One reason I love the Wikipedia article for “high five” is that it’s one of those entries about an utterly basic aspect of everyday life that reads like it was written by a group of aliens observing human beings: “Its meaning varies with the context of use but can include as a greeting, congratulations, or celebration.”

But the high-five Wikipedia page is among my very favorites not because of its writing, but because of its iconic photos — specifically the ones in the section on the “too slow” variation:

I love the aughts fashion, the use of the word “victim,” and the fact that “finger-guns” gets a hyperlink in the last caption. The woman in the photo gives an Oscar-worthy performance in the final image — she looks like she’s on the verge of tears — and her male counterpart couldn’t look more smug. The pictures are endearing and capture a kind of humanity you don’t find in your average stock photo.

The sequence was uploaded on August 14, 2008 by Bgubitz, a user who describes themself as an accountant who likes “sunsets and long walks on the beach.” Today, photos from the “too slow” series are featured on Wikipedia pages in eight languages and get more than 200,000 annual views.

A quick search of “high five wikipedia photo” shows that the images are an object of fascination for many others besides me. People around the world have noted that the pair looks a lot like Rachel and Chandler from Friends. But not everyone is a fan. In 2020, one particularly passionate Wikipedia user named Kugihot suggested the photos be removed because they were “simply a waste of precious Wikipedia public bytes.”

Writing on the article’s talk page, the forum where editors discuss the article at hand, the critic went on: “My main concern that is especially out of place to me is the final image which depicts the use of finger guns, which is arguably completely and utterly irrelevant in the context of different variations of high fives.”

To me, the fact that the photos inspired such extreme pedantry speaks to their power. Kugihot’s ridiculous suggestion was denied by other editors. Long live the high-five photos, finger guns and all!

I became increasingly convinced that there was nothing platonic about this high five.

Thanks to an overabundance of time alone with my laptop and a growing pile of responsibilities that I wanted to push off, I found myself fixated on these photos recently. I became increasingly convinced that there was nothing platonic about this high five — I mean, you can feel the chemistry through the screen. Just look at her smile in the first frame! Look at their gazes in the third frame! There’s no way two people so young and so beautiful could exchange such a flirty high five without feeling flutters of the heart.

I couldn’t help but wonder what their story was — and what had happened to them.

So I launched an investigation. I figured that the high-fivers must have some sort of internet presence, so I started combing the web for mentions of the photos. I saw that they’d graced the front page of Reddit several times, and one such post had a compelling comment:

“Fun fact: me and my wife (then girlfriend) are demonstrating the ‘too slow’ high five on the Wikipedia high five page.”

My eyes widened and my heart raced. Searching through the activity of that commenter’s account, I quickly gathered that the high-five guy loved indie-folk music, bourbon, and crossword puzzles. He had little kids, a soft spot for Yosemite National Park, and a Disneyland pass, which made me think he was from California. He seemed refreshingly wholesome (he provided calculus help to anonymous internet strangers on r/math) and sweet (he gave genuine advice to lovelorn posts posters in r/relationships).

He didn’t post often — only about once a month or so — and at first I was having difficulty finding anything that could confirm that he was indeed the finger-gunning high-fiver. But soon enough, I scrolled to a comment that confirmed my suspicion.

In a discussion of the photos in an r/askreddit post, he left a response deep in the comments: “For the 3-4 people who might see this, here is a picture of me and her on our wedding day.”

Photo evidence! “Victim misses” had become “victim Mrs.”!

Detective work

By this point, I’d read the guy high-fiver’s decade-old musings about philosophy and his recaps of Disneyland trips, which made me feel like I knew him on a personal level. But I still didn’t have any way to identify him.

Not surprisingly, searching Google for middle-aged men in California who like national parks and Sufjan Stevens didn’t yield anything of worth. I tried messaging him but didn’t get a response.

Then, on a recent snowy Sunday afternoon, I poured myself another cup of coffee and hunkered down at my laptop in pursuit of my white whale.

I went back to the Wikipedia profile of the “long walks on the beach”–loving account. It had only made 76 edits, which isn’t many, and hadn’t been active in a decade. On the user’s talk page, some Wikipedians had written to say how much they liked the high-five picture. “Awesome idea for the photos,” wrote one user in July 2009. “Doesn’t hurt that your girl’s a cutie too.”

Did they meet the night of the high five? Were they already together? Was it the finger guns that sparked their love story?

Was bgubitz the same person as high-five guy? I put on my thinking cap. The three pieces of information that bgubitz had revealed (accountant, likes sunsets, likes long walks on the beach) seemed to match the sweet, math-loving person on Reddit, but then again, two of those three descriptors are among the most generic traits ever. (Find me someone who doesn’t enjoy sunsets!)

Searching “bgubitz accountant” yielded an accountant named Ben Gubitz, who unfortunately looked nothing like the guy in the high-five photo. But Ben Gubitz’s Facebook friends were public, so I perused them until — voila! I finally found the high-fivers: Tim and Tamara O’Nan from Southern California. Nearly 14 years later, they’d barely aged, and now they had two kids in elementary school.

Yet I did not feel entirely satisfied. I wanted to know the whole story. Did they meet the night of the high five? Were they already together? Was it the finger guns that sparked their love story?

Pretty soon, the three of us were together on a Zoom call.

Birthday celebration

“It was my birthday, and we had just come back from a birthday dinner with some friends,” Tim explains on our video chat. “You can see some unwrapped birthday gifts in the background, and I’m pretty sure the shirt I was wearing was a gift from Ben, who was the friend that convinced us to pose for photos for Wikipedia.”

They tell me that he and Tamara are not big high-fivers, and they have no personal connection to the “down low/too slow” maneuver. The participants just realized that move didn’t have any photos on Wikipedia and saw it as an opportunity.

Tim and Tamara tell me that they met three years before the photo was taken. Tamara, who was in college, went to a restaurant in Newport Beach, Calif. where Tim, who was 30 at the time, was performing guitar and singing. Tamara thought he was hot. Tim thought the same about Tamara. Pretty soon, they were a couple.

But by the time the high-five photo shoot happened, Tim was about to move to Scotland to start a Ph.D. program in theology at the University of Aberdeen. Tamara was in a transitional period too: She had graduated from UCLA and was preparing for a physician’s assistant grad program. Because of their uncertain futures and the prospect of going long-distance, it didn’t make sense to stay together.

