The World Cup has become too large, too politically significant and too difficult to manage responsibly in one place. Expansion has increased the strain on host nations, while the tournament’s global importance has also made it a tool for political projection. Taken together, those forces have pushed the competition beyond what a single region should be expected to absorb.
Looking back at the 2018 World Cup in Russia, the event now appears to have functioned as a soft display of legitimacy for Vladimir Putin and his government. The tournament showcased the country and placed its leader at the center of the world stage. In hindsight, it was a measured and carefully framed moment of international validation for a strongman project already in motion.
This summer’s World Cup, by contrast, is shaping up to be something far more overt. The buildup to the tournament has already become closely associated with Donald Trump, turning the lead-up to the competition into a spectacle of political symbolism. Rather than simply serving as a sporting festival, the event has become a monument to power and influence around the host country.
That is part of the problem. The World Cup is no longer just a tournament to be staged, televised and celebrated. It is now a global event whose scale invites political use, drawing leaders, institutions and national identities into a single high-stakes arena. The larger the tournament becomes, the more difficult it is to treat it as a neutral sports competition.
Decentralizing the World Cup would help reduce that burden. Spreading the event across more than one region would make it harder for any one government to dominate the narrative or use the tournament as a showcase for itself. It would also acknowledge a practical reality: modern World Cups are so vast that asking one host nation or one part of the world to shoulder the full responsibility is increasingly unrealistic.
This issue sits within a broader conversation about the sport itself and the way it is presented to the public. The World Cup is football’s most popular and most visible competition, and that prominence makes every edition more than a sporting matter. It becomes a political and cultural event, one that reflects the priorities of the era as much as the quality of the football on the field.
The current shape of the tournament raises a simple question: if the World Cup has outgrown the capacity of a single region, why continue to force it into that model? A decentralized approach would not remove politics from the event, but it could limit the concentration of power, reduce the pressure on hosts and better match the scale of the competition to the world that now watches it.
This article is adapted from Soccer with Jonathan Wilson, a weekly look from the Guardian US at the game in Europe and beyond. Leander Schaerlaeckens is a Guardian US contributor. His book on the United States men’s national soccer team, The Long Game, is out on 12 May. He teaches at Marist University.
