Political Football: The Geopolitics of the 2026 World Cup

Join us for a special audio-video episode, also available in video form on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqBlbd4_1TU.

Professor Edward P. Joseph sits down with rising second-year MAIR student Manolo Préstamo for a wide-ranging conversation on the geopolitics of the 2026 World Cup. As the tournament unfolds across North America, the two examine how the world's most-watched sporting event has become a mirror of global politics.

They discuss the prominence of immigrant and dual-national players on national teams amid an increasingly charged global discourse on migration, and what the absence of major powers — Russia, banned from international competition, and China, unable to qualify — reveals about the shifting relationship between sporting prestige and geopolitical standing.

The conversation also turns to the politics playing out in the stands, from some Iranian supporters waving pre-revolutionary monarchist flags to the broader ways fans use the tournament as a stage for contestation back home.

Produced by the Phillip Merrill Center for Strategic Studies at Johns Hopkins SAIS.

Produced and edited by Wasay Mir.