{"id":126,"date":"2026-07-31T21:13:35","date_gmt":"2026-07-31T21:13:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/raisulsohan.com\/en\/?p=126"},"modified":"2026-07-31T21:13:35","modified_gmt":"2026-07-31T21:13:35","slug":"football-for-everyone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/raisulsohan.com\/en\/football-for-everyone\/","title":{"rendered":"Football Belongs to No One"},"content":{"rendered":"

How a Two-Thousand-Year-Old Game Became a Feudal Fiefdom<\/span><\/h2>\n

\"\"March 31, 1883. Kennington Oval, London. The FA Cup Final.<\/span><\/p>\n

One side was named the Old Etonians\u2014alumni of Eton College. Among the eleven men taking the pitch that afternoon were a baronet, a professor of Latin, and one of Britain’s most eminent commercial barristers. Their captain, Arthur Kinnaird, celebrated victories by performing headstands before the pavilion\u2014his trademark flourish. He played in immaculate long trousers.<\/span><\/p>\n

The other side was Blackburn Olympic: working-class lads emerged from the cotton mills of Lancashire. Cotton weavers, iron-founders, dockers who unloaded timber by the canal, and a dentist’s assistant. Their home ground was named Hole-i’-th’-Wall, borrowed from the adjacent pub.<\/span><\/p>\n

Under the rules of the day, paying players was strictly forbidden. Football was a gentleman’s pastime, and a gentleman does not play for coin. It sounded noble. In practice, what did the rule mean? The boy from Eton possessed leisure, independent wealth, and train fare. For the Blackburn weaver to attend training, he had to forfeit a day at the factory\u2014which meant losing five or six shillings in vital wages. Amateurism was never a moral ideal. It was an exclusionary barrier erected solely to keep the rich boy and the poor boy apart.<\/span><\/p>\n

The match went into extra time. With a goal from James Costley, Blackburn Olympic triumphed 2\u20131. For the first time in human history, the FA Cup entered a working-class household.<\/span><\/p>\n

Kinnaird performed no headstands that afternoon. As the trophy was presented, the gallery responded with three subdued cheers and, according to contemporary accounts, reluctant applause. Returning to Blackburn, Olympic captain Albert Warburton declared at the civic reception that the cup had found a good home in Lancashire, and would never return to London.<\/span><\/p>\n

Two years later, in July 1885, under relentless pressure from the northern clubs, the Football Association officially legalized professionalism. Footballers could now lawfully receive wages. In 1888, the Football League was born.<\/span><\/p>\n

And Blackburn Olympic?<\/span><\/p>\n

They collapsed in 1889. The capital required to survive in the professional era was money they simply did not possess. Six years. The very door they had kicked open let in the flood of capital\u2014and capital promptly devoured them first.<\/span><\/p>\n

Across one hundred and forty years, this story has repeated itself time and again. Almost always in the exact same pattern.<\/span><\/p>\n

A Game With No Inventor<\/span><\/h2>\n

Americans still argue over who invented baseball. James Naismith invented basketball, with the date meticulously documented. Rugby traces its genesis to a specific English public school.<\/span><\/p>\n

Football has no inventor.<\/span><\/p>\n

Because no single mind conceived it. Give human beings something round, and they will kick it. That is all. In the third century BC, soldiers of China\u2019s Han Dynasty played cuju<\/em>\u2014a stitched leather ball stuffed with feathers, kept airborne with the feet. FIFA itself has recognized cuju as the earliest ancestor of football. The ancient Greeks played episkyros<\/em>; the Romans, harpastum<\/em>\u2014physical exercises designed to keep legionnaires battle-ready.<\/span><\/p>\n

And in Mesoamerica, the Maya and the Aztecs played their sacred ballgame.<\/span><\/p>\n

A solid, heavy rubber ball, struck only with the hips, elbows, and torso, with hands and feet forbidden. Stone courts with sloping lateral walls and stone rings mounted high above. Across Mexico and Guatemala, the ruins of more than fifteen hundred such courts have been unearthed.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the Mayan creation epic, the Popol Vuh<\/em>, the Hero Twins\u2014Hunahpu and Xbalanque\u2014descend into the underworld of Xibalba to play ball against the lords of death, wagering their own lives. Here, play was not spectacle or recreation. Play was a cosmic negotiation with mortality. Archaeologists believe that in certain sacred contests, ritual human sacrifice concluded the match\u2014and iconography suggests the sacrificed was often the captain of the winning team, not the loser. For only the finest offering could be consecrated to the gods.<\/span><\/p>\n

Which means the price of the game had to be paid in human life. Here begins the foundational rift between value and price. That which possesses infinite value can have no price. To fix a price upon something is to render it interchangeable, a commodity for trade.<\/span><\/p>\n

Three thousand years later, seated in Zurich, someone would assign a price tag to the World Cup: twenty billion dollars. But that chapter belongs later in our story.<\/span><\/p>\n

Why Kings Banned Football<\/span><\/h2>\n

What was played in medieval England was known as mob football. On Shrove Tuesday, entire villages poured into the fields\u2014one parish against another\u2014striving to drive a bladder to the doors of the rival church. No pitch boundaries, no limits on player numbers, and virtually no written rules. The contest raged from dawn till dusk. Limbs were fractured; men occasionally died.<\/span><\/p>\n

