More Than a Game

For the last twelve years, I have somehow managed to miss the World Cup by only a matter of weeks. In 2018, I was away for military training. In 2022, I was halfway through a long submarine deployment. By the time I returned home, the tournament was already over.

Anyone who knows me knows that I am a diehard soccer fan. I have played since I was six years old, and today I still compete in an adult league while coaching youth soccer. I enlisted in the FC Barcelona army long before the Navy ever sent a recruiter.

It is fair to say that I have never been a casual fan. For me, soccer has always been more than a sport; it has been a way of life.

You can imagine my excitement, then, at finally being home in 2026 and able to plant myself firmly on the couch for match after match. I have been grateful simply to participate in what, for billions of people, amounts to a sacred secular ritual.

Yet the experience has also been strange.

By no means has the quality of the soccer been poor. The games have offered all the tension, brilliance, heartbreak, and chaos that make the sport beautiful. Still, the atmosphere has felt different from what I remembered and from what I expected after twelve years of anticipation.

Soccer as a global institution has been changing for some time. The industry has increasingly begun to imitate the methods and habits of American professional sports, where nearly every pause can be commercialized and every tradition converted into a product. The sport once known simply as the beautiful game now debates water breaks designed in part to create additional advertising windows, while the familiar complaints about FIFA corruption have grown ever more difficult to ignore.

Where World Cups once lingered on the passion of supporters who had made pilgrimages from every corner of the globe, today’s broadcasts seem increasingly preoccupied with everything but the supporters themselves. The conversation shifts from the songs in the stands to the price of a ticket, from the sea of national colors to celebrity sightings, from spontaneous moments of collective joy to the inevitable “fan cam” searching for the most attractive spectator to turn into the next viral clip.

The World Cup remains extraordinary. But increasingly, it feels as though the people entrusted with stewarding it do not fully understand what makes it sacred.

The supporters are no longer merely participants in the spectacle; increasingly, they are treated as a resource to be mined. Every pause becomes another advertising opportunity. Every crowd shot becomes another search for celebrity or virality. Every tradition becomes another asset to monetize.

Of course, professional sport is a business, and monetization is both necessary and inevitable. Stadiums must be built, athletes paid, broadcasters compensated, and tournaments organized. The problem is not commerce itself. The problem arises when commerce becomes so loud and so overt that it begins to erode the very character of the sport that made it valuable in the first place.

Increasingly, it seems many executives have convinced themselves that what people love about the World Cup can survive any amount of commercialization. They understand that the final is among the most watched events on Earth. They know billions will tune in regardless. Yet they behave as though the tournament’s meaning is inexhaustible—as though every additional advertisement, every manufactured interruption, and every cynical attempt at monetization can be layered onto the spectacle without changing what it is.

But this raises a deeper question.

What, exactly, are they exploiting?

Certainly not twenty-two people kicking a ball. That, by itself, could never command the attention of billions. The executives understand the value of the World Cup. What they seem less willing to ask is where that value comes from.

Sport, in and of itself, possesses no intrinsic value. In many respects it is frivolous. It creates no tangible product, discovers no scientific truth, cures no disease, and settles no political dispute. At its most basic level, it is simply a game.

Yet games have inspired fanaticism. They have united generations, fostered national pride, sustained hope during dark times, and produced memories that outlive many of the events we are told actually matter.

Many explain this phenomenon through tribalism, nationalism, or football’s unparalleled global popularity. There is truth in each of these explanations, but none of them is sufficient. In fact, I believe they point us toward a deeper misunderstanding—one that lies at the heart of how many modern executives, commentators, and even fans understand sport itself.

Consider the Olympic Games. In many respects, they are more global than the World Cup, more overtly nationalistic, and even more explicitly humanistic in their language. The Olympics celebrate humanity’s highest physical achievements. Nations gather peacefully. Athletes from every corner of the globe compete beneath ideals of friendship, excellence, and mutual respect.

Yet they do not command the same devotion.

For many of us, the Olympics more often becomes an exercise in admiration. We watch the highlights, marvel at extraordinary performances, tally the medals, and celebrate records that push the limits of human capability.

