World Cup 2026: Sport, Power, Imperialism, Inequality and Resistance

The much-awaited 2026 World Cup kicks off today as co-host Mexico and 2010 host South Africa clash at the Azteca Stadium in Mexico City. The tournament is hosted by three countries in North America - Canada, Mexico, and the United States of America. 

This year’s World Cup boasts 1248 players and 48 teams. The numbers represent a huge growth from the modest 13 nations that competed in the World Cup in July 1930 in Uruguay. Two of the co-hosts, Mexico and the United States, represented North and Central America, France and Belgium (Western Europe), Romania and Yugoslavia (Southeastern Europe - Balkans)^[1], and seven countries - Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay - represented South America. 

Only two continental African countries were independent at the time, but they were not affiliated with FIFA during the first World Cup. The invitation-only nature of the tournament meant that the two countries could not participate even if the economic, transportation and footballing conditions in the country permitted them. The rest of the continent was engaging in the organization and mobilization processes to end colonial domination. The colonial grip of Europe on Africa could not allow for the representation of the colonies. The political evolution and struggles for self-determination and representation that have characterised football/soccer reflect in part the struggles for liberation and representation that African peoples have engaged in over the years. 

The absence of an African nation at the first World Cup, however, did not mean that Global Africa was not in world football from the inception. The record of Uruguay’s victory cannot be mentioned without the starring midfield role of José Leandro Andrade Quiroz ("La Maravilla Negra," the Black Wonder). Brazil, as the most populous nation with peoples of African descent, had its notable black footballers such as Fausto dos Santos. 

Since Egypt’s debut in 1934, Africa, except for the 1966 World Cup boycott, has received 0-5 World Cup slots in football history. In 2010, when South Africa hosted the World Cup, Africa had 6 teams in the tournament. 

In 2026, ten continental African teams are participating in the World Cup: Algeria (The Fennecs), Cape Verde (The Blue Sharks), DR Congo (The Leopards), Ghana (The Black Stars), Egypt (The Pharaohs), Ivory Coast (The Elephants), Morocco (The Atlas Lions), Senegal (The Lions of Teranga), South Africa (Bafana Bafana), and Tunisia (The Eagles of Carthage). These teams add to the global African representation in North American, South American and European teams to position African peoples in the collective share of the joy, inspiration, excitement, heartaches, and memories football provides the players and the audience. 

At the same time, the continent and African peoples are not exempt from the politics of football and the implications of foreign and domestic politics of host countries for participating teams and officials. The instrumentalization of football and sports manifests in sportswashing where authoritarian regimes seek to harness footballing moments and soccer icons to evade scrutiny and accountability from their citizens. In another vein, football and sports in general, becomes a tool to entrench blockades and demonstrate political and supremacist muscle against countries a host nation disagrees with, and persons in service of world football who come from countries blacklisted by the host country. Cuba is one of the countries that have been consistently blocked by the US in all sporting events. The US blockade of Cuban athletes, coaches, and sports officials from entering the U.S.A and its territories has continued for decades and culminated in an estimated 100 blockades in 2025 alone.^[2] In the 2026 World Cup, the ban of sports officials has been extended to Iran and Somalia. The US-War on Iran is being fought at the World Cup stage through visa restrictions and denial of visa to administrative officials including Iran’s Federation President Mehdi Taj. The case of Omar Abdulkadir Artan, FIFA's top African official of Somali origin raises even more pertinent questions for FIFA in the choice of host countries and the distribution of officials and teams among hosts or co-hosts of global and regional tournaments. 

Nineteen match officials are representing Africa among the 170 match officials who will oversee the Mondial within 11 June – 19 July, 2026. Omar Abdulkadir Artan is one of seven referees among the 19 officials, and the remaining twelve include 10 assistant referees and two Video Assistant Referees (VAR).^[3] In enforcing its travel ban against Somalia, the U.S denied Omar Artan entry, effectively denying him the opportunity to officiate World Cup matches. 

