A football is not enough - by Johan Fourie - Our Long Walk
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A football is not enough<br>What the FIFA World Cup have taught me about economic growth
Johan Fourie<br>Jun 11, 2026
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On the afternoon of 11 June 2010, in a packed Soccer City, Siphiwe Tshabalala collected the ball on the left, took one touch, and smashed it into the top corner. It was a brilliant goal, nominated for a Puskas, but it was a magic moment because of what it signaled. Sure, Bafana Bafana would go on to draw that match against Mexico, then crash out in the group stage. But nobody in that stadium was thinking about the standings. They were thinking that South Africa, and Africa, was on the world’s stage.
Like most South Africans, I remember that moment – and what turned out to be one of the best World Cups – very well. And in the epilogue to my book I used that month to make an argument about economic growth. Want to win the economic World Cup, I wrote, then stop hiring expensive coaches and top-down strategies. Give every child a soccer ball. Empower the next generation, and let them design their own future.<br>I still believe the spirit of that line. But sixteen years of football – and sixteen years of economics – have taught me it was incomplete. A football, it turns out, is not enough.<br>Let me show you why, using the World Cup itself as a teacher.<br>Start with a simple question. Each World Cup is awarded to a host nation. Where does that host sit on the global income ladder when the tournament arrives?<br>I ranked every country by GDP per capita – the Maddison Project’s long-run income data – in each World Cup year, and measured the host against the world’s frontier economy, the United States.
My hunch was that hosts have crept closer to the frontier over time. The data says something else. For sixty years, hosts hovered between a third and four-fifths of US income: Switzerland and Sweden near the top, Brazil and Mexico far below. The 1990s and 2000s had World Cups in countries close to the frontier, followed by South Africa, Brazil and Russia less than half of US GDP. Then, a reversal, with Qatar in 2022 at 255 per cent of US income, the richest host ever, by a distance.<br>In one decade FIFA swung from the poorest host to the richest. South Africa’s World Cup was sold as development – a coming-out party for a young democracy and a whole continent. Qatar’s was a petro-spectacle, air-conditioned stadiums paid for with gas. So much for the idea that hosts edge ever closer to the frontier. If anything, the choice of who hosts has come seems unmoored from how rich a country actually is.<br>Perhaps, instead, there is a correlation between income and victory? Let’s look at the final itself. In every World Cup final since 1930, I compared the two finalists’ GDP per capita.
In 13 of 22 finals, the poorer nation lifted the trophy. Brazil, never close to the income frontier, won five times, usually against richer European opponents. On any given afternoon, ninety minutes is a great leveller.<br>And yet zoom out and the picture inverts completely. Only eight nations have ever won the World Cup. Plot the concentration of titles across the world’s countries, the way economists plot the concentration of income, and the contrast is brutal.
Income across nations has a Gini coefficient – the standard measure of inequality, where zero is perfect equality and one is one country owning everything – of about 0.52. The distribution of World Cup glory has a Gini of 0.97. The people’s game, supposedly the most democratic sport on earth, hoards its ultimate prize more tightly than the world economy hoards money. Football is radically equal for ninety minutes and radically unequal across a century.
How sport can make economics better<br>Johan Fourie<br>December 15, 2025
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If money does not buy trophies, what does? As I wrote before, football is unusually generous with evidence, because it records everything.<br>For the 2022 World Cup I counted, for each squad, how many players earned their living at clubs in Europe’s ‘Big Five’ leagues – England, Spain, Germany, Italy and France – and compared that to how the team performed.
The relationship is clear: roughly every three or four players plugged into those elite leagues is worth an extra goal of margin over the tournament. Teams do well when their best talent reaches the steepest learning environments and tests itself against the best, week in and week out.<br>It is the same lesson I drew from the Africa Cup of Nations, and it is an old lesson in economics too: openness beats protection, and skills are built where competition is fiercest. Note the cautionary dot, though. Germany arrived in 2022 with more Big-Five players than anyone – and went home in the group stage. Access to the best matters; on its own, it is not enough. You still need the system around it to function.<br>Now combine the lessons. Football has been getting more equal where it matters for spectacle – the gap between the...