“Whenever the photos go viral, we get texts from friends and acquaintances. It’s our five minutes of fame.”

Or so they thought. “I got eight months in the divinity program and realized I didn’t want to do it anymore. I felt aimless,” Tim says. “I had to get out of the ivory tower and figure out the basics of my life.”

Tamara has a different take: “The romantic version of the story is that he saw on social media that I had gone on a date with someone else and decided to fly home and marry me.”

Tim proposed soon after his return from Scotland, and they’ve been married for almost 11 years now. “We have two daughters who are four and seven,” says Tamara, “and we actually live right down the street from where those photos were taken.” Tim runs a math-tutoring business, and Tamara is a physician’s assistant.

I ask if they’ve ever been recognized by strangers in public, and they laugh and say no. But people they know have seen the photos circulating on meme accounts or Reddit. “Whenever the photos go viral,” Tim says, “we get texts from friends and acquaintances. It’s our five minutes of fame.”

I suggest that they recreate the photos, and they enthusiastically agree. Nearly 14 years after the original shots, they staged a reenactment in their house, finger-guns included:

Even better, they sent along these heartwarming family shots:

“I’m so grateful that the moment in my life the internet has clung on to for eternity happens to be with my one true love… phew,” Tamara writes to me after the family shoot. “Be careful what you put out there.”

Tim adds that the young man in the original photos would never have believed it if he got a glimpse at these 2022 pictures. “It was just so unlikely at the time,” he writes. “I was just about to travel halfway around the world for school, so our future together was uncertain. But in the end, it all worked out so perfectly.

“Thirteen years later, I’m married to the love of my life with two amazing daughters, and I’m happier than I’ve ever been. It’s more than I could have ever imagined. High five!”

UPDATED, with response of Google
Tonight I typed just one sentence into Google Earth and put refugees near the Mexican border. Then I planted a nuclear plant in Iran. Then I put a fatal crash on a street in Amsterdam. Google’s own satellite imagery underneath all three. What on earth is Google doing?

Google spent twenty years building the reference the world checks against.

Today it added a button that makes things up. Google Earth on the web now has image generation built in, powered by Nano Banana 2. It went live today, worldwide, for everyone, with no waitlist and no application.

You open Google Earth. You zoom to any coordinates on the planet. You click create image. You type what you want to see. The model takes Google’s satellite, aerial and 3D imagery of that exact spot as its starting point and gives you back a photorealistic picture. If it isn’t quite right you refine it.

Google’s own description of the “fun feature” is that Nano Banana “creates concepts grounded in the real world.”

Grounded in the real world means the invented thing is welded to genuine coordinates, drawn on genuine imagery, often in the same colours and the same light and at the same angle as the picture beside it.

The forgery does not have to look convincing on its own. It inherits the credibility of the map it was born on.

The announcement of 487 words, written by Bryan Horowitz, Product Manager, Google Earth from just a few hours ago baffled me. His instruction to the planet is six words long:

type whatever you want to see

That is the gate. That is the whole gate.

Elsewhere in the same post he suggests it’s fun to let your imagination run wild.

The post opens by asking whether you have ever looked at an empty lot in your neighbourhood and imagined a community garden. It closes by telling you to pick a spot on the map and start bringing your ideas to life.

It is live in every country tonight. Free. No application.

Somebody is going to bring an idea to life before morning. It will not be a community garden, trust me.

This new feature will guaranteed lead to governments, factions fighting infowars, trolls etc.

A government official wants a strike to look bigger than it was. A faction wants a hospital to look flattened, or intact, depending which one is holding it this week. A troll wants forty thousand reposts before lunch.

This morning all three needed a screenshot, a second browser tab and a little patience. Tonight they need a sentence.

Google responded to this article and said:

We take misinformation seriously - every image created with Nano Banana in Google Earth includes the SynthID digital watermark, so if someone is unsure about an image, they can ask the Gemini app or use Lens in Search to see if the image was Al-generated. In addition, we prevent image creation on harmful topics and are continually updating our protections.

One clause in there is checkable tonight, so I checked it. Google prevents image creation on harmful topics. Refugees at a border. A nuclear plant in Iran. A fatal crash on an Amsterdam street. A hospital with a bomb crater in Gaza.

Nothing was refused. No warning, no softened output, no suggestion to try a different prompt.

Now look at the rest of the answer. The watermark is Google’s. The app that reads the watermark is Google’s. The search that reads it is Google’s. Every road out of the problem runs back through the company that built it.

I understand that Google has Google products to run Google checks. Planet Earth is bigger than Google.

I put one of tonight’s clips on X and asked nobody to check it. Hive, one of the biggest names in AI detection outside Google, scanned the post on its own and published a verdict underneath.

The video came out of Google’s model minutes earlier. The audio track is silence — I measured it. Minus 91 decibels, first frame to last.

The only thing Hive found suspicious was music that does not exist.

Hive has a defence and it is a fair one, so let me make it before they do. What I posted was a screen recording, and a recording of a screen is a real recording.

That defence is the problem, not the excuse.

Fakes do not travel as clean files with their credentials intact. They travel as screen recordings, re-encodes, screenshots of screenshots, filmed off somebody’s phone in a hurry. The one case where the detector has an excuse is the only case that ever happens.

Google’s answer works if the image reaches you through Google, unaltered, and you already suspected it.

That is not how any of this arrives.

There is another problem that Google doesn’t count. The official who now gets to look at a genuine photograph of a genuine atrocity and say: AI.

He doesn’t need the tool for that. He needs everyone to know the tool exists.

If you have never verified anything in your life, here is why a less playfull mapping app matters.

When a photograph turns up online claiming to show a bombed hospital, a refugee camp or a burning refinery, somebody has to decide whether it’s true before a newspaper prints it. What they have is a reference — a picture of that same place, taken from above or from the street, that everybody agrees is real.

They put the claim next to the reference and they look at the gap.

Google built that reference and it is not a small thing. Street View passed 10 million miles of road in 2019. It now holds more than 280 billion images across over 110 countries. Google Earth turned twenty this year. Between them they are a photographic record of the physical world, and — this is the part that matters — every frame of it is dated.

Dated is the whole trick. If you know when the picture was taken, you can prove when something appeared.

