The former Arsenal, Barcelona and France star says players shouldn’t underestimate their ability to change how football works

As Fifa continues to face scrutiny from some confederations and fans, Thierry Henry has encouraged players to use their voice as the political battle for control of international soccer unfolds. The former Arsenal and Barcelona forward turned pundit spoke with the Guardian on Tuesday alongside Kate Scott and Jamie Carragher as CBS and Paramount prepare for this season’s Champions League broadcasts.

“For me, the players have more power than they think they have,” Henry said when asked for his thoughts on the situation. “And if they want it to change, they can make it happen – especially nowadays.”

This is an extract from Soccer Desk, a newsletter from the Guardian US. Subscribe for free here.

Fox’s broadcast at the tournament has become a story of two contrasting styles. And there is one clear winner

We all know someone like Alexi Lalas. He’s the ranter whose rants never actually say anything, the life of the party at the party no one enjoys attending, the “big personality” who’s always misjudging the size of the room. He’s corporate America’s idea of a fun guy, the type of workplace “character” whose business trip hangover never stops him from being first at the hotel breakfast buffet, hair wet, Untuckit shirt untucked. He would absolutely dominate karaoke night at a conference on infrastructure finance. If only this were the limit of Alexi Lalas’s actual impact on the world, our culture would live in blessed ignorance of his existence. But in the real world Alexi Lalas is not a small-time menace working the floor at an infrastructure conference. In the real world Alexi Lalas is American soccer’s brightest media star, and he is everywhere this World Cup.

When Lalas’s Roger Ramjet jaw thrust into frame on Fox at the start of this tournament, it’s fair to assume that many viewers felt a sense of dread similar to that expressed in the Grand Theft Auto meme: “Ah shit, here we go again.” Lalas’s ubiquitousness every World Cup is American TV’s answer to the Iran war: no one wants it, everyone hates it, and as it drags on, it inevitably becomes a face-saving exercise in damage limitation. But there was also a glimmer of hope: for this tournament Fox has enlisted a pair of elite European strikers, Thierry Henry and Zlatan Ibrahimović, to terrorize Lalas and shake proceedings up. Steered by Rebecca Lowe, this new-look panel has promised a slightly more sophisticated approach to covering the tournament than the yahooing belligerence that was Fox’s stock in trade at the last two World Cups.

In this week’s newsletter: From singers to YouTube stars and TV hosts, more famous faces are treading the boards. Some insiders think it’s killing the industry, but for others it opens up theatre to a wider audience

• Don’t get The Guide delivered to your inbox? Sign up here

Timothée Chalamet might have smirked his way out of an Oscar. Sabrina Carpenter might have been roundly snubbed at the Grammys. But there’s one place both would be welcomed with open arms: the UK theatre scene.

It seems we can’t get enough of celebs on stage (acting chops preferable but not mandatory). This week alone, London’s West End features Stranger Things star Sadie Sink, singer Self Esteem and Strictly cutie pie Johannes Radebe. Meanwhile, Mischa Barton, best known for playing Marissa Cooper in the 00s TV series The OC, is touring the UK and Ireland in a new adaptation of James M. Cain’s crime novel Double Indemnity.

This year was a pivotal one, in which the issue of restorative justice began to frame the UK’s post-imperial relationship with the global south

A little while ago, I was interviewed for a forthcoming book about reparations by a black British comedian and his co-writer. I approached it with modest expectations. It is a serious subject for me as a Caribbean man, and I wondered whether the complexity might be flattened or trivialised in the process.

I got to read the book this week. In The Big Payback, Lenny Henry and Marcus Ryder take a complex, controversial and deeply contested subject and do something both rare and necessary: they break it down into its constituent parts and explain – debunking and demystifying along the way – why so many of the stock objections to reparations are intellectually incoherent, historically illiterate or politically evasive.

After Guardian writers picked their favourite lesser-known festive movies, readers shoutout Klaus, The Ref and more

I thought a real modern hidden gem is All Is Bright starring Paul Rudd and Paul Giamatti as two down-on-their-luck Christmas tree sellers. It’s perfectly played by both, with Rudd putting in, not his usual “puppy dog everyone wants to be your mate” role but a sarcastic turn, complementing Giamatti’s Christmas grinch. More a black comedy (by Hollywood standards), it’s an excellent film. Andyouwillknowme