politics is really interesting.
Zidane’s way of doing politics is very occasionally to say things, and when he does, it’s very interesting. He sort of says political points, but also to really just be a symbol of France and Algeria’s relationship, which is in some ways maybe the most fraught international relationship in France, and to be a symbol upon which people projected things, and then in an interesting way, to offer the world as his final act as a soccer player. The headbutt in 2006, an act that people still talk about and which condenses so many things and questions. So it’s sort of interesting to think about different ways that players can become political or be political symbols.
Ron: And we’ve been talking this week a little bit about the Claudia Rankine piece that sort of explores the headbutt and tries to reinterpret it through that frame of post-colonial politics. Very interesting way.
Laurent: Yeah and that headbutt was really the trigger. In some ways, I mean, I guess described earlier as a natural progression, but it was wanting to write about that that made me into writing about soccer. And I should shout out to Peter Alegi, who is an important soccer scholar — I hope you’ll have him on a podcast at some point — who was my colleague at Michigan State at the time and was sort of my mentor. I said, ‘I’d like to write about this,’ and so he kind of gave me a bit of a curriculum and a way in, so that I felt kind of grounded in the scholarship. But it was really trying to untangle that moment, which to me is a memory about colonial history, all kinds of other things, and that’s why it felt like quite a natural thing.
I should say that, in my earlier work on Guadeloupe, there’s actually quite a bit that happens in the contemporary, or at least the framings are, about questions of contemporary cultural memory, cultural politics and so forth. So that’s why it’s to some extent, I had never been just writing only about the past in my books.
Ron: It makes sense.
Jesús: And the interesting thing, continuing with Zidane, is that he could technically be the coach for Algeria, but that’s not part of the conversation. He’s not coaching now. And all the rumors with Deschamps, the current coach for France after the World Cup in 2026, and stepping down. All the rumors are like, ‘Is Zidane going to do it? Is Zidane going to be the coach of the national of France. So that’s also interesting.
Laurent: I often think about his relationship to Rachid Mekhloufi, who is a player — who was one of the Algerians who left France and became part of the Algerian national team, but then went back and played in France, and eventually coached Algeria. So there are these earlier trajectories of that Franco-Algerian relationship.
Zidane is also Berber, which is interesting, so there’s a kind of series — there’s lots of layers to his personality. And I do think that’s interesting. I would also say that in a different — if we were in this era — Zidane basically decided when he was 15 that he was going to play for France and could not change that decision according to the rules at the time.
Today, players can change their mind, once after their 20s, when they were older; I’m not saying that he would have done something different, but it’s interesting that later — especially when there was a France-Algeria game — it’s one of the most interesting moments in terms of Zidane saying things. So there was a France-Algeria game in the Stade de France that culminated in a pitch invasion by French Algerian fans, who kind of interrupted the match that Algeria was losing and it was never completed. So Zidane walked off the pitch. It was an incredible moment in terms of you can get a sense of Lillian Thuram’s personality from this, and there’s footage of this that he stayed on the field — everybody else was bundled off the field, there were people running all over. And Lilian Thuram is like staying on the field and grabbing these kids who are running on the field and giving them mini lectures on basically on anti-racist politics and saying, ‘This is not the right strategy, because they’re going to deploy this to argue that you are disloyal to France,’ which is exactly what happened.
Jean-Marie Le Pen soon afterwards announced his candidacy for presidency outside the stadium, saying, ‘Look what they did to our’ — so that’s a really interesting moment. But Zidane had written before, had said before, ‘If there’s ever a match, I wish it could be a tie, like this would be that match. It’s really hard to play against.’ So I think that there’s actually a really interesting — and the last thing I’ll just say is, of course, I think Zidane’s story allows us to understand Algerian histories and that his parents migrated to France before independence. Which means in some ways, Zidane has never not been French. I mean, his parents were always French. They were French subjects in Algeria. And then they went to France, and they stayed there after Algeria became independent. So this idea of otherness is constructed in a certain way. And indeed, his father’s first work was as a laborer in Saint-Denis actually very close to where the Stade de France was built, reconstructing after the war. Do we have to start over with that?