In July 2014 the Russian Ministry of Defence held a press conference and produced satellite images about the downing of MH17. Bellingcat compared them against the dated archive in Google Earth and found the landscape didn’t match the dates claimed. The MoD images were fabricated.

Bellingcat published the walkthrough under the headline Who to Trust, Google or the Russian MoD?

In 2015, that was a rhetorical question. Not anymore.

There is a village in North Brabant, ninety minutes from my desk, called Volkel. It has an air base. That air base stores American B61 nuclear bombs, a fact the Dutch government has never confirmed, which became public through a leaked diplomatic cable and was later described by a former Dutch prime minister as absolutely pointless.

On Google’s maps, Volkel spent years as a rash of coloured pixels. So did the ammunition depot at Staphorst. So did a Patriot missile site in Limburg, and several royal palaces, because the Dutch approach to hiding a military installation was to paint a large abstract artwork on top of it. The photographer Mishka Henner collected them into a gallery and sold them as art, which tells you how well the hiding worked.

Tonight it is all in the open, and anyone who wants a missile site in Limburg can simply add one.

Now notice what that entire twenty-year argument assumed.

You only censor a map that works. Every blur, every polygon, every diplomatic request was an admission that Google Earth was accurate enough to be dangerous. Governments were not worried the map would lie. They were worried it would tell the truth.

Google’s position never wavered. It does not blur satellite imagery by choice. Sites come pre-obscured because a government or a supplier requires it as a condition of flying over.

So to take one real building out of Google Earth, you need a state.

To put a nuclear plant into Iran, I needed a sentence.

The asymmetry is not meant to be funny. For twenty years the danger was a map that revealed something true, and there was a procedure for that — a law, a ministry, a condition on the overflight permit. Tonight the danger is a map that shows something which was never there, and for that there is no procedure at all.

Somebody already did the hard version of what I did tonight.

In February 2025 a Google Earth satellite pass photographed a parking lot at the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet headquarters in Manama, Bahrain. Ordinary cars, ordinary rows.

A year later those cars were on X, in a photograph of the same base supposedly flattened by an Iranian drone strike.

Same cars. Same rows. Same spaces, vehicle for vehicle.

Somebody generated a war zone and forgot to move the Toyotas.

The Tehran Times posted it as a before-and-after of a US radar site in Qatar. It was not Qatar. It was Bahrain. The “before” was a genuine Google Earth capture from 10 February 2025. The “after” was made with Google AI — AFP and BBC Verify both ran it through Google’s signature detector and got a hit. It passed 950,000 views before anyone counted the parking spaces.

Building it took six steps. Screenshot Earth. Open Gemini. Upload. Prompt. Download. Crop. Six chances to get bored, and one forger who got bored at the parking lot.

Tonight, Manama can be changed in seconds with Nano Banana.

Upload a suspicious satellite image to Gemini, ad @verifyai and it will tell you if Google is behind the forgery.

Adjudicate off Google entirely. Sentinel-2 is free and refreshes every five or six days. Landsat, Planet, Airbus, Vantor. You want a sensor with an orbit, a collection time and a resolution you can check.

Take two collects. Todd Myers at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency said it before any of this existed: for every collect, you need a duplicate collect from different sources.

Check the orbit. If an image claims a specific satellite at a specific hour, the published orbital elements will tell you whether anything was up there. The most boring check in the toolkit, and the only one no model can fake, because it isn’t about the pixels.

Disclosure

I build ImageWhisperer. Google technology is part of it, not the whole of it. No single score is ever the finding.

Sources

• Google, Transform any place with Nano Banana in Google Earth, Bryan Horowitz, 30 July 2026

• Google Maps Platform, Street View Insights is now Generally Available — 280 billion images, 110+ countries, March 2026

• TechRadar, Google says its Street View imagery now covers 10 million miles

• Bellingcat, Who to Trust, Google or the Russian MoD? A Guide to Verifying Google Earth Satellite Image Dates

• Bellingcat, MH17 — The Open Source Evidence

• CNN, Google Maps: When censorship is beautiful — Mishka Henner, Dutch Landscapes

• Live Science, 15 Secretive Places You Can Now See on Google Earth — Volkel Air Base

• Google, We’re creating a new satellite imagery map to help protect Brazil’s forests

• Forbes, Google Earth Users Get Powerful New AI Image Upgrade Today, 30 July 2026

• Engadget, Nano Banana image generation comes to Google Earth, 30 July 2026

• Dan Clark, How AI fakes are turning satellite images into war misinformation, Financial Times, 4 March 2026

• AFP / CEDMO, Fake AI satellite imagery spurs US-Iran war disinformation

• DW fact check, Fake satellite images distort Middle East conflict from above

• European Commission, Transparency obligations under Article 50 of the AI Act

• TechRadar, You can now ask the Gemini app if an image was made by AI

• History & Archaeology Online, Did the Earthquake of 62AD lead to Pompeii’s Decline or Renewal?

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Even the most capable autocrats cannot rule alone.

In Russia, Vladimir V. Putin needs his circle of handpicked oligarchs; in Iran, the Revolutionary Guards and its allies in the business world protect the regime’s power; Viktor Orban transformed Hungary into an “elected autocracy” with the help of a few crucial judges, political enforcers and friendly tycoons. But to actually carry out the dirty work of consolidating and maintaining power, such leaders rely on help from a far greater number of lower- and midlevel people: military officers, secret police and bureaucrats.

Yet until recently, researchers paid little attention to how leaders convince and recruit ground-level workers to go along with their demands. The incentives for elites to stay loyal have been studied extensively, but the rank and file have remained something of a black box. In the absence of real data, researchers have tended to assume that they cooperate because of ideological extremism, fear of persecution or some combination of the two.

New research, drawing on an extraordinary data set from Argentina’s Dirty War in the 1970s and ’80s, suggests a very different explanation. It turns out that the kinds of career pressures familiar to employees everywhere — the desire to revive a stalled career or obtain a minor promotion — can be enough to incentivize lower- and midlevel officials to violate professional obligations, fundamental norms and even basic morality. The people who make those decisions, the research suggests, are neither extremists nor victims. They are often just middling workers looking for a way to get ahead.

