World Cup Willies
A bumper World Cup summer special featuring ghostly grounds, forgotten champions, missing trophies and more...
The World Cup is currently taking place in Canada, Mexico, and the USA, with a bloated 48-team line-up, an interminable group stage, quarterly ad breaks, visa restrictions, ticket rip-offs, Fifa peace prizes, David Beckham commercials, and (for us in the UK) inconvenient kick-off times. But it is still the World Cup, and it is still unavoidably the event of the summer. I’ve written lots about the World Cup over the years, some of which is collated below in a bumper summer special featuring ten articles to keep your eyes busy during hydration stoppages. First up, something brand new.
I wrote about the strange atmosphere in empty football grounds for the latest issue of Fortean Times magazine. This is a phenomenon familiar to many fans, where a ground can be entirely deserted yet still feel charged with the noise, energy, and memory of the crowd. You can read the article in Fortean Times issue 472 (July 2026), which is available now from good newsagents and from the Fortean Times online shop.
For anyone with a connection to the game, a football ground is more than concrete and steel and bum-worn plastic seating. Fans’ emotional ties to grounds are linked to embedded memories, of eye-popping goals, earworm chants, aromatic pies, and hair-raising excitement. Our minds play tricks. When we step into an empty ground - usually a cavernous, reverberant environment - the feel of the place can rekindle our emotions and memories, making the absent crowd, players, and matchday atmosphere feel almost present…
I’ve written a lot about the history of the World Cup. Everything from forgotten pre-World Cup world champions to missing World Cup trophies. There’s also plenty about the World Cup in my book about the history of football fans, Savage Enthusiasm. You can find out more about the book below, and you can read all of the following articles by clicking the links:
Before the World Cup: Who Were Football’s Earliest World Champions?
Who were football’s world champions in the 60 years before the first World Cup?
World Cup 1930: “the So-Called World’s Association Football Championship”
How the first World Cup established soccer as the world’s game
Hell for Leather: Mystery Surrounds the First-Ever World Cup Final Ball
Confusion about which football was used in the 1930 final
The Untold Story of the Wrong World Cup
In 1930, champions Uruguay paraded a mysterious lost World Cup trophy
World Cup 1950: The Maracanazo
The story of soccer’s biggest-ever crowd
World Cup 1966: They Think It’s All Over
How the 1966 World Cup helped save English soccer
Robbing Blind: Jules Rimet Trophy Mystery
The mystery surrounding the theft of the World Cup in 1966 remains unsolved
World Cup 1970: 25 Things We Loved About Mexico 70
Celebrating the most colourful World Cup tournament of all time
World Cup 1990: World in Motion
How Italia 90 changed what it meant to be a soccer fan
![Estadio Centenario, Montevideo, Uruguay, 1930 World Cup [Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!o2yx!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd9f11c65-94af-48b4-b43d-b0cbb8c1c102_720x440.webp "Estadio Centenario, Montevideo, Uruguay, 1930 World Cup [Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons")
Savage Enthusiasm: A History of Football Fans is my book about the world’s greatest game from the point of view of its supporters. It’s a complete history of watching football, from the very earliest days of the game, via golden ages and troubled times, through to the present day. There’s lots in there about the World Cup. You can read more about it here and get it from all good online bookshops, plus evil Jeff Bezos’ Amazon.
From the cover: Being a football fan is both a privilege and a burden. When you’re winning, it’s the best thing on Earth, and when you’re not, it’s the end of the world. And the thing about being a football fan is, whichever way fortune swings, you’re stuck with the game and your team for life. We’ve come to accept the great hold football has on us. But how did this happen? How did we become so entirely wrapped up in the game? How did we become football fans? “A splendid new book by an always exemplary researcher” - Sports Journalists’ Association. “An excellent read, rich in anecdotes and explanation” - Game of the People.
The Ruhleben Football Association is another football book I wrote. This one has nothing to do with the World Cup, but it should appeal to readers of this newsletter. It’s about how several of Britain’s most famous footballers had to play to survive inside a brutal First World War prison camp. Among them was Steve Bloomer, arguably the greatest player England ever had. It’s a thrilling, cinematic true story, and there have been several on-off projects involving podcasts, TV shows, and movies. Read it before it appears in cinemas… You can read about it here and get it from all good online bookshops, plus Amazon.
From the cover: In 1914, at the outbreak of the First World War, several of Britain’s greatest footballers were interned in a brutal prison camp at Ruhleben, near Berlin. Among them was Steve Bloomer, the prolific England striker widely regarded as the best player of his generation. Surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards, living in squalor and on meagre rations, and with their families and freedom far out of reach, Bloomer and the others found salvation in what they knew best – football. They bartered for balls, marked out pitches, and formed the Ruhleben Football Association, organising league and cup competitions involving hundreds of players and watched by thousands of spectators. This is the true story of how the prisoners used the game to survive, and how some of them used it to escape. “Myself and many others would not have survived without football” - Steve Bloomer.
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