World Cup Fever: A Footballing Journey in Nine Tournaments

by Simon Kuper

A Sports Book of the Year in the Irish Times, the FT and the Mail on Sunday

'The ultimate book for anyone who loves football, and plenty who don't ... Unmissable' Mail on Sunday

'Kuper is a wry and sharp-eyed guide' New Statesman

'A brilliant evocation of the joy of the football carnival and the absurdities of the global spectacle... an essential companion' David Goldblatt

It's the biggest sporting competition on Earth. A four-yearly chance for our greatest footballers to realise their ultimate dream. A month-long spectacle that's watched by billions. But the inaugural World Cup, held in Uruguay in 1930, was semi-professional, poorly attended and haphazardly organised - so how did it become a bonanza of multinational sponsorship, dubious ethics and shadowy characters, and the ultimate stage for football's greatest drama?

Simon Kuper is one of very few people to have attended every World Cup since 1990. In World Cup Fever he looks back at each tournament he's experienced - from half-empty stands at Italia 90 to the French triumph as hosts in 1998, South Africa's national dream in 2010 and the troubling legacy of 2022 - to reveal a captivating portrait of sport in a globalised world.

World Cup Fever is the story of how the tournament touches and sometimes even changes our lives, by one of the best writers on the beautiful game.

Genres: Sports, Football, Nonfiction, Soccer

346 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 2, 2025

About the author

Simon Kuper is a journalist for the Financial Times in England. He was born in Uganda of South African parents and moved to the Netherlands as a child. He studied History and German at Oxford University, and attended Harvard University as a Kennedy Scholar. He has written for The Times, Observer, Guardian and Le Monde, and also writes regularly for the Spectator and Dutch newspapers.

Reviews

[Joe O'Donnell · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is a curiously dispirited tone to much of “World Cup Fever”, Simon Kuper’s personal history of the nine tournaments he has attended since Italia’90. On the one hand, Kuper begins his book by eulogising the tournament, describing the World Cup as “unending story that accompanies us through our lives”, a magical thread that connects us back to our childhoods. Conversely, many of its sections are much less a celebration of the World Cup, that they are a lament for its bloated decay and its exploitation by corporate and authoritarian vultures.

A journalist’s lamentation that reporting on the World Cup is increasingly a monumental pain in the hole is unlikely to elicit much sympathy from most football fans. But Kuper can convey in an entertaining way the monotony and grinding repetition of covering modern tournaments: the gruelling travel and security requirements, the vapid press conferences, the increasing homogenisation of the fan experience, the plummeting standard of football – it all sounds like a chore. And that’s before we even get to the topic of sportswashing …

In attempting to give a sense of the nine tournaments he has been present at, Kuper wisely decides against recounting the minutiae of specific games. Instead, he is more interested in capturing ‘vibes’, but also approaching the tournament from a political angle, and asking “what does the World Cup tell us about our changing world?”.

Kuper’s answers to that question are hardly reassuring. He sees recent World Cups as having “prefigured shifts in global power beyond football”, namely the expanding geopolitical influence of autocratic, fossil fuel-producing nation states. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Kuper’s account of the 2010 decisions to award the hosting of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups to Russia and Qatar respectively (what Kuper describes as the “World Cup Vote (that) explains the world”. Although maybe we shouldn’t be that surprised; Kuper’s summation of the early history of the World Cup – not least how the hosting of the tournament was manipulated by Mussolini’s Italy in 1934 and the Argentinian military junta in 1978 – shows how FIFA’s embrace of brutal authoritarian regimes was “baked in from the start”.

I found the most intriguing passages of this book to be those focusing on the 2010 World Cup in South Africa (perhaps paradoxically, as 2010 is widely considered to be the dullest, most soporific edition of the tournament). What elevates those chapters is Simon Kuper’s upbringing during apartheid-era South Africa, which allows him to bring a level of insight that you’d get from few other western journalists covering the tournament. By concentrating on the personal stories of the people living in the shadows of the glistening new stadiums, “World Cup Fever” taps into the continuing importance of the tournament in a way that a series of match reports never could.

What Kuper’s book does succeed in showing is what remains magical about the World Cup, whether that be meeting people from other cultures, or “the construction of memories” and child-like wonder that the tournament can occasionally still generate. Of course, these are just the joys at risk of being drained by vampires like Gianni Infantino, through FIFA’s price-gouging ticketing systems and their craven kow-towing to authoritarians ranging from Trump to MBS. Overall, “World Cup Fever” is a bittersweet primer for next summer’s extravaganza of sportswashing and despotic shape-throwing.

[R.J. Southworth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Any football fan should enjoy this book, which delves into the wider contexts of World Cups (right up to the last one in 2022) and provides insights into how they operate outside the football itself, in a very entertaining way. As an England fan, it's very interesting to hear about the tournaments from a more neutral perspective (though the author does technically support the Netherlands).

[Ylva · Rating 3 out of 5]

A disappointment in the sense that I expected an account of games and insights into the game by someone who was a devoted supporter and went to the different World Cups during my lifetime (also a reason for buying the book) out of appreciation for the game. Instead, what you get is a tired journalistic account of the hassle of working through a World Cup, with an odd detachment from the game itself and an almost offensive view on what will remain a dream of many that the author painstakingly describes as an effort. Sometimes you almost get the feeling that the author is trying to make you feel sorry for him. If you are not able to enjoy it, perhaps you shouldn’t write a book about it, and if you are enjoying it, perhaps you shouldn’t make it out to be such a tiresome experience. Also, I’m not sure what the intent is, what this is supposed to be - a diary? A political introspection? A statement on sportswashing and corruption? An attempt at understanding cultures through fan behaviour? Perhaps an editor could have helped steer this in the right direction, but sadly reviews seem to have been too positive previously for this to appear warranted in their eyes.

[Killian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some great stories here, an enjoyable read