1. The Dilemma: Soccer or Politics?

The 2026 World Cup began long before the opening match. If one had to assign it an inaugural date, December 5, 2025, would be a plausible choice. On that day, FIFA presented Donald Trump with the first edition of an award it had itself created: the FIFA Peace Prize.[1]

The episode had an immediate precedent. Trump had repeatedly expressed his desire to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. In October 2025, the Norwegian Nobel Committee decided to award it to María Corina Machado—a choice that was itself open to question, given the Venezuelan opposition leader’s political record and her positions regarding the Israeli government. Two months later, Gianni Infantino presented Trump with an alternative award during the World Cup draw.

The decision did not result from a public procedure. No candidates, comparative criteria, deliberations, or independent evaluation process were disclosed. FIFA created the prize, and its president bestowed it upon the president of the principal host country. Infantino’s conduct was challenged by civil society organizations, national federations, and members of the European Parliament, who called for an investigation into whether it violated the political neutrality required by FIFA’s own regulations.[2]

The principal question is not whether Trump deserved a peace prize. To frame the debate in those terms would be to accept too quickly the moral authority FIFA decided to confer upon itself. The problem comes earlier: a sports organization converted its institutional authority into the power to confer moral legitimacy upon a head of government.

FIFA did not merely express an opinion. It created an honor, organized a ceremony, and used one of the World Cup’s central events to confer public recognition upon the president of the United States. It placed the symbolic resources of global soccer at the service of an operation of political legitimation.

The gesture anticipated the general structure of the tournament.

The World Cup is presented as a joint undertaking by the United States, Mexico, and Canada. Yet the three host countries do not occupy equivalent positions. The United States holds most of the matches, the decisive stages, the final, and the center of political, institutional, and media attention. Mexico and Canada participate as co-hosts, but possess far less capacity to determine the general conditions under which the competition takes place.

The trinational structure has not created a shared authority capable of constraining the dominant member. Organizational responsibilities are distributed among three countries, but political power remains concentrated in one.

Mexico and Canada contribute stadiums, cities, infrastructure, and continental legitimacy. The United States largely determines the conditions of entry. Joint organization does not correct the regional asymmetry. It reproduces it.

This inequality became especially visible in the case of Iran. The participation of the Iranian national team was made subject to Washington’s immigration decisions. Players and staff members deemed indispensable could receive exemptions allowing them to enter the United States, while other members of the delegation and numerous supporters remained subject to restrictions.[3]

The contradiction was precise: Iran could be admitted as a sporting participant, but not necessarily as a national community. The American state distinguished between the bodies necessary for the spectacle and those who wished to accompany them.

The distinction affects the very meaning of a World Cup. The competition presents itself as a gathering of countries, not merely of professional squads. Yet effective access to the tournament has been regulated by an immigration policy that separates the team from the population it represents.

The issue is not simply that the United States receives more attention than its neighbors. The problem is institutional. Washington extends its border sovereignty over the general operation of a tournament presented as a common undertaking. Mexico and Canada formally retain their status as hosts, but possess few instruments with which to modify American decisions affecting the competition as a whole.

The formula can be expressed simply: three countries organize the World Cup, but one of them can decide who is able to participate in it fully.

The award bestowed upon Trump and the subordination of the tournament to Washington’s decisions are not separate episodes. They belong to the same structure. FIFA conferred moral legitimacy upon the president of the country that, at the same time, imposes the principal political conditions of access to the competition.

Politics did not subsequently intrude upon a World Cup that had initially been neutral. It is present in the tournament’s institutional design, in the distribution of power among its hosts, and in the determination of who may cross their borders.

Hence the apparent dilemma: soccer or politics?

We are frequently invited to choose between watching the game and attending to the political conditions under which it takes place. But the disjunction is false. Soccer possesses a relative autonomy: there is play, competition, skill, contingency, and athletic merit. Yet this autonomy does not place the tournament outside history. The World Cup depends upon states, borders, institutions, economic resources, and relations of power.