Ron: Yeah we should just point out that we’re in Seattle and it’s that time of year seagulls fly by.
Laurent: The seagulls are telling me that I’m wrong about Zidane and that they think that his headbutt was actually a terrible, unethical act and that I’m making excuses for him. So thank you, seagulls. I appreciate your perspective.
Ron: Staying on this theme of the French national team — and last night you talked about this idea of collective representation and the way a national team represents the nation — Eric Hobsbawm’s famous quote that, “The nation is more recognizable as 11 named men” and those ideas of how you can project a love for an abstract concept onto a team.
One of the things I’m curious about your thoughts on is when you wrote “Soccer Empire” in 2010, the French men’s national team still had one of those really great teams that hadn’t won that often. They won in ‘98 lost in 2006 in the final, but before that had often gotten to the quarters, gotten to the semis, sort of a loved team that never sort of succeeded, and then had all of this post-colonial racial politics sort of mapped onto it. And part of what I’ve been struck with is that in the ensuing years, they win again in 2018. In 2022, they come in as one of the dominant and favored teams. I picked up in the general discourse, a little bit of a shift from ‘This is the beloved team that never quite does as well as we want them to’ to ‘This is now the dominant team, and we should root against them and someone else should get to win. It’s time for something else.’
And I’m curious to hear your thoughts on the way that shift impacts the symbolism of a team like the French national team, and then also interested in how that also the women’s team remains that team that has often been very good, high hopes, but not quite reached the pinnacle yet.
Laurent: Very interesting question. I mean, I think there’s so much. On the one hand — and I wrote a piece that was for actually an anthropology journal about, kind of, I said the most valuable player of like the 2018 World Cup was the man who actually kind of exposed in 2010 these discussions in the Football Federation about limiting the number of Black and North African players, because in an interesting way that then led to exposing of that kind of people who are promoting that and having to leave.
And then Deschamps coming in, I think with a very different vision that has been quite successful of really creating a team that was like, the best players and in which that kind of racial issue has really been almost — maybe not sublimated exactly, but it doesn’t come up at all in the same way. So I was very struck in 2018 while people outside France did talk a fair amount about the kind of African team — Trevor Noah’s sort of famous thing on this — within France, it was the first time that there was not a sort of serious, far right politician who had not attacked the team. So in every other prior World Cup, like clockwork, just like in the United States, you can expect someone will say like, ‘Soccer is un-American.’ There would have been someone, usually from Le Pen’s party, but otherwise who basically said, ‘Wow, there really are — why are there so many Black players on the team?’
And to note, I mean in 2006 it was 19 out of 23 players were of African, North African or other Caribbean backgrounds. But what happened with the 2018 team, I say, as I’ve written about it a little bit in The New York Times and elsewhere, was like a real shift from ‘98. Whereas the way that these players are occupying that space of being, in many cases, French, Muslim, of African background is just very different. They’re less talking about it as directly and more inhabiting it in a way, on social media. And some of the images that I showed yesterday were a version of that.
So N’Golo Kante, who comes from a Muslim Black family in France, it’s not like he doesn’t talk a lot about that. He doesn’t make a lot of statements about it. Even Mbappe doesn’t talk a lot about that. But they are, and everywhere in France people are walking around with Kante and Mbappe jerseys, whatever their background. So I do think it’s — and I think alongside that has been this increase in dominance in a certain way.
It’s also true that the long-term structural reasons for the strength of French football, I think, are worth thinking about, especially as we think about the U.S., for instance, as an example. So what are the structural underpinnings of that level, because it is a very high level and French footballers are very sought after around the world. They’re present in all the leagues. Coaches often see them as particularly well-trained, ready for professional career, and that’s not by accident — that’s the result of a concerted effort that is, for the national team, is part of it. But it’s only one part of it.
