Thirty-two days into the largest FIFA World Cup ever staged, the semifinal bracket is set. England will meet Argentina in Atlanta. France will meet Spain in Dallas. The final is eleven days away at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, where Donald Trump is expected to hand the trophy to whichever captain lifts it, an image FIFA has been building toward since the day it awarded him the inaugural FIFA Peace Prize. Between now and July 19, the tournament will settle its football. It has already settled something else: what a World Cup looks like when a sport’s only global regulatory body chooses proximity to power over the appearance of neutrality, and does so in full view of six billion people.
The 48-team expansion delivered on its promise of spectacle. Cape Verde, an island nation of 530,000 people, held Spain scoreless and pushed the defending champions to extra time before falling. Morocco reached back-to-back quarterfinals as the first African and Arab country to do so in consecutive tournaments. Egypt took Argentina to the brink of the greatest upset in the competition’s history, then lost in circumstances its own football federation has formally protested. Jayden Adams, twenty-five years old, who helped South Africa reach the knockout rounds for the first time in the country’s history, died six days ago; no cause has been given. And the tournament’s co-hosts are all gone, eliminated in the round of 32, the first time in World Cup history that every host nation has exited before the round of 16.
None of that is the story that will define this World Cup. The story that will define it is a phone call.
