Ball is Life; F*ck it, We Ball—An American World Cup and its Discontents

Like the light of a month-long flashbulb, the 2026 World Cup still lingers in the corners of our eyes, its flickering afterimage continuing to color our peripheral vision. What a terrible, and terrific spectacle; what joy, what sorrow—what profound contradiction.

As happens every four years, the cup brought the world’s eyes to the world’s game. And as happens every four years, the most rapacious, depraved cabal of corrupt bureaucrats and corporate flunkies conspired to extract as much value as possible from the earnest passions of honest people. And, as always, beyond the record profits and viewership, past the denied visas and shuttered local stores, the deported workers and disappeared protestors, there went the ball.

A World Cup in the United States (with apologies to Canada and Mexico, whose roles were always destined to be proscribed by their national stereotypes; polite and quiet, or jovial and unserious, respectively) is a strange thing in the best of times; the cliches are as such for a reason. This mad place has its own “football” and already thinks of itself as the whole world. And of course, as ever, these are not the best of times.

“Keep politics out of sports!” they roar, but of course football is political; it just never neatly lines up with your politics. Yes, you should read Fanon to understand the postcolonial psychology of DRC Congo’s defeat to England or Senegal’s capitulation to the Belgians. But even he would struggle to make sense of the near-global elation that same Belgian team sparked by knocking out the hosts immediately after. For seasoned spectators, allegiances shift like sand dunes: your club loyalties might outweigh national rivalries; an ex, a partner, a colleague or friendly shopkeeper may have already fixed your affiliation for a particular match long before the whistle is blown.

Spare a thought, then, for the casual viewer; assailed from all sides by the most political-non-political, most important-unimportant thing there is, this time amplified a hundred times by automatic translation, algorithmic content targeting and generative AI. How are they to make sense of all this? How to explain to Argentinians that their generational, mostly tongue-in-cheek, intra-sudamericana feuds had ended up as redemptive fodder for Black American imperialists, tired of getting rightfully roasted on Twitter for their participation in ICE or the US military? Or the enormous sigh of relief let out by the whole of Spain, grateful not just for the winner's medal but that they got cast as “the good guys”, whitewashing with Black excellence the years of racist and sexist scandals that have plagued Spanish football.

Speaking of the convolutions of identity, a hydration break to quickly tell the story of Harry Washington (c. 1740–1800): born on the Gambia river, forced into bondage, enslaved by George Washington (hence the name), Loyalist soldier, evacuated to Nova Scotia after the Revolutionary War, left Nova Scotia because of racism, became a colonist in the British Sierra Leone Company, rebelled against that same company because of taxation without representation, was finally defeated and exiled by a troop of mercenary Jamaican Maroons (themselves descendants of escaped enslaved people) in the employ of the British Sierra Leone Company, he died a patriarch of the Sierra Leonean Creoles, who enjoy a similar color-class position to other “coloured” people on the continent. Identity and experience have never conferred morality.

Welcome back! We thank the industrious digital bootleggers of the Global South for enabling us to watch the tournament in any language, for free, and the Chinese factories pumping out “replica” jerseys so Adidas can’t use our money to bribe FIFA any more than they already do. Push the Mbappe Dictator memes aside, don’t think too hard on why Erling Haaland is a lovable (read: marketable) oaf but Mario Balotelli was “troublesome” and “disruptive”; and certainly never mind the cognitive dissonance of the moments of silence before matches, for countries victim of earthquakes whose presidents are held captive in the same cities where those matches are being played—fuck it, we ball.

And didn’t we ball?