Not for nothing does Eleven Named People take its title from historian Eric Hobsbawm’s observation that “the imagined community of millions seems more real as a team of eleven named people.” Predictably this series of 11 questions to a guest explores how sport shapes attachment, identity, memory, and belonging.

Each guest answers the same questions, naming the players, teams, matches, and rivalries that matter most to them. Responses are brief and direct.

First up is Ron Krabill, sociologist, director of the Global Sports Lab at the University of Washington, and a professor of mass media, politics and sociology and editor of The World Cup: The Syllabus at the same university. Ron and I go way back: he first linked me with The New School when I was still a graduate student at the University of London, but that is a story for another day.

When you think about sports teams, what is the first team that really felt like your team — not just one you watched, but one you felt connected to personally?

The Big Red Machine (the 1970s Cincinnati Reds)

Who was the first player whose name you memorized — the first one who really captured your imagination? What made them stand out to you?

Davey Concepción: he was a superstar who played my position (shortstop) on my favorite baseball team.

Did you choose the professional club team and league you support yourself, or did you inherit them from family, community, or circumstance?

As a footballer in Northern Indiana in the 1980s, there wasn’t a team to inherit from those around me. So I chose the team (FC Barcelona) on my own, but based on inherited values.

Does the national team you associate with stand in for the “state of the nation”? How? Put differently, does the national team you support tell you something about how you feel about your country and how?

“It’s complicated.” My association with US National Teams is tenuous at most, varies between the USWNT and USMNT, and is ... evolving.

Have you ever fallen out of love with a team or a sport? What changed?

Absolutely. The Dallas Cowboys. I learned about the team’s politics while my own world view expanded beyond a relatively provincial childhood.

For you, what is the greatest rivalry in sports history, and what makes it so compelling?

El Clásico. The overlay of the Spanish Civil War, fascism v anarchism, Galácticos v La Masia, nationalism v communalism, European dominance, multiple GOAT candidates, contrasting styles, and an incredibly long, evenly fought history.

Who is the single greatest player of all time in that sport, in your view?

Lionel Messi, because of his combination of goalscoring and playmaking.

Can you put together your all-time greatest eleven (men or women or combined) in your chosen sport?

Hope Solo (G), Paolo Maldini (D), Wendie Renard (D, above), Cafu (D), Xavi (M), Michelle Akers (M), Zinedine Zidane (M), Aitana Bonmati (M), Lionel Messi (AM/F), Diego Maradona (AM/F) and Pele (AM/F).

What song best matches your team’s energy, rhythm, or attitude?

“Blend” by Gaël Faye featuring Tumi

What film best captures the feelings or memories you associate with sport and fandom?

Hoosiers

Finally, just for fun: could you put together a metaphorical “starting eleven”—a team of eleven named people drawn from culture, politics, intellectual life, music, film, or elsewhere—arranged like a sports team? For example, Thomas Sankara, Miriam Makeba, Rosa Luxemburg, Abdullah Ibrahim, Trotsky, and so on. They can all be intellectuals, all musicians, or any combination you like.

Stuart Hall (G), James Baldwin (D), Octavia Butler (D), Guillermo Del Toro (D), Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (DM), Patrice Lumumba (CAM), Antonio Gramsci (CAM), Rhiannon Giddens (LW), Angélique Kidjo (RW), N.K. Jemisin (F) and David Byrne (F).

This World Cup has exposed the weaknesses and contradictions of hosting global sporting events, while also creating opportunities for workers and local communities to win changes that make the tournament more accessible, affordable, and safe.

Among international sporting bodies, FIFA’s reputation is widely criticized as among the most corrupt, inflexible, and profit-driven of largely unregulated institutions.

The 2026 World Cup has exposed deeper worker and labor issues, particularly around accountability for the fan and local experience. FIFA has shifted responsibility for public transportation, security, and infrastructure onto host cities while retaining the majority of matchday revenue through ticketing, concessions, and parking. Across the US and Canada, host city agreements – often signed under prior elected administrations – have locked in terms that favor international officials and corporate partners over taxpayers, budget planners, and frontline hospitality workers. The resulting tensions among policymakers, hospitality workers, and FIFA have highlighted structural vulnerabilities in hosting mega-events, while also creating space for workers and local communities to push for greater fairness, affordability, and safety in the delivery of the World Cup.

At Los Angeles Stadium at Hollywood Park in Inglewood, California (SoFi Stadium), workers have leveraged the start of the Cup to win a new contract and protections against ICE. UNITE HERE Local 11 announced its willingness to strike in the lead-up to matches kicking off, but announced that they had reached a tentative agreement last week: “The tentative agreement secures massive wage increases, landmark job protections, and groundbreaking privacy rights. Notably, it includes an explicit right to strike if ICE or Border Patrol activity at the worksite threatens worker safety.”

Similar willingness to strike was also announced by UNITE HERE Local 8, representing hotel workers in the Pacific Northwest, with workers bargaining for similar protections, including, like those in Los Angeles, a right to strike if worker safety is threatened by federal immigration enforcement. Citing progress in negotiations and alluding to potential concessions won, UNITE HERE LOCAL 274 in Philadelphia postponed strikes in advance of the June 12th deadline for their hotel, room attendants, cooks, servers, bartenders, dishwashers, and banquet staff.

The magnitude of the tournament's return to the United States for the first time in 32 years represents an opportunity for matchday and hospitality workers with expiring or lapsed contracts to bargain for unprecedented wins.

Media coverage of ticket prices and hotel block cancellations by FIFA increases pressure, alongside the time pressure of the start of the tournaments, highlighting the strategic importance of timing and climate in negotiations with management, even if FIFA claims it is not directly involved.

The tournament, like many international sporting tournaments, is touted by FIFA and partnering political leaders as a unique, one-in-a-lifetime, business and revenue opportunity. A host country is promised increased tourism and quarterly and annual revenue projections, jobs, and infrastructure projects. But it has now been proven that the World Cup doesn’t come with any of these. Much of the cost is borne by local taxpayers, while FIFA and partnering corporate entities rake in the majority of the resulting revenue.

To offset taxpayer costs, city and state governments in the US and Canada purchased tickets directly from FIFA for resale, reducing the financial burden of hosting the tournament. In Toronto and Vancouver, where matches will be played at Toronto Stadium (BMO Field) and BC Place, Vancouver Stadium (BC Place), city governments are selling packages to corporations and donors. Media coverage of record-high average ticket prices serves as marketing, but recent coverage of the collapse of FIFA’s ticketing release scheme and of ticket prices calls into question how profitable the scheme might be.

In New York and New Jersey, the city and state governments, respectively, have released limited numbers of tickets available through lottery or targeted groups.

New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced $50 tickets for 1,000 NYC residents with free round-trip bus tickets to and from the stadium. New Jersey countered by offering free tickets to 770 residents from specific community groups identified by the state. But all these efforts, while media-friendly, make little difference to the ticket fiasco.

This comes as ticket prices have plummeted from initial release prices, and fears of empty stadiums came to fruition on Mexico’s opening day.

For fans unlucky enough to score a city- or state-level ticket and unwilling or unable to pay record prices, FIFA and host cities are also offering official Fanfests. These fanzones offer large festival-like viewing experiences: “fans will gather for live match broadcasts on large-scale video boards, immersive fan activations, and daily entertainment.” Many of these Fanfests are free to enter but require pre-reserved tickets, which are appearing on the secondary market at prices higher than the match tickets offered by the NYC lottery. The Fanfests’ appeal is simple: the next closest thing to being in the stadium. Attendees can reasonably expect to hold a ticket, not bring in outside food or drink, experience fans and free entertainment/performances, and watch the match. Early concession prices appear similar to those at stadiums, and many matches are viewed in standing-only areas, although in some locations seated tickets are still available at a price closer to the “get-in price” at a host stadium.

Fans in Boston traveling to the Boston Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts (Gillette Stadium), can expect to pay $80 for a round trip on matchday. Although the stadium size hasn’t increased from an NFL Sunday when fans travel to watch the New England Patriots, the price has ballooned 400% from the $20 round trip.

An NJ Transit train ticket from New York Penn Station to MetLife (renamed “New York/New Jersey Stadium” per FIFA regulations) costs $12.90 on non-matchdays throughout the summer. The same trip will cost ticketholders $105 on matchday throughout the 2026 World Cup. This is down from the initial price of $150, thanks in part to a partnership NJ Transit announced with the delivery app DoorDash to adorn the trains with its branding. Many of America’s public transportation authorities face budget shortfalls and degrading infrastructure. Increasing the matchday price for ticket holders is seen by officials as an additional opportunity to recoup costs associated with operations and matchday security.

The small town of Foxborough successfully took FIFA to task publicly over security funding. It withheld the necessary licensing to play in the “Boston Stadium” until it was received, again through a private partnership.

FIFA is also offering fans an opportunity to own a commemorative edition FIFA 2026 World Cup jersey for $375 - the price of a secondary market, last-minute match ticket. The limited-edition shirts are city-specific and meant to commemorate the host cities through an artistic expression of local iconography. There is no partner branding or local manufacturing on these, and they can only be purchased directly from FIFA or on the secondary market.

New York City is offering a locally sourced $50 alternative official limited-edition version that has locals lined up for its release. The jerseys were handmade in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, and are available in three colors at the official NYC City store on a first-come, first-served basis, offering an alternative public-private cooperative model centered on locality, authenticity, and affordability. Offering an alternative to the official FIFA iteration of anything seems to be a political-cultural win for football fans or locals wanting to engage with a World Cup insistent on trying to price them out.

Of course, contrary to singer Bono’s claim that the World Cup is the one time that the world comes together for one month, the World Cup is also about war and peace, fear and loathing, love and hate, hope and change. Anyone who has seen the animosity between opposing fans of any rivalry knows this. Sporting events can absolutely bring people together in powerful ways, but sports can also drive people apart and instigate violence – the examples are too numerous to mention.

When you add an overlay of nationalism onto these rivalries, as one does in both the Olympics and the World Cup, you have a recipe for inflaming those nationalisms and viewing sporting competitions as a proxy for warfare, implicitly if not explicitly. The US Men’s Hockey Team’s upset of the Soviets at the 1980 Olympics – the Miracle on Ice - was an incredible underdog story when viewed through our first lens. But who could deny that the resonance of that victory more than forty years later relies at least as much on its role in the history of the Cold War?

George Orwell lays out this argument in devastating fashion in his incisive 1945 essay, “The Spirit of the Game.” Orwell was writing in response to Dynamo Moscow’s goodwill tour of the United Kingdom, which by all accounts became an exceedingly violent series of matches.

“Sport is an unfailing cause of ill-will,” Orwell writes, because “as soon as you feel that you and some larger unit will be disgraced if you lose, the most savage combative instincts are aroused. … But the significant thing is not the behaviour of the players but the attitude of the spectators: and, behind the spectators, of the nations who work themselves into furies over these absurd contests, and seriously believe … that running, jumping and kicking a ball are tests of national virtue. … in other words, it is war minus the shooting.” Orwell concludes his essay by saying “There are quite enough real causes of trouble already, and we need not add to them by encouraging young men to kick each other on the shins amid the roars of infuriated spectators.”

These nationalistic approaches to watching are always lying very close under the surface of the World Cup. Indeed, organizing the tournament explicitly around national identities reifies the nation-state and the audience’s identification with the nation-state, even as the virtues of unity and sportsmanship are put forward.

The 1982 semifinal between West Germany and France – one of the first matches I can recall watching on television – conjured up bitter memories of the world wars. The match, which was eventually won by Germany in penalty kicks, was such an extremely rough and contentious affair that it was later called the Third World War by the French press and required a joint statement by the French president and the German chancellor to calm the tensions between the two nations afterwards.

In 2018, two Swiss players of Kosovar descent were fined by FIFA for celebrating their goals against Serbia with a gesture associated with Albanian nationalism and Kosovo independence, the double eagle. Then in 2022, the Serbian team hung a banner in their locker room with a national outline of Serbia which included Kosovo and the phrase “No Surrender.” Each of these events brought reminders of the war and genocide from the 1990s onto the pitch and into the dressing room.