The denials raise several questions. If FIFA was aware of countries on the US travel ban list, could it not have arranged for these countries and their officials to stay and play their matches outside the United States? Since FIFA does not have control over a country’s foreign and immigration policy, could it not use this limited capacity as an opportunity to engage more equitably by contacting other co-host nations to host Omar for officiating duties? In service to global football, will FIFA allow every host country to deny officials or athletes from other countries the opportunity to participate in a tournament if the hosts are at war or disagree with those countries? Will the lessons from hosting the 2026 World Cup increase focus on the multi-country hosting model in cases where any bidder has travel bans? What alternatives can be put in place to ensure that, in the case of a single host nation, diplomatic wars and other forms of aggression will not deny athletes and their officials from participating in tournaments? The answers to these questions can be extended to other forms of sports and hosting rights. 

Football’s capacity to inspire collective joy, national pride, and cultural memory is well documented. The collective humanity it instils in people across race, economic status, and geography makes it and other sports, spaces that must be jealously guarded against appropriation by authoritarian regimes, use as a bullet in the gun for diplomatic wars, and instruments for the enforcement of embargo.

As Evans Rubara demonstrates in his analysis of post-election Tanzania in this issue of Pambazuka News, the sport is susceptible to strategic appropriation. Rubara traces how the Tanzanian government’s invitation of football icons Didier Drogba and Rio Ferdinand coincided with efforts to deflect scrutiny from the violent aftermath of the October 2025 general election—an event that left over five hundred civilians dead, according to a presidential commission whose findings many have rejected as a whitewash. Situating these visits within the global pattern of sportswashing, from Nazi Germany’s 1936 Olympics to contemporary Gulf state investments, Rubara argues that such distractions offer regimes temporary breathing room while leaving unresolved grievances to fester. The paradox, he notes, is that football-mad publics are increasingly literate in these tactics, rendering the sport a contested political arena rather than a unifying escape.

Where Rubara focuses on the instrumentalization of football by post-colonial states, Yusuf Bangura’s article turns to the tournament’s affective and historical dimensions. In his pre-tournament commentary, Bangura celebrates the musical energy of the 2026 World Cup—highlighting Shakira and Burna Boy’s “Dai Dai” alongside IShowSpeed’s fan-driven “Champion”—and offers an extended reflection on Netflix’s “Brazil 70: The Three Stars.” That series, Bangura notes, does not shy away from the repressive military dictatorship under which Brazil’s legendary 1970 triumph unfolded, weaving together dressing-room conflicts, political interference, and the haunting memory of the 1950 Maracanazo. The juxtaposition is instructive: even football’s most celebrated moments are embedded in structures of authoritarian power, yet the sport’s aesthetic and emotional pull endure, often in tension with the very regimes that seek to harness it.

These two contributions frame football as a terrain of both liberation and manipulation. They invite readers to consider how the beautiful game is deployed—by governments, by corporations, by international federations—to manage perception, manufacture consent, or simply sell tickets. It is precisely this nexus of sport, sovereignty, and spectacle that the following interview with an Iranian anti-imperialist scholar explores. Focusing on the 2026 World Cup hosted by the United States, Mexico and Canada, the scholar dissects the contradictions of an empire that simultaneously bans athletes from Somalia, Iran, and Iraq while claiming to host a global festival of unity. From denied visas and humiliating airport searches to labour strikes and the carceral logic of ICE (Immigration & Customs Enforcement), the interview lays bare how the tournament’s exclusionary machinery mirrors deeper imperial wars. Read alongside Rubara’s critique of sportswashing in Africa and Bangura’s meditation on football’s political ghosts, the conversation that follows offers a necessary provocation: can any World Cup, under any sovereign power, truly be universal? 