In 1314, King Edward II issued a royal proclamation banning football in London. In 1363, Edward III banned it again. The official pretext was that young men playing football were neglecting their archery practice, thereby undermining the realm’s military readiness. In Scotland, King James I decreed by statute in 1424: “That na man play at the fut ball.”<\/span><\/p>\n

Across several centuries in England and Scotland, football was officially outlawed more than thirty times.<\/span><\/p>\n

Archery was merely a convenient alibi. The underlying cause was far simpler: football meant thousands of ordinary people congregating in open spaces, improvising their own rules, adjudicating their own disputes, without the sovereign state exercising the slightest jurisdiction. The monarch did not fear the ball. The monarch feared the crowd. A multitude that possesses something of its own, autonomous and self-governing, is nearly impossible to rule.<\/span><\/p>\n

Those who write about football almost never mention this truth.<\/span><\/p>\n

In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain, Parliament enacted a series of Enclosure Acts. The common lands where villagers had grazed cattle, gathered firewood, and cut turf for centuries were fenced off and privatized into landlord estates. Ancient customary rights were obliterated by the stroke of a legislative pen. The landless peasantry migrated to the burgeoning industrial cities, entering the dark satanic mills of Manchester and Blackburn.<\/span><\/p>\n

And having entered those factories, working six grueling days a week, in the hard-won leisure of Saturday afternoons, the game they built together was modern football.<\/span><\/p>\n

Modern football was born precisely as a replacement for the stolen commons. The common fields had been seized; human beings fashioned a new common ground in their place. A space belonging to no private landlord\u2014a space belonging to all.<\/span><\/p>\n

A century and a half later, the exact same logic, cloaked in the exact same rhetoric, has returned: Erect fences. Enforce proprietary ownership. Carve what is shared into percentage stakes.<\/span><\/p>\n

Football is humanity\u2019s last commons. And now, the enclosure of this commons has begun.<\/span><\/p>\n

Football Was Global Long Before FIFA Was Born<\/span><\/h2>\n

Whenever FIFA narrates its own history, it frames it as an evangelical crusade: We brought football to every corner of the earth. Our sacred mission is to make football a truly global game.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

A glance at historical chronologies upends this mythology completely.<\/span><\/p>\n

In 1872, Calcutta FC was founded in India. Mohun Bagan was established in 1889. In 1882, Scottish schoolmaster Alexander Watson Hutton began teaching football to schoolboys in Argentina, founding the Argentine Association in 1893. In 1894, Charles Miller stepped off a steamship in S\u00e3o Paulo carrying two leather balls in his luggage. In Uruguay, railway workers founded the club that would become Pe\u00f1arol in 1891. AC Milan was founded in 1899, FC Barcelona in 1899, Bayern Munich in 1900.<\/span><\/p>\n

FIFA was founded on May 21, 1904, in Paris.<\/span><\/p>\n

By the time FIFA drew its first breath, football had already colonized four continents. In seaport docklands, along railroad tracks, across missionary schoolyards. Wherever British sailors, railway engineers, factory managers, and millwrights traveled, they carried a leather ball in their kit. FIFA played zero role in this dispersion. FIFA did not even exist.<\/span><\/p>\n

Football became global as an unintended byproduct of the British Empire, not as a programmatic decree from Zurich. FIFA arrived long after the party had begun, and promptly claimed credit for the feast.<\/span><\/p>\n

This is not pedantic historical trivia. It forms the foundational premise of FIFA\u2019s grandest justification. When they proclaim in July 2026 that selling equity in the World Cup is necessary to “grow the game across the globe,” the question must be posed upon the firm bedrock of this history: Football never needed you to spread across the earth. You arrived after the harvest, merely to keep the books.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

1904 to 1974: Seven Nations, a Post Office Box, Zero Power<\/span><\/h2>\n

The seven nations that signed the founding charter in Paris in 1904 were France, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland. England refused to participate. Why should the nation that codified the laws of the game take orders from continental clerks?<\/span><\/p>\n

The inaugural World Cup took place in 1930, in Uruguay\u2014the dream of Jules Rimet. Almost every major European nation refused to attend. Crossing the Atlantic on a steamship took weeks; who would undertake such an odyssey? Ultimately, a mere four European squads made the voyage: France, Belgium, Romania, and Yugoslavia. England, Italy, Spain, Germany\u2014none bothered to show up.<\/span><\/p>\n

Imagine that: a World Cup, and Europe deemed it beneath its dignity to attend.<\/span><\/p>\n

For the subsequent seven decades, FIFA remained an impoverished, bureaucratic shell. A modest office in Zurich. When Jo\u00e3o Havelange assumed the presidency in 1974, FIFA\u2019s global staff numbered roughly a dozen people. Its primary revenue consisted of meager annual subscriptions from member associations. The institution possessed virtually no surplus cash.<\/span><\/p>\n

Sir Stanley Rous was president then\u2014an English gentleman, an administrator of the old patrician order. The center of his universe was Europe, and he felt not the slightest embarrassment about it.<\/span><\/p>\n

Then came June 11, 1974, and the political economy of world football was irrevocably transformed.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Mathematics Havelange Discovered<\/span><\/h2>\n

At the FIFA Congress in Frankfurt, the ballots were cast: Havelange 62, Rous 52.<\/span><\/p>\n

Jo\u00e3o Havelange, a Brazilian lawyer, former Olympic swimmer, and astute businessman, had traveled to eighty-six nations campaigning for that vote. On many tours, Pel\u00e9 stood beside him. Journalist Keir Radnedge later observed that Havelange was entirely indiscriminate: monarch or tyrant, dictator or democrat, if someone commanded a vote, Havelange sat at their table.<\/span><\/p>\n

