Don't Just Fund the World Cup. Fund the Game

When I returned home last week, it was strangely quiet.

Just a few weeks earlier, Santa Clara, where I live, had been one of the centers of the football world. Fans in jerseys crowded the streets. San Pedro Square in San Jose buzzed with watch parties. Even my layover in Newark felt like part of the tournament, with the airport full of supporters, matches playing on every screen, and conversations between strangers about who might win it all.

Now it was over.

The flags had come down. The crowds had dispersed. The TVs had moved on to baseball and the news. It was as if the World Cup had never been there.

Yet the more I thought about it, the more I realized that almost everything that makes the World Cup remarkable happens when no one is watching.

The tournament lasts only a month. The teams that compete in it are built over decades.

Every pass, every goal, and every dramatic upset rests on years of investment that most of us never see: youth academies, local leagues, coaches, referees, sports medicine, and football associations. By the time the opening whistle blows, much of the real work has already been done.

The World Cup does not create great teams. It simply reveals them.

Consider Spain, the eventual champions. Their success was not built during the tournament. It was the result of a football ecosystem developed over decades. Spain invested in youth development, coach education, and a shared football philosophy that runs through its system, from local academies to professional clubs and the national team. Players arriving at the highest level were not starting from scratch. They had spent years learning within a system designed to develop talent.

The trophy was the visible outcome. The real investment happened long before the final.

This is true across football. The strongest teams do not emerge simply because they discover exceptional players. They emerge because they create environments where talent can develop, where knowledge is shared, and where excellence becomes possible at scale.

No country becomes a football powerhouse by investing only in its national team. It needs the ecosystem that produces the national team.

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Philanthropy has a similar choice.

There is real value in backing exceptional organizations and ambitious ideas. The world needs institutions capable of taking on complex challenges and achieving meaningful results.

The philanthropic sector has created mechanisms to support this kind of ambition. Initiatives such as MacArthur’s 100&Change and The Audacious Project have demonstrated what can happen when significant resources are concentrated behind bold ideas and organizations with the potential to create transformative change.

The question is not whether philanthropy should support exceptional organizations. It should.

The question is whether we invest enough in the systems that make exceptional organizations possible.

Philanthropy is increasingly beginning to recognize this distinction.

The Ford Foundation’s BUILD initiative was an example of investing beyond individual projects to strengthen institutions themselves. Through multi-year, flexible funding combined with organizational strengthening support, BUILD recognized that durable organizations require more than short-term project funding. They need the resources and stability to adapt, learn, and grow.

Similarly, the Think Tank Initiative (TTI) was a 10-year, multi-funder program that strengthened independent policy research organizations in low- and middle-income countries across Latin America, Africa, and South Asia by providing flexible core funding and institutional capacity support.

More recently, Wellcome’s Evidence Synthesis Infrastructure Collaborative (ESIC) reflects a field-building approach. Rather than simply funding individual pieces of research, it is investing in infrastructure hubs that strengthen the systems, capabilities, and networks needed to produce and use evidence effectively.

These investments recognize something important: fields need infrastructure.

They need institutions that train. Networks that connect. Intermediaries that support. Communities that share knowledge and build collective capacity.

Football has academies, coaching systems, leagues, and governing bodies. Fields of social change need their own equivalents.

There is another lesson hidden in the World Cup.

The teams we see competing on the global stage are not a random sample of countries. They are the result of decades of investment, infrastructure, and institutional development.

Some countries appear consistently because they have built systems that continuously develop talent. Brazil has appeared at every World Cup, while Germany, Argentina, Spain, and other football powers have become regular fixtures at the tournament. Their success is not simply the result of having talented players at a particular moment. It reflects generations of investment in football institutions, coaching, youth development, and competitive leagues.

The same pattern exists in philanthropy.

Organizations that repeatedly appear in competitive funding processes are often those that have had the opportunity to build the equivalent of football infrastructure.

They may have experienced leaders, strong governance systems, dedicated fundraising capacity, communications teams, institutional relationships, and years of experience navigating funder expectations.

