Here is a question worth thinking about: who decides what counts as a real football country?
There was a period in the World Cup's history when the answer to this question was fairly straightforward — and fairly limited. Europe and South America produced the great football nations. Everyone else was, at best, interesting and occasionally surprising, but not expected to seriously threaten the established order. The World Cup's first sixty-odd years followed this geography with reliable consistency: all winning nations came from Europe or South America.
And then the world got bigger.
Not literally, obviously. The world has always been this size. But football's center of gravity began to shift, slowly and then more rapidly, as the sport spread to new continents, as FIFA's membership expanded, and as television money transformed the resources available to football federations around the world. The 1990s and 2000s were the period when the World Cup began to fully reflect the global sport it was nominally supposed to represent.
USA 1994: The Giant Tries the Game
When FIFA awarded the 1994 World Cup to the United States, the reaction in traditional football nations was a mixture of disbelief and irritation. The United States was the world's leading economic and cultural power. It was also, by the standards of serious football nations, a minor footballing country. The domestic professional soccer league had collapsed in 1984. The national team had only barely qualified for the tournament. The prospect of American stadiums full of people who didn't know what offside meant was, to European and South American observers, somewhere between concerning and insulting.
What actually happened in 1994 was rather different.
The tournament set attendance records that have not been broken since. Over 3.5 million people attended matches — a staggering number that reflected both the scale of American stadiums and the genuine enthusiasm of an American public that, when given a major sporting event to attend, tends to attend it with gusto regardless of whether they fully understand every rule. The atmospheres were extraordinary. The American public engaged with the tournament with a warmth and excitement that surprised even the most skeptical observers.
The football itself was mixed — this was still the era of cautious, low-scoring matches that the rule changes of the early 1990s hadn't fully addressed — but it contained moments of genuine drama. Roberto Baggio, Italy's transcendent attacking midfielder, carried his country to the final almost single-handedly. Brazil, brilliantly organized under Carlos Alberto Parreira, won their fourth World Cup title in a final that ended goalless after extra time and was decided by penalty kicks.
The penalty shootout produced one of the most excruciating images in football history: Roberto Baggio, who had scored five goals in the tournament and effectively been Italy's entire attacking plan, walking up to take the final penalty, and striking it over the crossbar. Over the crossbar. Not close to the post, not saved — over the crossbar. Baggio stood with his head bowed, and the image of him in that moment — the fallen star, the missed penalty, the weight of a nation's hope that had just evaporated — became one of the defining photographs of 1990s sport.
Brazil celebrated. Italy grieved. America went back to baseball, mostly, but something had shifted. The seeds of the modern Major League Soccer were planted in the soil of 1994.
France 1998: Zidane's Country
The 1998 World Cup in France was held thirty-two years after the previous French edition of any World Cup, and France 1998 was the full-throated, colorful, culturally rich, occasionally chaotic version of such an event that you would expect from the country that invented the word champagne. The expanded format — thirty-two teams for the first time — brought new nations, new stories, and new upsets.
France themselves provided the ultimate triumph. The French team of 1998 was built around a philosophy that the national coach Aimé Jacquet had spent years developing: technical quality, defensive organization, and a diversity of attacking talent that reflected the multicultural France of the late twentieth century. The team included players of North African, Caribbean, and Sub-Saharan African heritage alongside those of more traditional French background. The slogan that emerged from the tournament — les Bleus, Black-Blanc-Beur, Black-White-Arab — was an expression of a particular idea about France and French identity that the football team seemed, temporarily, to embody.
The player at the center was Zinedine Zidane — whose parents were Algerian Berber immigrants, and who carried that heritage as a matter of fact rather than public statement. Zidane was, technically, one of the finest midfielders the game had produced: his ball control was extraordinarily precise, his vision was exceptional, and his ability to impose himself on a match through sheer technical authority rather than pace or physical power was unlike almost any player of his era.
In the final against Brazil, Zidane scored twice with headers in the first half. France won 3-0. The streets of Paris celebrated with a scale and intensity that observers compared to the Liberation of 1944. A quarter of a million people gathered on the Champs-Élysées. The French president shook Zidane's hand. The match, the night, and the team represented something that France wanted to believe about itself, even if the political reality was more complicated.
Nigeria and Senegal — Africa Rising
The 1998 tournament also featured Nigeria, who reached the round of sixteen with a confident, attacking style that gave notice of African football's development. The 2002 tournament in South Korea and Japan would take this further when Senegal — appearing in their first-ever World Cup — beat France 1-0 in the opening match of the group stage, knocked out the defending champions, and went on to reach the quarter-finals.
The Senegalese celebrations after that opening victory were extraordinary: genuine, uncontained joy from a squad of players who understood exactly what they had just done. France, the defending champions, beaten in the first match of the tournament by a country that was appearing in the World Cup for the first time. The football world was bigger than people had assumed.
Korea and Japan 2002: The Greatest Upsets
But nothing in 2002 — and arguably nothing in World Cup history — compared to what South Korea did. Co-hosting with Japan, South Korea assembled a team under the Dutch coach Guus Hiddink that was tactically sophisticated, physically exceptional, and possessed of a spirit and determination that neutrals found themselves involuntarily cheering.
In the group stage, South Korea beat Poland and drew with the United States. In the round of sixteen, they beat Spain on penalties after a match in which two Spanish goals were disallowed by the referee in controversial decisions that remain debated. In the quarter-final, they beat Spain in a match that had South Korean streets and public squares full of millions of people watching on outdoor screens, dressed in red, creating a collective atmosphere that was broadcast around the world. In the semi-final, they lost to Germany — again on a penalty shootout — and finished fourth overall. Fourth. In their own backyard, yes, but fourth in a World Cup is an achievement that most established football nations would accept with enormous gratitude.
The goalkeeper Lee Woon-jae was named to the tournament's All-Star team. Hiddink was given honorary South Korean citizenship. The team's run was analyzed, debated, celebrated, and — by some opponents who felt the officiating had favored the co-hosts — contested. But the images of those millions of South Koreans in red, unified around their team in the streets of Seoul and Busan and Daegu, were genuinely moving in the way that only football at its most public can be.
Brazil won the 2002 tournament, with a brilliantly effective squad in which Ronaldo — who had experienced a medical episode in 1998 that had compromised his performance in the final and that doctors took years to fully explain — returned in extraordinary form, scoring twice in the final against Germany to claim his second World Cup winners' medal.
But the story of 2002 was larger than any single winner. It was the story of a tournament in Asia, and of a continent demonstrating that football had genuinely arrived everywhere.
Now, let me ask you:
What strikes you about the idea of football expanding to new continents and cultures? Do you think the World Cup is better with thirty-two teams from around the world, even if it means including nations that don't yet compete at the highest level? Or does expansion dilute the quality of competition in ways that matter?
And South Korea 2002: what is the difference between a genuine footballing achievement and an achievement that was aided by favorable officiating? Can both things be true simultaneously? Does the joy of the supporters who filled those city squares depend on the answer?
These are the questions that expansion brings. The bigger the world gets, the more complex the answers become.
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