There are few things that have been so consistently political as football. This is true of the sport’s early folk origins, in which village-wide kick-abouts became an excuse to destroy fences threatening to enclose common agricultural land. It is true of the mid-nineteenth century, when—expunged of its plebeian elements and codified along a clear set of universal rules—football turned into a tool to enlist future members of Britain’s ruling class in the project of empire and initiate them to the amateur athletic cult of the Victorian gentleman.

However, soccer is even more political today. Not only is the beautiful game a multibillion-dollar industry and the playground for all sorts of economic and political interests from Gulf States’ sovereign funds to American private equity firms, but it is also the most popular spectacle on the planet. This has made the game a catalyst for political struggles of all kinds.

The historian of football, David Goldblatt, will be giving a series of seminars on the history of the game for Equator magazine. Ahead of these talks, he sat down with Bartolomeo Sala to talk about how, despite the best efforts of the monied interests behind the sport, elites just can’t kick politics out of football.