When Benito Mussolini brought the second World Cup to fascist Italy in 1934, he was not just hosting a tournament. He was trying to make the event worship him. A new piece by Ben Lillie revisits that moment as the clearest early example of a pattern that has followed the World Cup ever since.
That is why how long is the world cup is being searched now: not for the length of the tournament, but for the life span of its political effects. The question matters because the World Cup’s biggest stage still draws leaders who want more than a trophy. They want legitimacy, distraction and a photograph that can outlast the final whistle.
Mussolini pushed FIFA to bring the tournament to Italy, then used every detail he could. He reportedly dined with the Swedish referee the night before a brutal semifinal, and that same referee went on to officiate the final. Italy’s Azzurri lifted the trophy in Rome, and Mussolini had already commissioned a second prize, the Coppa del Duce, six times the size of the real one. The symbolism was blunt. The tournament was meant to look like a national triumph and a political endorsement at once.
That instinct did not disappear after 1934. Argentina’s military junta hosted the 1978 World Cup while political prisoners were tortured within a mile of the stadium where the final was played, and the cheering from the match was audible through the walls of the cells. In 2022, Qatar spent a reported $200 billion on the tournament, and hundreds of migrant workers died building the infrastructure around it. FIFA still got the most-watched tournament in history, despite years of scrutiny over the workers who built it.
That is the hard truth of sportswashing: it often works. It can deliver prestige, scale and a global audience, even as it falls short of something deeper. Spectacle can be purchased. Belonging cannot. The people left inside that gap are the ones who matter most — players, fans, political prisoners and migrant workers — because they are the ones who have to live with what the event was used to say about a country.
What remains unanswered is how FIFA keeps leaving room for that to happen. The selection and oversight process is where the politics enter, but the exact mechanisms are still the missing piece. The World Cup keeps offering rulers a chance to wrap themselves in the game, and history suggests they will keep taking it as long as the door stays open.