Ron: That’s super helpful. And the women’s team, how do you see them?
Laurent: The women’s team I think is in a sense for one thing, the kind of infrastructural support is different, is lesser, is building. But I also think that women’s soccer globally is just is a very different ecosystem. And the women’s team, I think, for a while was in that position of being one of the stronger ones and having more support from France. I mean, Olympique Lyonnais kind of early on set the bar high with an investment in women’s soccer. The National Federation did do pretty well — not as well as they could have — but pretty well in terms of the Clairefontaine Academy and supporting.
So you had them kind of contesting along with Brazil, the kind of U.S. dominance, but in many contexts sort of losing to the United States. So I do think that will probably change, and there’s a kind of sense. And part of it is obviously the ecology between the French Women’s Professional Leagues and French National Team, that sustains things in a certain way. I also think, very interesting on the women’s team, is that the question of their makeup, of the makeup of the team, is also never been an issue in a certain way, except, of course, around the key issue of the hijab in French sport. And so France and Quebec are still two countries that don’t allow women to play in hijab, and Shireen Ahmed — who should also invite for your podcast — writes a lot about this. And so there’s a dynamic there around Islam and women’s sport that I suspect that is becoming increasingly important; has meant that certain players have not been able to play in France, and I think is an issue that will likely emerge. So that’s the place where there’s kind of a bit of a undergirding political question that I think — which is tied to a very live political question in France around the veil, which has been very important. So that’s a place where I would keep an eye on and it would be interesting to see how that evolves.
Ron: It’s interesting that you mention that because the U.S. Women’s National Team has been criticized in the opposite direction for being too white and not having enough diversity, and that’s now changing in really interesting ways in the last five years — to keep an eye on.
Laurent: One of the things — and you can even see this from the far right political sort of stratagems in their kind of publicity and so forth — is that the reality is that I think many French people, if they look at the French women’s team, will just see the people they know. I mean, in other words, many people at least in urban areas live in a world in which — and even in smaller towns — in which the French people they know are some of them are going to have North African backgrounds, some are going to have Caribbean or African background — and it’s just it’s a fact of life.
So even the far right has had to modulate, in that sense, from seeing that as a problem to seeing new immigration as a problem and so forth. So even in their publicity, you see a mix of backgrounds. And curiously, like in the French Caribbean, for instance, a lot of people vote for the National Front, because they’re worried about Haitian immigrants.
And that was not the case in ‘98, where things were more racialized. And so you could say Lilian Thuram is not really French, like, ‘Oh, but he’s actually from Guadeloupe, which has been French since 1635.’ It doesn’t make any sense. He’s more French than Corsicans, if you want to put it by length of time, or Alsatians, for that matter. But that kind of idea that they could vehicle that, I think just doesn’t play anymore, and that’s partly a victory of the French team to render something normal. That should be normal. But yeah.
Jesús: Different topic that I would be interested to explore a little bit with you is sports washing. This idea of all these countries like Russia and Qatar and now Saudi Arabia using mega events to make people forget their track about human rights violations, work rights violations, et cetera. We have seen cases with Russia. We have seen cases with Qatar. The interesting thing with Saudi Arabia, which will host the 2034 Men’s World Cup, is and I will quote this just to make sure I get in the right quote, is the Saudi crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and I quote, ‘If sport washing is going to increase my GDP by 1%, then we will continue doing sport washing,’ which is a completely different approach to the other ones. It’s more like we are going to pass this really bad law that is going to go against Russian interests while Russia plays, and we’re going to do it sort of hidden while people are distracted by sports. But here we have a strategy. ‘No, we are aware of this. We don’t care. We’ll just go for it.’ So how do you see Saudi Arabia? How do you envision the role? Because for some scholars, the 2034 World Cup will not be about sportswashing. It will be more about consolidating their political and economic influence in the world compared to Qatar, that is like, ‘Look, we’re a tiny area, but we’re part of the global economy. We want to be visible.’ So how do we see that it’s still almost 10 years from now but we already know Saudi Arabia will host the World Cup.