The World Cup is something altogether different. And that difference is tied not merely to the tournament, but to the character of soccer itself. The World Cup could not exist in its present form if football were any other game.

Soccer may be the most democratic sport humanity has ever created. It requires little equipment, little space, and no particular body type. A child needs only an open patch of ground and something vaguely resembling a ball. The game can be played by the tall or the short, the muscular or the slight, the wealthy or the poor. It belongs as naturally to a dirt field in a village as it does to the grandest stadium in the world.

Its emotional appeal is equally distinctive. Soccer is not beautiful because it produces constant scoring. It is beautiful because it makes us wait.

The game unfolds continuously, through passing, possession, movement, and pressure. Every attack carries possibility. Every blocked shot, desperate tackle, and narrow miss raises the tension. A goal is not merely another point added to a total. It is the release of everything that came before it: the anticipation, fear, frustration, and hope of thousands in the stadium and millions watching from afar.

The sport is called the beautiful game because it is an emotional journey.

That journey also leaves unusual room for hope. A weaker team can surrender possession, defend desperately, and wait for one chance to change everything. A tiny nation can stand against a global power and, for ninety minutes, refuse to be intimidated. Wealth, military strength, political influence, and historical prestige offer no guarantee of victory. On the field, every country must submit to the same rules.

In a way the Olympics cannot quite replicate, soccer turns national hope into a single, personified story. Players who may have grown up with little can rise to carry an entire people on their shoulders. A nation ignored in politics, economics, or war can force the world to pay attention. Even when it lacks global power, it can still demand respect on the field.

That is why I do not believe another sport could simply recreate what the World Cup has become. Football is not merely the world’s most popular game. Its accessibility, rhythm, uncertainty, and emotional intensity have made it uniquely suited to become a common language through which humanity expresses competition, belonging, grievance, pride, and hope.

And this is precisely what the tournament’s modern stewards seem to misunderstand.

They know the World Cup is valuable, but they increasingly treat that value as though it were embedded permanently within the brand. They assume the crowds will always arrive, the audiences will always watch, and the passion will survive whatever is imposed upon it. More matches can be added. More interruptions can be created. Tickets can become increasingly inaccessible. Supporters can be reduced to background scenery, viral content, and consumer data. The ritual, they seem to believe, will endure because the logo remains the same.

But the World Cup’s meaning does not belong to FIFA, its sponsors, or its broadcast partners. It belongs to the people who sustain it.

It is created by the family that gathers around the same television every four years. By the immigrant who carries the flag of an old home while building a life in a new one. By the child who learns the names of countries through a tournament bracket before encountering them in a classroom. By the supporters who cross oceans, spend their savings, paint their faces, sing until they lose their voices, and allow themselves to believe that eleven players might briefly carry the hopes of millions.

The executives believe they are selling access to a sporting event. What they are actually monetizing is accumulated human meaning: generations of memory, inherited loyalty, communal ritual, and the emotional labor of people who have spent their lives caring.

That distinction matters because meaning can be depleted.

A tradition can survive commerce, but it cannot survive indefinitely as nothing more than commerce. A ritual can accommodate spectacle, but spectacle eventually hollows it out when the participants become secondary to the product. The danger is not that the World Cup will suddenly cease to be profitable. The danger is that it will remain profitable long after it has begun to lose the character that made people love it.

Yet the lesson extends beyond soccer.

It would be easy for me, as a lifelong fan, to argue that football is simply the greatest sport humanity has created. I certainly would not object to that conclusion. But that is not the deeper point. The value of the World Cup is not that it proves soccer superior to every other game. Its value is that it demonstrates what sport can do when it becomes more than entertainment.

Human beings are not purely rational creatures. We are tribal, competitive, emotional, and status-conscious. We crave belonging. We divide the world into allies and rivals. We want to win, to represent something larger than ourselves, and to see our group triumph over another.

These instincts are not always admirable. Left without restraint, they can produce cruelty, chauvinism, violence, and war. But wishing them away has never made them disappear.

The Humanist task is not to deny human nature. It is to cultivate institutions that direct it toward human flourishing.

