Ode to football: Can the FIFA World Cup bring peace to the world?
Why this matters: an international story with cross-border implications worth tracking.
The FIFA World Cup begins on 11 June 2026, hosted across Canada, Mexico and the United States—the first time the tournament has been shared by three countries. It opens, however, in a world gripped by convulsions: war in the Middle East, war in Sudan, insecurity across the Sahel, and conflict and tension in many other regions. Even public health anxieties have not disappeared. At such a moment, any event that gathers humanity around a common spectacle carries a significance larger than entertainment. It reflects not only our vulnerabilities, but also our aspirations and our capacity for joy. The World Cup has never been insulated from politics or war. The 1934 tournament in Mussolini’s Italy was deployed as a showcase for fascist propaganda. The 1978 World Cup in Argentina unfolded under a military dictatorship that sought international legitimacy even as it faced accusations of grave human rights abuses. Two World Cups—those scheduled for 1942 and 1946—were cancelled altogether because of the Second World War. Football does not stand outside history. It plays within history, and sometimes helps to shape it. Recent tournaments have shown the same pattern. At the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, the match between the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran was widely seen as one of the most politically charged fixtures of the competition, shaped by decades of hostility between the two states. Yet the encounter also recalled an earlier and gentler moment: at the 1998 World Cup in France, Iranian players offered white roses to the Americans before kick-off, a small but memorable gesture that suggested football can, at least briefly, soften even the hardest political symbolism. Must it always be so? I think not. The World Cup, with its unmatched power to draw billions of viewers across continents, can also become a demonstration of global fraternity and camaraderie. FIFA’s own figures show that around five billion people engaged with the 2022 World Cup in one form or ano