And what he discovered was the ultimate constitutional secret of FIFA.<\/span><\/p>\n

At the FIFA Congress, every member association commands exactly one vote. The Cook Islands, population fifteen thousand, has one vote. Germany, population eighty-four million, has one vote. Bangladesh, Brazil, Montserrat\u2014each possesses a solitary vote.<\/span><\/p>\n

On paper, it is the most radically democratic apparatus on planet earth. In the United Nations Security Council, permanent members hold vetoes; in FIFA, there are no vetoes. The UN counts 193 members; FIFA boasts 211.<\/span><\/p>\n

In practice, it is the most easily corrupted mechanism ever devised.<\/span><\/p>\n

For when the electorate is impoverished and the central treasury is controlled by the incumbent executive, democracy ceases to be democracy\u2014it becomes clientelism. You cannot buy the powerhouse European federations; they command immense revenues of their own. But when a struggling football association depends on Zurich subventions for the lion’s share of its annual operating budget, its federation president will think very carefully before raising his hand in dissent on the congress floor.<\/span><\/p>\n

Havelange grasped this electoral calculus in 1974. He barnstormed through Africa and Asia promising development subsidies, an expanded World Cup, and the creation of youth tournaments that smaller nations could host. The promises sounded noble. But development funds and patronage funds travel through the exact same pipe.<\/span><\/p>\n

That pipeline remains intact today. With every passing decade, it has only grown wider.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Faustian Bargain: Horst Dassler<\/span><\/h2>\n

Havelange won, but where was the capital to fulfill his campaign pledges?<\/span><\/p>\n

The man who ultimately delivered the capital had actually campaigned against Havelange in the election: Horst Dassler, son of Adidas founder Adi Dassler. Dassler held enormous sway over European federations and had worked tirelessly for Rous. Yet Havelange was captivated by Dassler\u2019s peerless international rolodex.<\/span><\/p>\n

Dassler had already done the math. As marketing executive Patrick Nally later recalled, Dassler did not have unilateral control over the family-held Adidas marketing budget. He needed external capital. And if he could furnish Havelange with financial power, he could effectively direct Havelange.<\/span><\/p>\n

That single calculus became the birth certificate of modern commercial football.<\/span><\/p>\n

Nally arrived two months after the 1974 World Cup, bringing with him a colossal client: The Coca-Cola Company. Thus arrived football’s first global sponsorship package. In Nally\u2019s own words, Coca-Cola\u2019s capital fundamentally revolutionized FIFA: Havelange erected a palatial new headquarters in Zurich, hired full-time professional executives, and instituted modern PR and financial divisions. Other sporting bodies watched in awe and scurried to follow suit.<\/span><\/p>\n

In 1982, Dassler founded International Sport and Leisure (ISL) in Lucerne. Within months of its inception, ISL was handed exclusive control over FIFA’s merchandising and stadium advertising rights. No open tender, no competitive bidding\u2014just closed-door negotiations. By 1983, FIFA\u2019s core commercial assets were firmly under ISL\u2019s stewardship.<\/span><\/p>\n

How did that story conclude?<\/span><\/p>\n

ISL collapsed into catastrophic bankruptcy in 2001. In 2012, a Swiss prosecutor’s investigative report was unsealed: it revealed that while sitting on the FIFA Executive Committee, Havelange and his son-in-law Ricardo Teixeira had pocketed over $41 million in illicit kickbacks in exchange for granting World Cup marketing rights.<\/span><\/p>\n

Faust is the scholar of German legend who trades his immortal soul to Mephistopheles in exchange for omniscient knowledge and worldly power. In the immediate aftermath, the terms of the pact seem magnificent. The bill is presented later\u2014and by then, there is no way to revoke the contract.<\/span><\/p>\n

FIFA was penniless in 1974. For the four-year cycle spanning 2023 to 2026, FIFA projected revenues of thirteen billion dollars. What was lost along the way cannot be measured in currency.<\/span><\/p>\n

May 27, 2015, Six O’Clock in the Morning<\/span><\/h2>\n

The Baur au Lac hotel in Zurich. Windows overlooking the Alpine vistas; for decades, the favored sanctuary of FIFA dignitaries. That week, the congress was in town, with presidential elections scheduled two days later.<\/span><\/p>\n

At dawn, Swiss federal police moved in. Acting on an extradition request from the United States Department of Justice, seven FIFA executives were placed under arrest. Hotel staff held up crisp white bedsheets to shield them from the flashes of press cameras as they were escorted out.<\/span><\/p>\n

The US indictment named fourteen defendants on charges of racketeering, wire fraud, and money laundering. Bribes exceeding $150 million spanning more than two decades. US Attorney General Loretta Lynch declared the corruption “rampant, systemic, and deep-rooted,” spanning at least two generations of football officials.<\/span><\/p>\n

What were the bribes paid for? Primarily media and marketing rights to Latin American tournaments.<\/span><\/p>\n

Copa Am\u00e9rica broadcast rights. The CONCACAF Gold Cup. Continental club tournaments. In other words, the very region starving for cash to retain its homegrown talent was being bled dry from within: revenues generated from its matches were diverted into secret offshore bank accounts. South America was caught in a pincer movement: Europe harvested its players, while its own administrators plundered its television revenues.<\/span><\/p>\n

