It’s hard to ignore the pressure building around the Puget Sound region as we anticipate the start of the FIFA World Cup in June. Seattle is hosting 6 games across 3 weeks, and the city has pulled out all the stops. You know it’s a big deal when Seattle is forcing pauses on all construction projects and roadworks during the next month, requiring roads and sidewalks to be cleaned up. I have a handful of friends who have traveled all over the world to attend the World Cup, and now it’s right in our backyard.
I have been playing soccer for over 30 years, and coaching off and on for 15 years, while hosting weekly adult drop-in soccer, playing in leagues up and down the I-5 corridor, playing under a street lamp in a parking lot, or playing on a slanted dirt field in Mexico with a ravine running down the middle. I walked down the aisle of my high school graduation with my soccer ball, wrote a love poem for my English class about my soccer ball, and brought a soccer ball to every class my senior year. Needless to say, I was very excited when it was announced that Seattle would host World Cup matches.
This particular World Cup, however, has made it plainly obvious that FIFA, the organization behind it, is less interested in providing a valuable game of soccer and a good matchday experience for fans and supporters, and far more interested in offering an “exclusive” product and fleecing as many people along the way as possible. FIFA doesn’t provide the best soccer; they provide the best marketed and most expensive soccer. They are firm believers in “more” quantity, not more quality. And sometimes we confuse “best marketed” and “most expensive” as “best quality”. Oh, but how wrong we are! FIFA has become a conveyor belt: low-quality soccer wrapped in world-class marketing and sold back to fans increasingly priced out of the experience. Right now, the cheapest ticket for a 90-minute match between United States vs. Australia is $1,200, before parking, food, taxes and fees are added. Good luck taking your family to a game! Once the FIFA conveyor belt is in place, its purpose is simple: grow endlessly. More tournaments, more teams, more host countries, higher ticket prices, larger licensing deals, bigger sponsors. Fans and supporters increasingly feel less like participants and more like fuel for the machine.
Unfortunately, the US didn’t win the bid to host the World Cup because we were the best fit; we were the only other bid. Countries are catching on that hosting the World Cup is not as great an investment as it was originally marketed. The host country takes on all the risks, and FIFA contractually takes home all the rewards. It’s less about soccer, supporters, or kids and families seeing their home-grown players, and more about keeping the existing Machine running. Where else have we seen this pattern of institutions becoming so large that they no longer serve their original purpose? Tech? Healthcare? Finance? Agriculture?
How similar our current food system works, with many “FIFA’s” funneling and shoveling “food substances” down a complex system of distribution. Modern food is barely “grown” anymore, having been replaced with food that is “made”. There are literal and national distribution conveyor belts designed to feed more products that appear to be food, to a population that’s forgetting that food was supposed to nourish you. The food giants ask, “What else can we easily shove down this conveyor belt?”, rather than, “What would be good for the person at the end of this conveyor belt?” The FIFA World Cup of Food looks like Nestle, Unilever, Sysco, Kraft Heinz, General Mills, Tyson, JBS, Kroger, Coca-Cola, or Danone, and that conveyor belt is not stopping until you decide to get off. They are winning at a game designed to make you lose. The house always wins. The only way to win is to stop playing the game.
One of the best games of soccer that Emily and I got to attend was a non-league match between two local no-name teams on the outskirts of Manchester. We just walked up to the entrance gate and paid cash, barely any, for seats right up against the field. We could nearly touch the players warming up on the sideline and hear the mud squish under their cleats. We were surrounded by tons of families, little kids fetching stray balls during warm-ups, and entire youth soccer teams coming as a group after their own game. We didn’t pay for parking, the bus was $3.00, and there was no traffic. There were no TV crews or commercial breaks, and we didn’t have to go through security or pay for a clear plastic bag for our belongings. We didn’t have to download an app, or sign up for an account, or agree to let them siphon all the personal data from our phones in order to email us “other events you might like in the area”. That soccer game was designed for us and our enjoyment. Real food feels the same way that little soccer match did: local, imperfect, accessible, human, and built for the people participating in it. The good news is that getting off the conveyor belt is entirely in your control and usually starts small: buying from someone you know, cooking one real meal, supporting local growers, or gathering around a table instead of a brand.
