Chapter One
A tournament goes east
Awarding the World Cup to two countries was, on paper, a fudge. South Korea and Japan had both bid to host alone, and the rivalry between them ran far deeper than football. Rather than crown one and humiliate the other, FIFA in 1996 did the pragmatic thing and handed it to both. Each nation built ten gleaming new stadiums; the matches were split down the middle, and the final was sent to Japan, at the International Stadium in Yokohama.
There were sceptics. The kick-off times were brutal for European television, the tournament fell in the monsoon season, and there was open doubt about whether Asian crowds would fill the grounds. Those doubts evaporated within days. Four nations — China, Ecuador, Senegal and Slovenia — arrived as debutants. Curiously, Tokyo, the Japanese capital, did not host a single match. This was a 32-team World Cup, the format that ran from 1998 to 2022 before the expanded 48-team format arrived; everything about it felt slightly off its axis, and that was before a ball had been kicked in anger.