World Cup 2026: Variations on a Theme
The free world has not forgotten how tyranny uses sport. It has simply grown comfortable pretending that the lesson no longer applies.
Mussolini understood the value of football long before modern public-relations firms gave the practice a softer name. The 1934 World Cup gave Fascist Italy a stage on which power, discipline and national supremacy could be performed before the world. Two years later, Hitler’s Berlin Olympics offered Nazi Germany an even grander spectacle: a temporary pageant of order, beauty and national confidence, carefully arranged to conceal persecution, racism and militarism.
The lesson was never that sport becomes political by accident. The lesson was that authoritarian states understand sport’s political force better than many democracies do. They understand that a stadium can manufacture emotion, that a national jersey can disguise coercion, and that a medal, a goal or an anthem can be used to suggest a unity that does not exist.
Iran’s ruling regime has never had the prestige or the means to host a World Cup or an Olympic Games. It does not need to. Authoritarian power does not require ownership of the stage when it can insert itself into the spectacle, exploit its visibility and turn national representation into another instrument of control. The 2026 World Cup offered precisely such an opportunity.
History also teaches the opposite lesson. Sport can give the powerless a stage when other stages have been closed. In 1968, Czech gymnast Věra Čáslavská lowered her head during the Soviet anthem after the invasion of her country. Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised gloved fists on the Olympic podium to protest racial injustice in America. Colin Kaepernick took a knee because he could not stand for a flag while Black Americans were being killed with impunity.
None of them contaminated sport. They exposed the contamination already present in public life.
Sport is often described as a space apart from ideology, party discipline and state propaganda. Yet athletes and spectators need not leave conscience outside the stadium. Engagement with political reality is not the same as partisan involvement, nor an attempt to contaminate sport with ideology. The attempt to make sport “apolitical” has often meant something narrower and more convenient: allowing power to use the spectacle while denying everyone else the right to answer it.
At the 2026 World Cup, the Islamic regime made that problem impossible to ignore.
Iran did not arrive as a normal national team carrying the ordinary hopes and anxieties of a footballing nation. It arrived as a contested symbol: claimed by a regime that does not represent its people, watched by a public divided by grief, anger and political exhaustion, and defended by some as a group of athletes trapped inside a system they did not create.
All of these reactions contain part of the truth. None is sufficient on its own.