UEFA President Aleksander Ceferin’s statement that the World Cup expansion had produced “uninteresting” matches was not just a passing remark in a management debate about a crowded calendar or compromised technical quality.
It seemed, especially to the ears of federations coming from Africa, Asia and the Caribbean, as if it were a modern reproduction of an old tone: a tone that sees the game from above, from the seats of the football powers that are reassured by its presence, and not from the thresholds of the teams that have been dreaming of crossing the door for decades.
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That is why the response of the federations of the 13 countries participating in the World Cup was sharp in its meaning, although it remained diplomatic in its language. For Cape Verde, Curaçao, Uzbekistan or Haiti, there is no “marginal” World Cup match. As for Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt, Ghana, Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, South Africa and Congo, the tournament is not summed up in a question: Will it satisfy the eye of the European viewer accustomed to the Champions League? Rather, there is a deeper question: Who has the right to appear on the global gaming stage? Who decides that one match deserves to be seen, and another deserves only to be erased from memory before it even begins?
This tension is not new. He has accompanied the World Cup since its birth. The tournament that we see today as a huge television and commercial empire originally started from a similar contradiction: a universal dream about a ball that unites the world, an international institution that grows through bargains, small countries that see the stadium as a means of recognition, and major powers that view recognition itself as a privilege, not a right.
This issue goes beyond Ceferin himself. Every discussion about the “quality” of World Cup matches, and about the feasibility of expanding the tournament, hides within it an older question: Who defines fun in football? Is it owned by those who are accustomed to watching the game from European concession seats, or is it also owned by those who have been waiting decades to hear their country’s anthem at the World Cup?
A championship born from the need of young people to be seen
When FIFA was founded in 1904, it was not the global corporation and financial empire we know today. It was a small organization, of European origin, trying to circulate specific laws to regulate a game that had begun to cross borders. But contemporary football itself was bigger than its founders. It moved from British schools and clubs to ports, railways, factories and popular neighborhoods all over the world. Everywhere she reached, people left behind something of their language, class, temperament, culture, and way of life.
Then the journalist, the godfather of FIFA and the second president of the organization, Jules Rimet, came later to give the whole project another dimension. Rimet believed that football should not remain an aristocratic game governed by a narrow class concept of amateurism. He ruled out limiting football to members of the working classes, who do not have the luxury of playing without pay, or even have time for any hobby. For Remet, who dreams of holding the World Cup for the first time, the tournament is a promise. A promise to the people of unity and equality on one land and under one law, even if only temporarily.
But the dream, from its beginning, clashed with authority. The British, the first owners of the game, did not easily swallow the idea of England’s voice being equal to that of Uruguay, Egypt or Brazil within one football institution. In the Eurocentric imagination, football remained the daughter of the British home, even as it grew up in the homes of others. In the imagination of marginalized parties, football is an opportunity to move from a position of reception to a position of action.
The World Cup was not born of pure romanticism or a dreamy wish. It was born from a very complex mixture: Jules Rimet’s internationalist dream, the interests of federations trying to generalize their laws and regulate the game, and the desire of small countries to tell the world that they exist. This is what made Uruguay, not Europe, the starting stage.
Uruguay: A small country looking for its size in football
Before Uruguay hosted the first World Cup in 1930, it had confounded Europe at the Olympic Games by winning football gold in Paris 1924 and then Amsterdam 1928.
In both tournaments, a team arrived from a small country historically sandwiched between Argentina and Brazil, and dealing internationally as a dividing wall between the two countries. They were playing a different ball: short passing, smart, patient, with individual skill without chaos, and collective skill without stagnation.
This coincided with the “Batllismo Project,” a modernization project led by Uruguay at the beginning of the twentieth century, which sought to build a more stable social civil state, through reforms in education, labor, infrastructure, and expanding political participation. Under him, football was no longer just a game imported from the British, but rather became a tool for building the image of a small nation that wanted to present itself to the world as a modern, organized and recognizable country. Popularly, there was a strong feeling that small Uruguay could be an exception in South America.
Then football came to give this ambition a popular face. The game is no longer just a British port arena or an imported habit from the children of the elite. It became a space where the poor and the rich, blacks and whites, neighborhood people, workers and employees mixed, although in reality this mixing remained incomplete and subject to the discriminations of his time. But when the national team started winning, it gave the country an easy language to understand itself: We are small on the map, but we are not small on the field.