Laurent: I think it’s a totally fascinating topic and a great one to teach around, because I think in all the other domains, sport just condenses all the contradictions that exist in the world more broadly. So there’s a way in which what is interesting is how drawn, of course, to being around or near sport the powerful in the world are, whether financial elites or political elites. Even when it’s not — and it can’t be broken down as a kind of rational calculation, it’s fundamentally like a symbolic need to be close to it. And obviously there’s so much money in soccer at so many levels, and the infrastructure of it is required.
What is interesting, I think, about sport on one level and the professional level is that players, a lot of that money is actually going to players. So this is a little bit unlike other industries, where the concentration of wealth is largely exclusively at those managerial classes. The laborers — if you want, if we can call them that — of sport, not all of them of course, many are quite exploited. But there’s a significant and growing number of laborers in sport who receive regularly significant capital, and that’s partly because they’re able to move in a global marketplace and maybe play in Saudi Arabia and so forth. And to me, at least, that’s not something that bothers me that much that those players are — that N’Golo Kante is making what he makes in Saudi Arabia. For different reasons, I can say I don’t see that exactly as a negative, ultimately.
But I do think in terms of the mega events, I mean, these have always been — these are political events fundamentally. They were birthed and imagined as political events that both the Olympics and I think the intriguing thing about both the Qatar and the Saudi Arabia World Cup is that, of course, these are always double edged swords. This was true when Argentina hosted the World Cup. Everybody looks at your country. Everyone’s looking at our country, but everybody can look at your country and critique your country. This will undoubtedly happen in 2026. I mean, I’m sure that world media is kind of — writings about the state of the United States will look and will be maybe surprised to some people in the United States, but there’s going to be coverage of the United States that will be negative. And people will look closely at what — so there’s always a kind of trade off there. It’s not simply that everyone’s going to agree that your country is amazing. But I think in the Saudi case, the flip side of that was interesting, and I’ll note that for instance, Zidane campaigned for the Qatar World Cup. What always tends to happen with these tournaments — and this happened in Brazil too, where there was even like a massive social movement against the World Cup’s infrastructural cost in 2013 — is that almost right up until the beginning of the World Cup, the controversies are very intense. People are talking about boycotts and so forth. And then as soon as the tournament begins, it’s almost like a switch is turned. There’s a funny essay by a French writer that’s just called “How I Failed My Boycott.” And it sort of just self-knowing where he’s like, ‘At first I was like, I am not going to watch a single game.’ And then he’s like, then he was kind of walking by and a game was in the thing and he’s like, ‘Well, I can go in here and have a beer’ and by the end, of course, he’s watching the final.
Ron: I think similar dynamics in South Africa in 2010 as well.
Laurent: Same thing. I mean I went to that World Cup and all you had heard about for four years was that it was going to be like a massacre, basically, like complete disaster. And then it was kind of a state of exception. I mean, I know that period of time in South Africa was different from other times in South Africa, and in Brazil, too. What happened in Qatar, that’s interesting, is that the flip side of the kind of Global North worrying about a winter tournament, was that it’s actually not winter in the Global South. So, for instance, like Argentines could celebrate their victory in summer. So it’s interesting how much of these things are — and I think in that particular case, and this is really because of Morocco’s run, there’s also a way in which this World Cup sort of existed for the Middle East and parts of the world in a way different from others. So I think that there’s always these interesting — I mean, I would also note that in between, we have the Spain, Portugal, Morocco one, which I think is very intriguing, so I think a three country like 2026, but three countries — which with a quite complicated relationship between Morocco and Liberia, you have migration. So that’s going to be intriguing to think about. I guess this is all just a call — and I think it’s interesting to think of these things in many complex layers, but it’s also just a reminder that at the end of it, the sport has enough power that people make all kinds of irrational decisions to be associated with it.