“Making a Career in Dictatorship,” a new book by two German political scientists, Adam Scharpf and Christian Glassel, reads like what you might get if you crossed Hannah Arendt’s ideas about the “banality of evil” with a business school guide on how to get the most out of low performers.

Their in-depth study of Argentina’s military during that country’s era of coups and forced disappearances found that low performers — whom they refer to as “career-pressured” individuals — filled the ranks of the secret police. That service allowed them to “detour” around the ordinary military hierarchy, the book shows, achieving promotions and career success they could never have managed otherwise.

It turns out that would-be authoritarians don’t need to staff their regimes with ideological true believers, offer extreme enticements or impose draconian punishments in order to make successful power grabs. They just need to figure out how to target their ideal labor pool: the frustrated and mediocre.

Their conclusions have implications for countries around the world grappling with the stability of their democracies — including the United States.

A Data Set of Mediocrity

When he was a young Ph.D. student, Mr. Scharpf was conducting dissertation research in Buenos Aires when a government official dropped a fateful offhand comment during a conversation in a cafe. During the military dictatorship, the official said, the intelligence officers who did the regime’s worst dirty work were “essentially idiots.”

At first, Mr. Scharpf thought the man was just being insulting. He soon realized that the official meant the comment literally — that the military junta’s secret police had been, in his view, incompetent losers.

When he returned to his university in Germany, he mentioned the discussion to his colleague, Mr. Glassel. Both men saw a glimmer of social-science possibility. They decided to learn more. Argentina, it turned out, had published information on all of its military officers’ graduation ranks, promotions and retirements going back to the late 1800s, which meant that it was possible to identify and track the low performers. And because secret police work during the Dirty War was conducted primarily by army intelligence Battalion 601, the researchers could trace exactly which officers joined the unit, how long they stayed and what happened to their careers.

The data showed that the official’s offhand comment had been right. For the most part, the Argentine military operated under a meritocratic “up or out” system. Officers who underperformed early would fall behind their peers, and eventually be forced into retirement. But Battalion 601 offered a detour around that meritocracy: Low performers could transfer into the secret police, spend a few years earning promotions there and then return to the regular army, often leapfrogging over peers who had stayed with the regular forces. Men who took the detour ended up with longer careers, higher salaries and better pensions than similar individuals who stayed in the mainstream military units.

The worse an officer’s academic record had been at the military academy, the more likely he was to join Battalion 601. And once inside, the lowest performers were assigned to the most brutal units, carrying out the day-to-day tasks of torture and murder, work that was so morally repugnant that it carried a serious risk of both social stigma and psychological trauma. But that meant that the career rewards for doing it were the most valuable. A stint as a monster could rehabilitate the most disastrous underperformer.

How Regimes Rely on ‘Loyal Losers’

Ordinarily, of course, it is very difficult to get complete information on who a regime’s “dirty workers” are or what motivated them to take those jobs. So there aren’t really comprehensive data sets to compare with Mr. Glassel and Mr. Scharpf’s research on Argentina.

However, available information suggests that other countries may have followed a similar pattern. For example, Mr. Glassel and Mr. Scharpf found that superiors in the Nazi bureaucracy skillfully exploited career pressures to recruit commanders for the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing squads that carried out the “Holocaust by bullets” in Eastern Europe. Many of the recruits had backgrounds that placed them at a disadvantage, such as records blemished by disciplinary proceedings, unclear “racial purity” or lack of military and policing experience. Zealous service in the killing squads helped them improve their careers.

In the Soviet Union, the NKVD, the secret police who killed hundreds of thousands of people during the so-called Great Terror of 1937, “deliberately recruited individuals with poor formal skills and knowledge,” Mr. Glassel and Mr. Scharpf write, often with no more than a primary school education. Senior commanders nurtured their subordinates’ fear of failure by instigating competition between different offices to see who could arrest more people.

In the modern era, autocratic leaders often win power via elections, and then dismantle checks and balances to concentrate power in their own hands. That process tends to be far less violent than the acts carried out by the Argentine military junta or Stalin’s NKVD, but over time it sharply curtails political competition and freedom of expression.

Although each country has its own idiosyncrasies, that process tends to follow a pattern, said Erica Frantz, a political scientist at Michigan State University who studies democratic backsliding. Initially, elected would-be autocrats often appoint “loyal losers” to important positions to rubber-stamp their power grabs, Ms. Frantz said. “The leader knows that people are going to be more likely to be loyal if they don’t have many other career options, so when I say losers, I kind of mean it literally,” she said.

Take Hungary under Mr. Orban. He was first elected in 2010. By 2022, the European Parliament passed a resolution stating that Hungary had ceased to be a democracy and had become an “electoral autocracy.”

To make that happen he relied on a few handpicked loyalists at the top, plus a small percentage of ambitious strivers at the midlevel who saw politics as the route to success, experts say. “There were certain offices that did the dirty work,” said Kim Lane Scheppele, a Princeton University professor who has studied Hungary’s democratic breakdown. She pointed to the National Judicial Office, which selected judges and controlled their promotions, as particularly crucial. It was led by an Orban loyalist.

At the lower levels of the court system, a small percentage of ambitious individuals carried out the government’s agenda. “Five or 10 percent of the judges, the careerists, just do the ‘dirty job’ to get along with their career,” said Attila Vincze, a judicial studies researcher at Masaryk University in the Czech Republic who has studied how Mr. Orban co-opted courts.

Venezuela began a similar trajectory after Hugo Chávez was elected in 1999, but ultimately he and his successor, Nicolás Maduro, used more violent means to preserve their power. To crush protests and other public opposition, the government relied on the National Guard, a branch of the military tasked with preserving internal security, and armed gangs of civilians known as “colectivos.”

The National Guard is considered “the lowest rung of the armed forces” in terms of prestige, said Alejandro Velasco, a Latin America historian at New York University. “If you couldn’t get a job and you couldn’t get in the army, you would join the National Guard.” The colectivos grew out of informal neighborhood watch groups, but as their ties to the government grew, many members were given jobs in the security details of government ministries.

Eventually, such leaders become too unpopular for mere manipulation to keep them in power, and they lose elections. Which leaves them with a choice: leave office, as Mr. Orban did this month after losing an April election, or turn to more violent repression to hang on to power.