The most cinematic figure was Chuck Blazer\u2014former CONCACAF general secretary who lived lavishly in Trump Tower, infamously renting an adjoining apartment exclusively for his unruly cats. After being cornered for tax evasion, he turned FBI informant, wearing hidden recording devices into meetings with colleagues.<\/span><\/p>\n

Sepp Blatter was not arrested. On May 29, he was re-elected president for a fifth term.<\/span><\/p>\n

Four days later, on June 2, he resigned.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the aftermath, FIFA trumpeted institutional reform: an independent ethics committee, disclosure of executive salaries, term limits, the sterile vernacular of transparency. In February 2016, Gianni Infantino was elected president. The watchword of his campaign was reform<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n

And then?<\/span><\/p>\n

The FIFA Forward programme was launched in 2016. Development grants allocated to each member association multiplied exponentially. By FIFA’s own accounting, what each association received in 2016 expanded sevenfold across the 2023\u20132026 cycle.<\/span><\/p>\n

In other words, the institutional remedy to a systemic bribery scandal was to pipe vastly greater sums of cash directly to member federations.<\/span><\/p>\n

Previously, money slipped under the table\u2014into personal accounts, shrouded in secrecy, as kickbacks. Today, money moves across the table\u2014under formal bilateral grant agreements, audited, rubber-stamped as “development funds,” wired to federation accounts. Legal. Certified. Accompanied by glossy press releases.<\/span><\/p>\n

The destination remains identical. The recipients remain identical. The congress votes remain identical.<\/span><\/p>\n

Only the paperwork has been legitimized.<\/span><\/p>\n

What football received under the guise of “reform” was merely the institutional budgeting of patronage.<\/span><\/p>\n

Bosman, 1995: The Day the Suction Pump Started<\/span><\/h2>\n

To understand how this ecosystem was cemented, one must step back two decades, for long before the Zurich raids, the European judiciary had redrawn the global football map.<\/span><\/p>\n

Those outraged by the financial hemorrhage of Latin America usually curse FIFA. But the scalpel was never in FIFA’s hands.<\/span><\/p>\n

In 1990, the contract of Jean-Marc Bosman, an unheralded Belgian second-division midfielder, expired at RFC Li\u00e8ge. He wished to sign with a French club. Li\u00e8ge demanded an exorbitant transfer fee; the French club refused to pay; Bosman was left stranded. A five-year legal battle ensued. On December 15, 1995, the European Court of Justice issued its historic verdict.<\/span><\/p>\n

The judgment had two prongs: First, upon contract expiry, a player can move to any club without a transfer fee. Second, no quota or restriction can be imposed on the number of EU players fielded by any club within the European Union.<\/span><\/p>\n

With a single judicial stroke, European football became a frictionless single labor market. And a single deregulated market dictates that whoever commands the deepest pockets vacuums up the finest talent.<\/span><\/p>\n

The suction pump roared to life.<\/span><\/p>\n

Data from the CIES Football Observatory reveals that between 2020 and 2025 alone, 3,020 Brazilian professional footballers played outside their homeland. For Argentina, the figure was 2,171. A complementary metric underscores the destination: over 9,500 expatriate professional footballers across the globe ply their trade in UEFA jurisdictions.<\/span><\/p>\n

More alarming than the sheer volume is the age of migration\u2014what sociologists term the “juvenilization of athletic migration.” Historically, a South American talent conquered his domestic league, represented his national team, and departed for Europe as a seasoned adult. Today, they depart at sixteen or seventeen. Domestic supporters never witness their maturation.<\/span><\/p>\n

If a boy in S\u00e3o Paulo possesses sublime genius, you will never witness his prime upon a Brazilian pitch. To see him bloom, you must buy a ticket in Madrid.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Hunger of Erysichthon<\/span><\/h2>\n

Examine the financial chasm, and the structural imbalance becomes painfully clear.<\/span><\/p>\n

A club earns over three million dollars for a single group-stage victory in the UEFA Champions League. In the Copa Libertadores, a group-stage win earns three hundred thousand dollars. A draw in the Champions League yields more than triple the prize money of a victory in South America\u2019s premier continental competition.<\/span><\/p>\n

In 2025, the champion of the Copa Libertadores earned approximately $23 million across all rounds combined. Manchester City pocketed over $142 million for winning the Champions League.<\/span><\/p>\n

A severe internal rupture has fractured South America for the exact same reason: winning the Copa do Brasil yields roughly $18 million in prize money; the Argentine league champion takes home barely $500,000. Since 2019, every single Copa Libertadores title has been hoarded exclusively by Brazilian clubs\u2014a competition once the undisputed fortress of Boca Juniors and River Plate.<\/span><\/p>\n

How do clubs elsewhere survive?<\/span><\/p>\n

By liquidating their human capital. Beginning in the nineties, South America embraced Third-Party Ownership (TPO). The mechanism was simple: lacking liquid capital, clubs accepted cash injections from offshore investment funds in exchange for selling economic stakes in a player’s future transfer rights. When the player was sold, the fund took its cut.<\/span><\/p>\n

Trading shares in the future labor of a living human being, transacted like municipal bonds.<\/span><\/p>\n

In 2006, West Ham United signed Carlos Tevez and Javier Mascherano. Two Argentine internationals, both twenty-two, capable of walking into any elite club in world football, landed at mid-table West Ham because an offshore investment consortium owned their economic rights and orchestrated their moves. When Tevez moved from Corinthians to West Ham, Corinthians received virtually nothing from the transaction.<\/span><\/p>\n