That is why the decision to host the 1930 World Cup was as political as it was sporting. Uruguay was celebrating the centenary of its independence, and wanted to make the tournament a second birth certificate to the world. Uruguayan diplomat Enrique Boero moved in Europe, negotiating, convincing, and taking advantage of the hesitation of the European powers and their desire to move the tournament outside the continent that was about to explode again. As for Attilio Narancio, president of the Uruguayan Federation, he believed in the project to the point that he put his house as collateral for a loan that helped finance the team’s previous Olympic trip. He knew that the reputation that Uruguay was trying to gain could not be bought with propaganda. Rather, perhaps one football moment stuck in the world’s memory would build Uruguay’s reputation for decades, which is what actually happened.
Then came the Centenario Stadium, a political piece of concrete. It wasn’t just a playground. It was a national monument. Reinforced concrete terraces, a towering tower that recalls flag lines, and a city that wants to say through its stadium: We are not a distant margin; We are here, we have a form, a voice, and a seat in the story.
The ship that carried the first World Cup
In the summer of 1930, the Italian ship “Conte Verde” moved across the Atlantic, carrying the teams of France, Belgium and Romania, along with the match referees, Jules Rimet and the cup itself. The picture today looks more like an old novel than a world championship: players training on the deck of a ship, avoiding passengers in the morning, running between ropes and chairs, and then spending their evenings surrounded by music and light shows.
Lucien Laurent, the French striker who later scored the first goal in the history of the World Cup, was a worker at the Peugeot factory in the French city of Sochaux. He did not travel knowing that he would become a name in the history books. For him and his companions, the trip was a long adventure, a departure from the monotony of the factory and daily life to a distant country at the end of the Atlantic. There were no video analysis rooms, no medical equipment, and no armies of trainers. There was a ship, a sea, and players trying to stay as fit as possible.
Even Jules Rimet, the man who dreamed of heroism, seemed on that trip a less formal person than the statues of memory. He participated in the ship’s events, and won a dance competition after his partner made a cartoon hat that resembled the ship’s chimney. It is in these small details that the first World Cup appears for what it is: a tournament born without certainty, without magnitude, and with a lot of spontaneity.
But politics was never far from the surface. Romania, for example, did not travel just because its union wanted to; King Carol II personally intervened in the selection of the team and guaranteed the players paid leave. Since the first edition, the referees have understood that the team is not just eleven players, but an image of a country that can be exported and exploited. Also since the first edition, the authorities have entered the stadium, sometimes with a king’s hat, sometimes in a military uniform, and sometimes with a smiling administrative face like Ceferin.
Andrade: One man confused Europe
At the Paris Olympics, six years before the first World Cup, José Leandro Andrade made an aesthetic breakthrough in football. He was black, handsome, musical, and a presence unlike what European fans were accustomed to in international football. But, above all, he was a great player. He did not impose himself by force alone, but rather with a rare understanding of space. He knows where to stand, when to intervene, and how to turn a ball into an attack.
Andrade is famous for his “La Tejera” move, the scissors, when he extends one leg and snatches the ball with the other. What made him different was not the movement itself, but the mind behind it. He played as if he were seeing the field from above, reading the angles, letting the opponent think the lane was open, then closing it at the last moment.
However, Europe could not see it without its colonial glasses. It celebrated it, yes, but it often surrounded this celebration with the language of strangeness and strength. In her eyes, he is the “charming black player,” the “different body,” the “innate talent” that dazzles and cannot be explained.
In the story of Andrade is a seed that will be repeated often in the history of football: when creativity comes from the global south, the center describes it as instinct, not knowledge, body, not thought, instinct, not school, and coincidence, not planning. The truth was simpler and deeper: Andrade was not a strange phenomenon in a football circus, but rather a midfielder ahead of his time, and a man who carried in his feet an early response to the idea that Europe alone understood the game.
Hence, the position of the 13 federations appeared to be an objection to Ceferin’s statements and what they mean, and not to the Europeans’ right to criticize the expansion of the World Cup or discuss the level of its matches. These federations do not say that every match in the World Cup will be a major artistic event, but they refuse to turn “quality” into an excuse to reduce the value of teams, countries and peoples that have waited a long time to reach the tournament. For Cape Verde, Curaçao, Uzbekistan or Haiti, the importance of the match does not stem from the name of the opponent or the number of times they have won the World Cup, but from the moment in which the flag will be raised, the national anthem will be heard, and the country will appear, perhaps for the first time, in front of a global audience.