Leaders who take the latter path, as Mr. Maduro did in Venezuela in 2024 after his efforts to tilt the presidential election in his favor failed, need to have loyal units of the security forces available to do the dirty work of a violent crackdown. Mr. Maduro relied heavily on the National Guard and the colectivos. According to Human Rights Watch, government forces killed dozens of opposition supporters and detained thousands more after the stolen election.

The American Case

For Americans, this is not just an academic question. Many experts worry that democratic decay appears to be progressing especially quickly during President Trump’s second term.

Ms. Frantz sees parallels between Mr. Trump’s presidency and some of the elected authoritarian leaders she has studied elsewhere. Although Mr. Trump did not create the Republican Party, he has reshaped it over the last decade into an institution centered around himself. And a number of his cabinet members and political appointees, particularly in his second term, appear to fit the paradigm of loyalists whose résumés would be unlikely to land them roles in any other administration.

So the Trump administration’s apparent attempts to secure political control over the armed services, as well as the F.B.I. and ICE, stand out as worrying even when compared with other cases, Ms. Frantz said. Elected leaders “tinkering with” the security services “tends to be something that we see once a system has already transitioned to authoritarianism,” she said, rather than when democracy is in decline.

Mr. Glassel and Mr. Scharpf are concerned that President Trump’s planned expansion of ICE, in particular, could make it an ideal venue for “detouring” by ambitious underperformers who could be deployed for anti-democratic purposes. The worry is especially profound given the storming of the Capitol at the end of Mr. Trump’s first term, albeit by a less organized band of loyalists.

The playbook for a leader to create a loyal security service, they said, is to set up or repurpose an institution that can become a “second ladder” for career promotions, resource it generously and ensure that the barriers to getting hired there are low, signaling that it offers career opportunities to those who cannot find them elsewhere. (Cutting other government jobs or squeezing budgets can create a larger pool of potential recruits.) The leadership then signals impunity for people on that second ladder, to assure them that they won’t face consequences for wrongdoing.

The administration seems to tick those boxes, even if Mr. Trump’s intentions are obscure. (The president has spoken openly of a third term in violation of the Constitution and disparaged the need for an election.) ICE remains an anti-immigration force, but it is set to be radically expanded, with a budget that would dwarf other federal law-enforcement agencies if the current funding bill passes. The Trump administration has drastically cut employment in other federal agencies, leaving thousands of people unemployed or fearful that they soon might be. And top officials in the administration, including Vice President JD Vance and Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s deputy chief of staff, explicitly assured ICE officers of “immunity” after immigration officers killed a protester in Minneapolis in January.

At the same time, it has become easier than ever to become an ICE agent. Ryan Schwank, a former training academy instructor, testified to Congress in February that new cadets “are graduating from the academy despite widespread concerns among training staff that even in the final days of training, the cadets cannot demonstrate a solid grasp of the tactics or the law required to perform their jobs.” ICE recruits must now complete only nine practical examinations to graduate from the training academy, compared with 25 exams that were listed in a training syllabus dated July 2021. It’s a good career opportunity for someone looking to get ahead.

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Five small boats approach a cargo ship in the dead of night.

Inside the ship, among the boxes and containers, is a floodlit metal cage. On a walkway above, holding a cane and inexplicably limping, is Eric Cantona. He grabs a boxing-style dangling microphone and growls three words into it: “First goal wins.”

Thus begins one of the great football adverts: Nike’s 2002 Secret Tournament film.

If you’re reading this, there is every chance that you can conjure a few of the images that follow that opening sequence from memory. Maybe you recall Freddie Ljungberg’s rainbow kick. It could be Denilson twisting himself into another dimension or Thierry Henry using Francesco Totti’s back as a springboard.

You might remember the list of players that, over three breathless, Elvis-soundtracked minutes, turned a thousand playground daydreams into reality — or something like it.

There had been star-studded football ads before, but nothing on this scale. Secret Tournament featured 24 players. Many of them were established superstars. Some, like Ronaldinho and Javier Saviola, were still on the up. The only real outlier was Seol Ki-hyeon, not far off a complete unknown, there to represent South Korea, one of the two hosts of the 2002 World Cup. (The other host was not a problem: Nike had the stylish Japan midfielder Hidetoshi Nakata on their books.)

The story was simple: eight teams of three, a knockout tournament. This was recognisably a football set-up — Nike’s previous big football ad, 2000’s The Mission, had aped a spy thriller — but made to look edgy, frayed, clandestine. The action was technical and inventive but also anarchic, in the image of its director, former Monty Python actor Terry Gilliam, by this point a big name in Hollywood.

It was impossible to wrench your eyes away. Nearly a quarter of a century later, it still is.

With World Cup 2026 fast approaching and the latest slate of football adverts being released into the wild — including Adidas’ Timothee Chalamet-starring Backyard Legends, a spot with certain thematic echoes — The Athletic set out to get the inside track on the iconic Nike advert: the happy memories and the inspiration but also the mishaps, the internal politics, the war stories; tales of stressed creatives and moany stars; the behind-the-scenes verdict on which footballers could actually act — and which really, really couldn’t.

This is the story of Secret Tournament, told by those who made it.

Unleashing creativity

Nike had been on a run of memorable football adverts. The three that preceded Secret Tournament — Good vs Evil (1996), The Airport (1998) and The Mission — had all been produced by advertising agency Wieden + Kennedy Amsterdam, who were tasked with building on the formula ahead of World Cup 2002.

Glenn Cole, former creative director at Wieden + Kennedy Amsterdam: “Making those epics had become a tradition by then. The goal for years had been to (compete) with Adidas in the sport. When we started, we were number five or six, behind Umbro, Diadora, Lotto. The goal was to be number one by 2002 and this was the year.

“The Nike football brand was more mature, ready for prime time. They had the ‘right’ to be in the game in a more significant way. Honouring that was daunting. I remember feeling overwhelmed by the pressure of beating what we had done before.”

With the World Cup heading to East Asia, the brief was to make the accompanying advert more global than ever. Bigger, too: Nike’s roster for the promotional campaign ran to 24 players. At the same time, the brand was not an official tournament sponsor like its main rival, Adidas.

Cole: “The idea of brilliant football was our North Star. The question was how to express that on the biggest stage, knowing that we were the outsiders. ‘We’re not a formal sponsor, so how do we hijack it?’

