There’s nothing like the promise of permanent residency to make sport exciting. As well as the usual yellow and red cards, the referees will be able to award a green card to any player who dribbles past an opponent in games played on American soil. One of the most memorable figures in the World Cup was a Cameroonian player called Roger Milla, who did a dance by the corner flag when he scored. If that makes football sound boring, our point is made. Still, a creative goal celebration can be fun; to encourage them, the referee can rescind a yellow card for foul play if they are particularly imaginative. Competition is always a good thing, and that principle can be applied within matches by having two balls on the field at once. This will mainly be fun because of the effect that it will have on referees and commentators. In extremis, a panel of video assistant referees can award a penalty against a team for being too boring. Even the best teams spend inordinate amounts of time passing the ball from one side of the pitch to the other, apparently unaware that the goal is in front of them. They should be punished. It is just possible that these ideas will not be adopted before the World Cup starts. Bold thinking often takes time to become accepted. In the meantime, there are some consolations. It could be six and a half weeks of golf. ■ Subscribers to The Economist can sign up to our Opinion newsletter, which brings together the best of our leaders, columns, guest essays and reader correspondence. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//leaders/2026/06/04/how-to-make-football-more-exciting
Are most celebrity book-clubs irritating? Also this week, SpaceX, Star Wars and cinema production, urban trees, management waffle, dressing for the City June 4th 2026 Letters are welcome via email to letters@economist.comFind out more about how we process your letter “From red carpet to reading list” (May 9th) noted that most celebrity book- clubs are irritating, but that such clubs make reading less lonely, turning “a solitary experience…into a collective one”, as one academic put it. That is precisely the function of Charmaghz, a non-profit that works with girls in Afghanistan. Founded by an Afghan girls’ education activist, Charmaghz runs online book clubs where the Taliban has banned girls from secondary school and university.
Girls and women in Afghanistan are now routinely excluded from most public spaces. What they lack is the company of other readers their own age, and a setting in which their views on a novel, or anything else, are worthy. A weekly 90-minute session led by Afghan women, discussing “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” or “Around the World in 80 Days”, supplies both. You said that critics question the seriousness of many book clubs, in particular those led by celebrities. Seriousness is in no short supply among our participants. They are among the most determined readers I know, despite and probably because of the barriers they face to get hold of a book at all. Liz RobinsonChief executiveCharmaghzLondon SpaceX “is a marvel of free markets” and “capitalism at its most remarkable”, you said in your leader on the rocket firm’s forthcoming initial public offering (“A Starship enterprise”, May 23rd). This overlooks the critical role that government played in getting SpaceX off the ground. In 2008 the fledgling startup was heading for bankruptcy until NASA awarded it a $1.6bn contract, thereby providing a trajectory-changing revenue stream. American taxpayers absorbed much of the early risk that private investors would not. SpaceX’s success is impressive, but it is a triumph of state- supported capitalism more than a free-market marvel. T. Michael SpencerWashington, DC Your account of how Star Wars has descended from cinematic event to serialised filler deserves a wider diagnosis (“Yodanomics”, May 23rd). The paradox of our cultural moment is that the means of producing novelty have never been so abundant (generative tools, distribution platforms, and so on) and yet the cultural industries have rarely been so timid. Disney’s retreat from Tatooine to television is not idiosyncratic but symptomatic. Data-driven greenlighting rewards the legible past over the speculative future. Algorithmic recommendation collapses taste onto a handful of safe attractors. Capital markets, anxious about subscriber churn, prefer extending a known universe to funding an unknown one. The result is an ecosystem in
