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Despite Cristiano Ronaldo’s travails, Portugal heads into tonight’s World Cup knockout match against Croatia as a strong contender to win this year’s tournament. Victory in Toronto tonight would keep it on track for the latter stages — and reinforce a national brand that has consolidated the Atlantic country as a powerhouse far beyond the soccer field.
Portugal is home to just over 10 million people and has a modest economic footprint, but the small European nation has a remarkable track record when it comes to placing its candidates in top posts around the world.
Within the EU, Portugal stands out as having had more of its candidates occupy top institutional posts than any of the bloc’s other member countries. Since 1986, Portuguese citizens have served as president of the European Commission, the Court of Auditors, the Eurogroup, the Committee of the Regions — and former Prime Minister António Costa currently presides over the European Council. There has also been a Portuguese EU ombudsman, a vice president of the European Central Bank and nine vice presidents of the European Parliament.
Beyond the bloc, former Prime Minister António Guterres currently serves as United Nations secretary-general. And just last month the country scored a fresh diplomatic victory by beating out the larger, wealthier and more globally influential Germany to secure one of the vacant, nonpermanent seats on the U.N. Security Council.
According to former Portuguese Secretary of State for Internationalization Bernardo Ivo Cruz, Lisbon’s decision to go after top jobs on the global stage is an existential matter.
“After democracy was restored following the 1974 Carnation Revolution, we realized that our survival as a country depended on multilateralism: we’re too small to guarantee our strategic interests, and those of our citizens, on our own,” he said. “To do that, we needed to guarantee the world remained a place governed by the rule of law.”
The former diplomat said Portugal had worked hard to establish itself as a fair player that is capable of speaking with everyone on equal terms. “Being a small country is actually an advantage, because no one is afraid of us, and that makes us nonthreatening interlocutors,” he noted.
Thanks to its nearly 900-year history, Portugal has long-standing relationships with nearly every other nation. The bonds are especially strong with Portuguese-speaking former colonies like Brazil, Macau and Cape Verde, parts of the world with which Lisbon has worked to forge ties based on equal terms. And those good vibes among allies have been instrumental in having Portuguese candidates confirmed to posts where neutrality and a respect for the rules of diplomacy are paramount.
“The candidates that secure these top posts aren’t supposed to unfairly benefit their home countries,” Cruz noted. “But they benefit Portugal in a broad sense because they defend that multilateralism that benefits all countries, including our own.”
The matter, he added, was taken so seriously in Portugal that the country’s politicians had a habit of backing their candidates for international posts no matter what their politics might be.
“Our stance is that we never mix up internal drama with things happening beyond our borders,” he said. “You may hate someone in Lisbon, but the moment they’re up for an important post it becomes a matter of defending the interests of the state, and personal issues have no relevance there.”
Beyond political institutions like the U.N. or the European Council, Cruz said Portugal had a vested interest in the kind of soft diplomacy that plays out in sporting events like the World Cup.
“Evidently, if we end up winning this match, it only reinforces our country’s international prestige, and is a cause for celebration,” But, he added, “whatever happens, I think this edition of the World Cup is turning out to be a success for everyone.”
“Rather than hooliganism, what we’ve seen are the Scots marching through U.S. cities with their bagpipes and kilts, the Norwegians delighting American spectators with their rowing rituals,” he noted. “At a moment of such immense global tension, we all win by having this competition be defined by friendly celebration.”
Indeed, in much the same way that the small European nation is a force to be reckoned with when it comes to football, it also punches far above its weight in terms of broad international influence.
BELGRADE, Serbia — When Croatian supporters flooded Toronto and Philadelphia this summer, draping city halls in the red-and-white checkerboards found on the Croatian coat of arms and belting out one power ballad after another, the loudest songs, as always, belonged to Marko Perković.
“He’s become an inseparable phenomenon anytime Croatia plays or participates in any kind of competition, especially sporting events,” said Hrvoje Klasić, the leading Croatian historian focused on the legacy of World War II.
“People both at home and abroad view him as synonymous with love for one’s country,” he continued.
Better known as Thompson, after the submachine gun he carried in the Balkan wars of the 1990s, he is the country’s most popular singer — and its most enduring embarrassment.
Croatian fans have made his song, “Lijepa Li Si,” the unofficial anthem of the team and a fixture at every match, a song whose chorus salutes the wartime Croat statelet in Bosnia whose leadership was convicted of war crimes.
Thompson’s wider catalog is more explicit still. One track opens with “Za dom spremni,” the salute that functioned as Croatia’s answer to “Sieg Heil” during the World War II Ustashe regime.
In the past, his concerts have been banned or canceled in the Netherlands, Switzerland, Slovenia, Austria and Germany.
