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An Interview with David Goldblatt
September 29, 2025
From the geopolitical power struggles that erupt on the stage of the World Cup to the economic disparities visible in the uneven quality of balls, goals, and cleats between neighboring communities, football serves as a lens through which the complex dimensions of our world come into focus. What unfolds on the pitch is often a mirror of the world beyond it as football reflects life.
Like a kaleidoscope, each shift in league, level, or location refracts the game in new ways, raising questions about the economic, social, and political forces behind it, and revealing the underlying dynamics that give form to both the game and the society surrounding it. Take Leicester City’s improbable 2015/16 Premier League title, won with a starting XI that cost just £28.8 million, a powerful reminder that money alone doesn’t dictate glory. Or the thousands of Erzgebirge Aue supporters who traveled from Germany to Northern Ireland, 65 years after the Cold War scrapped their original match against Glenavon F.C: a testament not only to football’s unique ability to connect communities, but also to the traces of history it carries into every match.
Yet for every moment of beauty the game offers, there are just as many that expose how distant we remain from the world we hope to create. Such as the enduring phenomenon of “muscle drain,” a legacy of colonization in which talented players from developing countries migrate to wealthier leagues in Europe and beyond, weakening their home nations’ teams and domestic leagues while enriching the very leagues they leave for. Or the challenges FIFA will face, and likely ignore, as the United States hosts a World Cup featuring nations like Iran, whose players and fans are subject to a travel ban from the host itself, exposing the deep political fractures that still divide our world.
It is within this complexity that Football Case Study positions its Research Department, dedicated to exploring football as a cultural force, a policy field, and a strategic arena. Through interviews and research papers, it engages a global network of experts, local actors, and community members to chart innovative ways of harnessing the game for good.
To launch this department, Marvin Heilbronn sat down with one of football academia’s most influential voices: David Goldblatt. A renowned sports writer, broadcaster, sociologist and professor, Goldblatt has spent decades charting the game not as mere competition, but as a mirror of society.
His landmark book The Ball is Round: A Global History of Football (Penguin, 2006) is regarded as the definitive historical account of the world’s game. His latest work, Injury Time: Football in a State of Emergency, turns to the present moment, using football to interrogate a society unsettled by Brexit, Covid, and a wider “polycrisis” of economic decline, political unrest, and climate change. From grassroots clubs fighting to survive to the rise and fall of oligarchs, Goldblatt’s writing and commentary has consistently set the standard for using football as a way to understand the world.
The Global Game on the American Stage
As someone with both American experience and an international background, what do you make of the U.S. hosting two major international tournaments at a time when its government seems intent on closing itself off from the world?
Well, I'm not sure it's entirely trying to close itself off from the world. I think it's trying to re-orientate and reshape the global networks and the global institutions that it's enmeshed with. That's just to kind of take the migration issue and recent tariffs as the only thing that's going on, and I don't think that is the only thing. So I'm slightly wary of that take on it. I think it's a really extraordinary and interesting moment that the United States, irrespective of who is in the White House, is holding the Men's World Cup next year, albeit alongside Mexico and Canada.
Now the Gold Cup is held regularly in the United States, the Copa America was there last year and this summer it hosted the Club World Cup. This is an indicator both of the scale of the American market for professional men's football and also a sense that there's more to come. Even though it has grown enormously since the 1994 World Cup when it really was a marginal cultural and economic phenomenon, it's now actually quite mainstream. But it could be a lot more mainstream. And I think that's kind of an interesting moment.
Given the complex political landscape that you touched upon, specifically immigration policies and tariffs, how do you see football’s arrival in the U.S. fitting into that picture?
There is a paradox: that a government and a ruling ideology, which at the moment emphasizes American Exceptionalism, is embracing what is the world’s game and whose main claim is its universalism. You know, anyone can play football, everyone plays football. It's the most globally watched game. So that's an interesting paradox. But I mean, looking from the way the President is behaving, he certainly doesn't see it as a paradox. What he sees as the Club World Cup trophy sits on a desk in the Oval Office, is the most fantastic piece of commercial bling one could imagine, very much in keeping with his own sort of aesthetic.
So, I think all of that makes it a really interesting moment. I mean, how is it going to play out? Anything can happen and America has been in uproar for the last six months. Got another year of this to go.
In practice, how do you see the tension between exceptionalism and universalism play out around the World Cup?
I thought it was interesting that some minorities, particularly Latinos, avoided going to stadiums because they were worried about ICE showing up. And one wonders, where will we be with all of this a year from now? That's a pretty odd look to have going on while you've got the World Cup on the horizon, and clearly there's going to be some visa problems. In Colombia, it takes around 700 days from application to reception to get your visitor visa. So, how the hell is anyone from Colombia going to come to see the World Cup? I don't know. It's unresolved. What will happen about Iran who have qualified? Venezuela may qualify. That'll be a pretty interesting issue for Homeland Security.
