In June 2025, Nielsen’s Global Sports Report identified the United States as one of the world’s most promising football markets: 62 million fans, 62 percent of them expecting their interest to grow around the 2026 World Cup, 76 percent of them Millennial or Gen Z, 34 percent earning over $100,000 in household income, and more receptive to brand sponsorship than any other football market globally except Brazil. FIFA’s projection of $12 billion in tournament revenue was not irrational optimism. It was the logical consequence of concentrating the world’s most popular sport in the world’s most commercially receptive market. Football, as Nielsen documents, attracts 41 percent of all sports sponsorships globally; the 2026 edition was positioned to deepen that dominance in a market where, as the report puts it, the fanbase is “eager to spend with aligned sponsors.” That report was published eight months before the United States launched Operation Epic Fury. On February 28, the US and Israel began “official” military operations against Iran. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed and a conflict involving twelve countries ignited across the Middle East. Iran is a qualified participant in the 2026 World Cup; its group matches are scheduled to take place on US soil, in Los Angeles and Seattle. All of a sudden, the tournament that was designed as FIFA’s commercial and institutional apex has become, in the words of Kristian P. Alexander, an event unfolding “against a geopolitical backdrop that few planners anticipated.”

The most clarifying frame for understanding this moment comes not from sport management scholarship but from political philosophy, as filtered through football. Mads Skauge, paraphrasing Prussian general Clausewitz, renders a conjecture newly urgent amidst the politicization of football: “Football is the continuation of politics by other means.” The provocation is not merely rhetorical. Skauge departs from Christos Kassimeris’ The Politics of Football (2024). Kassimeris documents the historical depth of the football-politics entanglement—from Mussolini’s instrumentalisation of the 1934 World Cup to the geopolitical weight of Iran’s defeat of the United States at France 1998—to argue that the politicization of football is not an intrusion but a structural feature. Along this line, Skauge suggests that “Anyone claiming that football and politics must not be mixed is ignorant. Football has started and ended wars and elected and dismissed heads of state.” The 2026 tournament does not contradict this thesis. It represents its logical, if extreme, intensification: a case in which football has not merely reflected geopolitical tension but has been physically located inside of it.

Additional theoretical contributions, assembled into a single framework, clarify the structure of what is happening. In the introduction of The Geopolitical Economy of Football (2024), Simon Chadwick and Paul Widdop describe football as “a dense network of interconnected nodes and relationships, which bring with them complexity and sensitivity but also contradiction and, possibly, accusations of hypocrisy.” The dominant node in 2026 is the United States. When that node is destabilised—by a war of its own making—the disruption propagates across the entire network: sponsors, federations, co-hosts, broadcasters, and the governing body itself. Chadwick and Widdop observe that “without exception, this is surely the most difficult period in the sport’s modern history,” a diagnosis written before Trump’s second term and before Operation Epic Fury, yet now more prescient than its authors could have anticipated.

Another theoretical layer concerns image laundering and sportswashing. In a chapter included in The Geopolitical Economy of Football, Argyro Elisavet Manoli, Ioannis Konstantopoulos and Georgios Antonopoulos define sportswashing as the process by which “individuals, organisations or regimes/countries use sporting events or teams to improve their public image.” The canonical cases they analyse are intentional: a Gulf state purchases a club, a regime hosts an Olympics, an oligarch acquires a Premier League franchise. The 2026 case presents a structurally different configuration, including the fact that FIFA did not choose to launder the Trump administration’s image. Yet a sequence of institutional decisions—each individually defensible and each commercially rational—has produced the functional equivalent. I propose the concept of “involuntary sportswashing” to describe this configuration: a situation in which a sporting institution is captured by a host state’s political agenda through structural dependency rather than deliberate choice. The distinction from Manoli et al.’s framework is one of agency. Where conventional sportswashing is initiated by the reputationally damaged actor, involuntary sportswashing is imposed on the sporting institution by the dominant network node.

Kristian P. Alexander’s analysis of the 2026 security environment supplies the structural stabiliser that explains why resistance to this capture is so difficult. The tournament, he argues, is “widely viewed within the football world as ‘too big to fail’,” more so with 48 teams participating and FIFA projecting revenues of $12 billion. This financial anticipation implies that, “for national associations, qualification brings major financial rewards, sponsorship opportunities, and prestige. Walking away from the tournament would therefore represent not only a political statement but also a significant economic sacrifice.” This economic gravity acts, as........

© E-International