Jesús: And speaking of emotions there, the 2026 World Cup is hosted [by] the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and Seattle is one of the cities. So on the one to 10 scale, first, how excited about the World Cup are you? And on a scale from one to 10, how terrified about the World Cup hosted here in the U.S. are you?
Lauren: I’m always like 11 for excitement about the World Cup in any case. And actually, I don’t know exactly how it will unfold, but it will be fascinating. I mean, I think that broadly speaking, it’s likely to unfold fairly well, I think logistically and stuff. I mean, who knows obviously, and I think it’s interesting to think about a World Cup in such a big country geographically and what that looks like for people. There’s been a little while since you’ve had something at that scale — there’s a complexity to that. It seems to me already it’s interesting hearing about what you are planning. There’s going to be a West Coast experience, and I think an East Coast experience, and probably I guess, a Houston or whatever, and then the Mexican and Canadian. I think they’ll be very different experiences of the World Cup. Of course, I mean I don’t know if people are going to be able to come from abroad and come to the World Cup, so there’s a possibility a very anemic international presence, which would totally undermine the power of the World Cup. It’ll be interesting to see how communities in the United States rally around particular teams.
So I do think it strikes me that it’s coming very soon, and I’m not sure most places are actually ready, exactly. It doesn’t feel — I think Seattle seems maybe more ready than at least the cities on the East Coast. I mean, I might be missing something, but — and as I pointed out yesterday — it’s interesting on the East Coast anyway.
It’s interesting that it’s going to be happening at exactly the same time as the celebrations of the 250th anniversary of the birth of America in the United States, literally like the same weeks. So that’s interesting. And as far as — there isn’t really anyone who is thinking about — the U.S. Football Federation and the federal government and state governments are not, to my knowledge, really carefully thinking about that. In the ideal world, this would be a great opportunity. You’d have lots of international tourists to come see cool exhibits about Jefferson, but my sense is instead, there’s going to be these interesting — for a cultural studies scholar, it’s going to be totally fascinating. So get ready cultural studies scholars for the summer of 2026. And there will be several books that need to be written afterwards for sure.
Ron: Fantastic. I was thinking revisiting your 2018 book, “The Language of the Game,” that the video assistant referee system was just beginning to come into place. And since then, VAR has become a major lightning rod for football fandom. And I have some thoughts on VAR as a product of media and mediation, but I’m also really curious to hear what your thoughts are regarding VAR today, especially from a more analytical or academic perspective.
Laurent: Well, first, I’d love to hear more of what you think about it because — so I was anti-VAR. I even wrote a piece that was in The Wall Street Journal against VAR, and I was very happy because I got some support from various people. But what I’ve come to realize is that I didn’t need to be worried about VAR, because my worry about VAR was that it would decrease the theatrical, performative, dramatic dimensions of a sport that people love, partly because it’s unfair and infuriating, and they like to argue with each other about referee calls, but instead it has simply just given people more to argue about so effectively.
So it’s simply just multiplied; I mean, I do think it’s a little sad that we always have to have two goal celebrations now, but then on the other hand, maybe two goal celebrations is nice. It’s true that each of them is a little bit less strong than if they were together. And I think that it’s also interesting to see how the modulation of its use and pulling back and forward and on offside and those sorts of things. But I was concerned that they would somehow take away how insane soccer is. But I think — because that’s the dream, is to rationalize things through technology, as we’re well aware in our world today, that is not really what happens. But I don’t know, what do you think about that as a media studies scholar?