Here in the States, much of the advertising and commentary in the run up to and during the World Cup will undoubtedly draw on nationalistic tropes as well. We also hear that nationalism in some of the ways the players get talked about in the commentaries: the current team is among the most diverse ever fielded by the US, and yet that coincides with criticisms by various commentators questioning the team’s worthiness, their commitment and their passion to “Play for the Badge.” It’s not hard to read that as coded language for questioning the sufficiency of their patriotism.

If you watch the World Cup through the lens of war by other means, you might choose to go all-in on your own nation, whichever nation that might be. Or in the case of two nations in geopolitical conflict, you might support the nation which you support in that broader conflict.

The US and Iran are the obvious examples during this World Cup, but past examples include England and Argentina following the Falklands War, or the many echoes of the World Wars.

But I also want to offer a sort of subcategory to watching the Cup as war by other means, to nuance it a bit and perhaps lend a more sympathetic take on this way of watching. Matches between former colonizers and their former colonies are often watched through a lens of anti-colonialism – a nationalism in resistance to empire. Some notable examples of this include Morocco’s victory against Spain in 2022, and Senegal’s shocking upset over the defending champions and their former colonizers, France, in the first match of the 2002 World Cup.

Our current era of globalized football migration complicates this even more. Many – and in some teams you would say most – of the biggest stars playing for the European favorites are from families who immigrated from former colonies, including Spain’s Lamine Yamal and France’s Kylian Mbappe, two of the biggest stars in world football. Likewise, many of the players for the teams of formerly colonized nations in the Global South were born, raised, and trained in the soccer academies of their former colonizers. In the recent African Cup of Nations, for instance, more than a sixth of the players in the tournament were born and raised in France.

This of course complicates both how we understand nationalism and how we watch the World Cup through this lens. You might lean into a love of the underdog and look for teams from the Global South, supporting them in matches against teams from the Global North. Or, you might look for the teams in the Global North that display the greatest diversity within their teams. I often find myself using both of these approaches, sometimes even at the same time, and sometimes in contradiction to one another.

• Next up is Part Three: The World Cup is a struggle over human rights. “Five Ways to Watch the World Cup” was initially given as a public lecture sponsored by the University of Washington and Town Hall Seattle on May 19, 2026. What is printed above has been edited to remove extraneous material related to the live event and broken into five separate posts. Read Part One: The World Cup Unites the World. For more background, see the UW Global Sport Lab’s World Cup: The Syllabus.

There is a difference between rooting for teams that are given to us and the teams that we choose. My NFL fandom was bestowed upon me at birth by my family. I had no say in the matter, I have never questioned it, and it is the fan-team relationship that I feel most deeply. Go Packers, baby.

My NBA fandom is different and was mostly established due to pandemic-related boredom. I adopted the Portland Trailblazers while living in Oregon during 2020, and I’ve carried that fandom with me, passively and casually, ever since.

With that precedent, one would think that I should have a red-blooded connection to the United States Men’s National Soccer Team (USMNT). I’m a big soccer fan and was born and raised in the US, so the relationship ought to be straightforward. Instead, when I watch the USMNT, I feel nothing.

I also know that I’m not the only one who feels like this. For my entire life, I’ve seen friends who were born and raised here in the US use various connections to cheer for national teams other than our own: A father who is Spanish; a grandmother from Nigeria; having studied abroad in Argentina; owning a retro Japan jersey; or having a best friend from Mexico.

For years I’ve tried to put my finger on why.

It’s true that the team isn’t very good and that doesn’t help. It’s also true that some of us are wary of anything nationalistic. I’m not particularly proud of my country’s behavior lately, so to paint my face with the American flag and take my shirt off wouldn’t feel like authentic self-expression. That being said, I detest the way that my country’s flag has been co-opted and appropriated by MAGA and the American right, so maybe a little face paint wouldn’t be the worst thing. Additionally, it’s true that there isn’t a strong link between the sport and a larger national identity. Soccer is, at best, the 4th most popular sport in the country - probably closer to 6th. But those things can all be overcome.

For me, the biggest issue is identity.

The American soccer culture that I have always loved is inclusive, progressive, generous, and outspoken. This is the same identity that the United States Women’s National Soccer Team (USWMNT) embodied for years, inspiring a generation of young athletes in this country. I see almost none of that culture in the current USMNT team, which instead represents some of my country’s worst habits and tendencies.

The US is co-hosting the World Cup during a time when authoritarian, anti-immigrant, and nationalist sentiments are spiking. Tourist visas for World Cup fans are being restricted by the US government, and eye-watering ticket prices are just the latest representation of ever-growing wealth inequality. There will never be a larger and more easily accessible platform for the USMNT to push back against these things, and establish a meaningful cultural and political identity.

Instead, USMNT coach Mauricio Pochettino, originally from Argentina, flirts with both Javier Milei and Donald Trump, the right-wing presidents of Argentina and the US respectively, stating that combining football and politics is a “big mistake.” The most well-known USMNT player (not the best!), Christian Pulisic, only finds time to comment on politics when he’s defending his “Trump Dance” goal celebration or liking social media posts that joke about the killing of protesters. Even Alexi Lalas, the United States’ most angry and recognizable soccer pundit, found time to speak at the 2024 Republican National Convention.

The World Cup had not even begun yet and we already had incidents of Iraqi players being detained at the US Border, the Ecuadorian National Team’s outrage at the police handling of a pitch invader at a warm-up game in Ohio, and US border control’s refusal of entry to an award-winning African referee with a diplomatic passport. A major Mexican teacher’s union is already using the World Cup as leverage in their own strikes and I’m certain that there will be large protests in and around US stadiums this summer. Important words and actions will come from others, but I don’t expect anything meaningful to emerge from the USMNT camp.

The idea that the World Cup unites the world is probably the most optimistic way to watch the World Cup. It is also the most common justification given not only for the World Cup, but often sports more generally – that they bring people together, unite people across cultural and political differences, in a true meritocracy of skill and commitment, and offer a respite from the conflict and violence of our world. It’s how we justify the immense amounts of time and money spent on the business of not just professional sports, but also youth sports and sports on every level.

It’s a truism, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true. And this way of watching does contain moments of beauty, which at least partially explain its staying power as a framing for the World Cup.

If this is the lens through which you watch the World Cup, you’ll be looking first for moments of inspired play. This way of watching cares less about any given team or player, and approaches it instead as what is called, in football parlance, a neutral. In one of my favorite passages in Eduardo Galeano’s famous ode to the sport, Football in Sun and Shadow, he says “Years have gone by and I’ve finally learned to accept myself for who I am: a beggar for good soccer. I go about the world, hand outstretched, and in the stadiums I plead: ‘A pretty move, for the love of God.’”

The neutral loves beautiful styles of play. Historically, Brazilians have long been known for their style of “jogo bonito” or the beautiful game. As those of you who are fans of Ted Lasso (he plays a soccer coach on TV) may already know, the “Total Football” of the Dutch in the 1970s was also aesthetically pleasing, along with its more recent incarnation as the tiki-taka of the Spanish.

But styles of play have become more homogenous across nations because of the globalization of the sport and the concentration of top talent in the wealthy leagues of Western Europe. Nonetheless, certain styles of play can still be seen as more or less entertaining or pleasing to the eye, and looking out for these aesthetics is one way to watch the World Cup.

Beyond styles of play, if you watch the World Cup in search of evidence that it unites the world, you’ll be particularly drawn to the Cinderella stories – the underdogs – such as tiny Curaçao and Cabo Verde – two of the three smallest nations to ever qualify. This year the Cup has expanded from 32 to 48 teams, which means that you have lots and lots of underdogs to choose from this time around. While the expanded field arguably makes it more difficult for underdogs to make deeper runs into the tournament, you might also keep a look out in the knockout rounds for teams like Morocco, who made an unlikely run to the semifinals last time around.

Finally, if you are inclined toward the perspective of the World Cup as a unifying force, you’ll be especially looking out for moments of sportsmanship, or of divisions being overcome on the field of sport that are difficult or even impossible to overcome in geopolitics. There are of course many, many examples of this throughout the history of sports diplomacy and the World Cup.

One of my favorites was the reaction of the US Men’s National Team players after defeating Iran in the 2022 World Cup. The image here is of Antonee “Jedi” Robinson comforting Iranian player Abolfazl Jalali, following the U.S.’s 2-1 victory. Afterwards, Robinson’s teammate, Timothy Weah, described the way the US players reached out to their opponents, saying “I just wanted to show that we are all human beings and we all love each other. I just wanted to spread peace and love.” These are moments that show the potential of sport to bring people together.

A piece of media that exemplifies this approach is a TV ad made by ESPN to promote its coverage of the 2010 World Cup. It is titled, appropriately, “United.”

Those who know me know that, as a media studies scholar, I can talk at great length about videos like this, and in 2010 I wrote an article focused on this advertisement. I won’t go into all that now, but I do want to just name how this video operates on a powerful emotional and aesthetic level to build up the World Cup as something outside of and beyond the difficult experiences of our geopolitical world, promising a euphoric unity in its crescendo. That it uses the voiceover of Bono, lead singer for U2 and world-renowned for his own political stances within and beyond his music, only amplifies the disjuncture between the claims of unity and our second way to watch the World Cup, which I will explore next.

Next: The World Cup is war by other means.

• “Five Ways to Watch the World Cup” was initially given as a public lecture sponsored by the University of Washington and Town Hall Seattle on May 19, 2026. What is printed above has been edited to remove extraneous material related to the live event and broken into five separate posts. Ron is one of the editors of The World Cup: The Syllabus.

Writer Juan Villoro once captured Mexico’s relationship with football perfectly: “If fandoms decided the World Cup, Mexico would certainly reach the finals of every single tournament.” He is not wrong. Mexican fans consistently rank among the largest groups traveling abroad for the World Cup, no matter where it is held. Now imagine that passion directed toward the national team, known as El Tri for the three colors — green, white and red — of our flag, on home soil, with the entire world watching in the age of social media. It is going to be incredible.

In many ways, this is a perfect match: the World Cup returning to a country with both a deep, natural passion for football and a rich hosting history as hosts. First in 1970 and again in 1986.

And beyond the game itself, Mexico offers something special to the world: extraordinary food, vibrant culture, and people whose warmth will define the tournament experience as much as the football.

Like people have done in the past (particularly in South Africa 2010 and Brazil 2014), some Mexicans are using the tournament to highlight problems – teacher salaries and the families of the disappeared at the hands of the cartels and the state – as well as the unfinished airport outside Mexico City; as in previous cases, the World Cup will happen either way.

But that is not the most important part. For a new generation of Mexicans — my generation — this will be our chance to experience what it means to host football’s greatest tournament. Mexico has staged major events before: NBA and MLB games, Under-17 FIFA World Cups, and the Mexico City Formula One Grand Prix, which has won the award for best crowd every year since returning in 2015. But the World Cup exists on another level entirely.

I grew up hearing stories from my parents, grandparents, and others about the magic of the 1970 and 1986 World Cups. One person I will always remember is Javier, who worked for the gas company in my neighborhood. He used to tell me stories about those tournaments, and the one that stayed with me most was how he quit his job for three months just to spend his days near Estadio Azteca during the 1986 World Cup. He eventually got his job back, but that story tells you everything about the depth of football passion in Mexico.

Sadly, Javier will not be here to see this tournament, but I know he will be supporting with that same enthusiasm from wherever he is.

Javier’s story is not unique; back then, ticket prices were affordable for anyone.

As for our visitors, the national teams setting up their base camps in Mexico have started to arrive. South Africa, Tunisia, Colombia, Iran, South Korea, and Uruguay. Japan is using Mexico as a warm-up base but will cross the border and be based in Knoxville, Tennessee, once the tournament begins. Three Mexican cities (Mexico City, Monterrey, and Guadalajara) will host a total of thirteen games.

Mariachi music, photos with government officials in sombreros, and football-literate crowds at their practices are what the visitors have been experiencing. Even if our own national team plays against them, the spirit of camaraderie is built on the bond of the beautiful game—the universal language. The national teams that came for the additional rounds of qualifiers (DRC and Iraq especially) have already gotten a taste of Mexican hospitality and camaraderie. Once the tournament ramps up later this week, locals’ passion and love will only intensify. It is telling that, in the face of US inhospitality, Iran asked to stay in Mexico and cross over into the US to play games and then return to Mexico right after.