Michel Platini, then UEFA president, compared TPO to modern slavery.<\/span><\/p>\n

FIFA banned TPO globally in December 2014, taking effect on May 1, 2015.<\/span><\/p>\n

It sounded like righteous justice. But who bore the brunt of the ban?<\/span><\/p>\n

Europe’s aristocracy never needed TPO; they commanded self-sustaining revenues. TPO was the desperate lifeline keeping impoverished clubs afloat in South America and southern Europe. In Brazil, the reaction was sheer panic: analysts warned the domestic league would collapse without external capital. The Spanish and Portuguese leagues filed formal anti-trust complaints with the European Commission.<\/span><\/p>\n

FIFA excised the symptom and exacerbated the disease. It outlawed the predatory instrument, while doing nothing to resolve the crushing structural poverty that forced clubs into the clutches of those predators in the first place.<\/span><\/p>\n

In Greek myth, Erysichthon was the king of Thessaly who felled the sacred grove of Demeter. In retribution, the goddess afflicted him with an insatiable, ravenous hunger. The king devoured all his wealth, repeatedly sold his own daughter into slavery to buy food, and ultimately devoured his own limbs.<\/span><\/p>\n

South American club football has become Erysichthon: devouring its own children every transfer window to survive, growing weaker with every sale, and having grown weaker, compelled to sell even earlier next season.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Center Is Not Talent; The Center Is the Calendar<\/span><\/h2>\n

Why did Europe become the undisputed center of world football? The standard reply is: Europe has the money.<\/span><\/p>\n

An incomplete answer. Being the center is not about capital alone. Being the center means controlling the calendar, the validation, and the archive\u2014all three of which Europe monopolizes.<\/span><\/p>\n

First, the calendar. When international windows open, when transfer deadlines fall, which months host the World Cup\u2014everything is calibrated around the domestic seasons of European leagues. When the 2022 Qatar World Cup had to be shifted to November and December due to extreme desert heat, the howling uproar from European clubs laid bare who genuinely regards themselves as the proprietary owners of football’s time. South America’s calendar has never been anyone\u2019s concern. The Africa Cup of Nations must wage an existential diplomatic war with European clubs every two years just to secure player releases.<\/span><\/p>\n

Second, validation. The Ballon d’Or is awarded by a French magazine. Yet that single accolade arbitrates global greatness. The official criteria claim that all global leagues are considered equally. The words look elegant on paper; in reality, to win it, you must play on European soil. You could author the most statistically transcendent season in the history of the Brazilian championship, and you will not even make the shortlist. Talent is born worldwide; the certificate of talent is issued exclusively in Europe.<\/span><\/p>\n

Third, the archive. Where does the collective memory of the game reside? Search for “greatest goals” on YouTube, and ninety-nine percent of the footage was captured on European pitches by European television cameras. We watched Ronaldinho\u2019s sorcery at Barcelona, Maradona\u2019s apotheosis at Napoli. Footage of Neymar\u2019s genesis exists at Santos, but it is treated merely as a prologue; the real novel is written in Europe.<\/span><\/p>\n

Most tragic of all, the historical glory of Latin America is now held in European custody. To witness Brazilian brilliance, one does not look to Brazil; one tunes in to La Liga.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the quarter-finals of the 2026 World Cup, six of the eight squads hailed from UEFA. The champion was Spain; the runner-up, Argentina. And the Argentine squad that reached the final was composed almost entirely of expatriates playing in Europe.<\/span><\/p>\n

Latin America still nurtures the players. It simply cannot keep them.<\/span><\/p>\n

Asia: Results Arrive, Power Eludes<\/span><\/h2>\n

Regarding Asia, pervasive myths abound.<\/span><\/p>\n

That Asia has achieved nothing in football is demonstrably false.<\/span><\/p>\n

South Korea reached the World Cup semi-finals in 2002. In 2022, Japan defeated both Germany and Spain\u2014two former world champions\u2014to top their group. Saudi Arabia stunned Argentina in that same tournament. Japan\u2019s women\u2019s team were crowned world champions in 2011, defeating the United States in the final.<\/span><\/p>\n

The results exist. What does not exist is institutional power.<\/span><\/p>\n

The AFC counts forty-seven member associations; UEFA, fifty-five. Nearly parity in voting strength. Yet Asia controls neither the international calendar nor the global transfer market; no fundamental decisions governing world football are authored in Tokyo or Doha.<\/span><\/p>\n

Asia’s forty-seven votes are cherished by FIFA\u2014for exactly one reason: as votes.<\/span><\/p>\n

Granted, football culture thrives organically in Europe and Latin America in ways Asia cannot yet replicate. But what has the governing body claiming custodianship since 1904 done to cultivate that culture?<\/span><\/p>\n

Under FIFA Forward 3.0, $2.25 billion was earmarked across 2023 to 2026, allowing member associations to draw up to eight million dollars each.<\/span><\/p>\n

The capital flows. The question is: where does it vanish?<\/span><\/p>\n

What Japan Built, and What Zurich Refused to Do<\/span><\/h2>\n

The Japanese experience shatters FIFA\u2019s favorite alibis.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the late eighties, Japan languished below fortieth in the FIFA rankings. Its domestic league was semi-pro, terraces stood deserted, pitches were poor. Baseball and sumo captivated the nation; football barely registered.<\/span><\/p>\n

In 1992, the Japan Football Association unveiled an audacious blueprint: the J.League Hundred Year Vision.<\/span><\/p>\n

