They would have spoken different languages, carried different passports, and lived under different governments—a dockworker in Liverpool in 1966, a mechanic in Buenos Aires in 1978, a school teacher in Lagos in 1994, a taxi driver in Casablanca in 2022—yet something deeper than circumstance would have connected them across time and place in a way requires no explanation. Football: the sport with a shared emotional grammar that makes strangers feel briefly familiar. This was always the unspoken miracle of the World Cup. It was never only about goals or trophies or the final whistle. Its deeper meaning lay in what it allowed humanity to believe about itself, even if only temporarily. For a few weeks every four years, the world gathered in a single tent and participated in something larger than geography, politics, or history. A fisherman in Senegal, a banker in Frankfurt, a farmer in Argentina, a student in South Korea; all could look toward the same stage and feel, however briefly, that they were part of a single, unfolding story.
The tournament did not erase inequality or history or conflict, but it suspended them long enough to suggest that another kind of world might be possible. That is why the World Cup became more than sport, but a promise that humanity could meet itself without needing permission to belong. And for generations, that promise lived not only inside stadiums, but in ordinary life. It lived in crowded living rooms where neighbours gathered because only one household owned a television. It lived in radios balanced on windowsills as listeners leaned in to catch distant commentary. It lived in children painting national colours on their faces with whatever they could find, and in streets that fell silent at the moment of a penalty kick. Long before football became an industry, it was a shared language that required no translation.
Today, that promise feels increasingly fragile.
The 2026 World Cup is the largest ever staged, with 48 participating nations. FIFA presents this expansion as progress—and in many ways it is. More countries than ever before will appear on the world stage, more flags will rise, more anthems will be sung, and more stories will be written under the same global spotlight. Yet in this moment the tournament has become larger, it has also become more distant.
When the World Cup last returned to North America in 1994, attending matches still felt within reach for ordinary supporters who saved and planned carefully towards it. Today, the landscape has changed in ways harder to measure but easier to feel. Tickets that once were rare but attainable now demand sums beyond the options of many working fans. Accommodation rises sharply in anticipation of global demand. Air travel becomes expensive. Visa requirements introduce uncertainty that no amount of passion can overcome. For many supporters across the world, especially outside the wealthiest regions, the obstacle is no longer devotion, but access. For a supporter in the Global South, however, the barrier is not merely an ocean away at an embassy gate; it is waiting right outside the front door.
In Nigeria, the communal rituals that once defined the tournament, the packed, rowdy neighbourhood viewing centres, where the republic of humanity actually breathed, have been systematically dismantled. A harsh climate of regional insecurity has turned these shared spaces into targets, forcing fans into isolation. Compounding this isolation is a brutal economic triage. With the national grid always collapsing, and fuel for private generators too costly for the average household, even small miracles as powering a television has become luxury. Worse still, the 2026 fixtures kick off across North American time zones that force matches deep into ungodly hours of Nigerian night.
Thus, the modern fan is trapped in a cruel paradox. A smartphone offers instant access to a game played thousands of miles away, but local structural failure ensures the screen stays dark. The contradiction is difficult to ignore. The tournament expands, while accessibility contracts. The doors grow wider, while the threshold rises higher. What makes this shift significant is not only what it says about football, but what it reveals about the world that surrounds it.
For decades, the modern era was described as one of shrinking distance. Globalisation promised that borders would soften, movement would become easier, and human connections would deepen across geography. In many respects, these promises have been fulfilled. Communication across continents is instant. Information moves at remarkable speed. Financial systems operate across time zones with an ease that previous generations could hardly imagine. Yet, beneath this surface of speed, another reality has taken shape. The world has become easier to observe but harder to enter. The distance between countries has diminished, but the barriers between people have quietly multiplied. A person can watch a match played thousands of miles away on a device held in one hand, yet still find it increasingly difficult to stand inside the stadium where it happens. It is an age that celebrates connection but silently rations access.
