Tartan Army: The Europoors Conquer the American Empire
The World Cup shows us why Europe isn't just keeping up in the global development race — it's the region best positioned to win it.
The original (Spanish) version of this article can be found here.
I don’t know if you were paying attention, but these past few days, a European army has been storming the United States.
First came the Norwegians. A couple of Sundays ago, thousands of Vikings rowed in favor of their team in Times Square. Hours later, an army of Scots descended on Boston. Bagpipes in hand, kilts in the breeze, faces painted Braveheart-style for maximum intimidation, 50,000 Highlanders have marched through the streets of several cities to rally behind their national team, competing in a World Cup for the first time in 30 years.
Unarmed, the host country surrendered in their wake. The Wall Street Journal ran the headline “The Tartan Army Takes America,“ while the New York Times offered “No Scotland, No Party: Inside the Tartan Army’s Takeover of Boston“ and “The Best Party at the World Cup Storms Miami.“ Television networks and Twitter alike looped footage of that peculiar foreign invasion on repeat.
“In one week,” the BBC managed to put it, “the Tartan Army has drunk Boston dry and conquered its people’s hearts.” The word is “conquered”: the United States has surrendered to football — the quintessentially European sport — spellbound by its cultural exuberance.
It is striking that this infatuation should have arrived precisely now, at the worst moment in transatlantic relations — right when denigrating European culture has become something of a national sport among certain Washington elites, and when economic headwinds are loudest in accusing Europe of falling behind, of losing the race for progress.
A few weeks ago, I wrote a newsletter dismantling that idea — one that went viral, bringing hundreds of new subscribers to this community. I tried to explain that the belief in productivity as the key to prosperity rests on a confusion that doesn’t hold up, not even in the most basic economic doctrine.
But if producing isn’t the key to progress, then what is? What is the twenty-first-century economy actually about? What are we Europeans supposed to do to thrive, now that it seems we can no longer shelter under the wing of the empire?
In that newsletter, I left this claim hanging:
The future of the economy in the twenty-first century will revolve around the commercial exploitation of public, or abundant, goods. […]
The economic question of the century is not how to increase productivity, but how to create and sustain public goods so that industries can subsequently be built around them with a competitive advantage. Whoever is capable of creating ideas, ways of life, cultural models that the rest of the world desires and wants to adopt — but also software, medicines, technology, business models, and scientific advances — will have a competitive advantage, and the layer of services built around them will win the game.
Which is still somewhat vague and a little hard to grasp. What does it mean to “create and sustain public goods”?
Pretty girls don’t gatekeep. So today we’re going to use the football example to show exactly what I meant: how public (or abundant) goods are the key to the prosperity of nations in the twenty-first century. With any luck, we’ll be able to apply what we learn to our own lives and decisions.
Buckle up — here we go!
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Football is a great business — an immense industry, no question. But it wasn’t always.
Until 1961, footballers’ wages in England were capped by law at £20 a week. Professional football was an extension of the working-class culture of the industrial cities of northern England, and many clubs — Liverpool, Manchester United, Arsenal, West Ham — had been born out of trade unions. Players led entirely ordinary lives: they lived in the same neighborhoods as the fans, and on match days it was common to see them on the bus or tram alongside their supporters, heading to the stadium. Despite playing in one of the wealthiest countries in the world and being celebrities, many had a second job to make ends meet.
Fast forward to today: Premier League footballers now earn half a million pounds a week, and European football leagues generate around $30 billion a year in combined ticket sales and broadcasting rights — as much as the NFL and the NBA combined.
And the workers who used to ride the bus with those footballers? Industrial employment in the United Kingdom fell from 8.9 million workers in 1966 to 2.9 million in 2016. Since the mid-1960s, British industry has destroyed more than 6 million jobs. In that period, wages rose sharply for a time, but stalled in 2007 and have been stuck there for the past two decades. The country — and the industrial north in particular — finds itself in a profound existential crisis, trying to find its place in the world beyond Brexit.
Why is football doing well while industry in Europe is struggling? What does this sport have that has made it so successful while so many other industries were deflating? What does it have that we might copy to produce other sources of wealth? The answer to these questions holds the secret of the twenty-first-century economy.
The big football business
The football business starts with matches. But it doesn’t end there. To the figures we’ve seen, add the global merchandising market (over $15 billion in 2025), sponsorship revenue (over $30 billion), sports betting ($40 billion), video games (around $7 billion), and sports tourism, which draws tens of millions of travelers every year. So many that this World Cup is estimated to generate 13 million visitors to the host countries and over 21 million overnight stays, with an estimated economic impact of $41 billion on global GDP.
That landscape is completed by a grassroots economy that is rarely counted: youth academies, junior leagues, amateur clubs, training schools, local pitches, kit, physiotherapists, sports nutritionists, and a long tail of related goods and services.
If all of this were owned by a single company, it would be a mega-corporation: it would generate revenues comparable to one of the American tech giants, with a similar number of employees worldwide.
But it isn’t a company. It’s a cultural manifestation — a set of shared codes and practices, like gastronomy or folklore. It’s a collective fever made of packed stadiums, children dreaming of becoming footballers, and the thrill of a derby. And it is produced diffusely, through millions of everyday acts. They say it takes a village to raise a child; it takes a country — and an entire continent — to create a collective passion this fierce.
In economic terms, football culture is called a public good (though I’ve preferred to rename it an “abundant good”). Abundant goods, in my own definition, are those created and consumed in a distributed way, without their production or consumption depleting a resource for anyone else. Languages, mathematics, or football culture, for instance, are created and maintained in social life itself, without requiring factories to organize their production or markets to regulate their consumption. In the same way, anyone can consume Spanish grammar, the laws of geometry, or Maradona’s goal against England in 1986 without depriving anyone else of using them.
The consequence is that abundant goods cannot be traded. Nobody can buy or sell a passion for Real Madrid or the concept of a hat trick. How, then, can an immense industry exist around football?
What the companies working in this sector do — the clubs, Nike, Adidas, the bars serving fans on match day, the coaches running football schools — is to create scarce goods and services — such as stadium seats or national team shirts — from this abundant resource. Scarce goods are exhausted when consumed. Two people cannot consume them simultaneously: if one person consumes them, another cannot. That is why we can exchange them and why we are willing to pay for them.
This is what happens with stadium tickets, with merchandising, with the bars where people watch matches, with the coach teaching your child how to dive convincingly, and with the rental of the local pitch. All of these businesses have found a way to create scarce, exchangeable goods and services from a superior abundant good — they are guests, stowaways on a ship far larger than themselves, who have learned to fish.
The Productivity Illusion
What we still don’t fully understand is that this logic is not unique to football or culture: every industry — including the ones that employed those English workers who traveled with the footballers on the tram in 1961 — operates the same way.
Car manufacturers also exploit an abundant good — the mechanics of engines, metallurgy, the physics of combustion, aerodynamic design — to produce vehicles: scarce goods that can be bought and sold. Appliance manufacturers exploit another abundant good — the thermodynamics of refrigeration, the physics of microwaves, the mechanics of electric motors — to produce fridges, microwaves, and blenders.
AI is no different. The knowledge that makes it possible — model architectures, training algorithms, advances in computing — is an abundant good; it is a portion of shared knowledge published across hundreds of papers and computing conferences.
All human exchanges — the services of a lawyer, a physiotherapist, tomatoes, loaves of bread, mobile phones — are materializations in the form of scarce goods of a superior abundant good — law, physiotherapy, agricultural knowledge, bread recipes, mobile technology — without which none of these things could exist.
What Ford, Zanussi, IBM, and all the companies that became empires in the twentieth century did was take those abundant goods, package them, and put a price on them. OpenAI, Anthropic, and all the AI companies are trying — without much success — to do the same today.
Except they can’t. And this is what is key and different about our time.
The trick that, until the twenty-first century, allowed industries to transform abundant goods into scarce ones was a form of monopoly. During the 200 years between the Industrial Revolution and the year 2000, an unprecedented historical anomaly occurred: knowledge advanced so rapidly that there weren’t enough technicians to interpret it. Its most sophisticated forms — like those needed to manufacture cars or washing machines — constituted a moat other countries couldn’t jump. Like a monopoly, only a handful of companies could produce certain goods, and the rest of the world was a defenseless market for them.
That artificial scarcity produced the illusion of productivity. If at any point it seemed that a country’s productive capacity was the same as its wealth, it was because for a couple of centuries a few countries held a monopoly over the knowledge that allowed them to produce exclusively, and then trade in their goods.
(Well, that — and an error of Adam Smith’s that we’ll discuss soon in this newsletter, so subscribe if you don’t want to miss it!)
That monopoly — not productivity — is what made it possible for the industrial powers of the twentieth century to rise.
But in the twenty-first century, any country can make washing machines. And cars. Knowledge is universal; it has returned to its nature. Today — as I wrote in the piece on The revenge of the europoors— nobody can replicate that monopoly.
What happens when all industries try to exploit the same abundant good simultaneously? What happens when two empires, like the US and China, compete ferociously to make the same technology more powerful and more efficient? What happens when every country increases its productivity at the same time? When two countries throw themselves into frantic production — even subsidizing output, as is happening right now — what they achieve is cannibalization: they crash prices, impoverish their own workers, and condemn their economies (while benefiting consumers in third countries and creating the strange lived experience of these years, in which everything seems incredibly cheap, it has to be said).