The objective? By the year 2092, Japan would sustain one hundred professional football clubs.<\/span><\/p>\n

The year 2092. The architects who drafted the plan knew they would not live to witness its fruition. Saburo Kawabuchi, the league\u2019s founding chairman, openly acknowledged that the finish line lay beyond his lifetime.<\/span><\/p>\n

The architecture was rooted in community ownership: clubs were named after their hometowns, not their corporate sponsors. Clubs had to operate youth development and community sports initiatives, cultivating local commercial sponsors to eliminate dependency on national conglomerates. The goal was for clubs to belong to their municipalities, not to private equity.<\/span><\/p>\n

On May 15, 1993, the J.League kicked off. By 1999, J2 was established; in 2014, J3 followed. In 2009, the AFC rated the J.League the premier domestic competition on the continent.<\/span><\/p>\n

Today, Japan maintains three fully professional tiers with twenty clubs apiece. In the 2026 season, J1 attendance surpassed 3.6 million, averaging over 21,000 spectators per match.<\/span><\/p>\n

What was FIFA’s contribution to constructing this infrastructure?<\/span><\/p>\n

Nothing.<\/span><\/p>\n

Japan built it with its own capital, its own strategic foresight, and its own hundred-year patience. Not a single blueprint originated from Zurich.<\/span><\/p>\n

And that is precisely why Japan\u2019s success is profoundly inconvenient for FIFA. Because Japan proved that a vibrant football culture can be built from scratch, even in a baseball stronghold. All it requires is long-term vision, grassroots community ownership, and transparent administration.<\/span><\/p>\n

Why, then, has FIFA failed to achieve this across the rest of Asia in 121 years?<\/span><\/p>\n

Where the Money Flows, and Where It Never Lands<\/span><\/h2>\n

The answer is deeply uncomfortable, and it points an accusing finger straight at our own doorstep.<\/span><\/p>\n

In April 2023, the adjudicatory chamber of FIFA\u2019s Ethics Committee banned Abu Nayeem Shohag, general secretary of the Bangladesh Football Federation (BFF), from all football-related activities for two years, levying a 10,000 Swiss franc fine. The verdict: misuse of FIFA Forward development funds and the fabrication of false invoices to justify expenditures.<\/span><\/p>\n

FIFA released a devastating fifty-one-page decision detailing fraudulent procurements: sporting equipment, footballs, air tickets for the national team, and a lawnmower. Forensic auditors from BDO noted that cash transactions were so pervasive that financial reconciliation was virtually impossible.<\/span><\/p>\n

And this sanction arrived in the very week the BFF cancelled the national women’s team\u2019s participation in an Olympic qualifying tournament, citing a lack of funds.<\/span><\/p>\n

The money had arrived from Zurich. It simply never made it to the pitch.<\/span><\/p>\n

Now let us pose the question that everyone avoids:<\/span><\/p>\n

Why does FIFA tolerate this broken apparatus?<\/span><\/p>\n

Because FIFA\u2019s power structure rests squarely upon these very federations. 211 members, 211 votes. To secure the presidency in Zurich, an incumbent needs a compliant majority. And a federation lacking domestic revenue, whose existence relies on Zurich subventions, is the most loyal voting bloc imaginable.<\/span><\/p>\n

If a national federation develops genuine strength\u2014monetizing its domestic league, attracting corporate sponsors, becoming financially sovereign\u2014it ceases to depend on Zurich. And having achieved financial independence, it begins casting independent votes.<\/span><\/p>\n

The tragic paradox of the system: successful grassroots development costs the incumbent a captive voter.<\/span><\/p>\n

I am not suggesting an explicit conspiracy is hatched in backrooms. There is no need for one: the structural architecture produces this outcome automatically. Where corrupt, feeble, dependent federations survive, an incumbent president\u2019s reign remains secure. In this lexicon, “development” is not the objective; “development” is merely the rhetoric.<\/span><\/p>\n

In 1911, Mohun Bagan defeated the East Yorkshire Regiment barefoot to lift the IFA Shield\u2014an athletic victory that reverberated as an anti-colonial political earthquake across British India. On Dhaka derbies between Abahani and Mohammedan in the eighties and nineties, the capital ground to an absolute halt. That was not ancient mythology; that was living memory.<\/span><\/p>\n

The culture was there. The culture was cannibalized. And among those entrusted with safeguarding that heritage, one was banned by FIFA for forging receipts for a lawnmower.<\/span><\/p>\n

Ticket Prices, or Turning Love Into an Extraction Variable<\/span><\/h2>\n

At the 2026 World Cup, FIFA rolled out dynamic pricing for the first time.<\/span><\/p>\n

What does dynamic pricing mean? Like airline seats or hotel rooms, as demand spikes, prices skyrocket; as demand softens, prices drop. Algorithmic surveillance recalculating fares in real time.<\/span><\/p>\n

When the United States, Canada, and Mexico submitted their joint bid book, proposed group-stage tickets ranged from $21 to $323.<\/span><\/p>\n

What unfolded in reality? Entry-level tickets began at $60, with upper brackets soaring past $6,000. The cheapest seat for the final cost over $4,000. On secondary resale exchanges, final tickets reached astronomical heights, with some listings touching $33,000.<\/span><\/p>\n

Football Supporters Europe and consumer watchdog Euroconsumers lodged a formal complaint with the European Commission, arguing that FIFA exploited its monopoly power over ticket sales to impose conditions that would never withstand scrutiny in a competitive market. The attorneys general of New York and New Jersey issued civil subpoenas.<\/span><\/p>\n