which the cost of failure has become unbearable just as the cost of production has collapsed: an economy of infinite remixes of finite ideas. Generative AI will only sharpen the contradiction. A technology trained on the past can produce, at vanishing cost, ever more elaborate variations of what already exists. The risk is not that Star Wars becomes a soap opera, but that everything does. Whether audiences will keep paying for the upholstery of nostalgia, once they can stitch their own, is the real question on the desk of Josh D’Amaro, Disney’s new boss. PIER LUIGI SACCOProfessor of biobehavioural economicsGabriele d'Annunzio University of Chieti-PescaraChieti, Italy Banyan set out his case for felling India’s urban trees because they are hindering development (May 9th). The real issue isn’t a lack of courage to chop down the trees, it is a refusal to acknowledge the law of induced demand. In cities such as Bangalore and Hyderabad, the time savings promised by new flyovers typically evaporate within months as the new road capacity simply invites more private vehicles. Furthermore, the state’s interest in “greenery” is suspiciously selective. One need only visit the leafy, walkable streets of a government enclave, to see that the state understands the value of a canopy. It is only when one steps outside these protected zones into the “dysfunctional” city that trees are treated as impediments to progress rather than essential public-health infrastructure. When the state chops trees “in the dead of night”, as it did in Mumbai, it isn’t acting rationally, it is acting autocratically. Until Indian urban planning moves away from the 1960s American model of car-centric expansion and towards transparent, public-led transit design, “tree-huggers” remain the only thin line between a liveable city and a heat-radiating concrete desert. Dharmendra TolaniDelhi
Bartleby’s stream of unpunctuated consciousness on management babble (May 16th) caught my attention. I spent my career in middle management. The senior ranks commanded that each organisation within the company produce a mission statement. A seemingly simple task since we had only internal customers and a single product. Our mission statement was stated in straightforward English contained in one sentence. Clearly that did not pass muster. We had neglected to use the currently fashionable buzzwords. We ended up with meaningless gobbledegook and wasted countless hours. JOSEPH VANDERSLICEThe Woodlands, Texas Perhaps I’m not alone in having read Bartleby’s “velocity pivot” to the tune of Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire”. Should a new title be needed for this corporate filler text, I might suggest “We Didn’t Start the Email Thread”. DAVID PEDUTOAnnapolis, Maryland A photograph of a gentleman striding across Threadneedle Street wearing brown shoes with a dark suit accompanied your article on the recovery of London’s financial district (“Getting its mojo back”, May 2nd). In 1980, just transferred from the sartorially relaxed Rio de Janeiro to the City, I was similarly attired and on my second day I was called to the managing
director’s office. Rather sniffily he enquired whether I had trod in dog poo on the way in. Thankfully the City’s mojo no longer depends on its dress code. Peter BreeseLauzerte, France This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//letters/2026/06/04/are-most-celebrity-book-clubs- irritating
Why the World Cup produces an ugly version of the beautiful game FIFA could emulate other sports by tweaking rules to generate more excitement June 4th 2026 DURING THIS year’s World Cup, three outcomes are guaranteed. First, fans of one country will experience nirvana, while those in 47 others (up from 31 previously) will be heartbroken. Second, there will be moments of everlasting genius and infamy. There could be a goal as mesmerising as Diego Maradona’s solo dribble against England, a touch as sumptuous as Johan Cruyff’s turn against Sweden or a save as improbable as Gordon Banks’s against Pelé; a penalty miss as agonising as Roberto Baggio’s against Brazil, a handball as blatant as Luis Suárez’s against Ghana or a headbutt as shocking as Zinedine Zidane’s against Italy.
The third certainty is plenty of stodgy matches which few people remember fondly. That is because the World Cup—for all the fervour about sweepstakes, sticker albums and occasional screamers—typically produces an ugly version of the beautiful game. One way to measure this is in goals: in the past three editions, there have been only 2.6 per game in normal time, falling to just 2.3 in the quarter-finals, semi-finals and final. During that time, the rate in the English Premier League, the world’s richest domestic competition, has been 2.8. Notably, the moments of brilliance and ignominy mentioned above happened in otherwise cagey games. In only one did a team score multiple goals, and that was because Maradona punched one in with the “Hand of God”. This attritional nature shows up in other statistics. Compared with the preceding season of the Premier League, the last World Cup had 16% fewer shots per 90 minutes and 17% more fouls. One match featured 18 yellow cards and a red. This is partly because players are exhausted after an extended campaign. (The heatwaves expected in the upcoming matches will not help.) They also rarely train with international teammates, causing disjointed play. Tension is a factor, too, as eternal glory looms. Another reason for humdrum football is that, for middle- and lower-tier countries, it works. Since the World Cup expanded to 32 teams in 1998, six