World Cup as a proxy for conflict and Fifa's convenient neutrality
Fifa’s willingness to separate football from politics has always depended on which politics are involved.
Fifa insists football and politics should never mix. It just has an extraordinarily flexible definition of politics.
Football never escaped politics; it simply became better at pretending.
Fifa's idea to separate football and politics is comforting; nonetheless, it is also one that the organisation itself has spent nearly a century disproving.
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Every four years, the World Cup briefly convinces the planet that 90 minutes matter more than inflation, elections, or war. The entire world collectively decides that a misplaced pass is a national emergency. Benedict Anderson might have recognised the spectacle immediately. Nations, he argued, are imagined communities, and few rituals make millions imagine themselves together quite like football.
That emotional investment also explains why governments have always wanted a piece of it.
The World Cup has never simply reflected politics. It has produced political legitimacy, projected national identity, and occasionally laundered reputations.
If war is politics by violent means, international football often becomes politics wrapped in scarves, anthems, and 90 minutes of carefully choreographed symbolism.
Benito Mussolini understood this before most people did. Italy's hosting of the 1934 World Cup was less about football than about fascism staging itself before an international audience.
Around 3,00,000 propaganda posters were distributed across Europe. Italian players performed the Fascist salute before matches. Refereeing decisions remain controversial nearly a century later, with accusations of intimidation and political pressure surrounding Italy's eventual triumph.
The trophy mattered. So did the photographs.
Forty-four years later, history offered an uncomfortable sequel.
While Argentina hosted the 1978 World Cup, the military junta led by Jorge Rafael Videla was disappearing, torturing, and murdering thousands during the Dirty War. Barely 10 minutes from the Estadio Monumental, detainees inside the ESMA torture centre reportedly heard crowds celebrating goals.
It remains one of history's cruellest juxtapositions: a nation cheering while prisoners listened through concrete walls.
Fifa carried on.
That willingness to separate football from politics has always depended on which politics are involved.
Like the United Nations, it claims neutrality while operating within an unequal distribution of power.
The contrasting treatment of Russia and Israel illustrates this dynamic. Following Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, FIFA swiftly suspended Russian clubs and national teams from international competitions, despite the absence of a United Nations Security Council resolution authorising such a move.
By contrast, repeated calls from human rights organisations and several national football associations to suspend Israel over the war in Gaza have produced no comparable action.
Instead, Fifa has largely deferred the issue to Uefa, revealing how European football institutions exert considerable influence over global football governance. The inconsistency is striking: one conflict prompts immediate sporting sanctions, while another is treated as an internal administrative matter.
Historical examples reinforce the pattern. Apartheid South Africa was excluded from Fifa between 1970 and 1990 following sustained international pressure, while Yugoslavia was suspended during the Balkan Wars after UN sanctions. Yet Iraq continued to compete under Saddam Hussein, Rwanda was never barred during the 1994 genocide, and the United States faced no football sanctions after invading Iraq in 2003.
Likewise, Türkiye was never suspended following its intervention in Cyprus in 1974, although Northern Cyprus remains excluded from Fifa because its statehood lacks widespread international recognition.
These decisions are difficult to reconcile through any consistent moral framework, but make greater sense when viewed through the politics of international recognition and the balance of power.
International relations theory helps explain this apparent inconsistency.
Realists argue that international institutions rarely transcend the interests of powerful states; instead, they reproduce existing power structures. Constructivists similarly contend that international norms are shaped by those with the greatest influence rather than applied universally. Fifa appears to function in much the same way.
Its sanctions often follow the contours of European diplomatic consensus rather than a coherent global standard. Football's governing body, therefore, does not stand outside international politics; it reproduces it.
Ultimately, Fifa's selective neutrality is not an exception but a reflection of the wider international system. The World Cup may be marketed as a global celebration that transcends politics, yet its governance often reveals whose voices carry the greatest weight.
In that sense, the World Cup does not merely mirror global politics; it mirrors a version of it viewed predominantly through a European lens.
The inconsistency often attracts accusations of hypocrisy. But hypocrisy may not be the right word.
Fifa behaves remarkably like the international system itself.
Pierre Bourdieu described social life as a struggle over symbolic capital – the prestige and legitimacy that actors accumulate beyond money or military strength. Few institutions generate symbolic capital more efficiently than the World Cup.
Hosting rights signal international recognition. Winning projects national prestige. Even participation offers governments opportunities to wrap themselves in collective pride.
That explains why states compete so fiercely for tournaments that rarely make economic sense.
The politics are no longer confined to dictatorships, either.
The 2026 World Cup arrives amid renewed scrutiny of visas, migration controls and the close relationship between Fifa President Gianni Infantino and US President Donald Trump. Iran's qualification, alongside continuing conflicts in the Middle East and Europe, ensures geopolitics will once again accompany the fixtures.
Football, meanwhile, continues insisting it is merely football.
Perhaps the greatest irony is that Fifa's claim of neutrality has become one of its most political acts. Neutrality does not remove politics; it merely decides which politics remain visible.
Football may be the beautiful game, but Fifa has spent much of its history proving that beauty and bureaucracy rarely keep the same company.
Yet none of this diminishes football itself.
If anything, it demonstrates its extraordinary cultural power.
The intersection of football and politics was once again evident at the 2026 World Cup when Egypt coach Hossam Hassan dedicated his side's historic first-ever World Cup knockout victory over Australia to the Palestinian people.
Carrying both the Egyptian and Palestinian flags onto the pitch after the match, Hassan said the victory belonged not only to Egyptians but also to Palestinians, while offering prayers for those killed in Gaza.
Ahead of Egypt's round-of-16 clash with Argentina at the 2026 World Cup, Egypt coach Hossam Hassan used an official Fifa press conference to make an impassioned appeal for Palestinians, turning a routine pre-match media briefing into a reminder that football's global platform is difficult to separate from the world's conflicts.
"If a person anywhere in the world does not feel for the Palestinian people, then they have lost part of their humanity," Hassan said, adding, "What came out of me was simply a human reaction. Before being Arab, Muslim, Christian, or anything else, I am a human being.
"Through football — the world's soft power — I want to send a message: please let the Palestinian people live. I ask athletes and journalists everywhere to help deliver that message."
While Fifa insists politics has no place in the game, the World Cup remains one of the few global stages where political messages inevitably find an audience, and Hassan's intervention pierced through that contradiction at the heart of modern football as well as reminds us that it is impossible to isolate it from the humanitarian and geopolitical crises unfolding beyond the pitch.
No other sport commands audiences capable of turning stadiums into stages upon which governments, ideologies, and international rivalries all attempt to perform.
The same tournament that has legitimised dictators has also inspired anti-apartheid boycotts, Pan-African solidarity and human rights campaigns. Football has been propaganda and protest, nationalism and resistance, often within the same competition.
The World Cup, then, is not merely a sporting event occasionally interrupted by politics. Politics has always been one of the competitors.
