Is the World Cup really celebrating unity?

The media often describes the FIFA World Cup as 'a festival of global unity'. For a month, billions watch the same matches, sing the same songs, and recognise the same drama.

Its appeal is obvious. At a time of war, polarisation, border anxiety, and geopolitical fragmentation, football appears to offer a rare common language.

Yet the World Cup does not move us beyond nationalism. It gives nationalism one of its most legitimate and emotionally intense stages.

Flags, anthems, colours, historical grievances, collective pride, and fantasies of national destiny are all mobilised. Football fans do not treat them as dangerous or outdated, but celebrate them with passion.

This is what makes the tournament politically revealing. In many other contexts, we associate nationalism with exclusion, xenophobia, authoritarianism, or violence. The World Cup, however, sanitises nationalism through sport.

It becomes the last acceptable nationalism.

Nationalism under cover of play

The 2026 World Cup makes this especially clear.

The tournament is the largest in history, with 48 teams and 104 matches⁠ across Canada, Mexico, and the United States. Its scale reinforces the image of inclusion: more countries, more fans, more stories, more representation.

But inclusion into the tournament does not mean the disappearance of national rivalry. Quite the opposite. Expansion multiplies the number of national dramas available for global consumption.

World Cup success offers small countries a place on the world stage that is otherwise denied by military, economic, or diplomatic hierarchies

Every match becomes a miniature referendum on national character. Pundits describe teams as resilient, arrogant, disciplined, emotional, naïve, mature, underachieving, or heroic. These adjectives rarely remain purely sporting. They attach themselves to wider ideas about people, culture, history, and political status.

This is why the World Cup is never only about football. It is about recognition.

For established powers, victory confirms status. For smaller or historically marginalised countries, success offers a way of appearing on the world stage that is otherwise denied by military, economic, or diplomatic hierarchies.

Morocco’s continued success is a powerful example. After becoming the first African and Arab team to reach a World Cup semi-final in 2022, Morocco has again used the tournament to claim global visibility. Its 3-0 victory over Canada⁠ in the round of 16 set up another politically resonant meeting with France, the former colonial power it faced in 2022.

The politics here are not reducible to a simple anti-colonial script. Morocco’s team is itself shaped by migration, diaspora, European academies, and transnational football labour. But that is precisely the point. World Cup nationalism today is not old-fashioned territorial nationalism. It is nationalism made through globalisation.

Diasporic players, migrant fans, satellite television, social media, global sponsorships, and cross-border identities all help produce the nation as a footballing object.

The nation remains powerful, but it is assembled through transnational networks.

Football in a multipolar world

This matters because the World Cup now unfolds in a more multipolar international order.

Western dominance is less secure. China, the Gulf states, India, Brazil, and others are seeking greater influence. African and Arab teams increasingly demand recognition beyond the old hierarchy of European and South American football. Host states use sport to project modernity, competence, and global relevance.

The 2026 tournament is itself politically charged. It is co-hosted by three North American countries at a time when the United States, Canada, and Mexico are entangled in disputes over borders, trade, migration, and regional power. Human rights organisations have warned that the World Cup’s promise of openness sits uneasily with US immigration policies, visa bans and deportation raids that can restrict access for fans, journalists, workers and local communities⁠.

Sport therefore does not escape geopolitics. It translates geopolitics into a more emotionally acceptable register.

This is why the World Cup is so useful to states. It allows them to perform openness while policing borders, celebrate diversity while managing dissent, and invite the world while ranking nations through spectacle.

Sport does not escape geopolitics, but translates it into a more emotionally acceptable register

FIFA benefits from the same contradiction. It markets the tournament as universal, but it organises this universality through national competition. The world comes together only by separating itself into teams, flags, anthems, and winners.

Even the soundscape of the tournament reflects this managed nationalism. Reuters recently reported that FIFA works with national associations to curate stadium music, including songs connected to particular teams and countries. The result is not spontaneous national feeling alone, but national identity packaged for broadcast, sponsorship, and emotional consumption.

Recognition and exclusion

To be sure, World Cup nationalism is not always reactionary.

Football can produce real joy, solidarity, and dignity. It can allow diasporic communities to gather publicly around shared belonging. It can give smaller countries a sense of visibility otherwise denied in global politics. And it can unsettle Eurocentric assumptions about who belongs among football’s elite.

Norwegian fans perform the 'Viking Row', a team celebration where fans mimic the movement of rowing a boat, while chanting Ro! Photo: Facebook

But this is precisely why we should take it seriously.

Football enables diasporic communities to gather publicly around shared belonging, giving smaller countries a visibility otherwise denied in global politics

Indeed, the World Cup shows that nationalism remains one of the most powerful affective forms in modern politics. It can be exclusionary, but it can also be emancipatory. It can serve states and corporations, but it can also express the pride of communities long treated as peripheral.

The problem is that FIFA, broadcasters, sponsors, host governments, and security apparatuses increasingly govern these emotions. National belonging becomes both a collective experience and a commercial asset.

Fans create the atmosphere. States claim the prestige. Corporations capture the value.

The politics did not disappear

The World Cup may appear to suspend politics. It does the opposite.

The tournament concentrates politics into an intensely watchable form. It shows how national identity survives globalisation, how soft power operates through popular emotion, and how nations fight for recognition in symbolic as well as material arenas.

This is why the tournament matters for political science. It is not a distraction from world politics. It is one of the places where world politics becomes visible.

In a supposedly global age, the World Cup reminds us that the nation has not disappeared. It has been televised, sponsored, securitised, and made spectacular.

Nationalism did not leave the field. It became the game.

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