This is exactly what is happening with AI right now. As we are seeing, LLM models are mushrooming at ever-increasing speed, all over the world. Consumers are unaware of the real cost of the technology because investors are subsidizing it for them, the major labs are threatening a price war, and they know customers will move to find the cheapest option. Drums of a sector bailout are already beginning to be heard.
Without a moat, without something that restricts these innovations to a handful of companies, countries find themselves simultaneously compelled to compete so as not to fall behind and condemned to pay an enormous price for staying in the top tier — one that amounts to destroying themselves through debt.
The Economy of Abundance
This is what I mean when I talk about the economy of abundance. Not a utopian world where manna falls from heaven, but the rules of a new game. The nature of twenty-first-century society — where knowledge is universal and shared to the last corner of the globe — will mean that every good born from now on will follow the same pattern. They will be shared, universal technologies that cannot be monopolized to create corporate giants, but that can generate economic activity in their surroundings.
That is why I believe the countries that succeed in the twenty-first century won’t be the ones determined to produce more of something everyone else can already make. On the contrary: those who win will be the ones who know how to create abundant goods over which they can hold a competitive advantage.
There are at least two paths to achieving this. One is to invest in knowledge density — to specialize in a technology to be more competitive than the rest by generating economies of scale. But there is a second type of abundant good that I believe has more power for countries’ development: goods that have a natural protection against competition because they cannot exist without the community that sustains them. They are a kind of proprietary abundant good — something like cultural brands. Football is exactly that.
The Scottish Army as a Source of Wealth
A liquid identical to whisky can be produced anywhere in the world — but it is only called whisky, and only costs thousands of euros, when it comes from a distillery lost in the Scottish Highlands. In the same way, many people can play football, but there is only one Scottish national team. That irreproducibility is the only competitive advantage the twenty-first century will not be able to dismantle.
The key to football has been to create an abundant good of immense appeal — one that is impossible to copy because it is defended by an entire community and centuries of history. To replicate it, another similar community would have to make the same collective decision — and collective decisions are not made, they sediment. If Americans wanted to start playing real football, millions of families would have to change their way of life: driving the kid to training on Saturdays, getting used to the rain, learning to suffer through a match where nobody scores for twenty minutes, passing down the passion for a club as a kind of inheritance.
Until very recently, the country that was doing exactly that was the United States. For decades, America didn’t sell technology or products — it sold a way of life. Hollywood exported the ambition of living in a house with a garden and a car in the garage. The NBA exported an aesthetic, an attitude, and a way of moving through the world. Coca-Cola, Levi’s, rock and roll, and Marlboro were not products — they were fragments of an American abundant good — the American dream — that the entire world wanted to consume. That is what made the United States the economic empire of the twentieth century. Not its productivity — Germany and Japan were just as productive — but its capacity to create proprietary abundant goods that the whole world desired and only America could sell.
Curiously, this is the same principle that has turned Bitcoin into an asset worth trillions of dollars, despite the fact that its code is completely public. Anyone can copy it, and many have: there is an entire galaxy of cryptocurrencies that are technically equivalent or superior in some respects. But none has managed to displace it — because what defends Bitcoin’s value is the trust network, the critical mass of users, the accumulated history of transactions, the symbolic weight of having been first. All of that is irreproducible. The technology can be copied in an afternoon; the community cannot.
The Revenge of the Europoors
Which region of the world is best positioned today to create this type of cultural good? Europe, with its thousands of years of history and identity, has every advantage. You only need to look at what is happening with the World Cup.
The fact that a football World Cup is generating this level of enthusiasm in the United States is extraordinary — something that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. Until recently, soccer — Americans don’t even call football by its real name — was viewed on that side of the Atlantic as an eccentricity. An esoteric sport, picturesque at best, in which players are inexplicably forbidden, for reasons nobody can quite explain, from touching the ball with their hands. Until quite recently, Americans looked at football the way continental Europeans look at cricket: with a mixture of bewilderment and indifference.
While the American empire was strong, it was impermeable to foreign cultural influence. But today the United States is a country in decline — one where Hollywood is in crisis, TV series are no longer blockbusters, science is under tremendous pressure from European and Chinese laboratories, and a Latino artist dominates the Super Bowl. A country that has stopped generating cultural hegemony, and where all the resources are trapped in the gravitational field of Silicon Valley.
The Scottish Army, by contrast — despite the fact that Scotland hadn’t played in a World Cup for 30 years, despite being a peripheral European country not without its own political problems, one that has also faced significant economic difficulties in recent years, with an inhospitable climate and very difficult geography — is still a place where people believe in something. Specifically, as one commentator put it this week: “in never losing hope, never expecting victory, and never taking themselves too seriously.”
What the Scots have done these past weeks in Boston is project a way of life capable of seducing and capturing the attention of an interconnected world constantly battered by an avalanche of information.
This is where wealth comes from in the age of abundance.