​South Africa’s team, Bafana Bafana, which is staying in Pachuca in the state of Hidalgo, the Mexican birthplace of football, has already seen what this hospitality looks and feels like.

The local professional football club, Pachuca CF, released a welcoming video. A local Mexican TV channel highlighted the story of Luchito, a local boy who waited for Bafana with a hand-painted South African flag and his Panini sticker book. He wanted the team to autograph it.

In videos circulating online, you see coach Hugo Broos — who played for Belgium at the 1986 World Cup — embrace the fan, pose for photos, and present him with a new South Africa away jersey. One by one, the players sign it and take turns taking pictures with him. Since then, Mexican fans have continued showing up at Bafana Bafana training sessions.

It is hard to imagine teams based in the United States experiencing anything similar. Think of Egypt camped in Cleveland, Ohio: most locals probably do not even know the team is there, let alone care. By contrast, there are videos of Japanese players casually visiting local malls in Mexico, fully immersed in the surrounding atmosphere.

Uruguay and Colombia, both expected to make deep tournament runs, will likely enjoy this experience the most. Tunisia, meanwhile, will play its opening two matches in Mexico, including a highly anticipated clash with Japan that will mark the 1,000th World Cup match in history.

This is the magic of the World Cup, something that has long eluded the tournament’s main host, the United States. The country may offer world-class stadiums and training facilities, but it still lacks the essence required to truly host football’s biggest event. As the tournament expands, the US seems to take the World Cup for granted; Mexico never does. When it comes down to it, the United States and Canada still lack something quintessential to hosting the tournament: genuine passion for, and understanding of, the game.

Even if Mexico hosts only a handful of matches, the passion will be unrivaled. Fans traveling there will discover that Javier’s story is far from unique; millions like him give the World Cup its soul. Viewers watching from afar may well see the opening match at the Azteca and wonder why the final is not being played there.

Actor Diego Luna, who starred alongside Gael García Bernal as one of two football-loving brothers in the 2008 classic “Rudo y Cursi,” recently released another football-centered film, “Mexico 86,” on Netflix. Like so many Mexicans, his love for the game runs deep. He perhaps says it best: “Football is a passion that is with you until the end; it doesn’t understand age or social status; it’s a shared common that we all enjoy.”

The captain of the US men’s national football squad for the 2026 World Cup 2026 is Tim Ream. Tyler Adams, another squad member, was the captain during the 2022 World Cup. Yet the player seen as the team’s leader is Christian Pulisic, who plays his club football for AC Milan. Americans, encouraged by their media, compare their reality to the movies, so Pulisic is “Captain America.”

Pulisic is certainly a talented player. He has played club football for Borussia Dortmund in the Bundesliga in Germany, Chelsea in the Premier League in England, and now AC Milan in Serie A in Italy. But part of his appeal is also the product of media hype, to the point of being unbearable.

American media outlets have profiled him relentlessly. The first major profile outside a soccer publication appeared in 2016 in the New York Times, when he was just seventeen. The headline read: “Christian Pulisic Is the Greatest Thing Since ... What? Slow Down.” Despite The Times’s caution, it didn’t stop the hype. The following year, he appeared on “60 Minutes,” the long-running CBS news program that still carried considerable cultural weight at the time unlike now. Ahead of this World Cup, TIME Magazine put him on its cover. At the same time, HBO released a documentary filmed over four years with the USMNT, in which Pulisic predictably emerged as one of the central stars.

But the hype doesn’t add up to how he has performed on the field for the US. The conclusion one is forced to reach about Pulisic’s on-field performances is that with him at the lead, the US has been a respectable regional power (though it failed to qualify for the 2018 World Cup), but not transformative. And that, in fact, American media and marketing have treated Pulisic as a transformational global superstar before the team’s results justified that assessment. If you look purely at results, Landon Donovan, Clint Dempsey, Tim Howard, and even Claudio Reyna had better careers than Pulisic in the USMNT.

Then there is the small matter of his politics. Most of these profiles say little about his politics. As a result, if Pulisic has trouble convincing the rest of us that he is a global star, then he has an even harder time explaining his confusing politics.

Christian Pulisic has largely avoided public political engagement, but a series of actions and signals over time have strengthened perceptions that he is aligned with the American right. In 2022, he registered as a Republican, and he has also liked pro-Trump posts on social media. In 2024, The New Republic reported that “Every so often, Pulisic would be spotted liking a wayward Instagram post — like one saying that members of antifa should be shot — that suggested he was actually a closet Trump supporter.”

Against this backdrop of perceived political signaling and relative silence on contentious issues surrounding the national team, immigration, and identity, his public gestures have been closely scrutinized.

That scrutiny intensified in 2024, after his goal against Jamaica in the CONCACAF Nations League quarterfinal, when he performed the viral “Trump dance,” a celebration associated with Donald Trump and increasingly adopted by conservative athletes and fans. Pulisic later insisted the gesture was “not political” and “just for fun,” but the symbolism was difficult to separate from the broader political moment.

The celebration stood out all the more because Pulisic has otherwise remained mostly silent on contentious political issues surrounding the national team, immigration, and identity. Combined with his refusal to distance himself from the celebration, it has allowed pundits and supporters to project conservative politics onto him and, by extension, onto the U.S. men’s national team itself.

The trouble is that as soccer’s profile in the U.S. grows and becomes more entangled with politics, it will be harder for American players to keep their distance, pretending they’re just having fun, especially with Trump and Republicans watching.

On the one hand, the government is making it harder for fans to enter stadiums (or even the country); on the other, it is counting on the team to make a strong tournament run to bolster America’s self-image. It will be interesting to see whether the team takes a stand, though history suggests they probably won’t.

That said, if Pulisic may yet prove to be a rightwinger – or simply a coward – two of his teammates are stepping up: Timothy Weah and Weston McKennie.

Weah, whose father, George, is a former president of Liberia in West Africa and a Ballon d’Or winner, was initially uncomfortable with politics. After a surprise White House visit with Trump during the 2025 Club World Cup by his then-club, Juventus, he complained that he was forced to make the visit and “just wanted to play football” and was not interested in politics. Later, after criticizing the soaring ticket prices for the 2026 World Cup, he was publicly rebuked by USMNT coach Mauricio Pochettino, who argued players should stay out of such debates.

But then came a shift.

Last month, after being selected for the national team, Weah appeared alongside New York City’s socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani, calling for lower World Cup ticket prices and defying his coach’s admonition. Weah brought along a USMNT teammate, Mark McKenzie, who is also in the World Cup squad. Weah also appeared on a promotional video by Mamdani’s office promoting the World Cup in New York City.

McKennie, meanwhile, has been equally – if not more – consistent politically.

Thing is he may be the captain American soccer is looking for.

In 2020, he called Trump “ignorant,” said “you can call him racist,” and argued that Trump was not the right person to be president. While still at Schalke in the Bundesliga, he wore a “Justice for George” armband after the police killing of George Floyd. He also condemned the targeting of Black motorists by police and, when asked whether he feared backlash from reactionary white American media or politicians, dismissed a favorite right-wing talking point: “I don’t know how this is political at all … I’m not going to shut up and dribble.”

The last time Red Star Paris had a player in the French national team at a World Cup was 1938, when Alfred Aston, who worked part-time in his family’s printing business, played for France. Aston had also made the team for the 1934 World Cup in Italy. Before him, two other Red Star players had made the squad: Augustin Chantrel in 1930 in Uruguay and Jacques Mairesse, Aston’s teammate in 1934.

That was a long time ago. Their neighbors, Paris Saint-Germain (PSG), hadn’t been founded yet. That would take another thirty-odd years. Neither was the other big Paris club, Paris FC, founded in 1969. Of the three, PSG dominates the headlines these days.

On the last weekend of May, PSG were crowned European club champions after beating Arsenal of England in an uneventful final in Budapest, Hungary. Backed by vast financial resources and a global brand that extends far beyond France, PSG is considered one of the most recognizable and successful clubs, having won the last two UEFA Champions League titles. The current Ballon d’Or winner, Ousmane Dembele, plays for PSG. Bankrolled by Qatar Sports Investment since 2011, the club has spent more than €2 billion on player transfers in the last 20 years, embodying its over-commercialization of the game in a pay-to-win model. PSG is far from an exception. As for Paris FC, it was recently acquired by the Arnault family, owners of the luxury conglomerate Louis Vuitton.

In contrast to both PSG and Paris FC, Red Star Paris embodies a very different idea of football.

These clubs represent two contrasting visions of the changing social geography of Paris. Red Star FC emerged from the working-class industrial suburbs of the north and the political traditions of the banlieue rouge (red suburbs), while PSG and Paris FC have come to symbolize a different Paris; one shaped by neoliberal urbanism, global investment, and the financialization of football. Yet PSG’s support base remains far more socially diverse than its contemporary image suggests. Despite its association with luxury branding and global commercial success, the club continues to draw significant support from working-class communities, immigrant populations, and residents of the banlieue. Their divergence raises a broader question that extends far beyond sports: What happens when football clubs cease to represent neighborhoods and local communities, and instead become brands designed to market cities to the world?

Red Star is one of the four oldest clubs in France and a founding member of the French Ligue 1. The club was established in 1897 by footballing legend Jules Rimet, who later became the third and longest-serving president of FIFA. According to an exhibition on the club’s history, the name “Red Star” was inspired by the Red Star Line, a ferry service operating between France and England. Although the club was originally based in Paris’s 7th arrondissement (district), in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, it eventually found its home in Saint-Ouen, located in the Seine-Saint-Denis department. The club’s stadium, Bauer Stadium, serves as more than a sporting venue; it is also a site of memory. One of its stands is dedicated to former player Rino Della Negra, a member of the anti-Nazi resistance group known as the Manouchian Group, who was executed by the Germans in 1944. His name is still sung by supporters on matchdays: “We are the Red Star Fans. We come from the red suburbs.” “And the Rino ignites. Always for the Red Star!”

This year, the club came close to returning to Ligue 1 but ultimately fell short, losing to Rodez on May 12 and extending the supporters’ wait for promotion by another season.

Historically, Saint-Ouen is associated with the famous Paris Saint-Ouen Flea Market, the world’s largest antiques market. Yet beyond its global reputation, the surrounding Seine-Saint-Denis department has long been shaped by immigration, industrial decline, and economic marginalization. According to the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies, the district is the poorest department in metropolitan France, with 27.6% of its 1.7 million residents living below the poverty line. These social realities form an important backdrop of Red Star’s identity and the community of its supporters.

Red Star’s supporters have long been politically outspoken, and like many historic clubs in contemporary football, the club has not been immune to the pressures of commercialization. In 2022, former owner Patrice Haddad sold a majority stake in the club to U.S. investment firm 777 Partners, exposing a tension increasingly visible across European football: the clash between clubs as community institutions and clubs as financial assets. 777 Partners own or part-own a number of other clubs in leagues in Europe (Genoa, Sevilla, Hertha Berlin and Standard Liege), South America (Vasco da Gama in Brazil) and Australia (Melbourne Victory).

During his tenure, Haddad proposed plans to redevelop Stade Bauer and modernize the club’s infrastructure. The plan was fiercely opposed by fans, who argued that the stadium is the club’s spiritual home and a living symbol of its place in the social and political landscape of northern Paris. The concern was never simply about foreign ownership but about the subordination of the club’s political identity, community roots, and culture to commercial interests. Haddad did, however, develop the Red Star Lab in 2008, which has been widely celebrated and has twice received the French Football Federation’s Social Club Prize, in 2008 and 2022, in recognition of its efforts to connect players with art, culture, and the neighborhood around the club. The Lab has continued under 777 partners.

Supporter groups such as the Collectif Red Star Bauer and the Red Star ultras have worked to preserve the club’s local identity. At Red Star, politics is expressed less through parties or elections than through solidarity, collective action, and shared memory. These values can be seen in the supporters’ long commitment to anti-racism, anti-fascism, and opposition to the commercialization of football. For many fans, football is part of community life rather than just entertainment. The stands at Stade Bauer are often filled with political banners, including Palestinian flags and messages supporting humanitarian causes. In this way, the stadium remains a space for both local identity and political expression.

