Due to its truly global footprint, the FIFA World Cup has always been a celebration of diversity, both on and off the pitch.
It brings together different cultures, different playing styles and different levels of skill, professionalism and financial muscle.
However, with the tournament now over a week old, it is clear that they are playing 'football' on an uneven playing field.
As Statista's Felix Richter reports, while nations like France, Spain and England have assembled squads full of international superstars, other participants will field teams that are largely unknown to fans outside of the respective country.
According to estimates from Transfermarkt.com, there is a huge gulf in squad value between the nations traditionally challenging for the title and those happy to be part of the show.
You will find more infographics at Statista
France’s star-studded squad is worth more than 70 times as the teams assembled by Qatar, Jordan and Iraq, the least valuable squads in the tournament.
This is a reflection of the balance of power in global football, which is concentrated in Europe’s top leagues.... and correlates very well with likelihood of success.
It is partly for this reason that surprises have become increasingly rare in the world’s biggest football competition, where it’s hard to imagine a fairy tale run of a smaller nation to the tournament’s final stages.
Tyler Durden Sat, 06/20/2026 - 07:35Authored by J.B. Shurk via American Thinker,
British tyranny is globalism, and globalism must be destroyed.
British tyranny is so repulsive that the British people owe it to themselves to overthrow their government masters. It has been two-hundred-fifty years since America’s Declaration of Independence recognized the Crown system as a threat to Americans’ lives and liberties. English-speaking peoples still suffering under the British yoke should follow suit.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced a near-total ban on social media for children under sixteen years old. Ten of the most popular social media platforms are now age-restricted, with the toxic-leftist Bluesky platform a notable exception. The government claims to be “protecting children” from online harm. That’s a lie. If the British government cared about protecting British children, government ministers and police forces would not have covered up Islamic rape gangs targeting children for three-plus decades. The British government would not censor online reporting of foreigners murdering young Brits. The British government has systematically chosen to sacrifice the United Kingdom’s children.
This online “safety” measure must be understood, then, as a ruse meant to expand the government’s control over online information. Australia, New Zealand, and Canada have similar surveillance systems in place — all ostensibly erected to “protect the children” but designed, in reality, to control the speech of citizens. In these countries, the only way to communicate with other citizens on social media platforms is to prove your age by proving your identity. Mandatory digital identification systems are disguised as child welfare checks. The Brits and their Commonwealth vassals have built a surveillance system to monitor citizens’ thoughts, censor unapproved speech, and promote official propaganda.
Tyrant Starmer is pushing this online surveillance infrastructure while citizens in the U.K. are protesting and rioting against the British government’s murderous mass immigration policies — which have invited foreign rapists and killers to overrun the kingdom and slaughter citizens.
Third-world barbarism is exploding across Europe. Official Eurostat numbers show that sexual violence offenses in the European Union have doubled over the last decade. Rapes skyrocketed 150%. Knife crimes and murders are off the charts. Foreign nationals who have immigrated into Europe are responsible for roughly fifty percent of violent crime.
Just as the unelected European Commission ruling the continent continues to cover up immigrant crimes and censor citizens’ online discussion of these ongoing threats, the British government is more concerned about punishing native Brits for noticing that they are under attack than repelling violent invaders from Britain’s shores. (If Keir Starmer had been in Winston Churchill’s shoes during the Nazi Blitz, the British government would have surely helped the Germans cover up the bombings while blaming all the destruction on British citizens!)
Starmer’s government spies run a propaganda outfit that controls all public “narratives” regarding immigrant crime against native Brits. The group of spies write and release misleading statements, presented as coming from the families of victims, that are designed to downplay rapes, murders, and other violent incidents. While these spies use propaganda and censorship to cover up serious crimes committed by immigrants, they simultaneously engage in information warfare against British citizens by branding legitimate public concerns over safety as “disinformation,” “far-right racism,” “violence,” and “hate speech.” This spy group in charge of monitoring and shaping the public’s thoughts has flagged “reading Shakespeare, Chaucer or Milton, or books documenting grooming gang scandals as potential indicators of far-Right susceptibility.” The British spies — a veritable Gestapo fabricating public “truth” — plant media stories, steer online discussions, and deploy operatives to disrupt or direct public protests.