The point is not to reduce soccer to politics. It is to recognize that politics helps configure the space within which soccer can present itself as something distinct from politics.

2. Borders, Intervention, and Suspicion

The anomaly did not end with the presentation of the award to Trump. The United States hosted the World Cup while enforcing a restrictive immigration policy affecting citizens of numerous countries. The exemptions granted to players, coaches, and indispensable personnel did not negate the prohibitions; they revealed their selective logic. Those necessary for the competition could enter, while many of their compatriots could not accompany them.[4]

The distinction separated the representative from the community represented. A national team could appear under the name of a country while part of its fan base was excluded from the territory in which the matches were played.

The contradiction was not accidental. The World Cup presents itself as a universal gathering of nations, but its realization depends upon the territorial sovereignty of the host states. FIFA can proclaim that soccer unites the world; it cannot guarantee that everyone will gain access on equivalent terms to the space in which that unity is staged.

Warnings issued by civil rights organizations broadened the problem. The issue was not limited to visas. Immigration enforcement, surveillance, the possibility of detention, and the presence of federal agents also affected residents, workers, and spectators belonging to communities subjected to an intensified policy of immigration persecution.[5] Borders did not operate only at airports and ports of entry. They extended throughout the tournament’s social environment.

Sporting universality is thus subordinated to the state’s classification of persons. A participant admitted because of his usefulness to the spectacle does not thereby acquire the same right of entry as an ordinary citizen. The country is welcomed as a national team, but not necessarily as a population.

This tension between sporting universality and state sovereignty is not new. What distinguishes this World Cup is its visibility. The United States presents itself as the central host of a global community while applying exclusionary criteria to members of that very community.

The inequality of access was accompanied by presidential intervention in a sporting decision.

After Folarin Balogun was sent off, Trump called Gianni Infantino to request that the penalty be reviewed. The suspension was subsequently overturned, and the forward was able to play in the following match. Trump publicly claimed partial credit for the outcome. Infantino maintained that the decision had been made by FIFA’s disciplinary bodies.[6]

It is not necessary to demonstrate that the phone call legally determined the ruling. Its political relevance precedes that question. The president of the principal host country considered it legitimate to contact the president of FIFA personally in order to intervene in a matter affecting his national team.

Institutional independence does not depend only upon an authority’s ability to resist an explicit order. It also depends upon the existence of clear limits on political power’s informal access to institutional decision-makers. When a president can call the head of an organization, request that a sanction be reviewed, and subsequently claim credit for the change in judgment, the separation between government and sporting authority is weakened.

Infantino could insist that the disciplinary body had acted autonomously. But its autonomy could no longer be taken for granted. It had to be defended against an intervention made possible by the relationship between the two leaders.

The refereeing controversy surrounding Argentina arose within this context.

During Argentina’s path to the final, several decisions provoked protests from national teams, commentators, and fans. The expression “VARgentina” condenses the perception that Argentina has received preferential treatment. These episodes do not provide evidence that FIFA has established a systematic policy of favoritism toward Argentina. But that is not the only relevant question.

A competition depends not only upon the formal correctness of its decisions. It also depends upon public confidence in the procedures through which those decisions are produced. Such confidence requires independence, consistency, and transparency. Decisions must be free from external pressure, apply recognizable criteria, and provide adequate reasons. When any of these conditions is weakened, suspicion ceases to be merely an external reaction to the institution’s operation and becomes part of its internal crisis.

Infantino’s closeness to Trump, the creation of an award intended to invest him with moral authority, and the president’s phone call regarding the Balogun case do not demonstrate that referees have favored Argentina. They do, however, damage the framework within which FIFA asks that its decisions be accepted as neutral.

Suspicion does not arise exclusively from what happens on the field. It is nourished by the organization’s conduct off it.

