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"The PM wishes both teams well for the final, especially Spain." So began the final communique of Sir Keir Starmer's two years as British prime minister, saying it had been "a fantastic World Cup" and that "politics should stay out of football." But he added:
The World Cup might not be ours, but the Falkland Islands definitely are. Our position is unchanged. Self-determination rests with the islanders and our commitment to the Falklands will never waver.
His attempt to keep politics out of the world's favorite game, then, was unsuccessful - doomed by a banner held aloft by exultant Argentina players after their stunning comeback victory over England. It proclaimed the Malvinas (as they are known in Argentina) were Argentine. Javier Milei, Argentina's libertarian president who has tried hard to maintain friends in the West, responded:
The Malvinas are Argentine. What the players did is understandable. Emotion got the better of them. They did it, and that will probably lead to discussion of an economic sanction.
The World Cup has produced a glorious month for the human spirit, featuring exciting and inspiring sports events across North America (some of which even involved England). Fans have mingled harmoniously with rivals. From Norway's Viking rowing celebration to the Scottish Tartan Army who drank Boston dry and persuaded the organist to play the Proclaimers at Fenway Park, it's been a global party - but with unmatched power to bring out divisions.
International sports and politics are linked inextricably. In football terms, Argentina and England share a rivalry that matches anything in the world of team sports, and served up another compelling episode. But the frigid islands in the South Atlantic are the true source of tension between them. Battles on the pitch (note the military imagery) are doomed to invoke the all-too-real war the nations fought 44 years ago, which cost the lives of 255 Britons and 649 Argentines.
At the semifinal in Atlanta, English fans and players regarded themselves as underdogs against the defending champions, captained by history's greatest footballer, Lionel Messi. Their opponents thought it was about even more than that. Argentina's players were singing about regaining the islands as soon as they won their quarterfinal against Switzerland; and fans brought along the controversial banner for the players to wave on Wednesday.
Once that genie was out of the bottle, it quickly prodded even Starmer - one of the least bellicose politicians imaginable - to show that the Falklands still matter to the UK as well. England's defeat reopened a historical wound, just as football manages to foment bitterness and reopen wounds across the world.
George Orwell
In late 1945, as the Iron Curtain was falling across Europe, a Soviet club played several British teams on a goodwill mission. George Orwell was unimpressed. In his essay The Sporting Spirit, he argued that sport was "an unfailing cause of ill-will."
Even if one didn't know from concrete examples (the 1936 Olympic Games, for instance) that international sporting contests lead to orgies of hatred one could deduce it from general principles… The significant thing is not the behaviour of the players but the attitude of the spectators: and, behind the spectators, of the nations who work themselves into furies over these absurd contests, and seriously believe - at any rate for short periods - that running, jumping and kicking a ball are tests of national virtue.
Orwell also pointed out that sports, even on a local basis, had not been taken seriously between Roman times and the Victorian era. But then the US and the UK turned it into a "heavily-financed activity" that could attract big crowds and "rouse savage passions," and the infection spread. He saw them as the consequence of the forced inactivity involved in modern city living, and a way to keep the masses happy.
Writing when the World Cup was still a small tournament that the British teams didn't bother to enter, he warned that you couldn't do better to "add to the vast fund of ill-will" in the world "than by a series of football matches between Jews and Arabs, Germans and Czechs, Indians and British, Russians and Poles, and Italians and Jugoslavs, each match to be watched by a mixed audience of 100,000 spectators." Even 81 years ago, he foretold that this year's cup was a bad idea.
Eduardo Galeano
Unlike Orwell, the great Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano loved football. A trenchant left-wing critic of colonialism best known for the classic The Open Veins of Latin America, he also found time to write poetically about his beloved sport. And he agreed with Orwell that international soccer was "choreographed war."
In soccer, ritual sublimation of war, eleven men in shorts are the sword of the neighborhood, the city or the nation. In each confrontation between two sides, old hatred and old loves passed from father to son enter into combat.