Ron: I’m working on a piece right now talking about VAR needs a heavy dose of critical media studies, because it is that dream of rationality, that dream that we will know the correct call if we can just use the video and what we see, we believe. There’s this fantastic clip — so a Seattle Reign player, Sofia Huerta, a penalty was called for handling in the box by VAR. It wasn’t in real time. And there’s — the pro referee organization released this amazing clip of basically saying ‘We were wrong,’ but they released the audio of the VAR talking to the on-field referee, and the on-field referee is looking at the screen and saying, ‘I have her hand in a natural position’ and the VAR referee in his head is saying ‘No, I don’t see that the hand is raised, hand is not in a natural position.’ And he says, ‘Well, but I see it bouncing off her leg and then onto her hand, which would mean it’s not a handling offense.’ And the video is literally on loop showing exactly that happened, seeing the shot off her leg onto her hand, so it shouldn’t be a penalty. But the VAR is saying no, I don’t see that, it goes directly to her hand and they call the penalty.
So you’re seeing in real time in a way that press media studies scholars, like, we always say seen as in actually believing, but you don’t often get to watch in real time what it means to have someone just saying that.
Laurent: Well because at the end of the day, the problem of soccer refereeing is that you are trying to understand what’s in the mind of someone when they do something, right? And were they doing this on purpose, or were they just in the air moving their — I’m moving my elbow. It’s a podcast so you can’t see. Yeah, so I think —
Ron: The natural, is the hand in a natural position?
Laurent: What does that mean?
Ron: Have you ever played in a sport? Like is it at your side?
Laurent: I mean, even your raised boot or you end up crashing into someone’s legs — was that on purpose? You touch the ball a tiny bit — well, did you mean to? And you touch the tiny ball just because you could hit. I think there’s a way — because at the end of the day, it’s sort of an impossible set of things to — and I think when I penned my article like Andrés Cantor, who’s kind of the goal — the inventor of the long goal — was like wrote on Twitter was maybe my proudest moment. He was like, ‘I agree with you completely.’ But it was interesting because it was realizing, of course this is also someone who understands the theatrical nature of the game. And I think for those who think that soccer will someday become rational and fair, I think I have news for you, that’s not what it’s about.
And I think that if people — I think the sports power is precisely that people can feel so sad and angry about it so much of the time. That’s why it’s a human sport. I mean, if you want something purely rational, do math equations or something; but I just don’t understand why people don’t see that, that this is not a factory that’s building something. It’s a human drama, that’s why people like it. And what people want is to be able to talk about it, and it’s better to have more to talk about. And so thank you VAR.
Ron: As a side note, if you haven’t seen Andrés Cantor’s call of the final (penalty kick) PK in the World Cup —
Laurent: I have seen that. It’s one of the most incredible things ever.
Ron: Cabinet of curiosity.
Laurent: Yeah that’s right, another moment.
Jesús: And just if you haven’t, you should listen to the Spanish commentators talking about VAR, because it’s not like, ‘Oh!’, but sometimes they do have good ideas. For example, one idea that they mentioned is ‘Well, we have professional attackers, players. We have professional referees, but we don’t really have a professional group of people who only do VAR. We recruit from the referees, and each of them have different approaches. Instead of having just a group of people who will have the same approach.’ And the other thing that they always comment about is, the players just don’t know the rules. They keep doing what I’m doing with my hands, sort of a screen. That’s not a VAR call. Why are you trying to tell the referee that this should be a VAR call? Don’t you know the rules?
Laurent: Yeah, it’s only certain cases.
Jesús: And then there is this weird — we have a body of technology that people don’t know how to use, and also people don’t know when to use. And maybe there needs to be some clarification. There should be just a body of people managing this amazing tool that would be for the same, and people receive more instructions about when to use it.
Laurent: I think I saw on social media someone was like ‘VAR, but for faculty meetings.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, why don’t we just put VAR in all realms of our life? Just everything should.’ And then you could be like, ‘No, you did say that.’ But it would be good to have an archive. Then you could say, like ‘You did say that five years ago.’