The contradiction assumed its most explicit form after the semifinal between Argentina and England. During the celebration, several Argentine players unfurled a banner bearing the words “The Malvinas Are Argentine.” The British government demanded that the incident be investigated, and FIFA began evaluating the match reports to determine whether disciplinary proceedings should be initiated.[7]

Thus far, no penalty has been imposed, nor has any definitive disciplinary charge been brought. What exists is a British request for an investigation and FIFA’s preliminary review of the circumstances.

The banner was undeniably political. There is no reason to deny this. It connected a sporting victory with a territorial and historical claim advanced by the Argentine state. The players did not merely celebrate under the country’s name; they articulated a political position in that name.

Argentina’s claim to the Malvinas cannot be reduced to the war initiated by the dictatorship in 1982, nor does it lose its historical and diplomatic legitimacy because it was instrumentalized at that time. But displaying the claim after a victory over England inscribed the sporting result within an unresolved dispute between states. The match ceased to function solely as a competition and was incorporated into a national memory that remains active.

FIFA’s reaction makes an additional asymmetry visible. The same organization that created a peace prize for Donald Trump and presented it during one of the World Cup’s central events now considers the Argentine players’ political intervention potentially subject to disciplinary review.

The difference does not lie in the presence or absence of politics. It lies in who possesses the authority to introduce it.

When FIFA invests the president of the principal host country with moral legitimacy, politics appears as institutional protocol. When players display a national claim, politics appears as a potential violation. The organization does not truly separate soccer from politics. It administers which politics may occupy the center of the spectacle and which must be excluded or punished.

This does not require us to endorse the banner or to deny the legitimacy of rules limiting political messages during a competition. It does, however, require consistency. An institution cannot present itself as neutral when it treats politicization originating on the field as contamination while institutionalizing the politicization practiced by its own leadership.

The Malvinas episode also introduces an important qualification. A national team is not always a purely sporting actor. It can intervene politically, and it can do so under the same national name used by the government, diplomacy, and the state. The distinction between sporting and political representation is analytically necessary, but it does not describe two impermeable spheres.

This World Cup therefore concentrates four forms of inequality. The first concerns access: some people may enter as necessary components of the tournament, while their fellow citizens remain excluded. The second concerns independence: political power enjoys direct access to FIFA’s leadership in order to contest a sanction. The third concerns confidence: refereeing decisions are received within an institutional framework whose neutrality has already been called into question. The fourth concerns the right to intervene politically: FIFA reserves for itself the authority to politicize the tournament while subjecting the players’ intervention to disciplinary scrutiny.

The competition does not take place outside relations of power. It depends upon them to determine who may enter, who may intervene, which political positions may be expressed, and why its decisions should be accepted.

3. War and the Name of Argentina

The war in the Middle East must be added to this context.

To say that this war affects us all does not mean that its consequences are distributed equally. Destruction, hunger, displacement, and death fall upon particular populations, above all upon the Palestinian population of Gaza. The global reach of the conflict does not erase the radical inequality of suffering.

It means something else. War reorganizes alliances, alters economic priorities, divides societies, and changes the political meaning of cultural and sporting institutions. It compels governments to take positions and to do so in the names of the countries they represent.

Argentina is not participating militarily in Gaza. Javier Milei’s government has nevertheless turned its support for Benjamin Netanyahu and its alliance with Donald Trump into central components of Argentine foreign policy. That orientation does not remain outside the World Cup. It appears alongside the national team under the same national name.

This does not make the players responsible for the government’s decisions. Nor does it make Argentina’s supporters followers of Milei. But it prevents us from presenting the tournament as a stage detached from the wars, alliances, and conflicts shaping the world in which it takes place.

Argentina arrives at the final under multiple forms of representation. An admired national team represents the country in sporting terms. A government integrated into the international far right represents it politically. And the players themselves, as the Malvinas banner demonstrated, may momentarily leave behind a strictly sporting function and intervene in a national political dispute.

These representations use the same name, but they do not possess the same content and should not be subjected to the same judgment.

