Five Ways to Watch the World Cup; Finally: Whose Nation?

In the final installment, Ron Krabill, Director of the Global Sport Lab at the University of Washington writes about how nations themselves are reimagined through the World Cup.

This is perhaps the least common way that people consciously watch the World Cup, because the tournament is so obviously, by definition, constituted by matches of nation against nation. But underlying each match, and each national team, are struggles around the symbolism of the team itself. Who, or what, does a national team represent?

Most would answer “the nation,” of course. As one of my mentors, the British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, famously put it, “The imagined community of millions seems more real as a team of 11 named people.” As you may have guessed, this quote is where the name of this Substack, Eleven Named People, comes from. And yes, politicians of all ilk will do their best to attach themselves to the teams and the tournament itself.

Eric Hobsbawm.

Ana de Moura Leite’s point on this Substack a month before the World Cup matters here: the power of the Cup comes not from big business, not from media, not even from the nation – it comes from the ways in which everyday people make meaning of their sports and their teams. And people can – at least at times - be incredibly disobedient in how they make meaning of their teams, defying the politicians and the corporations to make meaning on their own terms, sometimes aligning but often not aligning with the discourses they are given.

When the 1998 French Team became the target of far right French politician Jean-Marie Le Pen, claiming that they weren’t really French and wouldn’t sing “Le Marseilles,” they instead became the symbol of French unity in diversity, of Black / Blanc / Beur – which translates to Black, White, and Arab – and they went on to win France’s first World Cup as a symbol of a modern, multicultural France, with a French-Algerian superstar, Zinedine Zidane.

Twenty years later they won again, with one writer declaring, “You want to troll French fascists? Tell them the truth: the most French man in the world right now is a black kid called Kylian Mbappe.” These issues came up again last month in a Vanity Fair interview with Mbappe, and many of those watching the Cup this year will continue to cheer on the French national team as a poke in the eye to the far right.

Iran, again, provides another compelling example of this contest over the symbolism of the nation. Does the current national team represent the current Iranian regime, who are three draws did not advanced to the knockout rounds. Its women’s team refused to sing the national anthem before a match at the recent Asian Cup, as did the men at an earlier international tournament. Do they represent the Iranian diaspora, who may showed up here in Seattle flying the oppositional “Lion and Sun” flag, which was the flag used prior to the Islamic Republic’s revolution? Who decides who, or what, these teams represent?

Here in the U.S., we’re familiar with these dynamics, especially if we contrast the ways in which the US women’s and men’s teams have become contested symbols of our own nation. During the 2019 Women’s World Cup, I took a group of UW students to the quarterfinal match between the US and France in Paris. That 2019 team had fully embraced their role as flag bearers for equal pay, gender equity, and Queer rights.

My students were able to articulate, in very clear terms, that they often feel a cognitive dissonance cheering for US national teams in any sport, given the United States’ histories of both sporting and geopolitical dominance. In the women’s team, however, they were able to find a different symbol and vision of the U.S. The students described their whole-hearted cheering for the women’s national team as a kind of cathartic freedom.

This brings us back to the criticism of the current Men’s team for not caring enough about anything. What might the US Men’s national team come to represent during this tournament? And again, who decides who, or what, these teams represent?

Morocco may make the most compelling example of this way of watching the World Cup. During their run in the 2022 tournament, Morocco simultaneously came to represent not only the nation of Morocco, but also the continent of Africa, as the first African team to reach the semifinals. But they also came to represent the so-called Arab world of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). This in spite of the fact that most of the players and the coach identify not as Arab but as Amazigh, the indigenous people of North Africa, who you may also know by the colonial name of Berber.

So the Moroccan team also came to represent the Amazigh. Yet that’s still not all – their success coupled with their players vocal support of the Palestinian cause, including bringing the Palestinian flag along during on-pitch victory celebrations, meant they also came to represent Palestine and Palestinian solidarity.

Again, who decides who, or what, these teams represent?

All of these examples show that the nationalism associated with any given team at the World Cup, whether we understand it as friendly competition or war by proxy, is a complicated, shifting, and contested symbol. While that symbol is often deployed as one of jingoistic nationalism, it can also become one of solidarity across and within national borders, of a different, more just vision of the nation, a breaking of the status quo, and even of something that moves above and beyond the boundaries of any one nation.

If you watch the World Cup in this way, you may see a struggle for a world that is still our world, but is more kind, more just, more compassionate, and more equitable.

In practice, I have no doubt that during the Cup itself, I, and probably all of you as well, will shift between each of these ways of watching at different times, or watch through a mashup of all of these approaches all at once, seeing different things, feeling the full range of human emotion, and appreciating again our shared humanity.

In conclusion, I want to leave you with one final example that brings together so many of these different ideas. First let me set the stage: it is October of 2005, and Cote d’Ivoire is in the midst of a Civil War. Their national team, captained by someone you may have heard of, Didier Drogba, has just defeated Sudan to qualify for their first World Cup. Live, on National Television, Drogba and his team addressed the people of Cote d’Ivoire from their locker room.

This plea eventually help lead to the end of the Civil War, a peace which lasted more than two years. Although fighting eventually resumed, making the victory a temporary one, we nonetheless see in this moment a way to watch the World Cup that goes beyond the world we’ve been given, and imagines something better.

Let’s join Drogba and his Ivorian teammates and sing: “Forgive. Forgive. Forgive. … We want to have fun, so stop firing your guns.”

* “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. The rest of the series can be found in Eleven Named People’s archive. For more background, see the UW Global Sport Lab’s World Cup: The Syllabus.