Football Was Never Neutral

In my previous post, I suggested that what I missed in football were the moments when the game seemed to escape its institutional frame, those brief openings through which collective life, political commitment, or historical memory entered the sport from the outside.

I am no longer sure that this is the right way to describe the present World Cup. Against my expectations, and, indeed, against the argument I had just made, politics has not merely intruded upon contemporary football but has structured this tournament from the very onset.

It began with FIFA itself, that strangely untouchable organization whose public language of neutrality increasingly resembles the language of a mafia demanding obedience. Haiti was prevented from using its beautiful jersey commemorating the Battle of Vertières (1803), one of the decisive anti-colonial victories of the Atlantic world, on the grounds that it violated FIFA’s policy of “no politics”, an irony difficult to miss, as the revolutionary call to arms of La Marseillaise may still be played before every French match without anyone discovering a political message in it.

Then came the foul treatment of the Iranian national team, where the rhetoric of neutrality seemed once again to operate unevenly, with the players entering the pitch already marked by geopolitical prejudice.

The tournament became even harder to read as mere sport when reports emerged that Donald Trump had attempted to influence the handling of a red-card controversy involving the United States. Whether or not such pressure had any real effect, the perception alone was enough to produce a remarkable spectacle: much of the footballing world appeared to unite behind Belgium in the subsequent match. After securing victory, the Belgian players celebrated by imitating Trump’s ridiculous dance, turning a football result into a moment of international mockery.

Now Spain reaches the final at precisely the moment when Trump is threatening severe economic retaliation against Pedro Sánchez’s government over its refusal to align with Washington’s preferred policy on Iran and over immigration policies that remain, by contemporary standards, unusually resistant to the punitive consensus dominating much of the West. Here, once more, the historical echo is hard to ignore: Thomas Jefferson himself suspended trade with Haiti after its independence, fearing that a successful slave revolution might inspire rebellion from below in the United States itself. The forms are different, but the instinct of punishing political disobedience and containing dangerous examples feels uncomfortably familiar.

And then there was Argentina’s victory over England, followed by the banner declaring that Las Malvinas son argentinas. In a single gesture, the Falklands dispute returned to the World Cup stage, reopening a wound that football has never entirely managed to close since 1986. The reaction was telling: many celebrated the banner, many condemned it, and Milei’s own right-wing government reportedly found itself irritated by it. Politics had not invaded the tournament; it had merely become impossible to conceal.

So perhaps my earlier formulation needs revision. The striking thing about this World Cup is not that football occasionally escapes into politics. It is that FIFA tries to police political expression while political reality keeps walking onto the pitch through every door left open: anti-colonial memory, sanctions, war, immigration, diplomatic threats, disputed territories, and the simple fact that players and supporters continue to inhabit the world rather than the sterile universe imagined by sports administrators.

The case of Norway is perhaps the strongest illustration. While its team exceeded every expectation on the pitch, its football federation quietly pursued another campaign off it, pressing FIFA and UEFA to suspend Israel by invoking the organization's own statutes on discrimination and human rights. Not through boycotts or symbolic gestures, but through institutional pressure.

The old fiction that politics contaminates football from the outside no longer holds. FIFA still invokes neutrality whenever inconvenient memories, revolutions, or occupations appear on a shirt, a banner, or in a celebration. Yet its own governing structures have become another arena in which geopolitical conflicts are fought. Neutrality increasingly resembles not the absence of politics, but a way of deciding which politics may appear and which must disappear.

As for the final tomorrow, I still resist the language of national destiny. My support for Spain has nothing to do with ancestry, despite the presence of a Spanish great-grandfather somewhere in the family archive. Yet I admit that I would take a certain pleasure in seeing Spain win under these circumstances, on American soil and in the middle of a public confrontation with the Trump administration. And if I am permitted one wholly unrealistic wish, it is this: that Lamine Yamal, whether Spain wins or loses, walks onto the podium waving a Palestinian flag, reminding us that football has never been as separate from the world as its administrators would like us to believe, and that players and supporters alike may still find, beyond the whole commodified spectacle, forms of collective life worth defending.