The FIFA World Cup 2026 kicked off last month across the United States, Mexico and Canada, three countries that share a continent and a successful trade agreement, however at this particular moment they also share a profound disagreement about what they owe each other, and President Donald Trump has just refused to renew that trade agreement.
The political charge around the tournament has been visible from the start: questions about Iran’s participation, a Somali referee denied entry to the United States, and a FIFA president who recently awarded Donald Trump a self-invented peace prize for agreeing to host, among many other such incidents.
None of this is surprising. What is less often noticed is how much further the connection between sport and politics runs, below the surface of any given controversy. The sports that US American, Canadian and European societies have made their own are not just entertainment or national tradition. They are, when examined closely, near-perfect mirrors of the political orders those societies actually accept, not just the ones they describe in their constitutions and celebratory rhetoric. And in a year when Western leaders are publicly arguing over who writes the rules of the next global order, those mirrors are worth looking into.
The reason sport is such an honest mirror for politics is simple: a popular sport survives, generation after generation, because something in its structure resonates with what a society already believes about how the world works. We keep the games whose hidden logic matches the one we live inside. The interesting thing is that each sport, like each political order, has a public face and a less visible one, and the gap between the two is where the real action is.
Sociologist and football historian, David Goldblatt, has shown this for football. This essay extends the argument to three sports, three countries and three visions of world order being contested right now.
Three Traditions
A productive analytical framework for reading the deeper connections between sports and politics comes from the English School of international relations, developed through the foundational works of Martin Wight, Hedley Bull and Barry Buzan. The English School identifies three traditions, or, in Wight’s formulation, “inner voices” that are always present in international society but compete for dominance.
The Hobbesian, realist tradition or “international system” understands international relations as persistent conflict in which states pursue power and security; rules hold only as long as the strong choose to honor them. The Grotian, liberal-institutionalist tradition or “international society” understands international relations as a society of states bound by common rules and institutions — imperfect, contested, but real and worth defending. The Kantian or “world-society” tradition, drawing on Kant’s vision of perpetual peace, understands international relations as ultimately constituted by individuals and transnational communities, driven by shared humanity and the possibility of a community beyond state borders.
The three traditions function not merely as analytical categories but also as competing theoretical narratives (another mirror to explore), each with its own logic of legitimacy, its own account of what rules are for and its own vision of who belongs to the community they govern. According to Buzan, “all three of these elements are in continuous coexistence and interplay, the question being how strong they are in relation to each other.” (p. 476).
At Davos in January, three Western leaders stood up in three consecutive speeches and placed their bets. Trump spoke Hobbesian: The US is strong, allies must pay, and rules are tools of leverage rather than shared obligations. The language was about interest, strength and reciprocity as raw power. Mark Carney spoke Grotian: the existing rules-based order and global trade is worth defending, middle powers must coordinate to defend it, and if the US will not lead then others must build the architecture themselves. Ursula von der Leyen spoke both Grotian and Kantian, anchoring European strategic autonomy in shared values and in a vision of common humanity that reaches beyond national interest.
The Munich Security Conference in February continued the argument with a sharper military edge related to Ukraine, NATO’s coherence, European defense spending and the question of whether American security guarantees still meant what they once meant. However, the Hobbesian reality is not lost on Carney and Von der Leyen.
American Football: The Socialist Sport of a Capitalist Country
American football is the national sport of the world’s most ideologically committed capitalist power, and it is structurally one of the most redistributive professional sports systems ever built. The NFL draft gives the best young talent to the worst-performing teams first, explicit redistribution from success to failure in the name of competitive balance. No team is ever relegated; all thirty-two franchises hold permanent, protected places regardless of how they perform.
National broadcast revenues are split equally among all franchises, so the Green Bay Packers receive the same television income as the Dallas Cowboys. Salary caps stop the wealthiest teams from simply buying dominance. On the field, eleven players move in scripted coordination where improvisation is not usually seen as positive creativity, but as an error that could cost the game; and the players who perform their collective roles best are held up as exemplars and super humans.
The Super Bowl halftime performers work for no fee, their reward being the honor and exposure to the largest audience of the year, while the league monetises their presence. In English School terms, this is the Grotian and Kantian story made flesh with shared rules, redistributed rewards, a collective ritual that briefly makes two hundred million people feel they belong to the same thing. Karl Marx, had he worn a helmet, would have recognised the structure.
Then ask who actually benefits, and the Hobbesian story reasserts itself. A thirty-second Super Bowl advertisement costs $7 million; the communal ritual serves as packaging for the delivery of enormous value to a small number of corporations. The halftime performers significantly increase their personal global brand value. And the players absorb costs that money does not adequately cover: chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the degenerative brain disease now documented in the overwhelming majority of former NFL players’ brains studied after death, is the price the system extracts from its workforce.
The collective infrastructure is real; so is the upward flow of its rewards, and the downward distribution of its costs. Trump’s admiration for Putin, Xi and Kim Jong-un fits exactly here. These are leaders who have mastered a version of the collective arrangement in which the institutions remain, the language of solidarity remains, and the man at the top takes the surplus while those whose labor makes the system run absorb the bodily cost.
When Bad Bunny headlined Super Bowl LX as the first native Spanish speaker to do so, a Puerto Rican artist who had publicly criticized Trump’s immigration enforcement, Trump posted on Truth Social minutes after the performance that it was “absolutely terrible” and “a slap in the face to our country.” The White House endorsed a rival conservative counter-show headlined by Kid Rock. Bad Bunny played on the screens at Trump’s own Palm Beach watch party regardless.