Sport is one of those institutions.

At its best, sport domesticates tribalism. It transforms enemies into opponents, conquest into competition, aggression into effort, and violence into physical struggle bounded by rules. It allows people to wear their colors, sing their songs, proclaim their loyalty, and experience victory or defeat without requiring anyone to be conquered beyond the field.

For ninety minutes, nations behave as though everything is at stake. Supporters shout, curse, embrace strangers, and invest themselves completely in the result. Then the whistle blows. The defeated are not occupied. The victorious seize no territory. The players exchange shirts, shake hands, and return home.

Nothing material has been won.

And that is precisely the achievement.

The emotions were real. The rivalry was real. The belonging was real. But civilization gave those instincts a form that produced memory instead of graves.

Yet sport does more than contain our baser impulses. It also redirects them toward admiration, aspiration, and hope.

The child watching at home does not merely learn to defeat an opponent. The child learns that excellence requires discipline, sacrifice, cooperation, and years of unseen effort. Athletes become proof that ability can be cultivated and that circumstances need not determine the outer limits of a life. Their victories invite others to train harder, dream more boldly, and imagine futures beyond those immediately available to them.

The World Cup carries that lesson from individuals to entire nations.

In politics, economics, and war, the same countries tend to dominate. Wealthy states possess greater influence, stronger institutions, larger militaries, and better access to opportunity. The Olympic medal table often reproduces much of that hierarchy. The largest and wealthiest nations can finance enormous athletic systems and accumulate medals across dozens of events.

Football is less obedient to the established order.

A country with little military power, economic influence, or geopolitical prestige can still stand level with a superpower on the field. A smaller nation can defend stubbornly, seize its moment, and force the world to take notice. For ninety minutes, inherited status guarantees nothing. Respect must be earned under the same rules by everyone.

The World Cup reminds us that excellence is not concentrated within the borders of empires. Human brilliance is scattered everywhere, even when resources and opportunities are not.

That realization does something remarkable to the tribalism with which the tournament begins. We enter wearing our own colors and caring most deeply about our own people. But when our team is eliminated, we rarely stop watching. We choose another story.

We adopt a new nation.

Perhaps it is the smallest country still alive in the tournament. Perhaps it is a team that plays with unusual courage or joy. Perhaps it is a people whose history we barely knew a few weeks earlier. Cape Verde has become the hero of this World Cup not because its supporters suddenly persuaded the world to become Cape Verdean, but because millions recognized something universal in its improbable journey.

This pattern repeats every four years. Supporters who arrived divided by nationality begin admiring players, teams, and cultures beyond their own. Host communities welcome traveling fans as honored guests. Strangers exchange shirts and flags. People learn songs in languages they do not speak. A tournament that begins by drawing sharp lines between “us” and “them” slowly complicates the distinction.

Once our own tribe is gone, we discover that courage, excellence, dignity, and hope were never exclusive to it.

The World Cup therefore does not merely channel tribalism. At its best, it quietly undermines tribalism’s most dangerous claim: that human worth belongs more fully to our people than to anyone else.

Sport begins with the desire to see our side triumph. It can end by expanding the circle of those whose triumphs we are capable of celebrating.

That is its Humanist promise. Humanism seeks not to flatten human difference, eliminate competition, or deny our instinct for belonging. It seeks to universalize the conditions for human flourishing and extend kinship beyond the boundaries instinct first draws around us.

Sport offers a practical model of that process. It gives our rivalries rules and limits. It rewards effort and cooperation. It demonstrates that greatness can emerge from anywhere. And after inviting us to care passionately about our own side, it teaches us to recognize ourselves in another.

The World Cup begins by asking us to choose a nation.

It ends by reminding us that humanity is larger than any one of them.

The greatest threat to the World Cup, then, is not commercialization itself, but the quiet inversion of values it encourages: that human belonging is valuable because it is profitable, rather than profitable because it is valuable.

This essay is part of an ongoing project on human-centered democracy, moral agency, and popular sovereignty. If it resonated, share it with someone you trust. More at The Weekly Humanist.