THE 2026 WORLD CUP
A football match is one of the few events that can fill a room with strangers and make them, for ninety minutes, something closer to a community. Even people who think they have nothing in common feel the same jolt when a goal goes in. The 2022 World Cup produced 5 billion total media engagements worldwide: 2.9 billion through linear TV, 2.7 billion through digital and streaming, 2.2 billion through social media. The 2026 edition is the largest in history, with 48 teams and 104 matches spread across Canada, Mexico, and the United States.
The tournament markets itself as a celebration of nations. The whole apparatus of national identity gets deployed: the anthem before kickoff, the flag in the stands, the broadcaster cutting to the president in the box. But look more closely at who is actually on the pitch, and the national story gets complicated fast. COMPAS at the University of Oxford found that nearly one in four of the 1,248 players selected for the 2026 World Cup were born outside the country they represent. Some squads stretch that figure much further: 96% of Curaçao's players, 85% of DR Congo's, and 73% of Morocco's were born in a different country from the one on their shirt.
This is not a flaw in the tournament's design. It is a window into how football actually travels. The sport spreads through the movement of people across borders: through migration and diaspora, through the colonial histories that connected distant countries, through the academy systems and labor markets that pull players from one continent to another. These are routes that exist precisely because of borders, not in spite of them. Borders are invented. But their consequences are entirely real, and the movement of people is shaped by that history. Football does not ignore this; it absorbs it. For diasporic fans, this rarely means feeling torn or confused. Often it means having more ways in: rooting for where you live, where your family is from, where your favorite player plays, where your friends are watching, or simply for the team that makes the room erupt. The flag on the jersey and the flag in the living room do not always match, and that gap is where a lot of the most personal watching happens.
Still, the World Cup is not simply a festival of belonging. The conditions under which people gather to watch it are not equal, and the tournament's political architecture is visible if you look. The Iranian national team has spoken publicly about the travel restrictions and logistical barriers their supporters face. Cabo Verde’s goalkeeper Vozinha's mother was initially prevented from attending a match because of visa costs and access barriers, a reminder that football's reach is not the same as football's openness. The communal moment exists, but it does not erase the structures that determine who gets to show up for it.
That gap between the spectacle of togetherness and the reality of unequal access is worth taking seriously. Communal joy at the World Cup is not passive escape, and it is not even quiet resistance. It is something more active than either: it expands what people understand to be possible. A room erupting over a goal, when the people in it do not share a team or a history, makes legible a kind of community that national narratives have long worked to deny or diminish. Football does not just reflect shared humanity. It demonstrates it in a way that is hard to argue with, and harder to unfeel. That is education by experience, a lived lesson in how much more substance exists between people than the borders invented to divide them allow.
FIFA presents itself as above politics, a position it has maintained even as international football has functioned repeatedly as a geopolitical instrument. South Africa was banned from FIFA competitions for two decades during apartheid, from 1970 to 1990. Yugoslavia was suspended in 1994 amid the Balkan Wars. Russia has been excluded since invading Ukraine in 2022. But FIFA's silences are as revealing as its suspensions: other states have played on through wars and authoritarian rule without consequence, and the organization's claim to neutrality is, in practice, a series of choices about when politics counts and when it does not.
The World Cup is a genuinely shared experience. A goal translates across almost every cultural context; the feeling of it needs no explanation. But the flags surrounding that goal carry different weight for different people, and the tournament exists inside a world where visas and national borders are not abstractions. Communal joy is real. So is the political structure it moves through. And sometimes, feeling that joy fully, understanding what it reveals about community and about what is possible between people, is where something shifts. Not just in how we watch, but in what we refuse to accept when the match is over.
For more RECS like this one, check out the rest of vol. 008:
