FIFA, Football and Politics
How the World Cup became the world's most effective stage for power — from Uruguay 1930 to the 2026 finals.
Every World Cup tells two stories at once. One plays out over ninety minutes and is settled by whoever scores more. The other plays out over decades, and it is about who gets to use the tournament, and what for. This brief follows that second story from FIFA's very first World Cup to the just concluded edition in July 2026. Politics have never really been separate from football. They have simply changed shape.
Montevideo to Rome: a trophy becomes a tool of state
When FIFA looked for a country willing to gamble on an untested idea in 1929, only Uruguay raised its hand with any real enthusiasm. Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and Hungary all wanted the honour of hosting football's first world championship without wanting to be the reason the whole experiment failed. Uruguay wanted both. The country, home to barely two million people, had already won Olympic football gold twice, in Paris and Amsterdam, and 1930 also happened to be the hundredth anniversary of its founding constitution. FIFA president Jules Rimet got his tournament; Uruguay got a stage built to order.
Nobody called it political theatre at the time, but it was already behaving like one. The new Estadio Centenario, built specifically for the occasion and named for the anniversary the country wanted the world to notice, doubled as a monument to national self-image at a moment when the global economy had just collapsed. Most of Europe stayed home rather than spend money it didn't have on a month-long voyage to Montevideo. England sent no team, and several federations sent regrets instead of squads. Thirteen countries showed up. Uruguay beat Argentina 4–2 in the final, and the celebration in Montevideo was answered almost immediately by a riot outside the Uruguayan consulate in Buenos Aires and a temporary rupture in diplomatic relations between the two countries. Four years later, Uruguay skipped the tournament in Italy altogether, still nursing the grievance.
If 1930 proved a World Cup could make a small country feel large, 1934 proved how efficiently a large state could make the tournament serve it. Benito Mussolini did not merely host the second World Cup, by most credible historical accounts he out-bid and out-manoeuvred a stronger Swedish bid to get it, then spent the tournament ensuring the result matched the story he needed Italy to hear. Referees reportedly dined with him the night before Italian fixtures. Officials were swapped out on short notice when a match wasn't breaking Italy's way. When Italy lifted the trophy, Mussolini's own newspaper ran the result as a personal triumph for Il Duce, and the players received not only the World Cup itself but a second, oversized cup of the dictator's own invention. Four years later in France, the instruction reaching the squad before the final was blunter — win, or else. Rimet, FIFA's own president at the time, is on record conceding that the 1934 tournament was organised by Mussolini, not by FIFA.
What both tournaments established, in the game's first two editions, is a pattern that has never really broken: hosting the World Cup is rarely only about football.
It is, more often, an opportunity for a state to narrate itself to the world — and the temptation to write that story before the final whistle has proven, across nine decades, almost impossible for the powerful to resist.
Dictators, bans and a continent's long wait
By the time Argentina hosted the tournament in 1978, the playbook Mussolini wrote in 1934 needed no updating. The country's military junta, which had seized power two years earlier, was in the middle of what Argentines still call the Dirty War — a campaign of disappearances, torture and killing directed at anyone the regime decided was a threat. Detention centres operated within earshot of the stadium where the final was played; survivors have since described hearing the crowd's roar through the walls of their cells. Argentina won the tournament, beating the Netherlands in the final, and historians examining the semi-final rout of Peru — a 6–0 scoreline Argentina needed by an exact margin to advance ahead of Brazil — have concluded the result was very likely arranged with the regime's involvement. A junta that could not deliver economic stability or an end to state terror delivered a trophy instead. For a moment, it worked exactly as intended.
Africa's experience of FIFA's politics across these same decades ran in the opposite direction, and it is the part of this history OAD returns to most often, because it is the case where the pressure moved against the abuse of power rather than in its service. South Africa had been a FIFA member since 1952, but its racially segregated football structures drew mounting scrutiny as apartheid hardened through the 1950s and '60s. FIFA suspended the country in 1961, restored its membership, suspended it again, and then in 1976 — the same year South African police killed several hundred protesting schoolchildren and young people during the Soweto uprising — expelled South Africa outright. It became one of the first major global sporting bodies to isolate the apartheid state completely, years ahead of the Olympic movement taking a stand. The exclusion lasted sixteen years. South Africa was not readmitted until 1992, as apartheid itself was being dismantled, and its first genuinely multiracial national side played its first fixture that July, a 1–0 win over Cameroon in Durban.
A pattern that cuts both ways
There is a lesson here that is easy to miss if these two threads are told apart from each other. Football's governing bodies proved themselves capable, across the same half-century, of two very different things: lending legitimacy to a junta that needed a trophy, and withdrawing legitimacy from a state the world had decided to isolate. Which of those instincts prevails in any given decade has rarely had much to do with football itself and almost everything to do with who held the leverage at the time.
From reconciliation to sportswashing: Africa's World Cup and the road to 2026
South Africa's turn as host, in 2010, was the moment the 1976 expulsion came full circle. It was the first World Cup held on African soil, and the bid — fronted personally by Nelson Mandela alongside Thabo Mbeki and Desmond Tutu — was framed explicitly as a debt the sport owed the continent, not simply a commercial opportunity for FIFA. Sepp Blatter, announcing the result, put it almost exactly that way: the victor, he said, is Africa. The tournament doubled as an argument for pan-African solidarity as much as a showcase for South African infrastructure, even as Bafana Bafana became the first host nation eliminated in the group stage — a reminder that political meaning and footballing results do not always travel together.
The number the diplomacy didn't mention
The figure worth sitting with is what the tournament actually returned against what it cost. FIFA's own take from the 2010 finals ran past $3 billion, its most profitable edition to that point, while independent modelling of South Africa's side of the ledger put the net addition to GDP at somewhere between 0.2 and 0.54 percent — a range so wide it tells you how uncertain the benefit really was. Stadium and infrastructure spending directly attributed to the World Cup came to roughly R13 billion, a modest slice of the R846 billion the country had already budgeted for national infrastructure over the same 2010–2013 window, which means a fair share of the "World Cup legacy" was work South Africa was going to do regardless of who held the tournament. A construction cartel was later found to have colluded on stadium tender bids and fined R1.46 billion for it. None of this erases what 2010 meant symbolically. It does mean the diplomatic dividend and the fiscal dividend were two separate transactions, and only one of them showed up in FIFA's accounts.
What followed, over the next decade and a half, has been an increasingly explicit contest over what a hosting right is actually for. Qatar's award of the 2022 tournament came bundled with bribery allegations serious enough that Swiss and American prosecutors went on to indict FIFA officials over related conduct, and a build-out reportedly running into the hundreds of billions of dollars that left large numbers of migrant workers dead and gave the word "sportswashing" more work to do in football journalism than it had ever had before. The line connecting Mussolini's Italy to Qatar's Gulf capital is not that the politics look identical — it is that the tournament remains one of the only stages on earth large enough to make almost any government's preferred story briefly true for a global audience.
The 2026 tournament, spread across the United States, Mexico and Canada, did not break that pattern. If anything, it compressed several decades of precedent into a single summer. A respected Somali referee with a valid visa, Omar Abdulkadir Artan, was denied entry to the United States, part of a wider travel-ban regime that also complicated access for players and fans connected to Haiti, Iran, Senegal and Ivory Coast. Iran's squad was reportedly routed through repeated crossings between Tijuana and its match cities in Seattle and Los Angeles. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security's own social media account posted a line, timed to national-team coverage, that critics quickly noted echoed a slogan from a far darker chapter of European history. And when American forward Folarin Balogun picked up a red card that should have ruled him out of a knockout fixture, FIFA suspended the ban after a phone call from President Donald Trump to FIFA president Gianni Infantino — who had, days earlier, created and awarded Trump football's first-ever Peace Prize. UEFA called the reversal a dangerous precedent for the integrity of the competition. Trump was booed loudly while presenting the trophy.
None of this required a dictatorship, a coup, or an apartheid state. It required, as it always has, a government willing to treat the tournament as leverage — and a governing body willing to let it happen.
We return to this history for a reason that has nothing to do with nostalgia for old scandals. Morocco will co-host the 2030 World Cup alongside Spain and Portugal — the first time an African federation has held genuine leverage inside a winning hosting bid, rather than campaigning for the continent's turn the way South Africa did in the early 2000s. CAF's own governance has faced its share of the scrutiny FIFA has faced globally, from qualification disputes to allegations reaching well beyond the pitch. The instinct to use a tournament, a federation presidency, or a hosting bid as an instrument of state or personal power is not a uniquely European, South American or North American habit. It surfaces wherever the incentive exists, and African institutions are not exempt from that incentive simply because the continent has, historically, been on the receiving end of football's politics more often than in control of them.
For OAD, that is the operative point. Sport, like trade corridors and mineral supply chains, is an arena where soft power gets built or squandered, and African governments and institutions are increasingly positioned to do the building rather than simply absorb decisions made elsewhere. Reading a century of FIFA's political entanglements clearly — who used the tournament, who was excluded from it, and why — is useful preparation for a moment when African federations and states will have considerably more say in how the game's politics get written over the next hundred years.
Written by Dolapo Sunmola for OAD Africa Forward, produced by Optimize Africa Development, an Africa-focused research, advisory and investment intelligence firm. This brief draws on reporting from Al Jazeera, CBC News, the Library of Congress, Yahoo Sports, TRT World and other contemporaneous sources covering the 1930–2026 tournaments, alongside independent economic-impact research on the 2010 tournament, including Grant Thornton modelling, HSRC analysis and Competition Commission of South Africa findings.