“We were given the assets: a chrome ball, Eric Cantona, players from around the world of varying degrees of fame and skill. At the time, there was a lot of talk about the rules of the game — players getting fined, just feeling a little constricted. Our seed idea was to create a place where players could be unleashed. We thought about a set of street tournaments and started making the rules: ‘What if it was one goal wins, a high-stakes environment?’

“The idea of a tournament was embraced by Nike. It seemed like we could give a bit of structure to street football skills, which is where all the innovation is.”

The cage, the boat, the roll call

An initial idea was for the tournament to take place in a court in the backstreets of Tokyo, the players arriving on scooters. That proved unworkable. Instead, the action would take place inside a metal cage, situated in the hold of a cargo ship, all recreated in a vast warehouse sound stage in Formello, around 10km outside Rome.

Cole: “The fact it was on a barge was because we felt we needed some neutral ground. International waters seemed like a good starting point.”

Stefano Maria Ortolani, production designer: “The idea of the cage came from the agency. Once we had that, we proposed the structure with the bridge up above. It gave it two layers, two different heights.

“It was quite a big construction. We had to recreate the interior of the boat first, with all the rivets and these enormous crates, showing that we were inside the hull. It was a long process. I liked the nets made of chains; there was a very particular sound every time the ball went in. And I liked that it was all so dirty.”

As Ortolani and his team worked, the talent was being assembled. Some of the players — Ronaldo, Totti, Nakata, Luis Figo, Edgar Davids, Denilson, Lilian Thuram — had appeared in previous Nike adverts. For most, though, this was a new experience. “One ‘wow’ after another,” was how former Lazio and Spain midfielder Gaizka Mendieta described it in 2002 and that was no outlier view.

Javier Saviola, former Barcelona and Argentina striker: “It was a really nice surprise when I got the call. It was an enormous pleasure and not something I had been expecting. I felt privileged to be there with some of the best players in history. The quality was spectacular.”

Ortolani: “There were so many champions. I only realised a few years later how good some of them were. Like Ronaldinho: he was still young and wasn’t very well known at that moment.”

Cole: “The appeal was when they heard who the cast was, who the other players were. They didn’t want to not be part of what ended up looking like the top 24 players in the world. That was the draw.”

The Secret Tournament teams

Triple Espresso: Thierry Henry, Francesco Totti, Hidetoshi Nakata

The Onetouchables: Patrick Vieira, Ruud van Nistelrooy, Paul Scholes

Toros Locos: Freddie Ljungberg, Javier Saviola, Luis Enrique

Cerberus: Edgar Davids, Lilian Thuram, Sylvain Wiltord

Os Tornados: Luis Figo, Roberto Carlos, Ronaldo

Funk Seoul Brothers: Denilson, Ronaldinho, Seol Ki-hyeon

Tutto Benne: Fabio Cannavaro, Tomas Rosicky, Rio Ferdinand

Equipo del Fuego: Claudio Lopez, Gaizka Mendieta, Hernan Crespo

Top scorers: 1 — Totti, Wiltord, Mendieta, Roberto Carlos, Nakata, Figo, Henry

Chaos factor

The main shoot took about a month, just before Christmas 2001. With the European season still in full swing, the logistics of it were challenging.

Ortolani: “The players all had matches at the weekend and they only had Mondays free. We could only shoot with them then. The rest of the week was spent filming close-ups: body doubles doing tricks with the ball, just their legs visible. It usually takes around three days to do a commercial. This took weeks. It was like a movie shoot.”

Nicola Pecorini, director of photography: “It was completely nuts from a practical point of view. We had a huge crew so we could optimise the time we had with the players. On the Monday, for example, we had six or seven cameras and crews.”

On one Monday, players from Arsenal and Manchester United shared a flight to Rome the day after a Premier League game between the two sides. Arsenal had won; Ruud van Nistelrooy and Paul Scholes especially weren’t best pleased at having to see their rivals again. “I f**king hated it,” Scholes said on The Overlap last year. Tim Wolfe, the copywriter on the ad, told The Times in 2022 that Scholes was “in a really bad mood, really hard to direct”. There were other issues, too.

Ortolani: “At one stage, Figo had an injury, something with his leg. Imagine! Everybody was very, very worried about it. It wasn’t anything serious but still… you know, he was playing for Real Madrid.”

Pecorini: “For whatever reason, the various Nike departments decided to combine the players in the worst possible way, practically speaking. We never had the winning team – Henry, Totti, Nakata – on set together. Never. They were never in the cage at the same time. It was crazy.”

Hidetoshi Nakata, former Parma and Japan midfielder: “We shot individually. I never saw the other players.”

Pecorini: “The players we had most were the ones based in Italy. It was easier for them to get there. But they went in and out with private jets and all that stuff. Nike were paying. I have no idea how much it cost them.”

Ortolani: “It would be impossible to make today. Players play every day of the week and you could never schedule them like we did.”

Let the ball decide

Inside the cage, there was no fixed plan. In the first instance, it was up to the players themselves to come up with the flicks and trick shots that would eventually make the final clip.

Pecorini: “The action wasn’t scripted. There was a lot of improvisation. The first-goal-wins rule was about it. A lot of the suggestions about what they could do came from the players themselves. They had ideas… how to use the bounce, use the corners, things like that.”

Cole: “We started with the most creative players, the ones who naturally just show up and have a sense of play. The Brazilians set the tone. Once you get young, elite footballers watching others do something spectacular, their inner competitor comes out. You can’t really stop them at that point.

“The only scripted thing was the ending, with Henry doing the header and Roberto Carlos trying the scorpion kick to stop it. The rest was improvised. You pick the best of it; there were plenty of failed attempts.”

There were a couple of tricky dynamics to manage. Clips like this are mostly about flair and technical skill; defenders are sometimes condemned to less glamorous roles. Then there is the need for the narrative to trump individual egos: Van Nistelrooy, in the form of his life for Manchester United at the time, did not enjoy being told to miss on purpose for one shot.

Cole: “You set up these one-on-ones with these guys who play against each other in big Champions League matches. Somebody has to win and somebody has to lose. So of course there is a bit of, ‘Er, no, we’ll see about that. Let’s see what happens’.

“All the guys were pretty professional. It’s not like they’re construction workers, but they show up ready to clock on. They really care about their craft, want to get each move right. You or I may see something and think it was incredible, but they’re like, ‘No, when I chested it, it came a bit too far from my body. It didn’t look perfect. Let’s do it again’.

