Dr. Shuhua Zhou
Chair Professor at the City University of Hong Kong and a Fellow of the International Communication Association. He studies television news and the human cognition of mediated messages, and earlier anchored and directed the English news program at GDTV.
Email: shuhzhou@cityu.edu.hk
When Henry Kissinger called soccer “the embodiment of human experience,” he meant a game in which national character showed itself on the grass. In his 1986 essay “Soccer Imitates Life”, he read West German soccer as the General Staff at work, Brazil as a samba band that could not abide joyless virtue, and England as muscular nostalgia. What strikes me, rereading him in 2026, is that his subject was reality itself—human beings improvising solutions no script anticipated. The spectacle asks how much of that reality has since been packaged and sold.
The spectacle theory of mega sporting events rests on three ideas. First, images over reality: live experience and raw competition give way to packaged images and corporate narratives. Second, the sport-media complex: events are staged to sell commodities and manufacture enthusiasm. Third, cultural ritual: the mega-event reinforces national identities and political values under the guise of entertainment. The 2026 tournament—hosted by the United States, Canada, and Mexico yet modeled on American sport—is a near-perfect specimen.
Consider images over reality. As Fortune reported, FIFA imposed a mandatory three-minute “hydration break” midway through each half, splitting the ninety-minute flow into basketball’s quarters. Ian Wright, on ITV, called it another way of getting American-style advertising into the game; ESPN found the breaks widely read as commercially driven, not mere player welfare; Fox alone reportedly earned over $250 million from these windows. The match—Kissinger’s reality—becomes the interval between images.
Then the sport-media complex. Expansion from 32 to 48 teams pushed FIFA’s projected revenue from $7.6 billion to $13 billion, and Infantino was floating a 64-team edition before the knockouts had ended. A Super Bowl-style halftime show stretched the final’s interval to twenty-seven minutes; championship rings, dynamic pricing, and turf sold by the square followed. FIFA said openly it was bringing “an iconic American sports tradition” to football. The commodity, not the contest, sets the calendar.
And cultural ritual—here the spectacle turns political. The Balogun affair, in which a red-card suspension was deferred for a year after President Trump personally telephoned Infantino, became the defining controversy; Trump thanked FIFA for reversing a “great injustice,” while UEFA warned that the integrity of the game was “at stake.” Iran’s team was admitted for barely a day; Argentine players unfurled a Malvinas banner after beating England in the semifinal. The bid’s watchwords—Unity, Certainty, Opportunity—curdled into arrogance and prejudice; the ritual told us plainly whose values these were.
Yet the human experience Kissinger loved refuses to vanish. The most compelling stories of 2026 belonged not to the giants but to the small nations: Cape Verde surviving a group with Spain and Uruguay behind a forty-year-old goalkeeper; Curaçao, the smallest country ever to qualify, taking a point from Ecuador. As the Financial Times observed, expansion’s real gift may be that more nations now own a World Cup story of their own. Côte d’Ivoire’s fate—the near-miss of a gifted African side—reminds us that style still carries meaning marketing cannot manufacture.
The old national styles endure too, refracted through the new machinery. Argentina still plays with Maradona’s improvisational genius; Spain passes as though possession were a philosophy; France remains, as Kissinger predicted, the most elegant of the European powers; England labors under a faintly pedantic nostalgia; Brazil attacks in waves of yellow. The United States, which Kissinger hoped would embrace the game, has instead absorbed the World Cup into its own commercial grammar—the host reshaping the guest.
I do not come to this as a detached critic. I have loved the game since boyhood; I played in college, even for the college staff team. And I brushed against its governing world exactly once. In 1991, when China hosted the first Women’s World Cup, I was a news anchor at Guangdong Television, and I caught FIFA president João Havelange and his secretary general, Sepp Blatter, after a press conference at the White Swan Hotel in Guangzhou. I had a little French then, so I asked—in French—for an exclusive interview. Our French proved equally halting, and Blatter himself ended up interpreting between my English and Havelange’s Portuguese. The two men who would preside over FIFA’s great commercial ascent were, that day, within reach—close enough to catch in a hotel lobby, patient enough to fumble through three languages. Whatever the game has since become, the human encounter was then the whole of it.
My own view is that spectacle and human experience are not opposites but layers: the images sit atop the reality, the sport-media complex feeds on genuine passion, the ritual works only because the competition beneath it is real. Kissinger saw soccer as a mirror of national character; the 2026 World Cup is one too—but a mirror that now reflects an age that would rather sell the game’s image than let us watch it. What we risk losing is the two hours Kissinger’s father never understood: standing in the cold, watching human beings play.
