If you follow global football, you would have seen some of it coming, some not. I refer to the unfolding of the current World Cup. After weeks of competition (this is written after the semifinal matches), we had unforeseen developments like “the Balogun affair”.
Who could have predicted Donald Trump’s appalling intervention in the tournament? And FIFA is emerging as irreparably damaged goods.
‘Football unites the world’
So says FIFA’s motto, but nothing stirs nationalism, xenophobia and racism more than international football these days, all promoted by powerful politicians who speak the language of hate and division fluently.
But in a rare outbreak of global unity, football lovers of every nationality–even many Americans–came together to will Belgium to victory over USA because of the Balogun affair.
Donald Trump’s interference in Folarin Balogun’s suspension and FIFA’s slavish acquiescence both bore a signature disregard for rules, transparency, accountability and fair play.
FIFA protested that it could not intervene on behalf of its award-winning Somali referee, who was rejected at the US border, or of Iran and other participating teams that were treated shamefully during the tournament, but found it possible to intervene ineptly to grant an advantage to the US team ahead of its knockout match against Belgium.
This was manipulation of the first order, astonishing even by FIFA’s venal standards, challenging the norms of good governance.
A terrible precedent has been established, which completely undermines the legal and ethical framework of sport. Alongside that, we saw the complete collapse of FIFA’s referee and VAR credibility.
The FIFA referee is now widely seen as the agent of an Infantino-Messi alliance, charged with delivering another World Cup title to Argentina.
Whether one agrees with that conspiracy theory or not, the fact is that it has gained massive global traction because of FIFA’s corrupt leadership and culture.
Ultimately, I do not blame Trump and Infantino in all of this.
No, fault rests squarely on the shoulders of FIFA’s 211 members, who for years have sat idly by and enabled Infantino as he does whatever he pleases with their organisation and our game.
Indeed, they are likely to re-elect him unopposed in 2027 for a third consecutive four-year term because their loyalty is bought with World Cup shekels.
FIFA’s credibility has been shredded across the globe but Infantino is already counting revenue from a 64-team tournament.
Only external institutional pressure, like the European Union’s call for a probe of FIFA due to the disgraceful Balogun episode, could dislodge Infantino. If you want him gone, go to British human rights outfit FairSquare’s campaign for FIFA reform at rebootfifa.com and follow your conscience. The chickens are home.
Pan-American failure
WC2026 demonstrated that there are no small teams at this level of the game. All teams are equal between the boxes. The difference between the elite and the masses, however, is goal scoring. The Golden Boot list amply demonstrates this. The top seven are all tournament quarterfinalists. But the marginalisation of South America, indeed, all of the Americas, is evident. CONMEBOL and CONCACAF produced one quarter-finalist between them.
My last article (“South America’s globalised decline”) focused on the gradual decline of South American teams in the World Cup and international club competitions.
We shall soon see if Argentina repeats but the continent has won only two of seven 21st-century World Cups and, worse, only four of 21 world club titles.
The globalisation of the world game, rooted in the wholesale extraction of ever younger South American talent from the continent by Europe’s big clubs, has weakened its domestic leagues, clubs and national teams.
South America now depends on the individual genius of a Ronaldo Nazário or Lionel Messi to claim global superiority.
As WC2026 amply demonstrates, only Argentina is capable of competing for a world title and after Messi, it will probably suffer as Brazil has suffered in the absence of another Ronaldo or Ronaldinho. This suicide will continue but the continent’s image has also been battered during WC2026 by the thuggery of Paraguay and Uruguay. Even worse, the behaviour of fans from Argentina and Paraguay, in the stadium and on social media, has shed devastating light on their centuries-old history of ethnic cleansing and racism.