The distinction raises the two questions organizing these notes:

What does it mean to cheer for a flag?

What have you done with my name?

The first is addressed to the spectator. The second is addressed to those who govern and act in the name of a community that does not belong exclusively to them.

Both questions become more significant when foreign policy ceases to be limited to the selection of allies and begins to provide categories for classifying domestic adversaries.

On July 16, 2026, Marco Rubio convened representatives from sixty-six countries in Washington to discuss what the Trump administration presented as a transnational resurgence of far-left political terrorism. The meeting, informally known as the “Antifa summit,” was accompanied by the announcement of new visa restrictions and by rhetoric depicting certain left-wing movements as coordinated international networks operating against Western civilization. Rather than limiting itself to prosecuting specific acts of violence, the initiative sought to transfer to the radical left the legal, diplomatic, and financial mechanisms developed over several decades in the name of the war on international terrorism.[8]

The shift is decisive. Ordinary criminal law prosecutes defined conduct: murder, bombing, threats, property damage, or conspiracy. Counterterrorism logic operates differently. It does not merely identify a completed act; it maps networks, affinities, channels of financing, indirect forms of support, and ideological environments. Its object is not only the offense but also the social space within which that offense might develop, find justification, or acquire legitimacy. In this way, the investigation of specific acts can be transformed into the preventive construction of zones of suspicion.

The risk appears when the category of terrorism ceases to distinguish rigorously among armed organization, protest, political activism, solidarity, civil disobedience, and intellectual criticism. An expansive definition makes it possible to present legal positions as peripheral components of a violent network. Universities, unions, humanitarian organizations, and social movements cease to be political interlocutors and may be reclassified as spaces of collaboration, financing, or legitimation.

In this sense, the meeting convened by Rubio can be understood as an attempt to establish a counterterrorist international directed against the global left. This does not mean that all sixty-six governments necessarily share the same program. It means that they are being offered a common vocabulary, mechanisms of coordination, and a convergent definition of the enemy.

Argentina participated in the meeting. The presence of Foreign Minister Pablo Quirno indicates that Milei’s government is not observing the initiative from outside but is joining the political architecture Washington is attempting to construct.[9]

4. “When I Hear the Word Culture…”

The case of Greater Palestine demonstrates how this vocabulary is being transferred into the Argentine public sphere.

The documentary, directed by Mexican filmmaker Rafael Rangel, examines events that took place in Gaza between January and March 2025. It records the return of displaced people after the announcement of a ceasefire and the subsequent resumption of attacks. Constructed from testimony and images obtained inside Gaza, the film depicts the destruction of homes, the loss of family members, and the impossibility of recovering an ordinary life.[10]

It does not present the Palestinian population as a variable in military strategy. It presents Palestinians as subjects of experience and testimony. Its political meaning lies in making visible what the language of war and diplomacy habitually reduces to figures, operations, and objectives.

The screening held at the National University of Rosario included the participation of Silvana Rabinovich, an Argentine scholar based in Mexico whose work belongs to a Jewish tradition critical of Zionism and committed to listening to Palestinian voices.

The government’s reaction was not directed primarily at the film’s testimonial content. Milei accused the university of promoting terrorism. Officials responsible for university policy warned of the possible legal consequences of providing space for an activity that, according to the government, might be connected to an organization listed in Argentina’s terrorist registries. The university subsequently denied having granted institutional endorsement to the event, apologized to the Jewish community, and opened an internal investigation.[11]

The sequence matters more than the immediate controversy.

A documentary about the Palestinian experience was interpreted through the category of terrorism. Its screening came to be treated as the possible promotion of a proscribed organization. The institution that hosted the event was warned of potential legal consequences.

The object of the accusation was no longer an act of violence. It became the cultural mediation through which a political experience could be made visible.