And now, the World Cup sits at the centre of this contradiction. It is more global in appearance than ever, yet more selective in participation. It has grown in scale, wealth, and technological sophistication; yet something essential about its emotional accessibility feels increasingly under strain. Football itself was never born from wealth or privilege. It was shaped by labour and improvisation. It was carried by miners leaving underground tunnels after long shifts, dockworkers unloading cargo under grey morning skies, factory workers finishing exhausting days, traders closing markets at dusk, and children turning narrow streets into fields of imagination. It spread across the world not because it demanded investment, but because it demanded almost nothing at all. A patch of ground was enough. A ball was enough. A shared moment of imagination was enough. That simplicity gave football its emotional foundation. Ordinary supporters could look at the sport’s grandest stage and feel, not like distant spectators but as participants in something shared. It belonged to them because they could recognise themselves within it. That feeling today seems to be effacing.
Modern tournaments increasingly resemble carefully constructed global spectacles, shaped as much by commerce and logistics as by sport. Hospitality areas expand, but general access tightens. Corporate experiences multiply, while ordinary seating becomes harder to secure. Security perimeters widen and spontaneity narrows. The language surrounding the event shifts gradually from shared experience to managed product. These changes rarely announce themselves; they accumulate quietly until they become the new reality. To understand what is at stake, it helps to return to a simple memory:
In a small compound in Lagos in 1994, a family gathers around a television placed on a wooden stool. The electricity is unstable, and the picture momentarily breaks into a grainy screen, yet nobody moves away. Neighbours arrive without invitation, bringing plastic chairs, or stand at the edges of the room because there is no space left. Children sit on the floor, their eyes fixed on the screen, even when they do not fully understand everything unfolding before them. If Nigeria is playing, the entire compound appears to breathe as one. No one in that space thought about visas or ticket prices or stadium access. The World Cup was not something distant being observed; it was something they were already inside, even from thousands of kilometres away.
That kind of belonging is harder to find now, not because football has lost its essence, but because the conditions around it have changed. The shared space has not disappeared; it has thinned. The danger is not that football will lose popularity; it shall remain universally loved, while becoming increasingly inaccessible to the people whose love gave it meaning in the first place. A game can survive without purity, but can it survive without belonging? This is why the World Cup now feels like more than a sporting competition. It has become a mirror reflecting the deeper contradictions of the age itself. We live in a world that has never been more connected, yet many feel more excluded; a world that celebrates diversity, yet struggles with inequality; a world that produces unprecedented wealth, yet places many of its defining experiences beyond the reach of those who helped build its culture.
The World Cup is not responsible for these contradictions, but it reveals them with unsettling clarity. It exposes the gap between the world we describe and the world we inhabit. It also reveals something more subtle about modern life: institutions tend to grow in scale without necessarily growing in intimacy—they become larger, more efficient, more global, but not always more human. Success is measured through expansion, revenue, and reach, while the question of belonging is often left unasked.
The true greatness of the World Cup was never its size. It was its intimacy. It was the sense that somewhere in the crowd stood humanity in miniature, gathered in one place, reacting to one moment, briefly united, not by identity but by emotion. That was the magic. That was the promise. The tragedy of the 2026 World Cup is not that it will fail. By every measurable standard, it will succeed. Stadiums will be full. Audiences will be vast. Sponsors will be satisfied. Records will be broken. It will be remembered as one of the most commercially successful tournaments ever staged. And yet success and loss are not opposites. They often arrive together.
But what happens when the world’s favourite game becomes an event that much of the world can no longer realistically attend, the fading of something less visible? Somewhere between rising costs, expanding barriers, and the growing machinery of global sport, something fragile appears to be slipping away. The World Cup was created so that the world could meet itself. The question now is whether it still can.♦
Edited by
Edited by Carl Terver
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Stephanie Sewuese Shaakaa writes from Makurdi. She’s a lecturer, writer and columnist, and has been published in The Punch, and Vanguard, among others.