The Boycott That Never Was

Calls to boycott the 2026 World Cup echo 2014 FIFA World Cup. There protests faded once matches began.

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.