The British government claims the power to block “false information” that is “legal but harmful.” On its website, the British government defines “extreme right-wing terrorist ideology” to include the belief that “‘Western culture’ is under threat from mass migration and a lack of integration by certain ethnic and cultural groups.” British Technology Secretary Liz Kendall claims that it is “illegal” to promote “disorder” on social media. Meanwhile, Starmer’s government tyrants are instructing journalists how to report immigrant attacks on British citizens. These are the actions of dictators who do not care about “protecting the children.”
Surveying the daily violent crime by immigrants and the British government’s ongoing cover-ups, former Prime Minister Liz Truss says there is a government campaign to “undermine the family” and the “nation state.” She says that forced diversity has corrupted the institutions and that government ministers suppress information and attack citizens while protecting barbarians. She concludes that mass migration and government control over information are being used as weapons to destroy Western civilization.
For years, we Americans have watched the evils of globalism expand both at home and abroad in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and most of continental Europe. Branded by its international supporters as some kind of final, utopian stage of human governance, globalism is just another Frankensteinian beast — created from all the worst parts of Marxist-communism, Leninism, Maoism, fascism, Nazism, authoritarianism, oligarchy, corporatism, elitism, and central bank hegemony. Globalism is totalitarianism. Its god is government, although it has created special liturgical rituals regarding an imaginary “climate change” apocalypse meant to scare the world’s peasants into accepting the supremacy of government authority and bureaucrats’ (globalism’s “priests”) centralized power over all economic transactions.
Globalist governments seek total control over the people, and every policy that globalist governments shove down our throats is meant to advance this goal of total control. COVID was not a health emergency. It was a government excuse to roll out digital identifications, mandatory pharmaceutical injections, “vaccine” passports capable of monitoring real-time citizen movements, and online censorship. It was a government program meant to condition citizens to accept that government bureaucrats should be empowered with limitless authorities — including the discretion to regulate church services, close and bankrupt businesses, lockdown citizens in their homes, separate family members from dying loved ones, and quarantine citizens for non-compliance. The “global warming/cooling/climate change/extreme weather” hobgoblin is a government-designed scare tactic identical to the COVID “emergency.” The only difference is that the “global warming” fearmongers have been telling us that we have twelve years left to live for the last century, while the COVID fearmongers told us that we had twelve days to live unless we complied. Manufacturing compliance was and remains globalist governments’ only strategic objective.
Globalism’s ruling elites lust for wealth, power, and total control over the public. Their lust will never be sated. They wish for a small collection of government and economic masters to subjugate as much of the planet’s population as possible as serfs. Globalism is a conquering empire. Its oligarchy of central bank popes, chosen political governors, corporate monarchs, and techno-fascist-brownshirt-bureaucrats are modern-day slavers and colonizers. Instead of putting us in chains and whipping us when we “misbehave,” they put us in a lifetime of debt and prosecute us for expressing opinions contrary to official government orthodoxy.
Do you believe that marriage is an institution recognizing the sacred union between one man and one woman? Do you believe that men and women are biologically different? Do you believe that mass immigration is a threat to national security? Do you believe “multiculturalism” and forced “diversity” destroy excellence, discount merit, and weaken the naturally salubrious bonds of common cultural heritage? Do you believe that every human has a God-given right to self-defense? Do you believe that Christians should remain faithful to their beliefs in both their public and private lives? If so, globalist governments see you as an “extremist,” “right-winger,” “religious fanatic,” “terrorist,” and “enemy of the State.” Your thoughts will be condemned. Your speech will be censored. You will be fined and prosecuted. You will go to prison for your beliefs.
The best way for Americans to fight encroaching globalism over here is to support British patriots in their fight against globalism over there. As Benjamin Franklin persuasively argued, “We must all hang together, or we shall all hang separately.”
Tyler Durden Sat, 06/20/2026 - 07:00