For many supporters, clubs such as Red Star embody a romanticized vision of football rooted in community rather than commercial value. Yet maintaining that identity has become increasingly difficult in an era of foreign ownership, investor-led development, and the global football market. While supporters may preserve a club’s culture through songs, symbols and collective action, the struggle over what a club represents remains ongoing.

The contrast between Red Star and PSG ultimately poses a broader question about the future of football. If Red Star asks who football belongs to, PSG asks how football can be marketed, financed, and sold to the global audience. Even if supporters at both clubs rally around many of the same social and political causes, the institutions themselves embody very different visions of the game. At its heart, this is not simply a story about two Parisian football clubs; it is a story about the tension between football as a community institution and football as a global commodity. The relationship between Red Star and PSG reveals how the sport can both reflect and reproduce wider questions of class, space, identity, and belonging. As investment continues to reshape the game, the question remains whether football can still be a people’s sport, or whether its future will increasingly be determined by the forces of global capital.

During the 2010 World Cup, Chimurenga magazine in Cape Town, in conjunction with the Chinua Achebe Center at Bard College in upstate New York, sent fourteen writers to thirteen African cities and to Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, to blog about their experiences watching the tournament.

They included Chris Abani, Alain Mabanckou, Nicole Turner, Funmi Iyanda, Binyavanga Wainaina, and Chimamanda Adichie. The project was called “Pilgrimages.” Their dispatches appeared as a series of blog posts. The Pilgrimages site is largely inactive and there is not much on it these days, which is normal for the internet. Another end product was an edited book. I’ll reach out to the Chimurenga editors and update this post if I learn more; given Chimurenga’s long history of documenting and preserving cultural work, they may well have additional context about the project.

In any case, in a video that I believe was filmed in Lagos by the anthropologist Jesse Shipley, featuring Adichie and Wainaina, sitting together on a couch, we see Adichie explain how her pan-Africanism expands as the World Cup progresses. She begins by talking about supporting Nigeria if they qualify, and once they are eliminated, she transfers her allegiance to the remaining African teams still in the tournament. (Update: Jesse Shipley sent me a link to the the short video as well as another link to a whole YouTube archive of videos from that project, filmed in South Africa, Ghana and Nigeria.)

It turned out that this idea was a version of an argument Adichie had made earlier in a Guardian (UK) opinion piece about how, for her at least, Africa became a country during the World Cup. She normally starts by being excessively nationalistic: “I do not ordinarily much care for football or for excessive nationalism, but whenever Nigeria plays a major game, I find myself undergoing a transformation. I kick the air as I watch. I scream. I pray. I will the universe to make us win.”

But then, “Sometimes the boundary of this identity widens, as it did during the 2006 World Cup when Nigeria did not qualify. And so, for one intense day while Ghana played the United States, I became Ghanaian. I watched with my Nigerian best friend Uju, hugging each other and dancing when Ghana finally won. ‘Some of our boys started playing this game without shoes,’ Uju said proudly. ‘Our boys’ were, of course, the Ghanaians.”

Later in the same article, she became positively giddy: “Our football nationalism, then, symbolizes a cathartic, even if fleeting, addressing of historical and political grievances. It is a platform on which to stand and say that we may not be part of the G8 who decide the fate of the world, we may always rank at the bottom of health, governance, and economic indexes, we may have crumbling institutions and infrastructure, but hey, we won by sheer talent and grit.”

Adichie caught some flak in certain quarters for inadvertently — or perhaps not — excluding Algeria, the fifth African nation to qualify for the 2010 World Cup, from her definition of “an African football nation.” In effect, she reproduced the old distinction between the parts of Africa separated by the Sahara, thus excluding North Africans. Still, very few Africans, including her critics, rejected her broader thesis.

I don’t agree with Adichie most of the time (she’s had some reactionary takes over the years), but she put her finger on something real. It’s also what the Chimurenga project—one of the most remarkable literary projects to come out of Africa—was trying to capture at the time: the strange way African identity seems to stretch during the World Cup. For a few weeks, national borders matter a little less, and people find themselves rooting for something bigger than their own country.

That feeling can be messy and full of contradictions, but in the moment it feels genuine. And despite xenophobia and the colonial-era language divides that still shape the continent, there’s always a sense that this broader connection might endure.

In other words, the World Cup gives people a brief chance to imagine Africa differently—not as a political idea or a development talking point, but as a community brought together through television, migration, memory, and football. The feeling doesn’t last forever, but that doesn’t make it any less meaningful.

• This is an updated version of a post I originally wrote for Africa Is a Country. On June 10, I will be part of a panel discussion on “Football as protest” at an Africa Is a Country Salon on the 2026 World Cup to be held at The Africa Center in Harlem, from 6 to 7 pm. Details here.

I grew up playing football (or soccer), as did my parents and younger brother — the latter now a college athlete — and it has always been a huge part of my life.

As I have moved from country to country, including Tanzania in East Africa, the sport has remained a constant: a bridge between cultures that requires little to no shared language, only sportsmanship and some level of skill. That is what I love most about it.

Football is a cultural cornerstone across much of the African continent. Whether through pickup games or self-formed clubs, many African immigrants in New York who play the sport find ways to continue playing for the joy, energy, and sense of community it brings.

This is exactly the story of the Nigerian New York Football Club (NNYFC).

Founded by Nigerian coach Dominic — who once attempted to play semi-professionally in France before moving to New York City — the club comprises more than thirty players who dedicate themselves fully to the sport and, inevitably, to one another. As they explained to me, football has brought them closer both on and off the pitch.

I was very lucky to meet and photograph the team both during and after a match I went to watch them play. Dominic warmly invited me after I reached out to him, and both he and the team welcomed me with curiosity, excitement, and an openness that felt genuinely refreshing. The game itself was lively, heated, and deeply comradely all at once — as football often is.

Dominic explained that their opponents, NYC Guinea, are longtime rivals. Younger and faster, NYC Guinea often defeats NNYFC, but the competition is about more than simply winning; it is also a matter of national pride. What I found especially beautiful was the wide age range within NNYFC itself. The youngest players seemed to be around 30, while the goalkeeper must have been over 50, yet they played and interacted as equals. Football truly is an equalizer in so many ways, and I always find joy and reverence in seeing that come to life.

I have been taking photographs for most of my life, but I have limited experience with sports photography and do not own a zoom lens. One technical challenge was capturing action shots that were both sharp and high quality, which often forced me to get as close as possible to the players. In the end, however, this limitation encouraged me to focus more on intimate moments between teammates rather than purely on action. Those became some of my favorite photographs from the project.

Moments of calm concentration, laughter, and camaraderie unfolded constantly both on and off the field, and I tried my best to capture them. After taking more than 115 photographs, I selected my favorites — the images I felt best encapsulated both the match itself and the community surrounding it — though I ultimately had around 50 photographs I considered especially strong. Some of my favorites are published here.

In a city where football could still be considered a fledgling sport compared to others, it was incredible to witness these two teams embody the energetic, passionate spirit of the game that I often feel North American soccer lacks, even at the professional level.

Michael E. Sawyer is an Associate Professor of African American Literature and Culture at the University of Pittsburgh. His new book, Sir Lewis: The Definitive Biography, was recently published by Legacy, an imprint of Hachette Books. I interviewed Sawyer about the book, his general impressions of Formula One, and his broader research interests. Sawyer has previously written books on Malcolm X, the influential Black American leader, as well as on Africana philosophy. This is an edited version of our conversation.

Why did you want to research and write a book about Lewis Hamilton, and what drew you to him?

I’ve mentioned elsewhere that I’ve been a Formula One fan for most of my adult life. What drew me in wasn’t just the racing itself, but the presence of someone like Lewis Hamilton—a non-traditional figure in a sport that had, for most of its history, been almost exclusively white. That dynamic was always compelling to me.

I followed him from the very beginning of his career, not just as a driver but as a figure who stood out in a significant way. Like many others, I was fascinated by his rookie season, where he came within a single point of winning the championship—something almost unprecedented, especially for someone new to such a complex sport. Even more remarkable was that he was competing against a teammate [Fernando Alonso at McLaren Racing Limited] who was already a two-time World Champion. [The eventual champion that season was Kimi Räikkönen.] So, even within his team, he faced an experienced and formidable competitor.

Around 2014 or 2015, I began paying closer attention to what Lewis was doing outside the car—his involvement in social justice, environmental issues, gender equity, and broader efforts related to diversity, equity, and inclusion. As someone who studies these topics professionally—and as someone who also deeply values athletes who take political and social stances—I found that aspect of his public persona especially compelling.

In 2020, during the pandemic, he took a bold, unequivocal stance against police violence in the wake of Breonna Taylor’s killing. [Breonna Taylor was killed during a botched police raid in Louisville, Kentucky, on March 13, 2020, after officers fired 32 shots into her apartment.] That moment stood out to me. It felt like a turning point, a moment that underscored the importance of his voice and platform. That’s when I decided to seriously consider writing a book about him. I began pulling my thoughts together and started the process of finding a publisher.

How did you find a publisher for “Sir Lewis”?

I began developing ideas and a proposal for the book, which ultimately found a home with a trade publisher. While I don’t typically differentiate between types of books, this one was published in a different subfield of publishing than what I’m used to—trade publishing with its own set of rules. One of the first things I had to do was create a comprehensive proposal that outlined the book’s audience, which made me consider things I don’t usually have to think about. I started taking it seriously in 2020. One of the key hurdles in trade publishing is the need for an agent. Unlike academic publishing, trade houses won’t accept unsolicited manuscripts, so securing an agent was essential. That process took some time, especially since I was coming from an academic publishing background and had to navigate the shift to the trade side.

I read a statistic recently that the average American audience wasn’t interested in Formula One before Netflix’s series “Drive to Survive.” Do you think you needed to address that, or was Lewis’s exclusion from the show enough of a way to introduce him in a new light, something that hadn’t been shown before?

You make an astute point about the cultural context at the time: In the first season of “Drive to Survive,” Lewis wasn’t part of the rights agreement between Netflix, Formula One, and the drivers. It was strange because while you’re watching the show and hearing about drivers, the one winning races—Lewis Hamilton—was absent. At that point, he was dominating the sport, creating an interesting void, especially for new audiences in the U.S. who saw him as an enigma that wasn’t even fully revealed. His absence on the show made the moment of his eventual inclusion richer, allowing for a deeper exploration of the media implications of his absence and the growing U.S. audience. [In 2020, Lewis, driving for Mercedes, joined Season 2 of “Drive of Survive.” It covered the 2019 Formula One World Championship.]

What’s also fascinating is that Lewis already had a following in the U.S. that had nothing to do with Formula One—it had more to do with his cultural cachet. His entry into “Drive to Survive” helped bridge that gap. The timing was also fortuitous: during the pandemic, people were at home, and Formula One was one of the few sports still going. It didn’t matter as much that there were no fans in the stands—Formula One races are made for TV, and the crowd is secondary to the action.

Lewis is such a fascinating figure because he’s not just a driver—he has a lot more going on. As a transatlantic figure, he spends a lot of time in places like New York, L.A., and Colorado, interacting with people like Serena Williams and [music composer and fashion designer] Pharrell Williams. This made him familiar to U.S. audiences beyond just the racing world, and that convergence of factors really made his story stand out.

The book begins by anchoring itself in a cultural moment, the Met Gala. It’s coming up soon here in New York City, actually within the next two weeks. It’s been announced that Lewis Hamilton will co-chair this year’s event, which will celebrate Black Dandyism. Do you think self-expression has always been central to Lewis, especially within Black culture? And how do you think this recontextualization goes beyond just fashion?

Yes, I started the book purposefully at the Met Gala to express that. The long-term elements of Hamilton’s life will be far more significant in a different kind of register than the brief time athletes spend as athletes. The Met Gala this year is particularly poignant for the reasons you mentioned because Lewis, [actor, rapper and designer] A$AP Rocky, [actor] Coleman Domingo, and I believe one other person [Vogue editor Anna Wintour] are co-chairs. The visual artist Rashid Johnson is a featured artist and a member of the host committee. The notion of Black dandyism is about being countercultural in a way that takes elements from all kinds of other cultures and syncretically puts them together.

