Dr. Mike Devlin
(PhD, University of Alabama) is a Regent’s Teacher and Professor of Advertising at Texas State University.
Email: mdevlin@txstate.edu
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/drmikedevlin
Dr. Alina Bernstein
Senior lecturer at the School of Media Studies of the College of Management Academic Studies (COMAS) and the Steve Tisch School of Film and Television, Tel Aviv University, Israel
Prof. Michael L. Butterworth
Director of the Center for Sports Communication & Media, Governor Ann W. Richards Chair for the Texas Program in Sports and Media, and Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at The University of Texas at Austin.
Prof. Younghan Cho
Professor of Korean Studies in the Graduate School of International and Area Studies at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies.
Dr. Danielle Sarver Coombs
Associate Professor in the Department of Business and Computing, Ravensbourne University London.
Dr. Yoav Dubinsky
Associate Teaching Professor in the Lundquist College of Business at the University of Oregon and the Operational Director of the University of Oregon Olympic Studies Hub.
Prof. Daniel Jackson
Professor of Media andCommunications at Bournemouth
Events like the World Cup are more than just mega-sporting events – they reflect globalization, commercialization, access, identity, and politics. Nearly 100 scholars across the globe share this perspective, offering their thoughts and reflections in this report, revealing both the beauty of the world’s game and the ugliness that mega-events like the World Cup can contain.
The 2026 FIFA World Cup was unlike any tournament before it. One word best encapsulates its legacy: more. More teams, more matches, more cities, more technology, and more commercial opportunity. Staged across Canada, Mexico, and the United States, it expanded not only in scale but also in its ambition to be the most memorable World Cup yet. The World Cup sought to transform a politically complicated continent into a shared sporting space where national differences could be celebrated and the beautiful game could unite fans and communities.
In many respects, it delivered on its ambition. We witnessed moments of joy, avid fandom, and long-held records broken. Fans were still the underpinning of the tournament’s success. Supporters filled stadiums, streets, homes, public plazas, and social media feeds. Fans adopted unfamiliar teams (here’s looking at you, Norway), rediscovered ancestral affiliations, and formed new allegiances. For several weeks, football provided encounters among strangers and celebrated a shared viewing space where millions were connected to the same event simultaneously.
Football is known as the world’s beautiful game, yet the tournament’s expansion also magnified the ugliness and contradictions associated with mega-events. A competition promoted through the language of universal access remained financially inaccessible to many communities asked to host it. A celebration of international mobility unfolded amid visa restrictions, border enforcement, and unequal freedom to travel. Claims of environmental responsibility and sustainability coexisted with continental distances, carbon-intensive transportation, and disposable merchandise.
As with many mega-events, tensions were especially visible in host cities, where the World Cup created opportunities for nation branding, tourism, diplomacy, and redevelopment. Yet it also raised questions and criticisms surrounding public expenditure, labor, accessibility, economic benefit, and debates over whether transportation and infrastructure investments created meaningful long-term benefits for host communities. Residents were forced to navigate changes in their daily commutes, and in some cases, faced financial burdens, some as seemingly minor as mandatory gratuities to reduce confusion for international visitors unfamiliar with U.S. tipping customs. While this may seem trivial in isolation, they call attention to the micro-level effects that mega-events can impose on host cities and their residents.
Beyond the structural and economic critiques, the tournament’s political significance was equally evident beyond the field. The World Cup did not suspend global conflicts and unite the world; rather, it reorganized and represented conflicts in new ways, often through various frames fitting competing media agendas. War, immigration, nationalism, authoritarianism, and the political uses of mega-events were presented to audiences through athletes, supporters, news coverage, protest, and tournament organizers. The World Cup also provided governments with opportunities to pursue domestic and international political objectives through the World Cup.
The media environment was similarly complex. Broadcasters, journalists, governing bodies, creators, algorithms, and artificial-intelligence systems each competed to determine which version of the tournament became visible. Journalists documented its political, social, and economic contexts, while creators and influencers complicated traditional relationships among access, journalism, promotion, and audience engagement. Generative AI offered new ways to consume and discuss the tournament while simultaneously disrupting established models of sports journalism, even affecting predictions for every event. This no doubt presented an entirely new reason to watch the World Cup, by transforming the World Cup into a marketplace of bets, predictions, and financial propositions. Again, the core promise delivered was one of more – more branding, more digital commentary, more wagering, and an algorithmically mediated experience that provided more.
The tournament also revealed the limits of the World Cup’s claims to inclusion. Without even addressing the inequity of who could afford to attend games versus those who could not, we witnessed other boundaries being challenged, blurred, and, at times, reinforced. For example, the visibility of women officials represented progress, yet the persistent language of the “first woman” showed how often equality is narrated as an individual exception rather than structural transformation. Even as the presence of women officials became increasingly normalized, gendered criticism and sexism continued to accompany their participation.
Identity continued to serve as a central point of discussion through the tournament. Athletes navigated contested ideas of national authenticity, while supporters moved among inherited, adopted, and shifting national identities. Disability access policies exposed the difference between symbolic inclusion and the material conditions that determine participation. In some instances, even caregivers faced financial penalties under policies ostensibly designed to facilitate inclusion. Succinctly stated, the World Cup celebrated representation, but visibility and equality were not always synonymous.
At the center of many of these contradictions stood FIFA. The organization transcends the roles of tournament organizer and rules enforcer. It is a commercial rights holder, a political actor, and global brand manager. Its rules shaped broadcasting, sponsorship, ticketing, merchandising, and stadium conduct —including the use of ticketing terms and stadium codes to protect sponsors and restrict ambush marketing. Its growth strategy generated unprecedented reach and revenue, leading critics to question FIFA’s relationships among commercial interests, political power, and institutional governance. Betting markets, ambush-marketing protections, the environmental cost of apparel, and the continued concentration of presidential power demonstrate that the tournament’s business structures help determine who benefits and which forms of participation remain possible.
For many, the desire to set aside politics, inequality, and commercial excess is understandable. The World Cup as a celebration of global unity and an opportunity to watch the world’s most beautiful game at the highest level, but scholars cannot dismiss questions of power, exclusion, equity, and access. After all, it is the world’s beautiful game and should belong to us all.
How can these two identities coexist?
Contributors examining the politics of World Cup enjoyment and sportswashing suggest that neither position is sufficient in isolation. The joy was real. So were the exclusions. Collective celebrations mattered, even within a system structed to monetize them. The political uses of football did not erase the human connections the game produced, just as those connections did not absolve the institutions that profited from them.
This report examines these tensions through the immediate observations, research-informed reflections, and theoretical insights of scholars working across media and communication, sociology, marketing, political science, history, law, and policy. Its contributions move readers from host-city streets to television studios; from stadiums to social media platforms; and from expressions of national unity to acts of resistance. Together, they consider not only what happened during the 2026 FIFA World Cup but what the tournament made visible about sport, media, politics, commerce, and culture.
So yes, two identities can co-exist, and the authors of this report highlight the beauty of the world’s game while honestly reflecting on all the ugliness that events like the World Cup reveal.
