Hilvânia Maria de Carvalho
A social scientist, psychoanalyst, and master’s student in Education at the University of São Paulo (USP), where she is also a researcher with the Olympic Studies Group. Before transitioning to academia and clinical practice, she worked in the financial sector and holds an MBA in Capital Markets and an ANBIMA CPA-20 certification.
Email: hilvania.carvalho@gmail.com
During every World Cup, an old debate resurfaces in Brazil: does football genuinely unite the nation, or is national passion merely exploited by commercial and political interests? The 2026 tournament was no exception. Drawing on psychoanalytic clinical practice, this piece argues that these two possibilities need not exclude one another – that we can love the national team and remain clear-eyed about the interests that feed on that love.
To understand this dynamic, it is helpful to look at human relationships through a clinical lens. In psychoanalytic clinical practice, it is common for an analysand to complain about being sought out by someone “only out of self-interest.” Statements such as “they only called me because they needed something” and “they only called out of self-interest” are common. A plausible clinical signifier in these expressions is the word “only,” because it indicates exclusion; that is, the analysand excludes love in opposition to self-interest. The resulting suffering stems from the feeling that “if there is self-interest, there is no love.”
However, the fact that someone does something out of momentary “self-interest” (the quotation marks indicate that the word interest is displaced here, as it is attributed a moral connotation that is not necessarily appropriate to the reason why someone made a decision) does not exclude the feeling of love one may have for another person. No one is capable of acting all the time solely out of love, given our human condition, marked by the necessities of survival and the consequent constitutive ambivalence. For example, a couple may decide to live together because of financial difficulties and, in the process, build a loving relationship. This raises the difficulty of determining what came first: necessity or love. If we return to the epistemologies of certain philosophical traditions, we find the binary mode of thought that opposes body and soul, as well as religious conceptions of a potentially exclusionary relationship between these dimensions of life. Nobody loves only. And everybody acts out of some form of “interest,” even in loving relationships. Reflection could therefore focus on which motives are healthy and on the extent to which they are bearable for each pair within a loving relationship or friendship.
Having established this, we arrive at football and the reflection on national identity, or national passion. We wish to consider the possibility that two feelings may coexist within the same phenomenon. All the turmoil surrounding football, the ugliness that often accompanies it, and the interests in which it has become immersed- reflecting the socioeconomic historical moment of humanity – do not exclude the operation of its symbolic force within the subject. Our feelings are not exclusionary, in the sense of “either this or that”; rather, they are cumulative and contradictory. The demand for one hundred percent certainty, or the logic of “either this or that,” corresponds, in many cases, to psychic structures considered pathological when they generate excessive suffering. National identity may remain positively invested despite the absurdities that surround football. The 2026 tournament itself embodied this duality. Hosted jointly by the United States, Canada, and Mexico, it projected an image of international cooperation and shared celebration while also marking a new level of commercial expansion, global media reach, and corporate investment in the World Cup.
A brief clarification is needed. The commercialization of football cannot be reduced to individual actors, governing bodies, or sponsors. It reflects broader economic and political structures that increasingly shape elite sport. The 2026 World Cup highlighted how data-driven marketing, commercial partnerships, and global media exposure have made football an especially valuable site for converting emotional attachment into commercial value. Recognizing these structural forces does not diminish the symbolic meaning of football; rather, it helps explain why national passion has become such a powerful resource for political and economic interests.
We return, then, to the proposition that it is possible to share a national identity and regard football as a national passion despite all its distortions: one thing does not exclude the other. Indeed, it is precisely because football is a national passion that serves the interests of the unscrupulous. From a clinical perspective, a source of anguish often appears in the confusion created by the fact that one’s own passion is used to serve particular interests. Sociocultural issues constitute the “moral individual” and are carried into intersubjective coexistence, fostering the fantasy of one hundred percent of coherence in human feelings. This, in turn, undermines our ability to analyze both the personalities involved in interpersonal relationships and the complexity of the mechanisms that structure social life.
If the passion for football brings together a national identity to the extent that it becomes a phenomenon used by capitalism to serve its interests, it is not by depriving football of this symbolic place that the criminal actions of capitalist financial agents will come to an end. The 2026 World Cup reminds us that these two realities are not mutually exclusive: the tournament brought people together through powerful expressions of national identity while simultaneously serving unprecedented commercial and political interests. The struggle we advocate is not against passion or national alterity, but rather for greater awareness of the effects of unscrupulous interests on the relationship between capitalism and football, as well as for a clearer understanding of the implications of those interests. Such awareness can provide a basis for choosing the rules and values that govern collective life. Criticism of football driven purely by resentment or emotional reaction may, in fact, be a displacement of feelings of powerlessness in the face of the forces of capitalism in its current financialized phase.
