One day before the FIFA Men’s World Cup final between Argentina and Spain, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expressed his support for Argentina. In a video released before the match, he said: “I don’t hide that I’m a fan of Argentina. I think most Israeli citizens do. That is because President Milei has revolutionized Israel’s relationship with Argentina, and we have no greater nor better friends. Which is why we support them.”

Both media outlets known for supporting Palestinian solidarity and media outlets affiliated with or supportive of the Israeli state immediately framed the World Cup final as a proxy for the relationship between Palestine and Israel. The final turned into a symbolic contest due to the official state policies of Argentina and Spain toward Palestine and Israel. Acts of individual actors, for example, Lionel Messi’s commercial connection with Israeli companies or his visit to Israel and the occupied West Bank as part of a 2013 “Peace Tour” organized by Barcelona or Lamin Yamal’s waving of a Palestinian flag after the La Liga championship, were turned into symbols of the collective stance of a nation and became reasons enough to support or oppose a specific team in the World Cup final.

As a Bangladeshi-American who grew up in Bangladesh—a country known for its passion for Latin American football powerhouses and its split loyalties between Argentina and Brazil—I have been a fan of the Argentine men’s football team since the age of 10. I have also been in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for freedom since I was old enough to read newspapers. I found it appalling to see the head of a genocidal state publicly endorse my favorite men’s football team and to watch Palestinian solidarity become over simplistically reduced to supporting or opposing a football team. Can we end settler-colonial violence by winning a football match?

While people have argued that symbols matter, I would urge them to consider how such symbolism ignores two important points: First, it overlooks the problem of transforming one of the world’s most celebrated sporting spectacles into a stage upon which Benjamin Netanyahu’s ethnonationalist genocidal project can be publicly performed and normalized. Second, people are not their governments. Argentina’s self-proclaimed “most Zionist president in the world” Javier Milei’s unconditional alignment with Netanyahu’s government does not reflect the fact that Argentina is also the home to a substantial and increasingly visible Palestinian solidarity movement.

To reduce Argentina to its president is to reproduce a colonial logic that erases the vibrant historical and contemporary social movements, labor struggles, Indigenous resistance, feminist and queer organizing, anti-racist and anti-fascist activism, and transnational solidarity engagements that have long shaped political life in Argentina.

Using sports as a platform for promoting geopolitical interests is not new. Sports have always been entangled with powerful states and institutions. They were exported globally as tools of European colonial expansion, serving as instruments of the so-called civilizing mission, mechanisms of control, and tactics of assimilation between the 16th and the 20th centuries. Many colonized and indigenous communities have also turned sports into powerful symbols of defiance, through which they subverted the master’s tools, beat the colonizers at their own game, and transformed stadiums and playing fields into communal spaces for practicing decolonial solidarity and organizing resistance away from colonial surveillance and policing.

Football is no exception. The imperial and colonial legacy still shapes the way football—especially the FIFA Men’s World Cup—is organized, governed, and experienced today. Concerns have been raised about the displacement of the unhoused population by local governments in US host cities. Immigration and Customs Enforcement continued to arbitrarily and violently target, deport, and kill members of communities of color through paramilitary-style operations while World Cup matches were held across US cities. In Canadian and Mexican host cities, marginalized and minoritized communities expressed concerns about disruptions to water supplies, threats to land access, rising living costs, and disruptive infrastructural development.

Even though FIFA has chosen the official slogan “United as One” for the 2026 Men’s World Cup, a series of events has already demonstrated that the powerful and the powerless are not united and that the playing field is not level for everyone. US President Donald Trump has publicly intervened in FIFA’s disciplinary process, and FIFA President Gianni Infantino’s cozy relationship with Trump has raised serious concerns. Unusually strict travel restrictions disproportionately affected the Iranian team's World Cup experience. The........

© Common Dreams