Screenshot via FIFA.com The FIFA World Cup draw is never meant to be that interesting. It is usually a bureaucratic step in a long tournament cycle, the closest football comes to a government tender: a series of pots, someone in a suit, and balls drawn slowly from bowls. Yet last Friday at the Kennedy Center in Washington, this familiar piece of administrative theater was inflated into something closer to a coronation. Andrea Bocelli opened the evening with “Nessun Dorma;” the stage was washed in the sort of gold lighting that flatters no one but suggests importance; and three heads of state were positioned behind color-coded podiums that looked borrowed from a daytime game show. Before a single team was drawn, the tone had already been set. Gianni Infantino worked the crowd as if auditioning for a different job. He invited Americans to chant the name of their country, then repeated the exercise for Canadians and Mexicans, producing a manufactured unity that sounded more like a focus group than a World Cup. The program moved briskly, featuring video montages, celebrity cameos, and musical interludes. What had once been a procedural ritual was now padded with the kind of extras that usually accompany product launches or national conventions. And presiding over it all, of course, was Donald Trump. He did not simply attend; the event bent itself around him. A new “FIFA Peace Prize” (created months earlier, with no clear criteria) was presented to him onstage, its gold-plated globe resting on raised hands “considerably larger than the Nobel,” as Reuters noted. The trophy stood on its own plinth bearing his name in capital letters. Trump placed the medal around his neck before Infantino could assist, a gesture that captured the spirit of the evening: an institutional ceremony rearranged to flatter a single person’s self-image. The pageantry was deliberate. The draw had been relocated to Washington at Trump’s request, and the production worked hard to match the atmosphere he prefers: loud, brash, compliant, and unembarrassed by excess. Bocelli’s aria opened the evening; Infantino’s call-and-response chants followed; and the Village People closed the night with “YMCA.” The sequence created a strange composite of sporting ritual and campaign spectacle. Football sat somewhere in the background, present but overshadowed by the needs of the show. It was an inversion of the usual dynamic: not politics intruding on sport, but sport volunteering itself for political use. FIFA has long insisted on its political neutrality. Players who lift their shirts to reveal a slogan or gesture in support of a cause risk fines or suspensions. The organization repeats the refrain each time it justifies a ban or reprimand: football cannot be used to take sides. But the principle is applied unevenly. Russia was permitted to host the 2018 World Cup months after annexing Crimea, and it was only suspended from global football in 2022 once its full-scale invasion of Ukraine made inaction untenable. Israel, by contrast, has faced no sanctions despite the scale and visibility of its genocide in Gaza. The award to Trump made this pattern harder to ignore. It was presented less than a day after his administration carried out another extrajudicial strike in the Caribbean. It also followed his remarks describing Somali immigrants as “garbage,” which drew swift condemnation across the US and abroad. None of this disrupted the ceremony. Infantino delivered the prize with the confidence of someone offering a formal endorsement, praising Trump’s “action” and “care for the people,” and presenting the World Cup as a platform aligned with those claims. Much of the excess functioned as a distraction from unresolved problems surrounding the 2026 tournament. Trump has repeatedly signaled that host cities could lose matches if they fall out of favor—an uncertainty that undermines the basic planning required for an event of this scale. His administration’s hostile immigration policies further complicate matters. Some qualifying nations (such as Haiti and Iran) have citizens who face travel bans or visa restrictions, a contradiction that sits uneasily beside FIFA’s rhetoric of global inclusion. Unlike Russia in 2018 or Qatar in 2022, both of which eased entry for supporters from across the global South, the US presents significant barriers to anyone without a Western passport. For many fans, the simple act of attending a World Cup match will be far more difficult in 2026 than it has been at any recent tournament. The truth is, the World Cup has never floated above politics. It emerged as a tool of statecraft almost as soon as it was invented. Uruguay used the inaugural tournament in 1930 to anchor its centenary celebrations and announce itself as a modern republic. Mussolini transformed 1934 into a fascist exhibition, complete with merchandising campaigns and an oversized alternative trophy minted for his own benefit. Argentina’s junta treated 1978 as a referendum on its authority. Brazil’s military regime folded the 1970 team into its national mythology, and the oil-rich states of the past decade (such as Russia and Qatar) and decades to come (Saudi Arabia) turn hosting rights into instruments of soft power. Even supposedly benign hosts—from post-independence nations seeking recognition to rising economies courting investment—treated the tournament as a stage on which to project a version of themselves. The 2026 tournament reflects a different kind of world, shaped less by rising political ambition than by fragmentation and strain. The US approaches the event with an inward-facing political climate, a restrictive border regime, and an undercurrent of civic volatility that sits uneasily beside the promise of welcoming millions. Even its relationship with its co-hosts carries this tension. Canada and Mexico appear in FIFA’s materials as equal partners, yet in American politics they are more often treated as extensions of domestic debate: a source of border anxiety in Mexico’s case, or an afterthought in Canada’s. The country can still command global attention, but the conditions of that attention have changed. The assumptions that once sustained a “global festival,” such as mobility, stability, and a sense of shared purpose, now rest on increasingly uncertain ground. This matters because the US is not just another host. It is the place where many of the forces reshaping the globe—migration, securitization, racialization, spectacle, technological fragmentation—appear in their most distilled form. To stage the world’s largest communal ritual inside this environment is to expose the state of that ritual itself. The World Cup relies on assumptions about openness, shared meaning, and international coordination that no longer hold, and perhaps have not held for some time. That is the deeper unease surrounding 2026. The incoherence is not simply Trump’s doing, nor FIFA’s. It reflects a larger truth: the world the World Cup was designed for is slipping away. The tournament still carries the shape of a universal event, but the conditions that made universality plausible have thinned. Hosting the world inside America makes this tension visible. The 2026 edition of the World Cup also exposes the limits of the form. The event is now so large, so dispersed, and so entangled with the priorities of powerful states that its promise of common purpose feels increasingly brittle. The draw in Washington hinted at a tournament organized less around global connection than around geopolitical tension and domestic volatility. What will come of that is yet to be seen. In under two weeks, our attention will shift to AFCON. This tournament is hardly sheltered from the forces reshaping football; Morocco, this year’s host, faces scrutiny over state spending, domestic repression, and the unresolved question of Western Sahara—all of which surfaced in the recent GenZ212 protests of a few months ago. Yet AFCON retains something the World Cup has shed. Its scale keeps it close to the societies that animate it. The distance between the event and everyday political life is shorter; conflicts around inequality, governance, and belonging remain visible rather than submerged beneath the machinery of a global spectacle. As our contributing editor Maher Mezahi put it last year ahead of the Ivorian edition, the tournament is a vessel that people continue to fill with their own meanings and histories, rather than an event defined entirely from above. This is why AFCON deserves as much attention as the World Cup. In a moment when global rituals struggle to cohere, smaller tournaments still reveal how football operates as a political form, and how it can mobilize, unsettle, and occasionally unite. They show us the stakes rather than smoothing them over. And they remind us that the future of the game may be easier to discern in Abidjan or Rabat than in the gilded theaters of Washington DC. – Will Shoki, editor |