So, I would say, in answer to your original question, I'm intrigued. I'm intrigued to see how this plays out, and the sort of complex set of unpredictable messages and stories that World Cups generate. I suspect given the trend of the last 20 years, the World Cup will have a bigger audience with more social media interactions and more mainstream media coverage than ever. Given that Qatar 2022 was breaking all of those records, which is something pretty extraordinary, I have no doubt it will massively exceed the coverage, for example, given to the Paris Olympics. Again, I'm intrigued at the moment to see what that looks like.
The Paradox of Commercialization
One could argue the U.S. hosting the 2026 World Cup is both a sign and a product of football’s mainstream trajectory. What are your thoughts on the commercialization of football?
The thing that I continue to find so extraordinary about the commercialization of football is that at the level of the domestic professional game, it continues to lose money. In fact, it's losing more money than ever. It makes me laugh that we talk about commercialization and the rapacious capitalism as like, isn’t capitalism meant to be about making profits? Isn't that its raison d’être? And yet, the Premier League, the richest football league in history, and getting richer every year now, with an annual turnover of £6.3 billion, is £8 billion in debt, and is losing money, and has lost money every single year overall since 2019. Apart from a few seasons between 2014 and 2019 when PSR was first introduced and the biggest leaps in media income occurred, the Premier League has lost money overall every single season since 1992.
If commercialization isn’t delivering profits, what impact is it having on the structure of the game itself?
So, yes, it's commercialized, of course, and yet it is the most ridiculous and insane commercial economy. I think that one of the main consequences of commercialization that concerns me, alongside that paradox, is that every year everything becomes more unequal, inequality between leagues and between nations. So the gap between the Premier League and La Liga and the Bundesliga continues to grow every year. Then the gap between those top leagues and the next tier down widens too, and it keeps cascading, until you’re all the way at the bottom with leagues in places like Lithuania or Belarus.
The same is happening within English football. As the Premier League gets richer, the gap to the Championship becomes larger and larger, and the gaps to the lower leagues below that. Within the Premier League, the gap between the top six and the rest continues to expand. I find that concerning, not only in terms of sporting jeopardy, but also just like, what a mad way to be running a sporting universe.
Beyond the financial inequalities, how do you see commercialization affecting the culture and meaning of the game for supporters?
The third element of commercialization that concerns me is the endless battle between those who want to turn it into a spectacle that makes money and those for whom attending football and following football is a form of secular ritual through which meanings and identities and narratives and histories are generated and reproduced. It's an endless squeeze on that element of the game, which is what, in the end, makes it really interesting.
Shaping Football’s Future
Where do you think the responsibility lies, from FIFA itself down to World Cup fans, in shaping the direction football is heading?
Well there's no one thing. And I think it's interesting that in the last 10 to 15 years, certainly in Europe, fan groups and supporter power has been enhanced. Certainly in Germany and Scandinavia as well as in England and Scotland, to some extent, fan organizations, both at the club level and the national level, have become more effective lobbyists, a more effective part of the kind of governance and policy process.
Here in Britain, the Football Supporters Association were instrumental in getting safe standing introduced, getting a cap on number of away fan tickets, and on prices of away fan tickets. And, of course, fan protests in 2021 scuppered the European Super League in England. So, the potential is there to do quite a lot, but people have to get organized. This is not an individual thing. It has to be through collective action. There's lots of good examples and lots of good models out there, but people have to get organized.
How does that power translate when the conversation shifts to global governance?
The global governance question is more intractable, because at the national and domestic level, fans have some leverage. But how do you regulate FIFA? FIFA sits outside all the forms of international governance and international law. It's beholden to basically no one. It has no oversight. It consistently breaks its own statutes.
Infantino’s mode of governance has been autocratic at best, and I think there's a huge question there about how some modicum of control, of democratic control and scrutiny can be placed on both FIFA, but of course, also all of the football associations that make it up. Because in the end, FIFA is a federation of 211 national association, and there is some interesting work being done on using European Law and the European Union in particular, as a supranational form of leverage over FIFA. Fair Square published an interesting report last year on FIFA governance that outlined some of these international legal options. For anyone concerned about the issue, I’d say the first step is to read that report.
The U.S. hosting the World Cup, following Russia and Qatar, marks a third consecutive controversial host nation chosen by FIFA. Do fans have a duty to push back? And how should football respond when visa restrictions make it nearly impossible for some fans to attend?