None of this is fringe within Croatia, however. Last summer Thompson drew more than 500,000 people to a single Zagreb concert, the largest in the country’s history, where fans chanted the same Ustashe slogan while the authorities looked away.
In 2018, when Croatia nearly won the World Cup, the second-placed team was welcomed back with Thompson aboard the victory bus and star midfielder Luka Modrić personally asking for him to perform.
Croatia has spent three decades declining to reckon with the Ustashe past, treating the fascist puppet state’s symbols as heritage rather than crime.
Across post-communist Europe, the end of the Cold War brought a wave of historical revisionism, as nations that felt their identity had been suppressed under communism recast neo-Nazi and far-right figures as patriots. Hungary, Ukraine and the Baltic states, as well as Croatia, have all made a version of this bargain, folding once-condemned nationalists into their modern national myths.
“These nations believe they were robbed of their national identities in the past century or are dissatisfied with their country’s present achievements, so they reach back into the past for themes from a more distinguished past,” Klasić concluded.
Every day, FBI intelligence officials, weather forecasters, diplomats, security coordinators and people from more than a dozen federal agencies gather on a conference line for what has become one of the most unusual meetings in Washington.
It’s dubbed the “WISLE call” — an acronym that stands for Warning/Weather, Intent, Safety/Security, Logistics/Communications and Event Operations. And it happens every morning around 10 a.m. Eastern during the FIFA World Cup, which is about to enter its fourth week.
From a secure operations floor inside FEMA’s Washington headquarters, officials spend about 30 minutes running through the day’s World Cup matches, touching on everything from extreme heat advisories and fan festivals to cartel activity in Mexico, drone threats, visa issues and stadium security.
On Tuesday, when Brazil played Japan in Houston and Germany faced Paraguay in Boston, the biggest concern on the call wasn’t terrorism. It was the weather.
“The main story over the next couple of days is going to be building heat across the central and eastern United States,” a National Weather Service official told the group. Philadelphia, Boston and New York were all under heat watches, while Houston officials reported temperatures nearing 95 degrees with a heat index above 100.
The daily briefing offers a rare window into the machinery and threat assessments that underpin the largest sporting event ever hosted in North America.
The command center resembles a national emergency operations center more than a sports headquarters. Ten Homeland Security agencies including TSA, Customs and Border Protection, and FEMA work side-by-side on a watch floor staffed around the clock. The State Operations Coordination Center for Event Response — yes another “SOCCER” acronym — is also involved.
About 50 people occupy the physical operations center during 12-hour shifts, from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. and again overnight, monitoring every match, fan festival and emerging threat across the United States. The center works closely with the International Police Cooperation Center in Leesburg, Virginia, where law enforcement officials from participating countries work alongside U.S. officials. Monday’s “WISLE” call began with intelligence — and, again, concerns about extreme weather.
An FBI official updated participants on the coming heat wave, noting the bureau was coordinating with federal, state and local partners ahead of the July 4th holiday while also tracking security implications as national teams exited the tournament and closed their training camps.
From there, officials moved city by city. In Boston, clear weather for the sellout crowd of nearly 66,000 for Germany-Paraguay. In Houston, preparations were underway for heat-related illnesses for the Brazil-Japan match.
The State Department’s representative dialed in from the Joint Coordination Center at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City with an update spanning three countries. Mexican police had dismantled a criminal group targeting tourists around World Cup venues, Vancouver’s fan festival had reached capacity during Canada’s match, and officials were monitoring large fan gatherings expected later that evening in both Mexico City and Monterrey.
Despite the long checklist of potential problems, nearly every operational report ended the same way: “All teams are green.”
Andrew Giuliani, executive director of the White House World Cup Task Force, used his remarks to thank FEMA and Homeland Security personnel while highlighting accomplishments across the federal government that extended well beyond soccer.
He praised U.S. Marshals for recovering 35 missing and endangered children during Operation Yellow Card in Boston, noted DEA fentanyl seizures in Kansas City and public health operations led by Health and Human Services and the CDC. He also announced that the mother of the Capo Verde goalkeeper had successfully received a visa to travel to the United States. “The behind-the-scenes work that goes into it,” Giuliani said, “is one of the reasons we’re able to talk now halfway through the World Cup about the incredible success.”
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin pointed to what he called the largest counter-drone operation ever assembled for a sporting event in the United States, saying officials had confiscated more than 500 drones while also using the tournament’s security posture to pursue human trafficking networks, fentanyl traffickers and counterfeit operations.
Because stadium security has remained stable, he said, law enforcement has been able to focus resources elsewhere.
“Because you guys are doing such a good job making sure that the games are going off without any major issues,” Mullin said, “we’re able to focus on other things.”
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