At the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, attending seven matches in the lowest pricing tier cost roughly \u00a31,400. In 2026, attending eight matches in that same category cost upwards of \u00a35,000.<\/span><\/p>\n

Dynamic pricing does not merely inflate costs. Dynamic pricing converts human passion into a financial extraction variable.<\/span><\/p>\n

You are an Argentine supporter. Your country reaches the final. Your emotional desperation is at its absolute zenith. The algorithm detects this desperation and ratchets up the price. In other words, the more you love, the more you are penalized.<\/span><\/p>\n

Under the traditional compact, loyalty was rewarded with priority: lifelong season ticket holders and devoted club members were granted first access. Under the new financialized paradigm, devotion is an index of extraction: the deeper your devotion, the more capital can be extracted from your veins.<\/span><\/p>\n

Here, the supporter is reduced to a consumer. A supporter is someone who returns even in defeat. A consumer is someone from whom every possible cent must be extracted before they walk out the door.<\/span><\/p>\n

July 28, 2026<\/span><\/h2>\n

Then came last Tuesday.<\/span><\/p>\n

The 2026 World Cup concluded on July 19 in New Jersey, with Spain overcoming Argentina. Reports indicated gross tournament revenues surpassed a record fifteen billion dollars\u2014the most lucrative sports event in human history.<\/span><\/p>\n

On the eve of the final in New York, addressing the FIFA Council and member associations, Gianni Infantino declared that FIFA must “unlock its commercial potential.”<\/span><\/p>\n

Nine days later, on July 28, the formal proposal dropped:<\/span><\/p>\n

Its title: FIFA Forward Enterprises (FFE). FIFA’s entire commercial and event-management machinery\u2014broadcast rights, corporate sponsorships, ticketing operations, licensing\u2014would be carved out into a distinct corporate entity. The new enterprise carried an initial valuation of twenty billion dollars. Outside private equity investors would be invited to acquire up to a twenty percent minority stake, raising up to $4.2 billion in capital. FIFA insisted that majority governance would remain in its hands.<\/span><\/p>\n

The consortium poised to lead the private equity investment was established by Joshua Kushner\u2014brother to Jared Kushner, son-in-law of former US President Donald Trump.<\/span><\/p>\n

And what were member federations offered in exchange for their approval?<\/span><\/p>\n

FIFA Forward grants would be hiked from $8 million to $20 million per association for the 2027\u20132030 cycle. In 2031\u20132034, that sum would climb to $22 million; in the subsequent quadrennium, to $24 million. In addition, an optional liquidity vehicle called the FIFA Fast Forward Program would allow each federation to draw down an immediate upfront advance of another $20 million.<\/span><\/p>\n

And the deadline for ratification? September 19, 2026.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the letter sent to associations, Infantino warned that should the threshold fail to be met, FIFA would revert to the baseline Forward 4.0 program, offering roughly $10 million per association.<\/span><\/p>\n

UEFA fired back immediately, issuing a blistering communique: FIFA had imposed an ultimatum upon associations\u2014back the venture or see their funding slashed. In UEFA\u2019s words: This alone tells you everything you need to know about the proposal.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Their statement contained even sharper indictments: The soul and governance of football are not commodities for sale. None of us owns football. It is not FIFA\u2019s private property to sell off.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

The newly elected Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Andy Burnham, stated unequivocally: “Football does not belong to private equity.”<\/span><\/p>\n

CONCACAF raised an equally devastating challenge from another flank: directing its FIFA Council members to demand why development funding could not simply be drawn from the vast cash reserves already sitting in FIFA\u2019s vaults.<\/span><\/p>\n

The decisive question. By the close of 2024, FIFA sat upon $4.76 billion in cash and liquid reserves. And a tournament that generated record-shattering revenues had concluded barely weeks prior.<\/span><\/p>\n

Why, then, sell off equity?<\/span><\/p>\n

A Bowl of Lentil Stew<\/span><\/h2>\n

In the Book of Genesis, Esau was the elder son of Isaac, the rightful heir to the ancestral birthright. Returning famished from the wilderness, Esau found his younger brother Jacob simmering a pot of lentil stew. Jacob said: Sell me your birthright first.<\/em> And Esau swore his birthright away for a meal.<\/span><\/p>\n

The stew was consumed that very afternoon. The birthright was lost forever.<\/span><\/p>\n

What has now been laid before 211 national football associations cannot honestly be christened a development blueprint. It is the procurement of votes, plain and simple.<\/span><\/p>\n

Amending FIFA\u2019s statutes requires a seventy-five percent supermajority. UEFA commands fifty-five members out of 211. Europe can block the initiative only if others stand with it; Europe loses if the global south walks away.<\/span><\/p>\n

And who constitutes the rest? Fifty-four votes from Africa, forty-seven from Asia, forty-one from CONCACAF, eleven from Oceania, ten from South America.<\/span><\/p>\n

To the vast majority of these federations, twenty million dollars is a colossal sum\u2014often exceeding their entire annual budget.<\/span><\/p>\n

In 1974, Havelange calculated this exact arithmetic to prevail 62\u201352. Fifty-two years later, the identical equation is being tabulated\u2014only the figures printed on the checks have grown exponentially larger.<\/span><\/p>\n

