Why Money and Power Can't Buy Soccer Wins (or F1 Wins, for That Matter).
The United States and China can purchase nearly anything, including Olympic supremacy. The world's two most coveted sporting crowns are the exception, and the reason is a century older than either superpower.
In the hills of Qingyuan, in China's Guangdong province, stands a gray Hogwarts of a building surrounded by roughly fifty soccer pitches. The Evergrande Football School opened in 2012 as the largest facility of its kind on Earth, a boarding academy built to industrialize the production of Chinese footballers the way the country had industrialized the production of everything else. Three years later, Xi Jinping made the ambition official state policy: tens of thousands of soccer academies, a domestic league to rival Europe's, a hosted World Cup, and, by 2050, a won one. It was the least ambiguous experiment in the history of sport. The most capable state on the planet, directed by its most powerful leader in generations, ordered itself to become good at the world's game.
This month, the world's game is being played in the country best positioned to judge how that experiment went. The 2026 World Cup, hosted by the United States with Canada and Mexico, expanded to 48 teams, nearly a quarter of all the nations on Earth. China did not qualify. The United States did, by virtue of hosting, and was eliminated in the first knockout round by Belgium, a country with roughly the population of Ohio. On Sunday, at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, the trophy will be lifted by Spain, England, or Argentina: two mid-sized European states and a South American republic that has defaulted on its sovereign debt nine times. The most powerful nation in history will supply the stadium, the security, the broadcast towers, and the invoice. Its team went home two weeks ago.
Formula 1 tells the same story with different scenery. Last December in Abu Dhabi, Lando Norris became the eleventh British driver to win the world championship. The United States has produced two champions in the sport's 76 seasons; the most recent, Mario Andretti, won in 1978 and was born in Italy. China has produced zero champions and, in three-quarters of a century, exactly one full-time driver. When General Motors finally put an American works team on the grid this season, the Cadillac name arrived with a Mexican and a Finn in the cockpits, and America's best prospect parked in a European feeder series to acquire the childhood he didn't have.
It is tempting, contemplating all this, to reach for a romantic explanation: that soccer and racing glory belong to nations of passion rather than power, that the poor in geopolitics are rich in games, that there is some cosmic ledger balancing aircraft carriers against World Cups. Brazil, with five of them, seems to prove it. So does Argentina. The theory writes itself somewhere around the third beer.
The theory is wrong, and it is wrong in an unusually instructive way. The real explanation for American and Chinese futility involves no cosmic ledgers. It involves railway engineers, a boarding school in Massachusetts, a cluster of workshops near an old British airfield, and a window of history that opened around 1870, closed around 1930, and has quietly governed the distribution of sporting glory ever since. Money and power, it turns out, can buy almost everything in sport. What they cannot buy is a time machine.
Start with the correlation, because it isn't there. Assemble a dataset of 52 nations, every country that has ever won a World Cup, reached its final four, or produced an F1 champion, plus every major power and a spread of controls, and score each one twice: once for greatness in soccer and Formula 1, once for hard power, built from economic output, military spending, nuclear weapons, and a seat at the Security Council. If glory and power really traded off against each other, the relationship between the two scores would run downhill.
It runs uphill. Across the whole world, more powerful countries are modestly more likely to own sporting silverware, for the unromantic reason that power correlates with being large and rich, and being large and rich helps at everything. Ghana has no World Cups either, and nobody writes essays about it. Restrict the sample to the twelve greatest powers on Earth, the group where the theory actually lives, and the relationship doesn't turn negative. It disappears. The correlation is negative 0.02, which is statistics' way of shrugging. Within the club of giants, knowing a country's power tells you precisely nothing about its sporting pedigree.
The correlation that isn't. Among the twelve most powerful nations, the trend line between hard power and soccer-and-F1 greatness is flat. Britain, Germany, France, and Italy sit at the top of the sport index; the two superpowers sit on the floor, alongside Japan, India, and Saudi Arabia. Power does not sort them. Something else does.
Look at who occupies each corner of that flat cloud, though, and the real question comes into focus. The United Kingdom is the most decorated F1 nation in history and a former global hegemon. Germany owns twelve drivers' titles, four World Cups, and the continent's largest economy. France has two World Cups and a nuclear arsenal. The naive theory, that power crowds out play, cannot survive five minutes with these countries. What separates the giants who win from the giants who don't isn't how much power they have. It's something older, something fixed long before any of them acquired their current power at all.
You can predict a nation's footballing destiny with unsettling accuracy from a single number, and the number is not GDP. It is the year the country founded its national football association. England: 1863. Argentina: 1893. The Netherlands: 1889. Germany and Uruguay: 1900. Brazil: 1914. Then the other list. Japan: 1921. China: 1924. India: 1937. Australia's modern soccer body: 1961. In the data, every decade of later arrival costs about a fifth of a standard deviation of eventual greatness, compounding silently across a century. Arrive in 1930 instead of 1890 and you have forfeited most of a standard deviation before a ball is kicked.
