After four years of waiting, the World Cup has finally arrived. For us football fans, it is a very captivating month. Sadly, the corporate capture of our beloved sport persists. Football has become a huge business, but in the last two decades, it has also become a geopolitical tool.
FIFA found the need to invent a “FIFA Peace Prize” to use as a sort of adulation tool to appease the president of the US, one of the three 2026 host countries. But this is only the cherry on top of a sundae that has been in preparation for decades.
This dance between geopolitics and football started long ago. The struggle between geopolitical powers that use the tournament to push their political agendas with the complicity of the media, has been at plain sight for at least a decade.
Corruption in FIFA’s circles had been known for many decades but was only fully revealed in 2015 in the scandal known as FIFAgate, when it was clear that the 2010 decision of appointing Russia and Qatar as hosts to the 2018 and 2022 World Cups would not be reversed — as the West had been pushing for.
The time had come to use this leverage to tell us how these ‘adversary’ countries are bad, with strong narratives presented by Western media.