“They were perfectionists.”

Playing for laughs

While the players’ technical skill shone through, not everyone was so convinced about the quality of some of the acting on display. Some of the stars, meanwhile, were more excited to be on set than others.

Pecorini: “The majority of the crew were Roma fans. That was the peak of Francesco Totti’s career. He was god to anyone who cared about Roma. Whenever he came on the set, the crew were all in awe. Maybe now he’s better, but back then he was very shy and clumsy. You’d ask him to look surprised, and he’d give a look of terror. So after the third or fourth take, my key grip, who is a lifelong Roma fan, went over, patted him on the back and said, ‘Capitano, stick to football, OK? You’re not cut out for acting’.”

Saviola: “I was there with Ronaldinho, Figo, Claudio Lopez. Cantona was there. Edgar Davids and Hernan Crespo too. I didn’t feel any pressure to perform. I still have a signed photo of the cast in my personal museum. They’re incredible memories.”

Pecorini: “Ronaldo wasn’t happy to be there. At that time, most of his time must have been taken up by promotional shit. I think he’d had enough. Ronaldinho was completely crazy. He was like a kid in the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. High energy, being foolish with the other guys. ”

Cole: “Ronaldinho was a natural. Denilson was a natural. Those guys are just entertainers, funny from the minute you meet them. They’re just big kids. Roberto Carlos also. Thierry Henry had great presence. He was a good performer — funny, smart.”

Pecorini: “Figo was good fun and he could act. He was good at understanding where the camera was. He was also probably the only one there with whom you could talk about something other than football, too.”

A lot of the energy on set was provided by doubles — jobbing actors who resembled the players enough to pass as them in quick cut-aways shots — and by a prankster on the crew.

Pecorini: “Some of the doubles were jugglers and freestylers. Others were more lookalikes. I can spot a few things in the editing.”

Cole: “The guy we always had the best double for was Roberto Carlos. Spitting image, Brazilian, great footballer, had the same nose, the giant thighs. Everything was identical. I think he played football in division two or three somewhere.

“The doubles stayed with us for the whole shoot, so this guy was in Rome with us for weeks. We used to go out with him and constantly get free dinners. If we couldn’t get a table, I’d just kind of gesture at him, not even say anything, and they’d be like, ‘Oh my God, it’s Roberto Carlos!’ They would clear a space and get a table for us. There would be kids coming up and asking for autographs. It got weird. I didn’t tell him to sign autographs!”

Pecorini: “There was a very funny guy called Marinese. He was this big, prehistoric grip. Whenever a new player came in, he immediately went over and asked for a photo. He had a Polaroid camera. The footballer would agree, they’d take the picture, the Polaroid would come out, and Marinese would give the picture to the player. He would say, ‘Good, now you have a picture with the famous Marinese, you can keep it’. They were all so confused by it. It was fantastic to see their faces. He flipped the whole thing. Maybe one of the players still has the photo and is still wondering who this guy Marinese is.”

Problem solving

With so many moving pieces, it was inevitable that the shoot would throw a few curveballs to the producers.

Ortolani: “We had a few technical problems. Roberto Carlos kicked the ball so hard at one point that he broke the side of the set.”

Pecorini: “Terry (Gilliam) wanted this big contrast, so I used these very strong lights. You would normally use them from 100ft away, but I put them 12ft above the players’ heads. We had issues because they were so strong. Although we would dim them down when we weren’t shooting, the beam would cook the turf.”

Ortolani: “We had to change the grass three times because it went yellow. We tried painting it but the players got all dirty when they fell down.”

Pecorini: “Terry came to the dolly grip, who had this long track along the side of the cage, and said, ‘OK, we’re filming Thierry Henry. Stick with him’. And this guy had the dolly, which is like a 300kg thing on wheels. If there is one famous thing about Henry, it’s how fast the motherf***er was! ‘Stick with him!’ The guy was like, ‘Err… yeah, sure!’

“On the Wednesdays, when the players weren’t there, we would shoot little details: the ball going in in a certain way, rattling the chains, the double bounces. It sounds silly but those things take so much time. There weren’t many visual effects back then, so you couldn’t rely on that. Now, they’d say, ‘Don’t worry, just shoot the corner, we’ll add the ball in later’. Back then, you shot the corner and then the ball doing what you wanted it to do.

“There is only one visual effect. Because the three players on the winning team were never actually together, they stuck Nakata’s head on a double’s body. But just for a moment: there’s one shot with the three of them. Nakata’s face there was spliced on later.”

Former Borussia Dortmund playmaker Tomas Rosicky only appears for a brief second, shot from behind. Two players — Seol and Fabio Cannavaro — are not discernible in the final edit at all. 

Pecorini: “There were so many of them.”

Cole: “They’re somewhere, aren’t they? Are their faces there? S***! I have to watch it again. I distinctly remember asking them to cover everybody. They were there, on set. Whether they were spectacular enough for the three-minute edit, I don’t know…”

Wolfe, the copywriter, has spoken about a moment that highlighted some of the risks involved in the shoot: Claudio Lopez, then of Lazio, slamming into a panel and falling out of the cage. Luckily, he was unharmed.

Pecorini: “There was more than one incident. It looked really good, but it wasn’t designed with safety in mind, put it that way. I’m amazed that more players didn’t get scratched. The steps to go in and out of the cage were steep and short. With football boots on, it wasn’t the best. We were pretty lucky.”

Saviola: “I don’t remember the thing with Claudio but we were moving around the cage a lot and it was… I wouldn’t call it dangerous, but we weren’t used to playing with camera equipment all around. The possibility was there.”

Cole: “I’m not sure how we’d do this spot today. I don’t think you could, or at least not the way we did it. Terry respected the players’ safety but I was really pushing them to play. The ball wasn’t getting kicked hard enough off the fence for fear of it hitting someone in the face. If it’s not intense, it looks fake, (so) I was being whiny about that.

“Next thing you know, they’re shoving each other into the cage, fingers are getting caught. I don’t know if you could shoot that with today’s safety standards. It was one of the last edgy ones.”

Eric and Terry

If there is a main character in the advert, it is Cantona, cast as a roving master of ceremonies on a gantry above the pitch. It might all have been different, however: the man initially scouted for that role was Italian referee Pierluigi Collina.

