Legacy

What does it mean to cheer for the country that once colonised yours? Forty years on from the Hand of God, does one match still define how a nation sees itself? And when Ghana play England, who exactl...

9 Jul 25min

hould football and politics ever really be kept apart? What happens when the host nation is at war with one of the teams competing in its own tournament? And when FIFA hands its brand-new peace prize ...

7 Jul 27min

What happens when a World Cup final is played a few hundred metres from a torture centre? How does a newly independent nation humiliate the champions of Europe — and still get knocked out by a fix in ...

2 Jul 37min

What turns a football team into a country's most powerful weapon? How does a game invented to entertain end up laundering the reputations of dictators? And when seventy years of European control colla...

30 Jun 34min

What happens when the nations that invented football start losing their grip on it? How does a team representing a country that doesn't officially exist end up touring the world and unnerving an empir...

25 Jun 41min

How did a game scribbled into rules by Victorian schoolboys end up watched by four billion people? Why do the countries that were colonised take such fierce joy in beating the ones that colonised them...

23 Jun 44min

What does a country sing about when it can't agree on its own founding? Why has Hollywood, which will film literally anything, never made a great movie about 1776? And when both the Black Lives Matter...

18 Jun 36min

Why did African Americans spend a century celebrating the Fifth of July instead of the Fourth? Why did a sitting US president personally try to end a journalist's career over one newspaper series? And...

16 Jun 40min