The university was not accused of carrying out, financing, or preparing an attack. It was suggested that providing a space for the film might place it within the sphere of collaboration with terrorism. The concept expanded from the criminal act to the conditions under which a public voice is allowed to circulate.

To enter into a debate over whether the film collaborated with a particular organization would be to accept the framework established by those seeking to discipline its circulation. The central question is not whether a testimonial work satisfies the government’s ideological precautions. It is what happens when the category of terrorism expands to the point that the screening of a film becomes an object of state suspicion.

This expansion serves a disciplinary function. It does not need to produce a criminal conviction in order to be effective. It is enough to raise the institutional cost of showing, discussing, or endorsing certain forms of testimony. The threat induces university authorities to investigate their own community, withdraw their support, and issue apologies.

Censorship does not always assume the form of prior prohibition. It can operate through the production of risk.

The university formally retains its academic freedom, but it must exercise that freedom under the possibility that an activity will be reinterpreted as collaboration with terrorism. The predictable result is self-censorship: before organizing an event, one no longer asks only about its intellectual relevance, but also about the political and legal consequences of displeasing the government.

The relationship between Rubio’s summit and Milei’s actions does not require proof of direct coordination in this particular case. There is a deeper political convergence. Both shift the boundary between adversary and enemy. Left-wing criticism, international solidarity, and university intervention cease to belong clearly to the field of democratic conflict and move closer to the domain of national security.

When the Argentine government acts against the National University of Rosario, it does not speak as just another political faction. It speaks from the state and in the name of Argentina. It presents its alliance with Netanyahu, its interpretation of the war, and its definition of terrorism as though they expressed the country’s legitimate position.

But Argentina does not possess a single voice concerning Palestine. Nor does Judaism possess a single position concerning Israel. Silvana Rabinovich’s presence is enough to refute both simplifications.

The democratic function of a university consists precisely in preventing the position of the state from exhausting the field of the thinkable. It must allow official concepts to be examined, victims to appear as subjects, and governmental alliances to be debated.

Threatening a university for performing this function means using the state’s representative power to reduce the plurality contained within the national name.

Hence the question:

What have you done with my name?

You have associated Argentina with a particular political alliance. You have turned that alliance into a criterion for regulating domestic discourse. You have brought whatever challenges your definition of the enemy into the conceptual vicinity of terrorism. You have used a common name to diminish the space of disagreement.

5. A Bifocal Perspective

What, then, does it mean to cheer for a flag?

It does not mean endorsing the actions of those who govern under it. Supporting the Argentine national team does not make anyone a supporter of Milei. Nor does it make the players responsible for the state’s international alliances.

But the answer cannot end with that distinction. The team and the government appear under the same name. The prestige produced on the field becomes available for political appropriation. Sporting representation and political representation are not identical, but neither are they completely separate.

The Malvinas banner demonstrates the same point in the opposite direction: politics does not arrive only from the government seeking to appropriate soccer. It may also emerge from the players themselves, who use the visibility of the national team to articulate a national claim.

In this World Cup, and especially as we approach this final, we need a bifocal perspective.

One focus must remain on the game: the quality of the players, the history of the national team, the beauty of a particular move, the uncertainty of the result, and the legitimate possibility of celebration. Without this focus, there is no soccer—only the political instrumentalization of sport.

The other must attend to the framework within which the game takes place: FIFA’s subordination to political power, selective borders, Trump’s intervention, the crisis of confidence in refereeing, the unequal administration of neutrality, the war in Gaza, and the Argentine government’s alignment with a reactionary international movement that has begun to reclassify the left as a terrorist threat.

To lose the first focus is to reduce the match to propaganda. To lose the second is to surrender to naïveté.

Argentines have a specific historical reason to preserve both perspectives. We have lived through the tragic glory of the 1978 World Cup. We know that a sporting victory can be authentic for players and supporters and, at the same time, become inscribed within a criminal political operation. We also know that recognizing the government’s appropriation of that victory does not require denying the efforts of those who played or the emotions of those who celebrated.