But I do think that’s interesting. I mean I do — what’s so interesting is about how much it’s modulated all the time. And of course, the question of why don’t they raise the offside flag when they know it’s offside but they’re waiting for VAR and then maybe someone gets hurt, there’s that kind of stuff or there’s all these — there’s a whole sort of subset of goals scored when everyone knows it was offside, but you still score the goal. And then, of course, I do think all these things will get adjusted. And essentially, I guess from a media studies Baudrillard perspective or something, it’s really the proliferation of more images.
It does bring me back to the 2006 headbutt, because that was this moment where it was like, it seemed like it was a little bit in between, whether the call was made based on seeing the replay and stuff. I guess because — I think when people thought like, ‘Oh, it’ll be like in football,’ and obviously in football it can also be ambiguous. And of course, there is the kind of slowing down of the game and the fact that every game now has 11 minutes of overtime — those elements I think are there. But it’s still much less than I would have thought, like it didn’t change soccer that much in the end, I think.
Ron: So this might have to be our last question in terms of time: so I was in a conversation over the recent holidays with a family member who’s a collegiate basketball coach in a high school, athletic director, and he was making the point that sport is fundamentally a conservative space. And I wonder how you think about that? How that tendency varies across different times and distances and how we can think about sport being either intrinsically or not intrinsically conservative, or progressive, or radical, or what that looks like?
Laurent: That’s interesting. Was this person talking about the United States?
Ron: Yes.
Laurent: I mean, I think — so we were talking this morning about American football, so American football in relationship to masculinity as a very strong cultural force. And so I think, obviously in terms of gender and sexuality, it feels like there is a way in which sport does play a role of maintenance. And we can see how worried people get about possibilities for that being untroubled in a certain way. So I think that’s probably right. And then at the same time, I think that women’s sport is in some ways deeply political just by its presence, and has been for a long time, because it troubles those things. I don’t think I could attribute one politics to soccer, because I think that it is just a political space that is as wide and diverse as any other, and it can be deployed in lots of different ways.
But it’s interesting to think about whether there are things about it that, I mean, I think of soccer as it’s very much about a collective. So that’s got a particular valence. There’s a Malcolm Gladwell podcast where he emphasizes it’s like a weak link sport, so there’s a way in which your team is really only as good as your worst player. So there’s actually in soccer, at least, a kind of urgency to make sure that all people are kind of being raised up, which has a particular political perspective versus a more individualistic.
So I think that people can do — and I think it’s obviously — I think you can point to Mussolini using soccer, Putin using soccer, and the Algerian Revolution’s revolutionaries using soccer and many other cases of left politics. So it feels to me — I do think there’s something about U.S. sports culture and U.S. soccer culture. There are some things that could be, again, great topics for teaching and thinking that have to do with this particular country’s relationship on a broader level to class and class structures and other things. But in the French case, I have to say my overall sense of it is that it has been generally, it has been a place of mobilization for anti-racist action. It has been a place, it has probably been the most important place, where colonial histories have been brought into the present space.
So in that sense, it has its political valence, I think has not been that conservative, but rather pushing to what I think of as just sort of like lucidity, which is like seeing the nation as it is in a way. It’s not that the team is radically departing from the nation, it’s that it’s kind of asking people to look around and say, ‘This is our history.’
There’s a very famous slogan that the Black British movement used in the ‘80s that just said, ‘We are here because you were there,’ which was a simple reminder that if France is what it is today, it is because of a history of 300-500 years of colonialism. That’s just how it is. I don’t know what to tell people. Like, if you could reverse it, maybe that would be great. So here we are. And now the question is, what are we going to do? And I think that’s where a lot of the voices on the team have been. So what’s the way forward? And the fact that a certain collective of people from many backgrounds can together bring victory and joy to people is a good message that whatever politics it seems like it’s a powerful message.
Ron: That’s a fantastic note to end on. Thank you so much, Laurent. Thank you so much, Jesús, for our fantastic conversation. Really appreciate having you here.
Laurent: Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it.
[MUSIC PLAYING – “Merci Kylian” by Laurent Dubois]