The worst expressions of this racism were former Paraguay goalkeeper Jose Luis Chilavert labelling France “a team from Africa” (a sentiment echoed by a former Prime Minister of Spain); the comparison of Kylian Mbappe to a chimpanzee by a Paraguayan senator; the abuse of international influencer IShowSpeed by Argentine fans shouting at him to “go back to the zoo” during their match against Cabo Verde; and similar behaviour aimed at Egyptians by Argentines waving Israeli flags during their match against the African team.
This follows the Argentina players chanting about the French players’ African ancestry after the 2022 final. In March 2026, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution declaring African chattel slavery to be history’s “gravest crime against humanity”.
The resolution, spearheaded by Ghana and backed by the African Union and Caricom, argued that racialised enslavement caused a “definitive break in world history” that continues to fuel systemic anti-black racism today. It called for historical accountability and reparatory justice. Three countries voted against the resolution - Argentina, USA and Israel. Paraguay abstained. Obvious ideological and geopolitical dots are there for connection to events at World Cup 2026.
Under Infantino, FIFA disbanded its anti-racism task force in 2016, claiming “its work is complete”.
It ignored warnings from human rights groups that its decision to drop anti-racism and anti-discrimination messaging at the 2025 Club World Cup and WC2026 was dangerous. Today, the tournament is awash in racist behaviour and chatter.
FIFA tracked 89,000 abusive social media posts during the group stage alone, a 13-fold increase from the 6,700 abusive posts flagged during the entire Qatar tournament. And South American fans lead the charge in the stadium. FIFA opened the door wide to this ugly legacy of WC2026. The chickens are home.
Colonial karma
“Diaspora: people settled far from their ancestral homelands”
The globalisation of world football has populated WC2026 with diaspora children. Even Argentina, Japan and Norway have them.
Only eight teams among the 48 finalists had no players born outside their country, including Brazil, Colombia, Czechia, Panama, Saudi Arabia and South Africa.
Almost a quarter of the 1,248 players at WC2026 were born in a different country than the one they represent.
Twenty years ago, at WC2006, that number was less than nine percent. FIFA’s eligibility rule changes have since globalised the talent pool.
The ten most common birthplaces among players at the 2026 World Cup are: France (98), Netherlands (67), England (49), Germany (48), Spain (36), Belgium (34), Sweden (34), Austria (31), Switzerland (30), Argentina (30).
The numbers underscore France’s outsized influence on the global football talent pipeline. Its diverse population and extensive youth academy network have made the country one of football’s most productive talent exporters.
After the collapse of the French national football team in the 2010 World Cup, the French Football Federation adopted corrective measures that led to improvements in subsequent tournaments, with France winning the 2018 title and reaching the final in 2022 and the semifinal in 2026.
Ethno-states are few and far between today and they do not dominate global football. Diaspora children, mainly African diaspora, populate the elite World Cup squads.
But to make a broader point about the role of immigration in modern international football success, we must add to this tabulation the children of immigrants—African immigrants, in particular—who represent the country they were actually born in.
Belgium, England, France, Germany, Netherlands, and even Portugal and Spain would be pale alternatives to their current selves without their players of black immigrant descent. Now we need some black coaches, by the way.
But the statistics above tell us where Western colonialism spread its tentacles over five centuries; where the formerly colonised seek opportunity abroad today as neo-colonial exploitation has allowed them none at home; and where refugees created by wars engineered and financed by Western powers to secure “democracy”, resources and their geopolitical interests have fled and laid roots.
The Western coloniser came to their lands to conquer and exploit their resources and bodies. Now the colonised have come home to the “mother country” to exploit opportunity and to make a better life.
Colonial Karma. Role reversal. Call it what you will, the tournament crystallises the intense contradiction between the dependence of many metropolitan countries on the labour and skills of immigrants and the anti-immigrant attitude and policy of many in the metropole.
The likelihood of winning a modern World Cup without diaspora players is negligible and the chickens have come home to roost, but the 2026 title will be decided in mere hours and, one last time, there is still Messi.
Editor’s note: The views expressed in the preceding article are solely those of the author and do not reflect the views of any organisation in which he is a stakeholder.