As for African and Arab teams that have experienced a long path of abandonment, disappointments and hopes, the World Cup is not a gift from the football center, but rather a right that was extracted on the stadiums by the sweat of the players and the cheers of the fans over the decades. Therefore, the statement of these unions can be read as a clear message: We do not ask for courtesy, but rather for recognition. A match that seems marginal to the eyes of a European elite may be an unforgettable day in an African village, a Caribbean island, or an Asian city, and it may give one child enough proof that the road to the World Cup does not always start from Madrid, Munich, or Manchester.
If the matches increase, the quality dies?
To be fair, the European view does not always start with arrogance, although it sometimes ends there. Europe, as it looks at current football, sees it not only as a game that has expanded too much, but rather as an economic system that has reached the limits of perfection: players fly weekly between countries to play from the Champions League to the Club World Cup, and from national team to club, until the human body has become merely a resource being depleted in this industry.
In the offices of European leagues, and in the locker rooms from which players emerge more bandaged than victorious, the same argument is repeated: If the matches increase unaccountably, the quality that created the magic of the game in the first place will die. The issue is not, on its face, that Cape Verde, Uzbekistan, or Curacao do not deserve to appear, but rather that when the World Cup grows larger, and when the Club World Cup turns into a new major tournament, the season becomes a train with no final stop. The player is not a machine, the audience is not an endless repository of amazement, and a tournament that wants to give everyone a seat may lose, in the eyes of the Europeans, something of its old quality.
But behind this rational argument there is a political shadow that cannot be ignored. Europe does not defend the health of players alone, but also defends its position in the game pyramid. Modern football, as we know it today, was built around the big European club: Real Madrid, Barcelona, Bayern Munich, Manchester United, Liverpool, Juventus and Paris Saint-Germain. That’s where the money is concentrated, that’s where the stars are made, and that’s where the broadcast networks and sponsors write the bulk of the game’s narrative. Therefore, when FIFA comes and expands the World Cup, or invents a huge version of the Club World Cup, Europe feels that the authority to define the game is slipping away a little from its hands. The question is no longer just: How many matches can a player play? Rather: Who owns the calendar? Who determines when the best players play and where? For whose benefit will the players’ fatigue be transformed into political and commercial capital?
The story of the European Super League revealed this tension on the other hand. When the elite clubs tried to close the door on themselves in 2021, they said they wanted to save the game from bankruptcy and chaos, but in reality they wanted to nationalize financial and football glory for their own account. Fans in England revolted, governments were confused, and some of the founders retreated within days, because popular football memory refused to turn the tournament into a closed club for the rich. However, the idea is not completely dead; It has returned in other forms, in new formats for the Champions League, in a feverish race for broadcasting rights, and in a constant desire among adults to guarantee an income that is not threatened by the surprise of a small team or a crazy night in a distant stadium.
Hence, the European view of current football appears to be dual, and perhaps contradictory. On the one hand, it has a real argument: players are exhausted, the calendar is cracking, and championships are multiplying as if the market does not recognize the limits of the body or the boredom of the audience.
On the other hand, when Europe talks about “quality,” the word is not entirely innocent; Because it often means quality as it sees it, pleasure as its audience knows it, and history as its heroes wrote it. Therefore, a match between newcomers to the World Cup becomes, in the eyes of Europe, a burden on the tournament, while in the eyes of an entire people it is an irreplaceable event and an indelible memory. Specifically here the complex of contemporary football appears: Europe fears inflation for the game, and this is a legitimate fear, but it is also afraid of a football world in which it is no longer the only center, and this is a political fear before it is artistic.
The truth is that the crisis is not between Europe and the rest of the world as much as it is between two visions of the game. A perception that sees football as a product that must be preserved from sagging, protected from too many matches, poor quality, and the erosion of scarcity. Another perception sees it as a symbolic right to appear, and a rare space through which small countries can pass onto the world’s screen. The first asks: How do we maintain quality? The second asks: Who said that quality is only born in adult stadiums? Between the two questions stands the World Cup, as it has always done, not only as a football tournament, but as a major negotiating arena between power and dream, between those who fear for the game because they own it, and those who love it because they have been waiting, for a long time, for it to pay attention to them.
