When Mexico and South Africa begin to contest today the inaugural match of the first World Cup with 48 teams, the world will once again gather around a ball. That collective gesture carries almost a century of history in which football has served as a stage for propaganda, resistance, and reconciliation.
The World Cup is not only the most-watched competition on the planet, with nearly 3.2 billion viewers per edition. It is also the largest laboratory of soft power that exists, a space where international politics condenses into ninety minutes. The 2026 edition has already demonstrated, before it even begins, that this geopolitical nature has not lost its relevance.
To understand the phenomenon, it is advisable to return to the origin. Jules Rimet, president of FIFA since 1921, had come out of the trenches of World War I convinced that football could create a common language between nations. In May 1928, at the XVII FIFA Congress in Amsterdam, he proposed organizing a world championship independent of the Olympic Games. Uruguay, the Olympic champion and in full celebration of its centenary of independence, offered to cover the expenses of all participants. In July 1930, thirteen teams competed in Montevideo in the first tournament in history. The foundational purpose was noble: to unite nations through the spirit of competition; what no one anticipated, or perhaps they did, is that the same stage could become an instrument of domination.
Barely four years later, the second edition of the tournament inaugurated what we now call sportswashing. Mussolini saw in the 1934 World Cup an unparalleled opportunity to project to the world the image of a fascist, strong, and victorious Italy. The regime financed stadiums in eight cities, referees systematically favored the host, and players born in Argentina were incorporated into the Italian national team under circumstances that violated FIFA’s own statutes. Mussolini, who witnessed all the matches of his team, also commissioned a personal cup, the Coppa del Duce, whose dimensions eclipsed the original trophy. Italy won, marking what many theorists consider the first instance of the instrumentalization of sport to wash the face of a regime, a practice that the world would use to this day.
History would repeat itself in 1978, when the dictatorship of Videla turned the World Cup into the center of its international legitimization campaign. The regime, responsible for the disappearance of between 15,000 and 30,000 citizens during the Dirty War, named the tournament “World Cup for Peace” and it was inaugurated by Videla himself in front of 70,000 spectators. Forty blocks from the stadium, the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo marched in silence. Estela de Carlotto summed it up accurately: “While goals are shouted, the cries of the tortured and murdered are drowned out”. The suspicions about Argentina’s victory over Peru by 6-0, which qualified them for the final, have persisted for decades. However, the tournament also generated international protests that helped to highlight the regime’s human rights violations, one of the first times that the World Cup acted, involuntarily, as an amplifier of resistance.
Between both episodes occurred one of the most significant acts of collective resistance in the history of football. In January 1964, FIFA announced the distribution of spots for the 1966 tournament in England: ten slots for Europe, four for Latin America, and one shared for Africa, Asia, and Oceania, entire continents with newly independent countries or in the process of decolonization. The African Football Confederation sent FIFA a letter with a minimum demand: at least one guaranteed spot for Africa. In response to the refusal of English president Stanley Rous, who considered the decision “definitive,” the fifteen eligible African countries boycotted the qualification. The continent, which represented a growing part of FIFA’s members, precisely thanks to the decolonization process, would not be in the tournament that called itself world. The boycott had consequences: in 1968, FIFA unanimously voted to grant Africa its own spot in the 1970 edition. Additionally, Rous would be defeated in the 1974 elections by Brazilian João Havelange, whose campaign was built precisely on the support of African and Asian federations.
The case of Brazil illustrates a different mode of failure, more subtle but equally revealing. In 2014, the country of football by definition hosted the most expensive World Cup in history, with an approximate cost of 12 billion dollars, financed about 85% with public money. The argument was that the tournament would generate infrastructure and international projection for one of the most unequal economies in the world. The reality was bleaker: about 170,000 people were displaced from their homes across the country to facilitate projects associated with the event, the stadiums built in cities without sufficient professional football became white elephants, and the massive protests that swept the country reflected the frustration of millions of Brazilians who felt that the spectacle was being held at their expense. The legacy of 2014 is also the story of what happens when a mega-event is designed from above without questioning the needs of the general population.
And yet, the World Cup has also been something genuinely different. In 2010, South Africa became the first African country to host the tournament, and for a nation that had barely emerged from apartheid sixteen years earlier, welcoming the world to its stadiums was an affirmation of sovereignty and dignity that is difficult to quantify. In 2002, Japan and South Korea co-hosted the tournament, a gesture that would have been unthinkable a few decades earlier given the weight of Japanese colonial occupation in Korean memory, and which constituted in itself a diplomatic message of far-reaching significance. In 1998, before the match between the United States and Iran, Iranian players presented flowers to their rivals: in a context of total diplomatic rupture between the two countries, the protocol of the game imposed a minimum of shared humanity. This represents the core of sports diplomacy, using sport as a channel of communication when official channels are closed.
All of this makes especially revealing what has happened before the start of 2026. The Trump administration has implemented visa restrictions that directly affect participating countries: citizens of Ivory Coast, Haiti, Iran, Senegal, and South Africa are subject to entry bans that almost prevent them from attending matches on U.S. soil, and even they are asked to leave the country on the same day they play, as is the case with Iran. A visa bond program of up to 15,000 dollars affects five other qualified countries. Haiti, which qualified for the first time in over fifty years, sees how its fans will not be able to watch their team play in the United States. Iran boycotted the tournament’s own draw, with its federation pointing to obstacles that “go beyond sports considerations”. FIFA, as in 1934 and 1978, has opted for pragmatic management, with the Trump Administration finally announcing the exemption of the bond for ticket holders registered in its fast processing system. A partial solution that does not resolve the underlying problem: the tournament that claims to represent the world begins conditioned by the immigration policy of one of its hosts.
The history of the World Cup is, ultimately, the history of soft power in its most naked form. It is a mirror that reflects the image of the world as it is, not as it would like to be: with its hierarchies, its exclusions, and its moments of unexpected grace. Rimet dreamed of a tournament that would unite nations. What he created was something more interesting and more human: a tournament that shows them as they are, with all their greatness and all their misery, and that in the best moments, perhaps for that very reason, manages to bring them together.
