From WNYC, I'm Brian Lair.

This is my daily politics podcast.

It's Thursday, June 11th.

Yeah, it's the opening day of the 2026 World Cup, in addition to everything else going on in basketball and in life.

Later today, Mexico and South Africa will kick off at the Azteca in Mexico City.

The tournament will eventually sprawl across 16 cities in Mexico, the United States, and Canada.

Will you be watching?

You can catch the action in a living room or bar

literally all over the world, which is exactly the point that Franklin Ford made 22 years ago

when he wrote how soccer explains the world, an unlikely theory of globalization. Though soccer

wasn't as big in the United States at that point,

force argument was that it was actually the most advanced expression of globalization

on earth, with all the money flowing through it, the tribalism inside it,

and the politics complicating it.

That was 2004.

Now it's 2026, and some of the players representing

their countries at this World Cup play for teams like Saudi-owned Newcastle United,

or United Arab Emirates-owned Manchester City. Really? Did you know that? Oh, and of course Iran, which the U.S. is

currently at war with. How Soccer explains the world has a new edition out with a new preface,

and there has perhaps never been a better moment to revisit it. Franklin Ford is a staff writer

at the Atlantic, an author of several books, including World Without Mind and The Last Politician inside Joe Biden's

White House. He's also written a recent piece in the Atlantic called The Quintessential Trumpian

...