There is a comforting lie we tell ourselves about football.
We tell ourselves that the white lines of the pitch enclose a neutral republic. That when twenty two players step onto the grass, borders fade, armies disappear, and the burdens of the world are suspended for ninety minutes. It is an old belief, deeply cherished and endlessly repeated. It allows us to surrender to the beauty of the game without asking uncomfortable questions about the forces that shape it.
But it has never been true.
Football has never existed outside politics. Not because politicians occasionally intrude upon the game, but because the game itself has become one of the most valuable instruments of prestige, legitimacy, and influence in modern public life. The World Cup is no longer merely a sporting competition. It is one of the largest political stages on earth, a month long spectacle through which nations present themselves to the world and powerful institutions negotiate their place within it.
At the center of that spectacle stands FIFA, an organization that speaks endlessly of neutrality while repeatedly demonstrating that neutrality is often less a principle than a convenience.
Few concepts have entered football’s vocabulary as rapidly as sportswashing. During the build up to the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, the term became unavoidable. Questions about migrant labor, civil liberties, political freedoms, and the treatment of minority communities dominated international coverage. Newspapers, broadcasters, activists, and politicians subjected both Qatar and FIFA to intense scrutiny. Whether one agreed with every criticism or not, there was little doubt that the tournament was examined through a moral and political lens.
Yet the language surrounding subsequent tournaments reveals a striking asymmetry.
When major Western powers host global sporting events, the conversation often changes. The same media institutions that eagerly frame non Western hosts through the language of legitimacy, image management, and reputation laundering frequently adopt a different vocabulary when the host belongs to the established centers of global power. The event becomes a celebration. The political context recedes. Questions that once appeared urgent become peripheral.
This inconsistency deserves examination.
If sportswashing refers to the use of sport to enhance a nation’s international image, then the concept cannot apply only to states that lack geopolitical influence. Powerful nations possess reputations to manage, interests to advance, and narratives to shape just as surely as any monarchy, developing state, or regional power. A principle that operates selectively is not a principle. It is a preference disguised as one.
The 2026 World Cup offered a revealing example.
Spread across the United States, Canada, and Mexico, the tournament represented the largest World Cup ever staged. It covered vast distances, required unprecedented logistical coordination, and placed millions of supporters within one of the most sophisticated border and surveillance environments in the world.
Long before the opening match, concerns emerged about visas, travel restrictions, and access.
Fans from parts of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East faced lengthy visa processing times and significant bureaucratic hurdles. For many supporters, attending the tournament required navigating multiple immigration systems across three countries. The practical result was that access to football’s greatest celebration remained deeply unequal. The tournament belonged to the world in theory. In practice, participation was often determined by the accident of nationality and the privilege of mobility.
The experience of Somali referee Omar Abdulkadir Artan illustrated this reality in particularly stark fashion. Selected as the first Somali official ever appointed to a World Cup finals, he arrived carrying not only official documentation but the hopes of an entire footballing community. Yet his journey became a story not of sporting achievement but of administrative exclusion. His experience raised uncomfortable questions about who is welcomed into the global game and who remains subject to heightened scrutiny, even while participating in its most prestigious event.
These contradictions were not incidental. They were embedded within the structure of the tournament itself.
As players crossed multiple time zones and traveled thousands of kilometers between venues, concerns about competitive balance, player welfare, and scheduling fairness became increasingly difficult to dismiss. At the same time, soaring travel costs and expensive ticket prices placed attendance beyond the reach of many ordinary supporters. The World Cup presented itself as a global festival while remaining inaccessible to large portions of the global public.
Yet FIFA’s response to many of these concerns was notably restrained.
This is where the organization’s claims of neutrality become difficult to sustain. FIFA routinely invokes political neutrality as a governing principle. Article 4 of its statutes speaks in lofty language about preventing political discrimination and maintaining independence from political influence. But neutrality is meaningful only when applied consistently. An organization cannot become fiercely attentive to political realities in one host nation and conspicuously indifferent to them in another.
The issue is not whether Qatar deserved scrutiny. Every World Cup host deserves scrutiny.
The issue is whether the standards applied in Doha are equally applied in Los Angeles, Mexico City, Toronto, Riyadh, Moscow, Beijing, or any other city fortunate enough to host the world’s most powerful sporting event.
That question ultimately extends beyond football.
The debate over sportswashing is, at its core, a debate about power. It asks who possesses the authority to define legitimacy, whose political shortcomings become international scandals, and whose are quietly absorbed into the background of normality. The answers are rarely determined by universal principles. More often, they reflect existing hierarchies within the international order.
Football merely provides the stage upon which those hierarchies become visible.
When the final whistle blows and the trophy is lifted, the temptation is always to remember only the goals, the celebrations, and the moments of sporting brilliance. Those moments deserve to be remembered. They are the reason billions of people continue to love the game.
But they are not the whole story.
The modern World Cup is not simply a football tournament. It is a gathering point for money, influence, diplomacy, national image, and institutional power. To pretend otherwise is to misunderstand the scale of what football has become.
The old fantasy persists because it is comforting. We want to believe that the pitch remains a sanctuary untouched by politics. We want to believe that once the whistle sounds, power yields to merit and the world recedes into the background.
Yet every World Cup reminds us of the opposite truth.
The pitch is not separate from the world. It is one of the places where the world reveals itself most clearly.
Stephanie Shaakaa
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