Self-expression has always been central to Lewis, from the very early days of his career. Whether it was braiding his hair, getting tattoos, or wearing items outside the standard team livery [that is the paint scheme, logos, and sponsor placements that a driver is supposed to wear], he pushed to show up in ways that reflected his individuality. I believe that this legacy dates back to Black athletes and celebrities, from the elegance of Duke Ellington to the aesthetic presentation of Muhammad Ali. These things have always existed. Lewis fits into that legacy.

The Met Gala of 2021, where I begin the book, and what’s happening now, four years later, interestingly bookend his career at these moments. He’s moving toward the end of it, but fashion, and the Met Gala in particular, remain constants.

Lewis Hamilton is not only the most successful Formula One driver but also the most vocal about change, particularly with the importance of the Hamilton Commission and his advocacy for F1’s drive to change. How do you think he manages to balance that while still performing at such a high level, especially given that he may have detractors, given how the current season has started?

I think Lewis and Muhammad Ali are comparable figures in many ways. Ali was an international superstar who took political stances that cost him the most productive years of his life, particularly when he was prevented from boxing due to his protest against the Vietnam War. What Lewis has done, which I think is truly innovative and shifts the conversation around sports, athletes, and activism–is that he speaks while he is at the very top of his sport, even now.

Even as he navigates a new team, which may not be fully understood due to the complexity of Formula One, he remains far and away the most marketable figure. All of this has happened despite, or perhaps because of, the vocal and outward stances he has taken on issues such as gender equity, queer rights, diversity, equity, inclusion, children’s rights in underserved areas, the environment, veganism, police violence, and more.

One way to look at it is that Lewis’s popularity and influence are not despite his activism, but because of it. He’s remained incredibly popular even though he hasn’t been in contention for a championship since 2021. His commitment to speaking out on these issues has only grown more fervent.

Lewis’s relationship with his father, Anthony, is a big part of the book. How have they influenced each other in dealing with racists and how do they differ?

For me, one of the most interesting parts of writing the book was this broader conversation, which goes beyond Formula One but is still an integral part of it: about fatherhood—parenthood more generally, but especially parenting under stressful conditions. From the perspective of a child, navigating a highly complex situation while trying to perform at an extraordinarily high level. How do you manage that, whether it’s with music, gymnastics, or even something like wanting to be the best fifth-grade teacher in the world? Every parent grapples with this.

Then there’s the next layer: professionalism. When your parent is essentially your manager—whether you signed up for it or not—they have to make decisions that go far beyond the personal relationship. It’s no longer just “show parents”—it’s show business. They have a business relationship that complicates things.

The third layer is the complexity of race. Anthony Hamilton came from a generation that dealt with racism and bigotry in ways that Lewis found insufficient. That doesn’t mean his dad was wrong, but it highlights an evolutionary perspective. Anthony’s approach was shaped by his experience, where racism was often a casual, day-to-day issue. For him, as a person with a job, that was the reality. But when you’re the most famous person in the world or the best at something, racism doesn’t simply fade away. The idea that you can simply do your job well and people will accept you doesn’t apply when you’re dealing with an international sport like Formula One.

There was definitely tension between Lewis and his dad over how to approach these issues. After the racist incident in Barcelona in 2008 during Formula 1 testing [when Spanish spectators in blackface targeted Lewis], Anthony and Lewis had fundamental disagreements about how to move forward in addressing racism. Lewis felt that staying silent wasn’t the solution, whereas his dad had a different view. Despite this, his dad was always around. There was a period when he wasn’t as involved in managing Lewis, but he never completely disappeared from his life.

Lewis races for Ferrari. Ferrari is everything. If it wasn’t football, it’s the Tifosi [the passionate fans of the Scuderia Ferrari HP Formula 1 team are known by this name]. It’s a synchronized religion. Honestly, I don’t think there’s a bigger marriage in the history of the sport than Lewis and Ferrari. How significant do you think this is as a cultural moment? It feels almost like an extra chapter in the book, don’t you think?

You’re absolutely right. There’s nothing comparable to this in any sport. It’s hard to imagine—some things just wouldn’t make sense, right? For example, if we were back in the ‘70s with Pelé, such a legendary figure, and somehow he ended up playing for Argentina—it would be ridiculous, right? It just doesn’t add up.

When you think about Ferrari and its place in the legacy of Italian culture, it’s deeply rooted in the history of Italian art, dating back to the Renaissance. Enzo Ferrari himself embodies everything about Italian sensibilities, both the good and the bad. Being an Italian artisan means dedicating yourself to your craft at all costs. It’s not about practicality, or even price—it’s about the Ferrari itself. That’s what matters. The Tifosi, and the Italian people in general, are incredibly invested in their pride for art, and Ferrari stands as a pinnacle of Italian artistic expression today, alongside fashion and the Renaissance.

Formula One becomes the ultimate platform for Italians to showcase their artistic pride. When Lewis Hamilton joined Ferrari, it was a huge move—not just on the racing front, but culturally. You saw it when he arrived, how he presented himself, the F40, the F50, everything at Enzo Ferrari’s house. It was a moment that truly moved Ferrari forward, symbolizing a new chapter. And, you know, considering Italy’s history with race and figures like [footballer Mario] Balotelli, it felt like a cultural statement in itself.

Do you think he has to be ‘perfect’ in Italy, especially as a Black man? Does he have to embody the ideal cultural representation of what it means to be Black in the 21st century? Or do you think the media would be less forgiving because he’s Sir Lewis Hamilton, so to speak?

We’ll have to wait and see what happens, right? Lewis isn’t Balotelli—he’s not that kind of figure. [Balotelli’s actions, while laudable and at a cost to himself, seldom result in sustained advocacy or changes at an institutional level]. Lewis comes with real credentials. And the Tifosi are incredibly forgiving; they’re knowledgeable fans who understand the complexities, and they’ll support him as long as he’s working hard. I think this is a moment for us to step back and recognize that someone of Lewis’s stature doesn’t really have anything to prove. The courage it took for him to join Ferrari is significant. It’s not just about the driving—it’s about adjusting to an entirely new platform, from the steering wheel to the drivetrain, even the communication, since it’s not Bono [the engineer Peter Bennington who worked with Hamilton at Mercedes] anymore. There’s a lot of change.

But despite all that, the Italian fans I’ve been following—on social media, talking to people I know—they’re still firmly behind Lewis. I think Charles [Leclerc] is the perfect teammate for this, too. When he looks back, racing with Lewis will be one of the defining moments of his career. This is a rare cultural moment, and I just want to enjoy it, whether or not Lewis wins a championship. I know he’s frustrated—he still wants to lead from the front.

How will Lewis’s time at Ferrari shape the final chapter of his racing career?

The second half of the season will likely be much better for him. We’ll see what happens when they arrive in Miami and how they address these issues. [The race was won by McLaren driver Oscar Piastri from Australia; Hamilton finished eight.] It seems to me that he and Leclerc have taken different approaches to developing the car. Lewis is as competitive as ever, but he’s got to get through this qualifying issue and work his way up. That said, I think he’s in a car capable of delivering a championship, so I’m optimistic. There’s no doubt in my mind about his skill or desire. Those two factors are huge.

One thing that needs to be taken seriously is Lewis himself. The Ferrari years are going to be fascinating to follow. It’s one of those stories that unfolds as you watch it.

But what I find most interesting is the question you raised: what’s really happening in Italy with Lewis there? What does his presence mean for Ferrari as a brand, not just locally, but globally? To be honest, I don’t think Ferrari has ever truly had a spokesperson in the way other brands do. It wouldn’t have mattered if Lewis spent his entire career as a Mercedes spokesperson—because, let’s be real, I doubt most Mercedes owners even know or care about their F1 team. But nobody who owns a Ferrari doesn’t care about the Formula 1 team. So, in that sense, it’s the perfect marriage between the two. It’s revelatory and revolutionary.

• This article first appeared in The New Context, a publication of The New School’s Graduate Program in International Affairs.

Dazed Digital features a striking, but very short, photo essay on a Palestinian girls’ football team that joined youth teams from 20 countries at the Street Child World Cup 2026 in Mexico City. Organised by the non-profit Street Child, which works with children in low-income and disaster-affected countries, the tournament crowned Mexico’s girls’ team and Brazil’s boys’ team as champions, defeating Kenya and India respectively.

James Greig, Dazed’s political editor, writes that the Palestinian squad consisted of ten girls from Tulkarem in the West Bank, a region that has faced escalating violence, displacement, and property destruction by Israeli soldiers and settlers. The team is supported by Palestine: Sports for Life (PSL4), a non-profit founded in 2011 by Palestinian athletes to empower children, youth, and especially women through sport. PSL4 runs girls’ football programs across five West Bank communities, employing women coaches and holding sessions within safe walking distance of participants’ homes, helping nurture a new generation of footballers despite the realities of occupation.

Sonny Rollins died yesterday at 95. One of my favorite Rollins tunes is “Airegin.” The name “Airegin” is “Nigeria” spelled backward. It was first recorded in 1954 with Miles Davis, Horace Silver (piano), Percy Heath (bass), and Kenny Clarke (drums).

The record would become a jazz standard, alongside two other Rollins compositions from that period: “Doxy” and “Oleo.”

There were not many reviews at the time. In the original DownBeat review, Nat Hentoff was dismissive (”unimaginative”), though fellow musicians disagreed, as Aidan Levy notes in his book Saxophone Colossus: The Life and Music of Sonny Rollins.

Two years later, Davis recorded it again on his own, this time with Coltrane on saxophone, for the album “Cookin’ With the Miles Davis Quintet.” He did another version. It was also regularly performed by major saxophonists including Dexter Gordon, Phil Woods, Stan Getz, Art Pepper, and Michael Brecker. You can see why: it was a deep record.

There are other recorded versions, including a guitar version by Wes Montgomery, and a version with lyrics, written by the singer Jon Hendricks and recorded in 1959, which at first sight sounds frivolous, but, in today’s terms, would be classed as decolonial (!). Just google for the lyrics.

In a 2017 letter to JazzTimes, written after his album “Freedom Suite” was excluded from a “protest jazz” list, Rollins expanded on the song’s political and cultural value: “I had an activist grandmother, and when I was a little boy, 3, 4, 5 years old, she used to take me on marches up and down Harlem for people like Paul Robeson and segregation cases on 125th Street. That was just a part of my upbringing. Later, when I was playing music and making a little name for myself, I was able to record ‘The House I Live In,’ which was very much a civil-rights anthem at the time. And I made an early record with Miles Davis, ‘Airegin,’ which was Nigeria spelled backwards. It was an attempt to introduce some kind of black pride into the conversation of the time. That was my history.”

And in an interview dated March 2021, Rollins told the blog Zaynnah Magazine that, though he had never been to Africa, “the inspiration behind ‘Airegin’ was that at the time, there was not enough of an African consciousness in the United States.” He repeated the story about growing up with his grandmother, who he reminded the interviewer was from St. Thomas in the Caribbean, and was most likely a Garveyite, and marching with her in parades for Black consciousness and civil rights. He had seen newspaper photographs of Nigerians that gave him pride, inspiring him to write the record: “Africa is our home... something that we need to be proud of.” He kept the song’s meaning discreet by spelling "Nigeria" backward, but people still discovered it.

Sidenote: Rollins was a devoted baseball fan. Growing up in New York City, he preferred baseball to music practice and idolized the Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher Don Newcombe, earning the nickname “Newk.” In 1951, Newcombe became the first Black pitcher to win 20 games in a season, and in 1956 he became the first player to win both the National League MVP and the Cy Young Award in the same year. His achievements came during an era when Major League Baseball remained largely segregated, even as the Brooklyn Dodgers had begun integrating the sport with the additions of Jackie Robinson in 1947, Roy Campanella in 1948, and Newcombe himself in 1949. Rollins later paid tribute to his childhood hero with the 1959 album Newk's Time, released on Blue Note Records.

In the realm of formal politics, many Egyptians have long felt uncertain and disillusioned. Political leadership has often been characterized by limited options for meaningful representation, with state actors prioritizing their own power over the needs of the population. This entrenched perception, that political leaders benefit from people’s hardship, has steadily eroded public trust and diminished collective confidence in governance. However, football offers Egyptians a rare and meaningful sense of agency. It manifests in which club to support and how to express that allegiance. Until the state started banning most spectators from games, fans in the stands were able to express their identities and participate in a shared emotional and cultural experience. And it is within this space that football Ultras emerged, as devoted fans and a politically significant collective.