Canadian Ice Hockey: Solidarity, Deterrence, and the Enforcer
Canadian ice hockey looks, at first glance, like the Grotian story in athletic form. The game is built around collective performance; no player stays on the ice for more than 30 to 90 seconds at the highest level; the goalie depends entirely on everyone around him. Hockey also carries codes of honour that operate above the written rulebook, obligations to teammates that no contract fully specifies: you stand up for each other, you play through pain, you do not leave someone exposed. In that sense it reaches toward the Kantian story too, a community of people held together by values that go beyond the formal rules.
But hockey’s most important figure is the enforcer, the physically intimidating player whose job is not to score but to protect teammates and to make opponents think twice. He is valued not for what he produces but for what he prevents, and his usefulness rests entirely on the other team’s belief that crossing him will carry a real physical cost. That is the Hobbesian story with skates: order maintained not by shared values but by the credible threat of force. And hockey has a formal outlet for when that threat is not enough: the gloves come off, the officials step back, and after roughly a minute of sanctioned combat the game resumes.
This is not a failure of the system. It is the system acknowledging its own limits, managing an escalation that might otherwise break the game entirely. Mark Carney was a hockey goalie at Harvard, the position with the clearest view of the entire rink and the least room for error when the system fails. His Davos speech was goalie politics: the old referee has left the ice; middle powers must coordinate; deterrent capacity must be credible.
Canada has responded to Trump’s tariffs and sovereignty provocations in a recognisably hockey register, with retaliatory measures, economic nationalism, and hockey games between the two countries that became politically charged in a way not seen for decades. Whether Carney’s coalition of so-called middle powers can collectively fill the enforcer role on a rink where the biggest player has decided the rules are optional remains unanswered. The Winter Olympics ice hockey final earlier this year, which the United States won, was an uncomfortable early data point.
European Football: Fair Play, and Who it Actually Applies To
European football presents itself in the most explicitly moral terms of any major sport. UEFA’s campaigns carry banners for fair play, inclusion, respect and LGBT+ rights; players wear armbands for various causes; federations issue statements on nearly everything. The institutional architecture is just as elaborate: Financial Fair Play regulations attempt to impose fiscal discipline; anti-racism protocols enforce social norms; transfer rules are meant to protect young players from exploitation; promotion and relegation mean that incumbents are not permanently protected.
It is, in design, the Grotian story, a rules-based architecture with genuine Kantian aspirations, open in principle to all, with real consequences for those who fall short.
The darker side shows exactly why those norms are sometimes little more than a shell. When the rulebook meets serious money, wealthy clubs hire lawyers and wait out the regulators, and bet on paying a fine lower than the broadcast and tournament revenues. The talent pipeline running from Lagos, Dakar, Buenos Aires and São Paulo to the richest leagues in Europe has been described as neocolonial extraction dressed as opportunity.
There is an old joke attributed to Henry Kissinger that no foreign leader knows which number to call when they want to speak to Europe. European football has the same problem: owners, league presidents, national federations, and UEFA itself all claim authority, and on the hardest questions, the system often produces no decision at all. The EU operates the same way. Its trade relationship with Israel has continued through a military campaign in Gaza that the International Court of Justice found plausibly involves violations of the Genocide Convention, with calls to suspend the EU-Israel Association Agreement largely unheeded.
Hungary’s (Orban’s) obstruction of EU sanctions on Russia while remaining a full member in good standing is the political equivalent of a superclub’s Financial Fair Play workaround: technically within the system, operationally undermining it, and tolerated because expulsion costs more than accommodation. It is seen in other areas as well when EU ministers are planning further climate policy rollbacks during a historic heatwave.
The normative language is sincerely held and routinely bent, and the Hobbesian reality underneath the Grotian and Kantian surface is that the rules apply most firmly to those with the least power to resist them.
The FIFA World Order
The figure who may understand all of this most clearly is not at Davos. Gianni Infantino runs FIFA with 211 member associations, more than the United Nations. He is managing the world’s most-watched sporting event with more than six billion viewers. His recent award of a self-invented FIFA Peace Prize to Trump prompted an ethics complaint from London-based human rights NGO FairSquare later supported by the Norwegian Football Association and 50 members of the European Parliament. But the show goes on.
Infantino grasps something the Davos crowd is still arguing about: global order is not built only in security councils, diplomatic communiques, and trade agreements. It is built in attention, in the shared events that six billion people choose to organise their summers around, in who controls the right to host and the image of a leader lifting a trophy.
Interestingly, European football is already a dominant sport or growing fast in China, India, South Africa and Brazil, which means the sport that best mirrors the rules-based European order may be on its way to becoming the dominant game on every continent. The winner of that game is not Trump, not von der Leyen, not Carney. His name is Gianni Infantino.
The Game Worth Watching
None of this is to say that the NFL caused US inequality, or that hockey is secretly a Canadian foreign policy manual, or that FIFA is a shadow government. The point is the other direction: popular sports are relevant to study because their underlying structure resonates with what a society already believes about how the world works, including the parts it does not say out loud. Sports as familiar tropes then become powerful for people to better understand and engage the political game.
Heard through these three sports, the speeches at Davos stop sounding like competing policy platforms and start sounding like three coaches, each raised on a different game, each convinced that their version of the rules is the one the world should adopt. The contest between those three visions is the real game of 2026, and it will outlast the World Cup by years.
What kind of order do people accept when they gather around a common good? History suggests that the answer could be more inequality, more hypocrisy and more rule-bending than anyone would admit in advance, as long as the game is compelling enough and they feel they belong to something larger than themselves.
Some leaders are betting on this. But the spectators at a World Cup are also, in the end, citizens and history also suggests that the messiest transitions in political history have tended to begin when the crowd decided the result on the pitch was not going to stand and took matters in their own hands. For now, the game goes on.