Soccer was invariably described using the language of war, he said. Like conflict or religion, autocrats can employ it as an opiate of the masses. The Argentine regime that retook the Falklands in 1982 had been buoyed by the nation's World Cup victory in 1978. And the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński reported that after Brazil won the 1970 cup playing arguably the most beautiful football ever seen, a heartbroken Brazilian exile told him: "The military right wing can be assured of at least five more years of peaceful rule."
In 1969, the contest between El Salvador and Honduras for a World Cup place boiled over into an outright war that cost 6,000 lives and left some 12,000 wounded. Kapuściński was on the scene as El Salvador was defeated 1-0 in Honduras, prompting an 18-year-old Salvadoran girl to commit suicide. The president and the soccer eleven formed a guard of honor at her funeral. When the Honduran team arrived for the return leg, "a screaming crowd of fans broke all the windows in the hotel and threw rotten eggs, dead rats and stinking rags inside." At the stadium, fans burned the Honduran flag and replaced it with "a dirty, tattered dishrag." Some 150 Honduran cars were burned. Then Salvadoran troops crossed the border, and a 100-hour war began. In Latin America, Kapuściński intoned, "the border between soccer and politics is vague."
Football against the enemy
Lest anyone think this is restricted to Latin American passions, English fans still yell "two World Wars and one World Cup" at Germany. Even the liberal Dutch nurse historical grievances. The Anglo-Dutch football journalist Simon Kuper recounts:
In 1988 Holland beat Germany in the European Championship semifinal. It was the best football feeling I'd ever had in my life. Millions of Dutch folk went out into the streets, threw bicycles in the air and shouted, 'We have our bikes back!' because the Germans had impounded Dutch bikes during the war. All the Dutch reaction from the match was about the war… and this was 1988.
The experience inspired Kuper to write Football Against the Enemy, recounting his experiences watching soccer in 22 countries. Dutch-German tensions intensified as he wrote, culminating in the Dutch player Frank Rijkaard spitting at West Germany's Rudi Völler at the 1990 World Cup.
This year, a number of festering political issues boiled over even before the Falklands sideshow. American decisions to block a Somalian referee from entering the host country under new immigration policies sparked outrage. President Donald Trump's intervention with FIFA to rescind a suspension for the US star Folarin Balogun before their last-16 game with Belgium prompted another international incident. The Belgians, after administering a 4-1 thumping, mocked the US president by imitating his dance to "YMCA."
Before Paraguay's last-16 game with then-favorites France, a diverse team dominated by players with African or Arab heritage, the Paraguayan Senator Celeste Amarilla made a breathtakingly racist social media post about French captain Kylian Mbappe. Politicians of both countries attacked her. Then Mariano Rajoy, former prime minister of semifinal opponents Spain (whose team has players of Moroccan and Ghanaian descent) published an op-ed taking a dig at a French team "without Frenchmen." He refused to apologize.
The sport also inspires rage against former colonists. After I ended a column Thursday with a wish for Argentina to "appreciate English generosity" (meant to criticize the spineless way England had lost their nerve after taking the lead), I received this response:
In typical colonialist manner, you and the prevailing English-speaking media narrative seem intent on diminishing the agency of the Argentinian team... The idea that the Argentinian team was simply superior might be a tougher pill to swallow for you Brits, entitled and full of yourselves as you are.
As a long-suffering 59-year-old Englishman who has never seen his national XI win anything, I am used to the idea that Argentina have the far superior team. It seems part of the immutable order of things. Born when the UK had already given up its empire (one exception, critically, remains the Falklands), I think of England as a medium-sized country who are underdogs in a great sporting rivalry with Argentina. Others, evidently, still view Britain through the prism of its historical misdeeds.
There's been genuine joy in the tournament, with a great final game ahead. That there's also ugliness shouldn't be taken as a symptom of a world growing more intolerant. It's not new. Football has always brought out our worst divisions, even as it stages a global celebration.
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John Authers is a senior editor for markets and Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former chief markets commentator at the Financial Times, he is author of "The Fearful Rise of Markets."