Football in Egypt functions as far more than a sport; it is an entrenched social institution, part of the fabric of life. The vast majority of Egyptians are football followers. If not directly, then through siblings or parents, and support for clubs such as Al Ahly or Zamalek is often inherited across generations, forming part of familial and cultural identity. Yet within this inheritance, there remains space for individual expression. For many, the stadium becomes an arena where nationalism, dignity, brotherhood, and belonging are both performed and sensed. While nearly everyone engages with football in some capacity, the Ultras represent a more distinct and organized subset of supporters, detectable by their intensity, structure, and unwavering commitment.

Ultras are not casual fans. They adhere to a strict code of conduct that governs their participation: they chant continuously for the full ninety minutes regardless of the match outcome, stand throughout the game, travel to both home and away matches, and contribute to highly coordinated visual and auditory displays, including banners (tifos), chants, and songs.

This level of discipline and devotion distinguishes them from ordinary or casual spectators or fans who watch the games on television and go to the stadium occasionally for important matches. Importantly, membership in Ultra groups is not determined by socioeconomic status, age, or religion. Instead, it is grounded in loyalty to your club, to its ethos, and to your brothers (ultras are largely a male domain; Egypt is no exception), all of which produce a powerful collective identity. The Ultras movement in Egypt began to take shape in 2007, most prominently through groups such as Ultras Ahlawy (UA07) and Ultras White Knights (UWK), representing Al Ahly and Zamalek, respectively. These two are the biggest and most successful clubs in Egypt and on the African continent. While both these Ultras groups consistently claimed to be apolitical, their practices and experiences suggest otherwise. Even before the 2011 uprising, which resulted in the end of military rule after 59 uninterrupted years, Ultras were engaged in confrontations with state authority, particularly the police. During the late Mubarak era, the Egyptian regime viewed public assembly as a threat to national security and suppressed any unauthorized gatherings. Football stadiums, however, remained one of the few spaces where mass gatherings persisted.

Inside the stadium, Ultras frequently clashed with police forces. These confrontations were not merely incidental; they cultivated a collective understanding of resistance. Ultras became adept at navigating police tactics, organizing large groups, and maintaining cohesion under pressure. For the duration of a match, they experienced a form of temporary autonomy. In an environment where they outnumbered the police and asserted control over their space, they were a liberated people, unmanaged and free. Over time, they came to see the stadium not just as a place for football, but as a charged space of protest and solidarity. This politicization was further shaped by their engagement with broader regional struggles. Ultras demonstrated visible solidarity with movements such as the Arab Spring uprisings, which at the time took the capital’s main public square, Tahrir, as well as with Palestinian resistance, incorporating these themes into their chants and visual displays. One widely circulated chant emphasized pan-Arab unity and resistance to division. It reflects a political consciousness that extended beyond national borders:

Rulers’ oppression increased and division was a weapon,

The more I hate my brother the more [the rulers] succeed,

They divided us, separated us and our chains increased,

And Arabic, my country’s language, was buried under borders,

And in their media, our past was years of catastrophe,

but read our history and see our resistance to colonies.

I’m Egyptian, Syrian, and the land is Palestinian,

I’m Tunisian, Libyan, and the direction is Saudi,

I’m Bahraini, Yemeni, and the soul is Moroccan,

I’m an Arab revolutionary and I will fight for the cause.

Despite their insistence on being “apolitical,” these multimedia forms reveal an underlying ideological orientation fixed in opposition to oppression and commitment to collective struggle.

Ultras’ involvement in the Arab Spring can be understood through the concept of “transgressive contention,” as theorized by sociologist and political scientist Charles Tilly. This framework describes moments when ostensibly apolitical actors enter the political arena and reshape collective action. Ultras exemplified this process. Their organizational discipline, clashes with the police, and collective identity made them central to the revolution. In Tahrir Square, they coordinated crowds, anticipated police movements, defended protesters, and sustained morale, becoming what some called the revolution’s “military core.”

The revolution reshaped the public framings of Ultras. The Ultras, previously depicted as unruly and disruptive, were now celebrated as protectors and revolutionaries. As the movement grew, Ultras expanded their organizational reach, mobilizing politically engaged youth and becoming one of the largest civic forces in Egypt at the time, second only to the Muslim Brotherhood. (The Brotherhood won elections and President Mohammed Morsi governed for one year before being deposed in another military coup. Since then, Egypt has been governed by the military again.)

In the period between the ousting of Mubarak and Morsi’s election, the military reacted with severe repression against Ultras. The most devastating example occurred in February 2012 during the Port Said Stadium massacre, where over seventy fans and Ultras were killed after police restricted stadium exits, contributing to a deadly stampede. Widely understood as an act of retribution, the massacre marked a turning point in the state’s approach to the movement. In the years that followed, censorship intensified: the term “Ultras” was banned, their images were prohibited from publication, and courts designated them as a terrorist organization. By 2018, the groups were formally disbanded.

Despite their removal from stadiums, the legacy of the Ultras endures. Their subcultural identity is rooted in Egypt and among diasporic communities. Their trajectory and stadium-to-street pipeline exemplify how spaces of leisure and subculture can become incubators on the frontlines: capable of toppling an authoritarian regime. In the words of “Hekayetna (Our Story)” (translated from Arabic), by Ultras Ahlawy:

Football when we arrived was lies and deception,
It was brain numbing and a shield for the authorities.
They tried to beautify it but it resembled the grief of the country. They did not take account of the thousands in the stands.
We will never forget your past,
You are the slaves of the regime.
And when the revolution came, we went and participated in every city,

I will never let you feel safe as an authority and will never forget what you have done to us, I will never allow you to rule us again one more day,
Keep setting your police on us.
They all died with the dream of ending the regimes grip on the country,
Oh SCAF, you bastards.
You sold the blood of the martyrs in return for protecting your regime that you are part of, Oh SCAF you are bastards.

The Cape Town director and writer Adrian van Wyk, now studying cultural politics at a Brazilian university, makes decolonial films that listen closely to history and let the archive speak. His debut feature, “What The Soil Remembers,” a collaboration with Ecuadorian filmmaker Jose Cardoso, explored the racist past of Stellenbosch, both the town and the university, and its lingering legacies, particularly on the town’s coloured residents.

The new film, “Notes from the Underground,” which is codirected by Chris Kets and Van Wyk, turns to the Cape Town roots of South African hip hop. The film could be regarded as the first full-length documentary to really map the movement’s history.

Reflective, immersive, and quietly powerful, the film serves as both a tribute and an intervention. Rather than repeating familiar stories about hip hop since the 1980s, Kets and Van Wyk focus on how Cape Town artists – Ready D (from the seminal group, POC), Rozzano, Emile XYZ (from Black Noise), Driemanskap, Niko10Long, Isaac Mutant, and Mutant’s daughter, Lyrix — anchor the film, fighting to hold onto the culture’s political and communal spirit while imagining different futures.

The result is a thoughtful corrective to standard hip hop documentaries, showing a scene shaped as much by memory, resistance, and place as by the promises – and failures – of post-apartheid South Africa.

The film premieres at the Encounters International Documentary Film Festival, scheduled for early next month, with screenings at various venues across Johannesburg and Cape Town.

The English Premier League and British football hardly featured notable African players before Arsene Wenger arrived as manager of Arsenal F.C. in 1996. The few high-profile exceptions were Tony Yeboah and Lucas Radebe at Leeds United F.C. and Daniel Amokachi at Everton F.C.

By the time Arsenal dismissed Arsène Wenger in 2018, he and the club had earned the distinction of being primarily responsible for mainstreaming African footballers in the top flight of the English game. At one point in the mid-to-late 2000s, at least seven of Arsenal’s eleven starters on any given match day were black, either the children of African migrants to Europe, African-descended players from the Caribbean, or, more to the point, players born in an African country. By 2025, more than two dozen African-born players had played for Arsenal, primarily due to Wenger’s doing.

At least three African players – Lauren, Kolo Touré, and Nwankwo Kanu – were regular starters on the “Invincibles,” the legendary Arsenal team that went unbeaten for a whole season in 2003-2004. It is also a striking coincidence that the last major player Wenger signed at Arsenal was an African: the Gabonese Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang.

In this way, Arsenal inaugurated a revolution about race in British and global football culture. On the field, represented by these players and their successors, Arsenal came to represent London’s diversity, especially its African diaspora. Arsenal legend Thierry Henry (his parents are immigrants from the French Caribbean; his mother from Martinique and his father from Guadeloupe) commented on the occasion of his retirement from the club that Arsenal, by being one of the first clubs to have black players at the heart of its team, became “the club of the people and the streets.” All this combined to cement Arsenal’s place in African football lore and to make it one of the most supported football clubs on the continent, especially among football fans who came of age in the 21st century.

Like other professional clubs at the pinnacle of the English game, Arsenal had historically recruited only white players from Africa. The first was a descendant of white South African settlers, Dan le Roux. He had an unremarkable career at Arsenal between 1957 and 1958, playing in only seven matches. The first black player to sign for Arsenal was Brendon Batson, a Grenadian-born immigrant to Britain from Trinidad. Batson played 10 times for the club between 1971 and 1974 before moving to West Bromwich Albion F.C., where, together with Cyrille Regis and Laurie Cunningham, he became part of perhaps the most iconic trio of black players at an English top-flight club in the 1970s. Batson’s signing also opened the way for a smattering of black players whose parents were also from the Caribbean to run out for Arsenal for the first time, and the side that in 1989 won the Gunners their first title in 18 years featured the unforgettable trio of Michael Thomas, Paul Davis, and David Rocastle.

When the Premier League was born in 1992, Coventry City F.C. was the first, that same season, to pick an African footballer to start a league match: Peter Ndlovu from Zimbabwe.

It was left to Wenger to sign Arsenal’s first player from the African continent, Christopher Wreh, from Liberia. One of Wreh’s distinctions is that he is one of only two players (the other is Thierry Henry) signed by Wenger during Wenger's time at both AS Monaco FC and Arsenal. But perhaps a more significant detail of Wreh’s biography and Wenger’s time at AS Monaco is that he is a cousin of George Weah, later president of Liberia, who, as a footballer, won the Ballon d’Or in 1995 – the first and still only player to have done so while representing an African country. Wenger’s relationship and success with George Weah at Monaco also explain his subsequent affinity for African players. (It bears mentioning that when Weah won the Ballon d’Or, he called Wenger on stage and handed him the trophy instead. Later, when Weah became president, he invited Wenger for an official visit and awarded him Liberia’s highest honor: “Knight Grand High Commander of the Humane Order of African Redemption.”)

Christopher Wreh had a decent career at Arsenal, spending four years at the club and an additional three years on loan. He contributed to Arsenal’s FA Cup (scoring the goal that won the semifinal) and Premier League double in 1998. It was Kanu, however, whose 1999 arrival forever changed the perception of African players in England. Kanu had previously won the UEFA Champions League with AFC Ajax and the Olympic Games with Nigeria. A proven winner and a tall, rangy player able to score goals from apparently impossible angles, Kanu was, in Wenger’s words, “a genius, creative, technical, brave, a player everyone admired.” He quickly became a cult hero at the club.

In 2000, Kanu was followed by Lauren, the son of Equatorial Guinean exiles who fled to Cameroon (for whom Lauren later played at the World Cup) and then Spain, where Lauren started his football career. In 2002, after a short trial, Kolo Toure joined Arsenal from an academy in Côte d’Ivoire. In his book about his time at Arsenal, Wenger singles out Toure, along with Sol Campbell, as “fundamentally important” to the success of the Invincibles. Bought on the cheap (he cost just 150,000 pounds), in Wenger’s words, Toure “became one of the best central defenders in the game.”

Next came Emmanuel Eboué, who also started his career at the same academy as Eboue in Côte d’Ivoire. (Yaya Toure, Kolo’s younger brother, had a trial at Arsenal in 2003, but Wenger decided not to sign him.)