Cole: “We were thinking that he would be the guy. But then we were like, ‘Well, the point of this is supposed to be anti-rules, play how you want, football at its most pure’. We decided we should probably have no ref, but instead some kind of host, more a voice of the game. Eric was the natural choice.”

Pecorini: “He was probably the one who had the most fun. I had worked with him before, on the Airport advert, so it was like seeing an old friend. He is a very funny guy. And, I think, having seen what he did after, a decent actor. Much better than Totti. If I had to choose people to go to dinner with, out of all those guys, I’d pick Figo and Cantona.”

Cole: “Eric was always a very eccentric personality in and outside football, but he was easy and fun. He did a good job of keeping the players in a light mood.”

It is safe to assume that Cantona, a cinephile, was more excited than most of the players to be working with Gilliam. The director was a left-field choice to direct the advert, but threw himself into the project.

Cole: “He really embraced it. What he’s really brilliant at is creating a world that has some quirks, that feels real enough. So when it came to environment and atmosphere — the look and feel of the thing — he was just a home run. And although he’s not naturally a football fan, he treated the players like actors delivering performances, and invited them to be themselves. He nailed it.

“Keeping the atmosphere cool and weird was where his genius showed up. Early on, we were on this gloomy stage, in this rusted metal cage, and we’re asking players to be brilliant at 10am. It just didn’t feel loose enough. I spoke to Terry and he said he would try something. He went to the back part of the set and started banging this giant metal prop chain on some barrels and shouting rhythmically. He was trying to make music with it. I remember looking at him and thinking, ‘If this was a Monty Python sketch about this commercial, I would totally believe it’.”

It was not all plain sailing. Ad shoots tend to involve entire armies of stakeholders. Gilliam sometimes bridled at the number of voices in the room.

Pecorini: “He doesn’t like making commercials because he doesn’t like having to deal with agencies. And this one was like agency squared, because there were lots of people involved. He’s always very confrontational — sometimes too much. Very often he’s right, but sometimes you think, ‘Just drop it’, you know?”

Ortolani: “Yes, he was annoyed. It was Nike people, the players’ agents and entourages. It was a nightmare. People were asking him questions constantly. He was a bit upset by it all. He wants to work, not just talk.”

Pecorini: “If you are within the Nike ranks and you have the opportunity to come to Rome for three weeks, expenses paid… even if you don’t have anything to do, you find a way to be necessary. They had to justify the fact they were there by coming up with completely pointless things. It’s like, ‘You’re in Rome, go have an ice cream and come back later’. But no.

“One night, we had to shoot the exterior of the ship, in the harbour. There was a big thing with the permits and customs. Two hours before call time, Terry told me he wasn’t coming. ‘If I come, I’m going to get in a fight with those assholes. You do it’. I said, ‘Yeah, can I have your salary for the night as well then?’ If you have any idea of what a director’s fee is, you’ll know why I wanted that.”

Cole: “Feature directors are not used to having another person in their ear. But in advertising you’re generally right there, making decisions together on every shot. I do think that drove Terry a little nuts.

“In the first week, he told me to go and sit in a corner. He yelled at me. Frank Hahn, the art director, printed shirts for the whole crew the next day. They read, ‘Terry Gilliam told Glenn to go sit in the corner’. And I had one that said, ‘Terry Gilliam told me to sit in the corner’. That really broke the ice with Terry, actually. Things went really well after that.”

Pecorini: “There were also some stupid things. Seol, the South Korean player, refused to be on the same team as Ronaldinho, if I remember right. But it wasn’t him; it was Nike South Korea who didn’t want it. Because Ronaldinho was nobody at that stage, globally. They wanted a bigger name. We lost so much time sorting that out.”

Cole: “Terry is more used to acting and comedy than football players — and being threatened by agents and managers.”

Remixing Elvis

One of the most memorable things about the advert is its soundtrack: a remix of the Elvis Presley song A Little Less Conversation by Dutch musician Junkie XL. After the advert’s release, the track went to number one in the UK, Australia, Canada and beyond.

Cole: “The music was a real monkey wrench. We just could not land the right track to pull it together. If you turn the audio off and try to follow this thing, it’s pretty hectic beyond the colours of the jerseys. There was just no obvious tone or tenor. We tried rock, metal — dark, intense stuff — but it didn’t really underscore what we were seeing.

“We talked to all sorts of music producers, contracted a band, some hot producers. They brought in stuff to play, and we were very polite, but I remember thinking, ‘Oh my God, this is a disaster’.

“A couple of the guys went to watch Ocean’s Eleven, which had just come out. There’s the shortest clip in that movie when you hear the loop from A Little Less Conversation, the original. We put it on the next day and I thought it had a fun, free-wheeling, gambler’s sort of vibe. And the theme was cool. A Little Less Conversation — just shut up and play.

“It felt dated, so we wanted to modernise it. I called a friend in Amsterdam, Tom Holkenborg. Junkie XL was his stage name. I asked him if there was anything he could do by the next morning. The following day he played it to me over the phone. It sounded amazing, 80 per cent there. We presented a final version to Nike; it was a split room at first but people started to fall in love with it.

“It’s very hard to clear music tracks. Elvis had never licensed anything to be used for commercial purposes. His estate was famously against it, but our contact at the label flew to Graceland, spoke to them about the power of global football. He also said it had the potential to break a long-standing tie between Elvis and The Beatles for number-one hits globally. That might have sparked their competitive interest. They agreed to let us use it. I couldn’t believe it.”

Legacy

Secret Tournament was a smash hit. Football fans around the world adored it; kids tried to replicate the moves in playgrounds on every continent. Wieden + Kennedy won two prestigious Golden Pencil awards for the campaign. Even today, it holds a special place in many people’s hearts — not least the people behind it.

Ortolani: “It is the most popular commercial I’ve done. Absolutely. People all over the world saw it.”

Saviola: “I was really happy when it came out. My family and friends all sent messages. They were all surprised — firstly with how good the final product was but also the impact it had. It was seen all around the globe. And everyone remembers it, even today.”

Cole: “Nike loved it, from what I understand. I think it was good for their culture and good for business. It’s up there with my personal favourites. It’s the one that people bring up the most. The fact people are still talking about it is awesome.”