Even White House interference and Fifa\u2019s greed cannot spoil the celebrations. At last, an arena in which multiculturalism triumphs and underdogs score<\/p>\n
Of all the outrageous things Donald Trump has done, from bombing other countries to appeasing dictators, his sneaky interference<\/a> in last week\u2019s USA v Belgium World Cup match sparked by far the most united and furious reaction across the world. Condemnation was all but universal. Trump\u2019s cheating heart cannot understand the unmatched, ubiquitous power that the \u201cbeautiful game\u201d exercises over ordinary lives everywhere. It massively surpasses his own. The world truly loves football. It doesn\u2019t love him. And then USA lost the match anyway. Karma. This modern morality play joyously illuminated the limits of authoritarianism.<\/p>\n In an age dominated by overbearing, illiberal economic and military powers, the men\u2019s World Cup is upending the conventional geopolitical pecking order and power balances in refreshing and instructive ways. In this alternative universe, smaller nations \u2013 and ordinary people \u2013 can and often do get a bigger shout. Despite huge state investment in all aspects of the game, China again failed to qualify<\/a>. Russia, never much good at football in the first place, was kicked out<\/a> after invading Ukraine. And despite all Trump\u2019s Maga hooliganism, the US remains soccer small fry. So much for superpowers.<\/p>\n Simon Tisdall is a Guardian foreign affairs commentator<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Even White House interference and Fifa\u2019s greed cannot spoil the celebrations. At last, an arena in which multiculturalism triumphs and underdogs score Of all the outrageous things Donald Trump has done, from bombing other countries to appeasing dictators, his sneaky interference in last week\u2019s USA v Belgium World Cup match sparked by far the most … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-75970","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75970","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75970"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75970\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75970"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75970"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75970"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}