The experience of 1978 rules out both indiscriminate condemnation and innocence.

Maradona once said that “the ball does not get stained.” The phrase possesses undeniable rhetorical power. It expresses the desire to preserve the game from the degradation inflicted by those who administer and exploit it. But taken as a description of the world, it is false.

The ball gets stained because it never rolls outside history.

It gets stained when a dictatorship turns a championship into an instrument of legitimation. It gets stained when a sports organization creates an award to flatter the president of the host country. It gets stained when a border admits the players and excludes those they represent. It gets stained when political power intervenes in disciplinary decisions. It gets stained when neutrality is applied selectively. It gets stained when the prestige of a national team is used to normalize a government’s alliances.

“The ball does not get stained” is a beautiful counterfeit coin. It preserves the gleam of a moral truth—the game should not belong to those who degrade it—but circulates as though it described a separation that has never existed.

Lucidity requires a different formulation: the ball can be stained, but it does not belong entirely to those who stain it.

The answer, therefore, is not to surrender the flag to the government or to confuse the country with those who administer it. It is to maintain the distance between representation and ownership.

Milei politically represents the Argentine state. He does not own Argentina.

The national team represents the country in sporting terms. It is not responsible for Milei’s politics. But neither does it always remain outside politics, as its intervention concerning the Malvinas demonstrates.

Citizens may support the national team while simultaneously demanding that the government answer for what it does under the same name. They may also share a claim expressed by the players without relinquishing their right to judge the moment, form, and setting in which it was articulated.

This double demand avoids two reductions. The first identifies an entire society with its government and turns state responsibility into collective guilt. The second declares that sport has no relationship whatsoever to power and leaves the field open for the government, FIFA, or sporting actors themselves to exploit its prestige without accountability.

A bifocal perspective means refusing to sacrifice one truth to another.

To cheer for a flag is to recognize a belonging without suspending judgment.

To ask, “What have you done with my name?” is to remind political, institutional, and sporting power that institutionally representing a country does not mean owning it.

Notes and References

[1] Graham, B. A., & Beaumont, P. (2025, December 5). Trump awarded inaugural Fifa peace prize at World Cup draw in Washington. The Guardian.

[2] PA Media. (2025, December 9). Gianni Infantino accused of breaking Fifa rules with Trump’s peace prize. The Guardian.

[3] Garrido, V. M. (2026, June 17). Irán recupera la visa expirada de un jugador en pleno Mundial y en medio de la crisis de la selección persa en Estados Unidos. El País.

[4] Fernández, A. (2026, June 17). El Mundial, foco del debate sobre la política migratoria de Trump. El País.

[5] Fernández, A. (2026, June 17). El Mundial, foco del debate sobre la política migratoria de Trump. El País.

[6] Ronay, B. (2026, July 7). All the presidents’ meddling: The Balogun scandal shows how Fifa can break football. The Guardian.

[7] See the reports published by Reuters and The Guardian on July 16, 2026, concerning the “The Malvinas Are Argentine” banner, the British request for an investigation, and FIFA’s preliminary evaluation of the match reports.

[8] Seisdedos, I. (2026, July 16). Marco Rubio convoca a 66 países a un encuentro para combatir a «los extremistas de izquierda» en todo el mundo. El País; “Enemies of civilization”: Top Trump officials launch sweeping attack on left. (2026, July 16). The Guardian.

[9] Idiart, G. (2026, July 16). El gobierno de Trump llamó a «terminar para siempre con el terror violento» de la izquierda y recordó a Montoneros. La Nación.

[10] Rangel, R. (Director). (2025). La gran Palestina [Documentary]. Insurrección Films. See also the film’s technical information on FilmAffinity and the interview with the director conducted by Rompeviento TV.

[11] Página/12. (2026, July 11). La libertad académica cuestionada por Milei. Página/12; Página/12. (2026, July 14). Bartolacci salió a pedir disculpas. Página/12.