By the time a funding opportunity opens, the competition has already begun.

For other organizations, particularly those that are smaller, newer, or closer to the communities where challenges are most acute, the barriers often come much earlier. They may have deep contextual knowledge and trusted relationships, but lack the unrestricted resources, networks, or institutional support needed to compete in a process designed around organizations that are already prepared for competition.

Talent exists everywhere. Opportunity does not.

This does not mean that the strongest organizations are undeserving of support. Just as the World Cup should celebrate the teams that reach the final, philanthropy should support organizations that demonstrate excellence.

But it should also ask a deeper question:

Who never made it onto the field?

And what investments would allow more organizations, from more places, to develop the capabilities needed to compete?

There is a second reason to build the field, and it has quietly become the more urgent one.

A great team can be beaten. You study it. You mark its stars. You plan for the one player who decides games. Concentrated strength is powerful, but it is also legible. And what is legible can be targeted.

Leave football for a moment.

If a single bee finds its way into your house, you deal with it. If a hive moves in, you are the one who leaves. Not because any one bee is stronger, but because there is nothing single to swat.

But a scattering of bees is not a hive. What makes a hive hard to defeat is not number. It is coordination. The comb, the shared defense, the capacity to keep working when part of it is lost.

That coordination is the ecosystem. The academies and networks and intermediaries again, seen from the other side. Not only what produces excellence, but what makes a field hard to take apart.

This matters now in a way it did not a few years ago.

The pressures facing social change are no longer events that a strong organization can out-fund. They are conditions. Civic space continues to narrow. Trust erodes. Funding retreats.

And when funding retreats, power does not stay where the need is greatest. It flows back toward whoever is large enough to outlast the drought, which is rarely those closest to the problem.

A single strong advocacy organization is a legible, ‘swattable’ target, and a networked field is not. The autocrat's move is to name one prominent, foreign-funded flagship, raid it, deregister it, smear it - cut off the head. A dense field of locally-rooted actors can't be delegitimized wholesale; you can't credibly call all of them foreign agents, and removing one doesn't stop the function. Similarly, in a low-trust, AI-saturated environment, concentrated authority is a liability - you only have to discredit one named source, and discrediting is cheap. A single marquee institution, a flagship fact-checker, "the experts," is the easiest possible target. Whereas distributed, interlocking, replicable evidence - many independent producers, plural verification, local knowledge institutions - is harder to discredit wholesale because trust isn't staked on one swattable node.

A champion can be beaten on the day. A field is harder to defeat, because there is no one to beat.

One reason field-building is difficult to fund is that its results are often invisible.

A national team can point to a trophy. A player can point to goals scored and matches won. A club can point to championships. These are visible achievements with clear moments of celebration.

Fields are different.

The impact of a stronger field is often distributed across many organizations, many years, and many people.

It appears in the researcher who was trained by a stronger institution. The policymaker who has access to better evidence. The organization that avoids repeating mistakes because it learned from peers. The emerging leader who found a community that invested in their growth.

There is no single trophy to lift.

This creates a challenge for philanthropy. It is often easier to tell the story of one organization changing the world than to explain how a network, intermediary, or professional community made dozens of organizations stronger.

Yet football teaches us that these investments are not optional.

The coach who develops players, the academy director who builds a pipeline of talent, and the local league that gives young athletes a place to compete may never receive the same recognition as the person who scores the winning goal. But without them, there is no winning goal.

The strongest philanthropic strategies recognize that we need both tournaments and academies. We need investments that back exceptional organizations and ambitious ideas. We also need investments that strengthen the ecosystems around them. We back champions for the concentrated force only they can bring. We build fields for the resilience no champion has alone.

The World Cup won’t be back for another four years, but when it comes around, perhaps we should ask a different question.

Not only: Who will win?

But also: What made it possible for this team to be here?

Philanthropy should ask itself the same question. The future of social change will not only depend on finding more winners. It will depend on building stronger fields where excellence can emerge from more places. Because no one wins the World Cup by investing only in the World Cup.