All of these debates were rehearsed when the World Cup went to Russia. Indeed when it went to Argentina in 1978, in some ways, even when it went to Mussolini's Italy in 1934, and certainly over Qatar 2022. There are those who want to boycott, and I can understand folks who want to boycott it. But boycotts have very rarely worked in any way.
The only time a sporting boycott has really had an impact is apartheid South Africa. And that took 20 years, and it required forces within South Africa to be calling for it, and then the rest of the world to join in, and that none of those things pertain when it comes to the host nation of a World Cup. If you're going to have a protest, what's the demand? The demand, in the case of anti-apartheid, was the end of apartheid and the creation of a democratic South Africa. Are we really going to spend five weeks refusing to watch the World Cup saying America needs to rewrite its constitution or change the composition of its Supreme Court? I think there are important battles about the state of American democracy and politics but not quite sure that the World Cup is the space in which to explore them.
I'm prepared to be wrong on that. People are innovative and interesting in the way that they try and use these spectacles to send out an alternative message. I do think that FIFA’s behavior and FIFA’s mode of operation is highly questionable. But again, it's a very complicated argument to be getting across for fans in the stands at a World Cup.
So I'm sort of open and really interested to suggestions. And I think certainly a certain amount of humor and lampooning of FIFA and Mr. Infantino is probably a good thing. But I think it's quite difficult to see where we are going with this political protest.
Football as a Lens
What is the importance and the power of looking at football through a sociological and cultural lens?
Well, I’ve reached the point where I can’t really imagine not looking at football this way. It brings me enormous pleasure and insight, but also frustration and annoyance.
As with anything, there are so many levels you can engage with it. It’s like reading a book, you can skim it, read it straight through, read for pleasure, or stop and examine a single sentence in depth. All of those are perfectly valid ways of consuming it, and often you’ll find yourself doing a mix.
Football is the same. You can enjoy it on the surface, or you can dig deeper through analytical, critical, and historical reflection that places it in a wider social and cultural context. That layered approach brings more pleasure, more insight, and changes the way you see the game. It becomes a richer, more textured experience, which is why I encourage people to think about football in that way.
Where does your own balance lie in how you read the game?
I think it probably depends on the context. I went to the game at Bristol Rovers last season where they managed to get themselves relegated. I thought, you know, the captain goes down with the sinking ship.
And that was an experience where both things were going on. Obviously, I was despairing as a fan, like, oh fuck, you know? They’d been mediocre to bad all season, and then they topped it off with a ten-game run of straight defeats. That was bad. And it was really bad having the piss taken out of you by the Reading fans.
But on the other hand, it was a completely hysterical sociological experience. The Reading fans, who still had a chance of making the playoffs, brought about 3,000 inflatable objects with them, everything from sex dolls to blow-up beds to blow-up palm trees. They were throwing them around their end of the stadium and taunting the Bristol Rovers stewards by chucking them onto the pitch during the game. There was this whole other world going on while the match was happening, and I was just really into watching them, their dynamics, and how it all worked.
So both are always happening for me at the same time. There are peak moments where it’s just fandom, I think when Bristol Rovers won the playoff at Wembley in 2015, I was just as batshit as everybody else. And there are other times where I’m not really engaging with the game itself at all, but with everything else going on around it. It just depends on the occasion.
Promise and Peril of the Modern Game
What gives you hope for football in this new age?
Women’s football. Women’s football is the future. That’s the most extraordinary transformation of the game in my engagement with it. The global game actively excluded half the planet for 100 years and developed, at times, a very toxic and masculine culture. To see that being transformed, certainly here in England, and of course in the United States, and all the challenges and positives it has brought to football, is really amazing.
Here in England more people are playing football now than they have in a long time. It’s extraordinary. A quarter of the population plays some form of football, that’s a lot, especially in an age when people are actually moving less. That gives me hope.
The resourcefulness and political organization of fan groups in Europe also gives me hope. In Sweden, for example, fan power meant they had a vote on VAR, and they said no VAR in Swedish football. Fucking great.
What stands out to you specifically about the Women’s game?
On the one hand, the tribalism, the edge, the sense of risk you get around men’s football has its pleasures, but it can also be very toxic. One of the great things about women’s football is that it is less intense, less tribal, less manic, but also far more civilized.
When I went to the Euro 2022 final, England versus Germany, I was walking down Wembley Way, the pedestrian strip between the Tube station and the stadium, when someone started shouting my name. I turned around, and a woman was holding up my bank card, which had fallen out of my pocket, trying to give it back to me. If that had been a Men’s game, that card would have been down at Tesco two minutes later, on contactless, buying fags and booze. That's why the women's game is great.
What are you most wary of for the future of football?
You know, as ever, the overweening influence of money and power.