These players, along with recruits from France, the Netherlands, and elsewhere (at one point, controversially, Wenger fielded no British-born players), would form the nucleus of Arsenal’s success in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

At the beginning of the 2010s, as that first group aged and moved on, Wenger made another run with a new crop of players and another group of African players at its core – including Alex Song, Alex Iwobi, Emmanuel Adebayor, and Gervinho. Both Song and Iwobi are part of African football’s familial legacies, respectively those of Rigobert Song and Jay-Jay Okocha. However, success became more elusive for Wenger’s next generation: these teams won the FA Cup multiple times and qualified for the Champions League every season, but never won the Premier League again.

By 2013, Arsenal fans were beginning to call for Wenger’s dismissal. With Wenger’s eventual retirement, Arsenal’s reliance on players from Africa also came to an end. However, Wenger’s successors would continue this legacy by signing the children of African immigrants in London, such as Eddie Nketiah and Bukayo Saka.

Wenger also signed a number of North African players or players of North African descent, most notably Mohamed Elneny from Egypt, Marouane Chamakh from Morocco, and Samir Nasri from France. And, from South and Central America, players like Joel Campbell (Costa Rica) and the Brazilians, Gilberto Silva and Julio Baptista.

When Wenger signed players like Kanu, Lauren, Toure, and Eboue, English football was still distrustful of foreigners, especially players and coaches from outside Europe. African fans, watching via satellite television, recognized themselves in Wenger’s Arsenal (he was one of the first foreign coaches in the Premier League). Their accents, hairstyles, fashion, and joyful football (though when they needed to, they could also play a physical style) stood in stark contrast to the tactics of their opponents at other clubs. Wenger also seemed unfazed by African players flying off every two years for a month to play in the Africa Cup of Nations, further endearing him to African fans who felt disrespected by Europe’s top leagues, their clubs, and football managers when their native sons were denied the opportunity to represent their countries.

Today, the African legacy at Arsenal is felt more off the field than on. Among the most popular “Fan TV” outlets on social media for English Premier League teams, those aimed at Arsenal fans are the most diverse. On YouTube, Kelechi, a Nigerian immigrant scientist and Arsenal fan, is now equally recognizable as Saka. Kelechi autotunes afropop songs to describe his mood before giving his match analysis on AFTV or, increasingly, on his own social media channels. That channel and its offshoots have done more to mainstream African participation in the World Cup and the Africa Cup of Nations among young Euro-American football supporters. All this has cemented a view of Arsenal as open, welcoming, and diverse, and above all as representing democracy, antiracism, and forward-looking values, something in short supply on the continent.

There is, therefore, a grim irony in the fact that the same club spent years (from 2018 until 2025) advertising one of Africa’s most efficient dictatorships through its “Visit Rwanda” sponsorship. Although Arsenal’s sleeve sponsorship agreement with Rwanda has now come to an end, the controversy surrounding the partnership left unresolved questions about the contradictory relationship between global football branding, authoritarian image-making, and the political aspirations of the new generation of African supporters who found an affinity and identity with the club.

• This is derived from a chapter I originally wrote for the book, Black Arsenal: Club, Culture, Identity, edited by Clive Chijioke Nwonka and Matthew Harle, in 2024.

On May 14th, the French Football Federation announced its 2026 World Cup squad. Despite turmoil at Kylian Mbappé’s club, Real Madrid, where he is blamed for the dysfunction on the field and behind the scenes, he retained the French captain’s armband.

Mbappé is also emerging as a leader in more ways than one. On the face of it, he has not shied away from speaking out against the rightward drift in French politics, which mirrors depressing trends across much of Europe. In recent elections, the far right – represented by the National Rally – has come closer than ever to winning both the presidency and a parliamentary majority in France. In 2022, only a tactical alliance between Emmanuel Macron’s centrists and the left prevented Marine Le Pen and the RN from taking power. Jordan Bardella, widely seen as Le Pen’s successor, is currently polling first in the race for the next presidential election, scheduled for April 2027. Bardella is the right’s likely candidate, as Marine Le Pen’s campaign remains uncertain due to an embezzlement conviction she is appealing. Macron, meanwhile, cannot run again because the French constitution limits presidents to two consecutive terms. With no clear centrist successor yet emerging, it remains unclear whether another tactical alliance between the center and the left would be enough to keep Bardella and the RN out of power.

Which is how and where Mbappé re-enters the chat. It is not his first time.

On the eve of the 2024 Euros (eventually won by Italy), the RN captured the largest share of the French vote in the European Parliament elections, winning roughly 31 percent. The result shocked France and prompted Macron to call a snap parliamentary election. Ahead of that vote, Mbappé described the RN’s success as “catastrophic,” urged the public to vote, and warned against “extremes knocking at the door of power.” His teammates, Marcus Thuram of Inter Milan(more on his family later) and Jules Koundé of FC Barcelona, were similarly direct in criticizing the RN. Ousmane Dembélé, along with two white teammates, Benjamin Pavard and Olivier Giroud, offered more indirect criticisms. Mbappé, however, absorbed most of the backlash. It was striking that Antoine Dupont, the white captain of France’s men’s national rugby team, also rejected Marine Le Pen’s politics but did not face nearly the same level of scrutiny or abuse.

Which gets us to now. Last week, Mbappé was profiled by Vanity Fair ahead of the 2026 World Cup. Questions of French identity and the RN surfaced halfway through. The magazine noted that Mbappé’s candor was not unusual, observing that “candor is a quality that distinguishes French athletes from their American counterparts.” Midway through the piece, reporter Aidan McLaughlin recalled how Mbappé, who helped France win the 2018 World Cup, missed the decisive penalty in France’s Euro 2020 defeat to Switzerland and was subsequently subjected to intense racial abuse from French “fans,” severe enough that he considered quitting the national team. “It’s a dynamic that players of mixed identity so often face in France,” McLaughlin writes. “They’re heroes when they win, totems of Gallic pride. When they lose, they are maligned as Africans with no business representing the country.”

Mbappé said the rise of the right shocked him and compelled him to act: “We truly try to fight this idea that a footballer should shut up and play.” The section on politics ends with Mbappé talking about using his foundation, which creates opportunities for working-class and poor children to play football, to effect change. He lists his political values as compassion and solidarity. The piece then moves on to his brand deals.

Except for his comments on the right and on French identity, Mbappé’s political commitments remain relatively vague. This stands in contrast to previous national team captains and other prominent stars, who often articulated clearer public positions. Mbappé’s mother is of Algerian descent (she was born in France, while his father is a Cameroonian immigrant), and he must have been aware of the history of the FLN team, formed in 1958 by Algerian players then active in Ligue 1 to promote the Algerian independence movement through exhibition matches around the world. Among them was Rachid Mekhloufi, a star at Saint-Étienne, as well as three members of the French national team: Mustapha Zitouni, Abdelaziz Ben Tifour, and Saïd Brahimi. It was also widely speculated that several members of the team were in contention for France’s squad at the 1958 World Cup in Sweden.

Black-descended players such as Marius Trésor, Jean-Pierre Adams, and, most notably, Jean Tigana – who finished second in the Ballon d’Or voting in 1984 for his role in France’s Euro 84 championship – came into their own within the national team setup in the 1970s and 1980s. While they were not generally outspoken on politics during their playing careers, several would later, in retirement, reflect on the racial abuse, scrutiny, and persistent questioning they faced from sections of the media and fans regarding their identity and sense of belonging. This period also coincided with the rise of the National Front, led by Jean-Marie Le Pen (Marine’s father), which emerged as a national political force in the 1980s, winning its first seats in the National Assembly and bringing questions of immigration and national identity more forcefully into mainstream French politics.

By the mid-to-late 1990s, Front National was a well-established, influential far-right force in French politics. This happened to coincide with France hosting the 1998 World Cup and famously winning with a team of “Black-Blanc-Beur” (Black-White-Arab). Two years before, during Euro 96, which was played in Britain, Jean-Marie Le Pen told FN supporters that it was “artificial to bring in players from abroad and call them the French national team.” The team included at least seven players with family origins in France’s former or current colonies in the Caribbean, Africa, or the Pacific. Its star was Zinedane Zidane, born in Marseille and of Algerian descent. Le Pen accused most of these players of not singing or not knowing the lyrics to the French national anthem. Michel Platini, who captained the side in the 1980s and was of white Italian descent, said that nobody in his generation, when teams were mostly white, sang or knew the anthem, and it wasn’t a problem.

The captain in 1998 was another player Didier Deschamps (he now manages the team), and since then, except a rotating captaincy between 2010 and 2012 and Hugo Lloris between 2012 and 2022, the national team has been led by Black or Arab-descended players, including Marcel Desailly, Patrick Vieira, Zinedine Zidane, Lilian Thuram (Marcus Thuram’s father and arguably the most explicitly left-leaning of recent French footballers), Thierry Henry, Patrice Evra (he was captain during the disastrous 2010 World Cup which was marred by racist insults against the Black and Arab players in the squad), and Kylian Mbappé. (Earlier, Trèsor, who was born in Guadeloupe in the Caribbean, was captain from 1976 to 1979.) This is obviously giving the Right stress.

Politically, Mbappé resembles Zidane's political approach more. Zidane has also spoken out against the National Front, in 2002 and again in 2017. In 2002, he said: “But above all, they must think of the consequences that could arise if they vote for a party which does not correspond to French values.” His words closely anticipate the kind of civic appeals that Kylian Mbappé later echoed in his own public interventions.

In 2023, rumors circulated that Zidane was interested in the role of coach of the French men’s national team. Had he been appointed, he would have been the first head coach of North African heritage in the team’s history. Noël Le Graët, then president of the French Football Federation, dismissed the idea out of hand. Mbappé responded on X: “Zidane is France. We don’t disrespect a legend like that.” The statement quickly made headlines and was widely interpreted as contributing to the pressure that eventually led to Le Graët’s resignation. It is suggested Zidane will take over as manager of the national team after the 2026 tournament.

For all his comments about elections, Kylian Mbappé is hardly a radical. Zidane has a similar reputation in France. Mbappé remains deeply invested in branding and image management, reportedly leaving Paris Saint-Germain partly because the club overused his likeness in its marketing without compensation commensurate with his global profile. Silicon Valley-speak about “new values” and “world-changing ambition mostly appeals to him. Ironically, many Silicon Valley tech billionaires he admires have flirted with, enabled, or directly funded right-wing political movements akin to the National Rally.

Unlike previous editions, the 2026 World Cup will unfold amid millions of immigrants from countries where football is woven into daily life. The irony is bitter: the World Cup has never been so close, yet never so inaccessible.

Hours spent in virtual queues (sometimes up to four) offer no guarantee of actually securing a ticket. Lower-priced tickets disappear, leaving fans empty-handed after long waits.

Those who miss out and turn to the resale market are in for a greater shock: the cheapest available tickets for the final now start at $4,185 on FIFA’s resale platform, more than seven times the price of the cheapest seat at the 2022 final in Qatar and vastly higher than the roughly $100 entry point for the UEFA EURO 2024 final. Even FIFA’s projected average final ticket price of $1,408 has already been surpassed. And unlike any previous World Cup, this one is being played on the doorstep of nearly two million Brazilians in the US – the largest Brazilian community outside Brazil itself, according to the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs — along with millions of other immigrants for whom football is a cultural inheritance. Among Brazilian and African fans in our circles, the reaction is immediate: this World Cup feels out of reach, pricing out the ordinary supporters who give the tournament its atmosphere and meaning.

Many of the fans outside the United States who can most easily afford these steep prices are in Europe, and even they are rebelling. Football Supporters Europe (FSE), the continent’s largest fan network, joined the consumer group Euroconsumers to file a formal complaint with the European Commission against FIFA. They argue FIFA has abused its dominant position by imposing excessive prices and opaque buying rules for the 2026 World Cup.

In past World Cups, FIFA made efforts to keep tickets within reach for local fans, like creating special low-cost tickets (“Category 4”) reserved only for residents of the host country. At the 2010 tournament in South Africa, about 15% of tickets were in this category, starting around $20. In 2014 in Brazil, 400,000 such tickets were set aside, starting at $30, with extra discounts (another 50 percent!) for students, seniors, and people on social support. In Qatar, FIFA moved away from tiered ticket pricing but still used some resident-based pricing and phased sales to guide ticket sales.

