The 2026 FIFA World Cup will unfold amid intensifying U.S. militarism, imperial consolidation, and border securitisation. Rather than standing outside these realities, the tournament risks functioning as spectacle for empire — projecting “global unity” while systems of extraction, anti-Blackness and unequal mobility deepen globally. Football mega-events have never been politically neutral. From the 1934 World Cup staged under Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime in Italy to the 1978 tournament hosted under Argentina’s military dictatorship, global football has repeatedly been mobilised to legitimise authoritarianism, elite power and geopolitical influence. The question is therefore not whether football is political, but whether the game can survive these ultra-capitalist-dictatorship-merged forces, seen in corporate capture, militarised borders, and increasingly authoritarian forms of governance.
The 2026 tournament arrives amid escalating geopolitical instability and a decline in U.S. global legitimacy. Ongoing support for Israel’s assault on Gaza and Palestinian-occupied territories, confrontation with Iran, sanctions against Cuba and Venezuela, and the expansion of military infrastructures all form part of a broader architecture of imperial control. The United States maintains roughly 750 military bases globally and spends close to a trillion dollars annually on military infrastructure and warfare. In this context, the World Cup becomes useful soft power at a moment when U.S. authority is increasingly contested.
Football is used to project openness and multiculturalism while borders harden and migration is criminalised. As sports scholar Jules Boykoff has argued, mega-events increasingly function as political spaces where expanded state power is normalised through spectacle.
FIFA, meanwhile, presents itself as politically neutral while functioning as one of the most powerful corporate institutions in global sport. FIFA generated approximately $7.5 billion during the Qatar World Cup cycle while host states and cities absorbed enormous public costs. Mega-events are routinely sold through the language of jobs, regeneration and economic opportunity, yet the outcomes are often far more uneven. This is on top of widespread human rights violations against migrants who laboured to make the World Cup hosting possible.
The 2012 London Olympics were promoted as a vehicle for regenerating East London. Yet, researchers and local activists documented rising property values, displacement pressures and accelerated gentrification across areas such as Hackney Wick and Stratford. Similar dynamics emerged elsewhere. In South Africa 2010, FIFA exclusion zones restricted informal traders and local vendors from accessing lucrative commercial spaces around stadiums and fan parks. In Brazil 2014, stadium expansion and urban redevelopment displaced poor and largely Black communities while billions in public resources flowed into tournament infrastructure. In each case, the language of regeneration concealed a transfer of value: from public to private, from local to global, and from communities to corporations. Ticket pricing and corporate hospitality increasingly exclude ordinary supporters and working-class football culture. The World Cup increasingly resembles a heavily securitised corporate commodity rather than a genuinely public sporting festival.
The 2026 tournament also risks deepening border securitisation under the language of “World Cup security.” Canada, Mexico and the United States have already outlined trilateral security coordination frameworks for the tournament, including cross-border policing and security cooperation. Human rights groups have warned that the U.S. World Cup may create a climate of fear for fans, workers and journalists because of aggressive immigration enforcement and visa uncertainty, including for players. Fans from countries outside the U.S. Visa Waiver Program must obtain visitor visas to attend matches in the United States. U.S. visa refusal rates remain extremely high for several African and Global South countries, meaning the tournament’s promise of “global unity” will be filtered through deeply unequal mobility regimes before many supporters even reach the stadium. Sponsors, executives and wealthy tourists move through expedited systems while supporters from Africa, the Caribbean, the Arab world and Latin America confront suspicion, delays and exclusion. The border is not outside the tournament. It is one of the tournament’s hidden infrastructures.
One of the opening matches of the tournament, Haiti versus Scotland, symbolically exposes many of these contradictions. Haiti has returned to the FIFA World Cup stage after a 52-year absence, a key milestone the country is celebrating amid imperial violence imposed on it. Haiti represents one of the greatest anti-colonial victories in modern history: the only successful slave revolution resulting in the first Black republic in the Western hemisphere. France imposed an “independence debt” that extracted wealth from Haiti for generations after liberation, while the United States continued cycles of occupation and intervention. As Jemima Pierre argues, Haiti remains a powerful illustration of how anti-Blackness operates through intervention, debt, dispossession and containment rather than through overt racism alone.
The anti-Black architecture of the World Cup is similarly visible not only on the pitch but in how mega-events reorganise cities, ownership and economic opportunity. FIFA 2010 in South Africa demonstrated how global corporations often captured the benefits of the tournament while indigent and working-class communities were pushed to the margins. Informal traders and local vendors were excluded from lucrative trading zones around stadiums and fan parks while FIFA-controlled commercial spaces prioritised licensed sponsors and approved vendors. Similar dynamics emerged in Brazil in 2014, where urban “beautification” and securitisation displaced poor and largely Black communities.
Racism within football itself also remains deeply entrenched despite FIFA’s diversity campaigns. Black players continue to face racist abuse across elite football systems, from the treatment of Vinícius Júnior in Spain to repeated incidents across European football. As Amira Rose Davis reminds us, sport is inseparable from broader struggles over race, labour, citizenship and belonging. Sports scholar Ben Carrington similarly argues that modern sport often celebrates Black visibility while resisting deeper transformations in power and inequality.
One of Africa’s most celebrated referees, Omar Artan, who was set to be the first Somali to referee at the World Cup finals, has been refused entry to the United States. Artan, the 2025 Confederation of African Football (Caf) men’s referee of the year, was turned back at the US border just days before the World Cup opening.
Yet football became the world’s game because it was a working-class game: built in factories, docks, mines, plantations, townships and marginalised urban communities long before FIFA transformed it into a corporate spectacle. The exclusion of ordinary supporters through pricing, securitisation and corporate hospitality is therefore not incidental — it is the displacement of the very communities that built the game itself. Football has historically carried anti-colonial and democratic possibilities, from Algerian liberation organising to township football under apartheid and Palestinian football under occupation.
The next World Cups, including those linked to Morocco and Saudi Arabia, will raise many of these same questions again: who controls global football, who profits from mega-events, whose labour and land are mobilised, and whether football can remain a public culture rather than an elite spectacle. Reclaiming football, therefore, means resisting its capture by authoritarianism, by corporations, by militarised borders and by elite governance structures that increasingly displace the very communities that made the game global in the first place.
As Eduardo Galeano once wrote, football’s history is a struggle between the joy of the game and the demands of the market. The question has never been whether football is political. The question is whether football can survive the militarised and unequal order increasingly governing the world itself.
Featured photo by Benita Barnard: Wide-angle view of the empty Cape Town Stadium, Cape Town, South Africa
Lebohang Liepollo Pheko is an activist scholar and feminist political economist. She has roots in South Africa, Lesotho, and Zambia and works at the intersection of decolonial feminism, global political economy, and reparative justice. She analyses power and dispossession, viewing racial capitalism as a foundational entry point of contemporary dysfunction. Liepollo works in community with many social movements. Twitter: Liepollo9
Anne Marie Collins (she/her) was born and raised in Glasgow, rooted in generations of displaced people resulting from the British occupation in Ireland, who have continually resisted British and all empires. Currently, she co-organize EqualHealth’s Campaign Against Racism, a global movement of healers, health workers, and community organizers resisting and interrupting the harm of racial capitalism.