The time machine. Football association founding year against eventual soccer-and-F1 greatness across 52 nations. The shaded band marks the diffusion window. Nations that organized late, or whose sporting culture was already spoken for, never caught up.
Why should a Victorian founding date matter more than a modern balance sheet? The best answer was worked out two decades ago by the political scientist Andrei Markovits and his co-author Steven Hellerman in Offside: Soccer and American Exceptionalism. Every industrializing nation, they argued, possessed a limited cultural "sport space," and that space was filled during the few decades when mass spectator sport first crystallized, roughly 1870 to 1930. Soccer poured into open sport spaces along the arteries of British commerce. British railway engineers seeded it in Buenos Aires, British sailors in Montevideo and Genoa, British mining and textile men in Bilbao and São Paulo. If your country was a node in Britain's trading network during the window, the game arrived early, took the space, and locked in. Sport spaces behave like railway gauges and keyboard layouts: not necessarily optimal, ferociously permanent.
The United States missed the window in the most American way possible: it was busy. It was not a node in Britain's network but a rival system building its own culture industry, and it filled its sport space deliberately. Baseball turned professional in 1869. The college football codes were hammered out in the 1870s and '80s, partly as a conscious act of differentiation from British games. Basketball was invented from scratch in a Springfield, Massachusetts, gymnasium in 1891. By the time soccer professionalized globally, America's cultural shelf was full. Markovits's deepest point is that American soccer failure was never athletic failure. It is the signature of a nation that industrialized on its own terms, visible a century later every time the US men's team exits a tournament it is hosting.
The pattern holds with the precision of a fingerprint everywhere you press it. Japan's sport space was filled by baseball, imported in the 1870s not from Britain but from American teachers, which means Japan's national game is a fossil of its American linkage exactly as Brazil's is a fossil of its British one. India's space was claimed by cricket, delivered through the formal empire rather than the informal one. Canada had hockey, Australia its cricket-and-Aussie-rules duopoly, and Ireland filled its space on purpose, with Gaelic games promoted by nationalists specifically to keep British sports out. A nation's games are not a menu of its preferences. They are a map of its nineteenth-century trade routes, still legible after the empires that drew them have dissolved.
A nation's games are not a menu of its preferences. They are a map of its nineteenth-century trade routes.
Formula 1 requires less theory, because it barely pretends to be a world sport. It is a European industrial guild with a broadcast deal. Seven of this season's eleven teams are headquartered within about an hour of the old Silverstone airfield, in a stretch of English countryside the industry calls Motorsport Valley. The route to a seat runs through European karting, then a ladder of feeder series based almost entirely in Europe, and a serious prospect must relocate there by age twelve or fourteen while a family or sponsor burns between one and three million dollars. In the data, simple domestic access to this European core is worth nearly a full one and a half standard deviations of F1 greatness, the largest single effect anywhere in the analysis. The sport's champions map onto the European auto industry and its cultural periphery, Britain, Germany, Italy, Austria, Finland, and onto nothing else.
And here the data produces a wrinkle so tidy it feels planted. The Anglo settler nations whose soccer was smothered by cricket, rugby, and hockey turn out to overperform in Formula 1: Australia has four drivers' titles, New Zealand, South Africa, and Canada one each, a suspicious haul for countries with no footballing pedigree at all. The explanation is the mechanism confirming itself from the opposite direction. Jack Brabham did not build an Australian racing ladder; he moved to Surrey in 1955 and climbed the British one, and every Commonwealth champion since has done some version of the same. The same British network that strangled these countries' soccer delivered their motorsport. The trade routes giveth, and the trade routes taketh away.
The United States, meanwhile, did to racing exactly what it did to ball games: it built a parallel universe. NASCAR and IndyCar gave American talent its own money, its own ladders, and its own legends, and no reason whatsoever to send a twelve-year-old to Italian karting tracks. When America finally engaged with Formula 1 in earnest, it did so in the only register a superpower knows. It bought the whole sport, through Liberty Media, in 2017. It added races in Miami and Las Vegas. And this year it put a factory team on the grid, backed by General Motors, staffed at the wheel by Sergio Pérez of Mexico and Valtteri Bottas of Finland, with the American Colton Herta stationed in Formula 2, at age 26, to absorb the European apprenticeship that his own country's parallel universe never required of him. The superpower's entry vector is capital. It buys the casino. It does not play the tables.
Which brings us back to those fifty pitches in Guangdong, because the obvious objection to everything above is: fine, history dealt the hand, but surely enough money can buy a new deck. No actor on Earth was better equipped to test that proposition than the Chinese state, and no test has ever been run at greater expense.
For a few years in the mid-2010s, the Chinese Super League paid some of the highest wages in world football. Oscar left Chelsea for Shanghai in a transfer worth about $70 million; Carlos Tevez was reportedly collecting around $40 million a year to play, occasionally, in Shanghai's colors. State-linked conglomerates bought clubs the way they bought ports. The plan on paper was coherent: import the world's best, inspire fifty million young players, harvest a golden generation. A decade later the league's financial bubble has burst, dozens of professional clubs have dissolved, one reigning national champion folded months after winning the title, and the men's team could not crack a 48-team World Cup field. In the statistical model, China does not merely fail to punch above its structural weight. It underperforms its own prediction by a full standard deviation, one of the worst residuals of any major nation. The command economy that conjured high-speed rail and a space station could not conjure a midfield.
The reason is that there are two kinds of sports, and the difference between them is the entire answer to this essay's question. Call the first kind state-capacity sports: swimming, track, gymnastics, rowing, shooting, the great Olympic disciplines in which success converts more or less directly from funding, population, sports science, and centralized academies. A determined government can build a medal machine in these within a decade, and both superpowers have. At the Paris Games in 2024, the United States and China finished with 40 gold medals apiece, tied at the top, with third place a full lap behind. Run the numbers and Olympic gold tracks national power at a correlation of 0.67, about as tight a relationship as social science ever produces. Sport, in this register, is an engineering problem, and superpowers are magnificent at engineering problems.
The inversion. Paris 2024 gold medals against hard power. The superpowers are not bad at sport. They are the two most successful sporting nations alive, in every discipline where success can be manufactured.
Call the second kind ecosystem sports. Their talent pipelines are not programs but century-old cultural organisms: tens of millions of children playing informally because the game is woven into identity, a dense pyramid of clubs compounding selection generation after generation, families transmitting technique the way they transmit accents. Soccer is the purest case. Formula 1 is a smaller, stranger one, an ecosystem of karting families and engineering firms rooted in one corner of one continent. Ecosystem sports cannot be engineered, because their essential input is time that has already elapsed. China's program failed not because the state lacked capacity but because it aimed capacity at the one category of achievement that is definitionally not for sale. Fifty pitches can be poured in a year. The reason a Uruguayan five-year-old juggles a ball against a wall, unprompted, in a country of 3.4 million people with two World Cups, took a hundred years to build and cannot be procured.
Ecosystem sports cannot be engineered, because their essential input is time that has already elapsed.
There is a classic teaching example in statistics: people with yellow-stained fingers develop lung cancer at wildly elevated rates, yet no one believes fingers cause tumors. Smoking causes both, and the proof is that when you hold smoking fixed, the finger-cancer correlation vanishes. The same test can be run here. Hold fixed the historical variables, the founding year of a country's football association, whether its sport space was already occupied, its access to Europe's motorsport core, its population, and then ask whether national power still predicts sporting greatness. It does not. The coefficient collapses to statistical nothing. Power and glory are yellow fingers and lung cancer: neither causes the other, and both are effects of the same upstream event, the moment and manner in which a nation joined the modern world.
That is the finding underneath the finding, and it dissolves the romance and the puzzle at once. Countries that industrialized as nodes inside the British-European network got the games, and the biggest of them, Britain, Germany, France, got great-power status too. Countries lashed to the network's commercial edge, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Spain, got the games without the power, and then poured into them all the meaning their geopolitics couldn't hold, which is why Maradona's 1986 handball against England felt, in Buenos Aires, like a naval engagement won. And the two countries that industrialized as rival worlds unto themselves, continental systems too vast and self-sufficient to be anyone's node, became superpowers for precisely the same reasons their sport spaces stayed closed to the world's games. The United States and China are not bad at soccer despite being superpowers. They are bad at soccer for the same reason they are superpowers. One geological event, two fossil layers.
If the theory is right, it makes checkable promises. Cadillac will not produce a homegrown American F1 champion this decade, however many races Austin and Vegas host. China will remain a top-two Olympic power and will not come meaningfully close to a men's World Cup by its 2050 deadline. India will rerun the Chinese profile with a British accent: rising medal counts, aggressive capital export into global sport, no football breakthrough, because cricket claimed its space by the same law. And the cleanest test is the one unfolding now: esports is the first hegemonic sporting form to crystallize while the United States and China sit at the center of the world's network rather than outside it, and the theory predicts they will dominate it natively, at the talent level, from birth. Early returns lean exactly that way.
On Sunday afternoon in New Jersey, someone else's anthem will play. None of it is a tragedy, and none of it is a trade. It is just the nineteenth century, still visible, the way starlight is. Britain's sailors and railway men drew a map of the world in footballs, and later in racing cars, without ever meaning to, and the map has outlived the empire, the gold standard, and every geopolitical order since. The countries on the map play. The countries that drew their own maps own the venue, sell the tickets, and light the stadium. The landlord doesn't play. The landlord never needed to.
A note on the numbers
Statistical claims derive from an original dataset of 52 nations covering World Cup results through 2022, Formula 1 drivers' championships through 2025, football association founding years, sport-space and motorsport-access indicators, and a hard-power index built from approximate 2024 GDP, military expenditure, nuclear status, and UN Security Council membership. Estimates use ordinary least squares with robust standard errors; Russia is excluded from the Olympic model owing to its Paris ban. With a hand-assembled sample of this size, coefficients should be read as effect-size estimates rather than precise truths. The sport-space framework follows Markovits and Hellerman, Offside: Soccer and American Exceptionalism (Princeton, 2001); the economics of footballing success follows Kuper and Szymanski, Soccernomics.