The Geopolitics of the World Cup

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**Ravi Agrawal** (0:57)
Hi, I'm Ravi Agrawal, Foreign Policy's Editor-in-Chief. This is FP Live.
So this week, the largest ever World Cup will commence. 48 teams will play 104 matches in 16 cities across three host countries, Canada, Mexico and the United States. But as always with tournaments like this, it's not just a festival of sport. The World Cup is also a moment to talk about geopolitics, immigration, economics and much else.
That's coming up, but first, here's my read on a story that caught my eye this week. We've been talking about the Iran War a fair bit recently. We've also focused on the energy crisis sparked by the war. What's gotten less attention is a worrying trend line. China's solar industry is in trouble. More than three dozen Chinese solar manufacturers have either gone bankrupt or been bought out. The survivors have undergone steep job cuts.
As Adam Tooze put it in the FT recently, the only way to describe this is madness. We have a global energy crisis. Most countries are looking for alternatives. And China, the country that produces 80% of the world's solar panels is shutting down factories? What on earth has happened?
Part of it is protectionism in big Western markets, particularly in the United States. There's a fear either of Chinese products or of becoming too reliant on any one source. The solar industry also happens to be a brutally competitive market, especially in China, where companies used to receive massive subsidies that later dried up. According to The Economist, China has been growing its solar market so quickly that its power grids cannot keep up. At the start of this year, nearly 10% of solar power was being wasted. Installations of new panels this year are projected to fall by more than a quarter.
So will China's solar industry go bust? I think that's unlikely. The state has always encouraged managed competition in China and been brutal about the results. But advances in battery and grid technology will eventually catch up, and China will likely figure out how to balance supply and demand. The bigger question which Tooze raises is how the rest of the world will act. In a year in which we realized how precarious supply chains for energy can be, will countries adjust how they think about China? It's certainly food for thought.
Okay, on to this week's topic, the World Cup. Football, soccer, the beautiful game, whatever you want to call it, it has always been mired in geopolitics. This year, two of the participants, the United States and Iran, are literally at war with each other. Two of the co-hosts, Canada and Mexico, aren't on the best terms with the United States, the host with the most number of games. And fans from some participant countries can't even attend the tournament because of immigration rules. Is this the most politicized World Cup in history? My guest today is Mehreen Khan, a British journalist specializing in economics and sports. Khan is the economics editor at The Times of the UK. She was previously EU correspondent at the Financial Times based out of Brussels. Let's dive in.
Mehreen, welcome to FP Live.

**Mehreen Khan** (4:47)
Thanks so much for having me, Ravi.

**Ravi Agrawal** (4:49)
So let's start with this. What makes this year's tournament exceptional?

**Mehreen Khan** (4:55)
There's lots of things that make it exceptional. One is it's the biggest World Cup ever. You've already mentioned that it's been expanded from 32 teams to 48 teams. That means we're getting record numbers of games, over 100 matches. It means it's longer.
The World Cup will run from June 11th, so just over 48 hours time all the way to July 19th. It's going to occupy most of people's summers.
It's happening in over three countries for the first time ever. We've had shared hosts, but we've never had three countries. Of course, they are contiguous in some sense. It's one continent. That's never happened before. There's various things that are being experimented for the first time, including new pricing systems that are making fans already very unhappy about how expensive it is. It might be the hottest World Cup on record, because being in some parts of the US at this time of the year is going to be incredibly prohibitive for athletes. So there's lots and lots of firsts. And I think it's not the first geopolitical World Cup. You know, politics and geopolitics usually collide with World Cups. But if we're going to think about it from the way that I think foreign policy readers would like to think about it, this is the second time the US will host a World Cup. The other one was in 94 And, you know, the global hegemon hosting a tournament gives it a slightly different dynamic. And when Trump's involved, it gives it an extra spicy dynamic. So it's worth to say that in the run up to this World Cup, there's already been more noise, controversy, sensitivities than I've remembered in any World Cup. That includes Russia and Qatar, which are probably the two more controversial ones that people remember. So, yeah, everyone's not talking about the football right now. And I think that's kind of where we're at. And that might be where we're at for a while, actually.