And regarding the governance standards of many federations destined to receive those twenty million dollars, we are under no illusions. FIFA\u2019s own ethics chamber documented it meticulously across fifty-one pages in the case of Bangladesh.<\/span><\/p>\n

Which means capital raised from selling equity in the World Cup will flow into institutions where it will never reach the grass roots. And the constitutional surrender granted in exchange for that money is permanent.<\/span><\/p>\n

The transaction stands exposed: a perpetual share in humanity\u2019s shared patrimony will be privatized forever, and the political sanction for that sale will be bought with cash that will never reach the boots of an aspiring player.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Ship of Theseus<\/span><\/h2>\n

FIFA\u2019s defenders will argue: twenty percent is a modest minority holding; governance and sporting regulations remain firmly under FIFA\u2019s jurisdiction.<\/span><\/p>\n

There is an ancient Greek paradox regarding the Ship of Theseus. Preserved in a harbor, each decaying timber plank was replaced one by one with seasoned wood. When the final original plank had been swapped, was it still the same ship?<\/span><\/p>\n

The paradox is not about the final plank. The paradox is about the first plank.<\/span><\/p>\n

Until now, humanity operated under the consensus that no single entity owns this game. FIFA never referred to itself as an owner; it called itself a custodian, a trustee. A trustee manages a trust; he does not sell off its equity.<\/span><\/p>\n

FFE breaches that sacred threshold. Henceforth, the world will recognize that the World Cup carries a corporate price tag, and that equity in its harvest can be bought.<\/span><\/p>\n

Once a valuation is established, percentages are merely matters of boardroom negotiation: twenty percent today; twenty-five percent in four years when development budgets demand fresh capital; thirty-five percent thereafter.<\/span><\/p>\n

In 2021, the European Super League imploded within forty-eight hours. Why did it shatter? Not in corporate boardrooms, not in high courts. It collapsed because supporters of Liverpool, Chelsea, and Arsenal took to the cobblestones outside the stadiums. Players broke ranks and spoke out. Under the weight of popular rebellion, the clubs retreated.<\/span><\/p>\n

That remains the only power in football that has not been completely bought.<\/span><\/p>\n

UEFA\u2019s current posturing sounds lofty: None of us owns football.<\/em> A noble sentiment. Yet the body proclaiming it is the very cartel that built the Champions League money mountain that reduced the Copa Libertadores to a pauper, captured the entire surplus of the post-Bosman labor market, and plucked sixteen-year-old boys from Africa and South America for decades.<\/span><\/p>\n

UEFA does not champion the soul of football in this war. UEFA is defending its continental monopoly. Because both battles coincide, the latter masquerades as virtue.<\/span><\/p>\n

That Which Never Returns<\/span><\/h2>\n

Let us return to Blackburn.<\/span><\/p>\n

Consider that squad of 1883: weavers, foundry-men, wharf-side laborers. Journeying to London to topple baronets and classical scholars, returning with the silverware to brass bands welcoming them at the station platform.<\/span><\/p>\n

Within six years, that club had vanished from the earth.<\/span><\/p>\n

They were undone by their own triumph. Their victory demonstrated that working-class teams could conquer the ruling class\u2014and upon that revelation, capital rushed in, and capital promptly devoured the very pioneers who had unlocked the gates.<\/span><\/p>\n

Every step of the modern game has echoed this trajectory. Each time the common custodians of football are promised you will receive more<\/em>, they return home with less.<\/span><\/p>\n

Professionalism was inaugurated in the name of players’ rights; it birthed the transfer market. The Bosman ruling was delivered for individual worker freedom; its consequence was three thousand Brazilian footballers exiled abroad. TPO was banned to shield vulnerable players; its result was pulling the plug on South American clubs’ oxygen. The World Cup was expanded to forty-eight teams to foster global inclusion; its fruit is the most extortionate ticket pricing and the most grotesque commercial harvest in human history.<\/span><\/p>\n

Now we are told: selling twenty percent of the World Cup will develop the game.<\/span><\/p>\n

You have every right to doubt this claim. Not merely a right\u2014you have one hundred and forty years of empirical evidence.<\/span><\/p>\n

Football endures because playing it requires no wealth. A ball, two bricks for goalposts, and as many souls as wish to run. At the Shahbag intersection, on a dusty patch in Savar, down a back-alley in Rosario, across a shantytown in Lagos\u2014nowhere do you need permission to play. That is the singular reason neither cricket, nor basketball, nor tennis has ever come close to touching football\u2019s universal grip. Every other sport demands the purchase of equipment.<\/span><\/p>\n

What requires no purchase belongs to no master. And what belongs to no master belongs to all of humankind.<\/span><\/p>\n

Zurich is now drawing its pen across that sentence.<\/span><\/p>\n

The boy in Savar who runs onto the dust this afternoon knows nothing of these machinations. He does not know that a price tag of twenty billion dollars has been affixed to his game. Nor should he need to know.<\/span><\/p>\n

The dread is simply this: that on the day he finally learns the truth, there may no longer be anyone left to ask him for permission.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On March 31, 1883, at the Kennington Oval in London, the FA Cup final was played. One team was the Old Etonians; the other was Blackburn Olympic\u2014weavers, iron-founders, and dockers from Lancashire. For the first time in history, the FA Cup went home with working men.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-126","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-football"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/raisulsohan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/raisulsohan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/raisulsohan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/raisulsohan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/raisulsohan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=126"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/raisulsohan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/raisulsohan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=126"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/raisulsohan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=126"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/raisulsohan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=126"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}