But then, cheaper tickets weren’t truly accessible for a large fraction of Brazilians or earlier South Africans. Attending the World Cup was difficult for most, but it was within reach for a meaningful share of the population. What we are witnessing in 2026 is a different order of exclusion. The people buying tickets in the resale market are either a tiny economic elite or ordinary fans treating it as a once-in-a-lifetime financial sacrifice.

Where the World Cup is being held has a lot to do with it. The United States has an unregulated ticketing market. Dynamic pricing, resale platforms, and speculative ticket trading are features of American sports and entertainment that fans in Brazil or South Africa never had to navigate. By bringing the World Cup to the US without adapting its ticketing model to the global nature of its audience, FIFA has effectively imported the logic of American sports into an event that has always belonged to the world.

Now, for the first time in World Cup history, FIFA has introduced dynamic (or variable) pricing. Under this model, ticket prices are determined by supply and demand in real time, a mechanism already familiar from airlines, hotels, and ride-hailing apps. At the 2026 World Cup, it works like this: after each sales round, FIFA reads the demand and sets a new, higher price floor for the next round.

It’s an economist’s dream: dynamic pricing is efficient because it helps match supply with demand.

But two major problems with FIFA’s current ticket sales deserve attention. The first is market structure. FIFA is not just the sole seller; it also controls supply. When a single actor controls both supply and pricing, “dynamic pricing” no longer functions as it would in a normal market.

Scarcity also shapes fan behavior. A supporter prepared to pay $200 may suddenly spend $600 or even $1,000 when tickets appear to be disappearing.

The second problem is resale. FIFA’s own resale platform charges 15 percent fees to both buyers and sellers, meaning FIFA profits from every secondary transaction.

To understand what FIFA has done, it helps to understand the market it stepped into. The US live event ticketing market is considered screwed up by fans. Economists Eric Budish and Alan Krueger have shown that music and sports events routinely set low face-value prices in the primary market to maintain goodwill with fans, while the resale market extracts the real price from fans. The profits that should go to performers end up with scalpers and resale platforms instead. No one running the ticketing sales has an incentive to fix this profitable market.

Several solutions could be tested. Budish suggests making tickets non-transferable, like airline tickets, to weaken the resale market. Another option is to reserve a substantial pool of non-resalable tickets at genuinely affordable prices. Journalist Alex Mayyasi proposes a broader model that combines lotteries, rewards for loyal fans, VIP packages, and discounted tickets for supporters who contribute time to youth soccer or to underfunded women’s clubs.

Who could have pushed FIFA to bring the prices down? Football associations are not a realistic pressure point, as they just reelected FIFA President Gianni Infantino. The most promising avenue is public officials in the host countries. Donald Trump, who has shown little concern for high tickets before, but remains highly attuned to polling, told the right-wing New York Post that World Cup tickets are too expensive. This statement, now that most of the tickets have already sold, seems ineffective. But his pronouncements still shape political debate, especially on the right. Apart from the May 7 letter by two Democratic Congresspeople to FIFA, in March, nearly seventy U.S. Congresspeople sent a formal demand to FIFA, criticizing dynamic pricing, artificial scarcity, and misleading seat maps as patterns of potentially deceptive practices. This could have had some effect as new sales rounds took place in subsequent months.

The most popular politician in the US right now is New York City’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani. Unlike most US politicians, Mamdani is an actual football fan. The 2002 World Cup, which Brazil won, was the first he remembered. He rooted for Senegal, which shocked France in the opening match. During his 2025 mayoral campaign, Mamdani promoted his “Game Over Greed” campaign, demanding that FIFA end dynamic pricing, cap resale prices, and reserve 15% of tickets for local residents. He was calling for the measures FIFA implemented in South Africa and Brazil. But even Mamdani knows that FIFA puts profits first, and as the mayor of one of the hosting cities, he can’t do much about it. In the meantime, he declared that all official fan fests would be free, reversing his predecessor’s decision and breaking with the practice of most other host cities.

In the end, Mamdani’s is a modest but pointed act. FIFA prices people out of the stadium; Mamdani puts the game back in the streets. But let’s be honest about what that means: the world’s most popular sport is now accessible to ordinary fans only as a street party, and not because they are far away, but because they cannot afford to walk through the stadiums’ doors.

Something else is emerging from the WhatsApp groups and community chats. Beyond the frustration, beyond the hours spent in virtual queues, a slower realization is taking hold among Brazilians living in the United States. The 2026 World Cup has offered an uncomfortable perception. When there is no Category 4 ticket, no resident discount, and no institutional floor beneath the price, the market does not democratize access. FIFA’s ticketing has become, for many in this community, a blatant encounter with what an unregulated market does when no one sets the rules: it prices out precisely the people whose passion gave the product its value in the first place.

• An edited version of a post first published as “Tão perto, tão longe: Fifa expulsa dos estádios quem mais sonhou com a Copa” on UOL.com.br.

Daniele De Rossi was an outstanding midfielder for both AS Roma and the Italian men’s national team between 2001 and 2019. He won the World Cup with Italy in 2006 and spent his entire career at Roma (459 matches) before relocating briefly to Boca Juniors in Argentina in 2020. Like former club teammate Francesco Totti, De Rossi symbolizes loyalty in modern football, where club allegiances are increasingly rare.

In retirement, he became an assistant to Roberto Mancini on the Italian men’s national team, which also found success, winning the 2020 Euro. Four years later, De Rossi was rewarded with managing Roma. Even if results didn’t ultimately go his way, he will always be beloved there. He is now the manager of FC Genoa and the owner of Ostiamare Lido Calcio, his boyhood club, who were just recently promoted to Italy’s third division for the first time in thirty-five years.

Throughout his career, De Rossi has remained independent-minded, a thoughtful and unconventional personality. For example, in 2012, the German tabloid BILD alleged he was a right-wing supporter of former Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. De Rossi did not respond to the claim. Around the same time, his mother told a journalist that the Italian government raises taxes on the rich. De Rossi was asked whether he shared her views. He joked that he confronted her that it would negatively affect him as a millionaire, to which she retorted: So you can pay your tax.

His only on-the-record political statement dates to his playing career, when he criticized the right-wing Northern League, a party that admires Mussolini, promotes federalism, and aligns with Italy’s conservative bloc, often emphasizing immigration. In 2010, after the League joined Silvio Berlusconi’s coalition—one that advanced a notion of the “True Italian” and drew on Berlusconi’s own admiration for Mussolini—its members attacked the inclusion of Mario Balotelli in the national team. Daniele De Rossi responded by defending his teammate: “Whoever is part of this group will always be well received.”

Questions of national identity remain central in Italian politics. Current prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, is allied with the Northern League and pledges to “defend” the country from globalization, by which is meant immigration. De Rossi has not commented on her government. (Meloni is a fan of rugby.)

Daniele De Rossi had previously said he did not vote during his playing career, but in 2016—while still at Roma—he publicly praised Rome’s then-mayor, Virginia Raggi, the city’s first female mayor and the first elected from the Five Star Movement (M5S). The movement, founded in 2009 by comedian Beppe Grillo, is a mix of left- and right-populist politics. At times, its positions contradict each other, though when Raggi governed Rome, it leaned left. De Rossi claims that, like with Roma, he always wanted what is best for Rome. “We are all equal members of a large family.”

In a recent interview, De Rossi stated that if he had been able to vote in the recent U.S. election, he would have voted for Democratic Party candidate Kamala Harris. He explained, “I cannot describe myself as apolitical—if anything, I am non-partisan—because I have never felt bound to any specific political side. There are politicians I dislike; I might even go so far as to despise them, yet on certain issues, I have found myself in agreement with their stance.”

Probably the most enduring anecdote about De Rossi, which has resurfaced since the promotion of Ostiamare, is what happened when former Italian national team kit-man Pietro “Spazzolino” Lombardi passed away in 2016: De Rossi was reported to have left his World Cup winner’s medal in Lombardi’s coffin with him.

Twelve years ago, Brazil didn’t just host the World Cup; it was a site of forced modernization. The historic, crumbling terraces where fans stood for generations, sweating, shouting, and shoulder to shoulder, were torn down. In their place rose the “Arenas,” featuring improved infrastructure and modern comforts. However, the new design mandated a seated environment, fundamentally altering the matchday experience. By replacing standing rooms with numbered seats, the stadiums achieved lower densities and higher prices. Excited, loud fans were largely replaced by quieter spectators.

While the Brazilian government and local municipalities drained their coffers to meet FIFA’s luxury standards, the streets were burning. Protests surged across the country under the rallying cry “Não vai ter Copa” (There won’t be a World Cup). Protesters took to the streets with signs demanding a different kind of investment: “We want hospitals, schools, and transportation to FIFA standards.”

Fast forward to today. The host countries have moved north to the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, and the atmosphere feels strikingly familiar as protests once again precede the main event.

In the United States, the “No Kings” movement is gathering steam. This time, the issue isn’t the World Cup budget itself, but rather the billions in taxpayer money allocated toward global conflicts and immigration enforcement. In Mexico, the echoes of 2014 are visceral. In the working-class neighborhood of Santa Úrsula Coapa, adjacent to the Banorte Stadium, the iconic Azteca in Mexico City, which will host the tournament’s opening match, residents have organized sustained resistance to displacement, water privatization, and gentrification linked to the World Cup’s development. Graffiti reads “El Mundial pasa, el despejo se queda” (The World Cup ends, the displacement stays). In Canada, the protest takes a different form but carries the same logic. Outside the FIFA Congress in Vancouver, hospitality workers and low-income residents held up red cards, declaring: “Show FIFA the red card.” They are protesting against displacement, criminalization and discrimination, and advocating for more investment and care for the population of Vancouver. In Toronto, a winter warming center for homeless people was closed in March after the venue had been pre-booked for FIFA use.

The tension has reached a boiling point, leading many to ask: Shouldn’t we boycott the World Cup?

The same happened in Brazil, where whispers of a boycott circulated before the 2014 World Cup. However, the moment the whistle blew, the nation was glued to the matches as if the tension had never existed. I argue that this is mainly because football is not merely a top-down imposition but a profound expression of popular culture. The Brazilian writer Nelson Rodrigues famously captured this inseparability of football and popular identity in his chronicle “O Escrete de Loucos,” written after Brazil’s 1962 World Cup victory. Reflecting on what had truly won the tournament, he wrote that no one would understand that the victory came not from tactics or talent alone, but from “o mistério de nossos botecos, e a graça das nossas esquinasz” (the mystery of our corner bars, and the grace of our street corners). For Rodrigues, the game was never a manufactured “formula” spectacle but an organic expression rising from the ground up, from the very fabric of popular life.

I would venture to say that a true boycott is impossible because of the very people who keep the game’s heart beating. The World Cup is kept alive by the kids in the favelas, the immigrants in Queens, and the families in local bars who refuse to let their sport be stolen.

There is a deep, uncomfortable irony in modern football: it is a popular cultural expression managed by an exclusive hierarchy. Run largely by white, European men, the organization has transformed football into a business model, one that prioritizes very high ticket fees, corporate sponsors and VIP hospitality over the fans who gave the game its value in the first place.

While the majority of fans are priced out of the modern arenas, the culture has not vanished; it has simply migrated. Communities have reinvented the ‘stadium atmosphere’ in public squares, street corners, and living rooms, allowing fan culture to persist and permeate different layers of the city. As the English football historian David Goldblatt argues, football is the world’s most universal cultural practice, one capable of illuminating shared histories and collective identities across vastly different societies. Indeed, these fan rituals exemplify what Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger called the “invention of tradition” — deliberate practices created by communities to forge identity and claim a sense of belonging in a rapidly changing urban landscape.

While the 2026 World Cup will be held in gleaming stadiums, a parallel history will unfold in urban spaces. The U.S. is a mosaic of global identities, people who brought with them unique footballing traditions and ways of inhabiting the urban landscape. This is where the “stolen” sport is reclaimed, as immigrant communities transform parks and plazas into informal arenas that the corporate structure cannot fence in - the mystery of the bars and the grace of the corners persists, proving that the heart of the game remains exactly where Nelson Rodrigues found it in 1962: rising from the ground up.