The questions surrounding the World Cup also relate to struggles for sexual rights, equity in conservation practices, instrumentality of religion for domestic, imperialist and supremacist agendas, repositioning of geopolitical forces losing hold on Africa, and solidarity with Cuba. While the moment of the tournament persists, questions remain whether members of the sexual minorities might not be repressed during celebrations in this soccer moment, as criminalization and mob action against suspected LGBTQIA+ persons increases in Ethiopia and other parts of Africa. Betre Gatun reveals that continental and global pressures will be essential in protecting the lives peoples who might be suspected of expressing ‘sexual deviance.’ 

Equity is expected on the playing fields across the US, Canada and Mexico. Humanity is also required to introspect on the lies in conservation practices that favour the wealthiest and create hero worship of men who exploit these practices. James Mulei’s review of “The Big Conversation Lie” offers insights into the call for equitable conservation practices. Similarly, global disparity in health privileges treatments for the rich in society, most of whom also have the means to pay for the exorbitant and exclusionist ticket prices of the 2026 World Cup. Diseases of poverty and treatments that cannot offer the highest bid, as Danielle Taana Smith reveals, are neglected, and pharmaceutical companies move to cash in by concentrating predominantly on diseases that pay.

Within the first few days of the World Cup, the White House will host a Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) Freedom 250 in commemoration of the US president’s 80th birthday on June 14, 2026. The event, while commemorating the US President’s Octogenarian milestone, represents yet another moment where sports epitomise and serve political power. Indeed, sports and other passion-generating rallying points such as religion and faith serve political purposes in diverse ways, from imperialist strongholds to internal political manipulations in Africa. Otobong Inieke’s analysis positions Nigeria as a country where external instrumentalization of religion has served historical purposes in dividing the country into a Muslim north and Christian south, and local politicians, powerful think tanks, and predatory governments manipulate religion for material interests. At the same time, ethno-religious conflicts, banditry and other forms of insecurity are utilized as context for foreign intervention in the country as the government struggles to end violence in Nigeria. 

Nonetheless, the geopolitical field of play continues to expand like teams competing in successive World Cup tournaments. The current World Cup has an extended group stage and knock-out stages. The seven rounds of the tournament, including the introduction of the round of 32 has rendered the World Cup a prolonged battlefront towards the ultimate football prize. In this battlefield, spectators and players underestimate any team they are playing against to their own detriment. Powerful and well-resourced countries may come to recognize that less well-armed adversaries can still inflict strategic defeat or, at the very least, impose significant costs in their pursuit of dominance.

Like the 2026 war in the Straits of Hormuz, the price of victory or defeat will not be paid only by the participating countries, but also by the global audience. As the geopolitical chessboard shifts within sports and politics, France’s pivot to East Africa and the rhetoric of partnership remain questionable, regardless of the deployment of sports as an area for French investment in Africa. Rais Boneza diagnoses the partnership ‘talks’ of President Macron of France in the Africa Forward Summit and records the print of an arsonist’s script in the repositioning of France. Global Africa requires French accountability for its past atrocities, and reckoning in the face of the repeal of the French law which viewed enslavement as a crime against humanity. The repeal of the domestic legislation affirms the country’s abstention from the historic vote at the UN that highlighted the transatlantic enslavement of Africans as the gravest crime against humanity. Interestingly, France has been invited and has accepted to attend the 17-19 June 2026 High-Level Next Step Conference on Reparatory Justice in Accra on the way forward after the historic verdict on the transatlantic enslavement. It remains to be seen whether this participation will compel France to confront its historical legacy and reassess policies and practices that continue to limit economic, social, and political transformation in Africa. While France reflects on its historical responsibilities, we also join the Academic Staff Association of the University of Dar es Salaam in demanding an end to the United States' blockade and embargo of Cuba, whose effects continue to be felt across the economy, energy sector, healthcare system, and sporting life.

The politics surrounding the 2026 World Cup are emblematic of broader struggles by peoples around the world against injustice, racism, repression, authoritarianism, inequality, and war.

We look forward to a wonderful tournament and lessons for the transformation of the organization of subsequent World Cups to circumvent blockades, detention, visa restrictions, and denial of entry for officials and players, as well as fairer pricing for sports lovers who wish to attend the stadium.

Endnotes