Subscriber Only: The Age of Football: The ugly side of the beautiful game

President of Fifa Gianni Infantino, Russian president Vladimir Putin and French president Emmanuel Macron during the award ceremony following the World Cup final match in Moscow last year. Photograph: Andrey Rudakov/Bloomberg via Getty

In the prologue to this heavyweight rebuke of the international football scene, David Goldblatt takes us back to the night of Sunday, July 13th, 2014, when Germany met Argentina in the World Cup final in Rio. One billion people watched the game; 3.2 billion watched some part of the tournament.

“No shared moment will come closer to who we are demographically,” Goldblatt writes. He reserves a more caustic eye for events in the Maracanã stadium, where heads of state and sports and celebrities have gathered – Ashton Kutcher, Placido Domingo and LeBron James are among the great and the good.

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