Photo: Jay Biggerstaff/Getty Images
The world will come together for the World Cup in North America starting this week. To what extent can the gathering of athletes, the spirit of competition, and the goodwill created by sport provide opportunities for diplomacy in a world disrupted by war? Mega sporting events like the World Cup and the Olympics are intimately tied to global affairs as athletes compete against each other, adorned in the national colors of their country.
The spirit of global sporting events mandates, in ideal circumstances, that countries put aside their extant conflicts for the moment of competition on the field. In some cases, sport can act as an unconventional form of diplomacy, opening doors to dialogue in a way that no diplomatic demarche could accomplish. In the early 1970s, “ping-pong diplomacy”—spurred by the impromptu visit to China by the U.S. amateur table tennis team competing in the world championships in Japan—helped pave the way to the opening of relations between America and communist China. Sport can also act as a prism through which international conflict is refracted. Sport and geopolitical conflict arguably reached its apex during the Cold War with the decision, ironically, not to compete. In 1980, the Carter administration boycotted the Moscow Olympics over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The Soviet Union reciprocated in 1984 by refusing to compete in the Summer Olympics hosted in Los Angeles.
Given these precedents, what are the chances that sports diplomacy on the soccer pitch in 2026 can create diplomatic opportunities or even peace breakthroughs? As the United States prepares to co-host the largest World Cup ever played, with 48 nations represented, the link between sports and politics is no less relevant than it was during the Cold War. While armed conflicts, territorial disputes, economic disagreements, and diplomatic disputes exist among the competing countries, the notion that international sport is, in George Orwell’s phrase, “war minus the shooting,” is far from validated.
Figure 1 shows the potential pairings of countries involved in extant conflicts—classified as armed conflict, severed relations, territorial disputes, and divided nations—at World Cup tournaments from 1930 to 2026.
The first observation is that it is rare for adversaries to compete in the same tournament. Across 23 World Cups, the percent of potential team pairings that involve adversaries in an active conflict has never topped 1.1 percent. The proportion of potential adversarial matchups was highest in the 1982 World Cup, which took place during the Falklands War.
The luck of the draw has brought protagonists into direct competition only four times in World Cup history, and the results are memorably infused with political symbols even if diplomatic breakthroughs go unachieved. The match between East and West Germany at the 1974 World Cup would be the only time the two Germanies would square off against one another before unification with East Germany, resulting in one of the biggest upsets in World Cup history. The 1986 match between Argentina and England became the prism through which both sides remembered the Falklands War and sparked an intense rivalry thereafter. The 1998 World Cup match provided a brief moment of goodwill in an otherwise antagonistic U.S.-Iran relationship. The two teams broke with protocol to take a combined team picture, and the U.S. team received white roses from the Iranian team, a Persian symbol of peace. The 2022 World Cup match between the United States and Iran became the stage for a show of resistance against Tehran when members of the Iranian national team refused to sing the country’s national anthem, in support of anti-regime protestors at home.
Today, even with wars in Europe and the Middle East underway, the 2026 World Cup, co-hosted by the United States, remains a low-conflict field, with active adversaries making up 0.35 percent of the 48-team field. All four adversarial pairs in this year’s tournament landed in different groups, so none can meet before the knockout rounds, and most likely never will. Iran and the United States are actively at war today but are not likely to face one another at the tournament, though a meeting in the knockout rounds is not impossible. Even before the games kick off on June 11, however, politics can still rear its head—the Iran soccer federation complained that FIFA had pulled its fan-ticket allocation for its three U.S. matches and that Washington had rescinded visas for some of its officials.
By raw count, 2026 has more adversary pairs, four, than any World Cup before it. But according to our data, even as the World Cup has grown in size from 13 teams to 48, larger and larger tournaments have not meant proportionally more adversary pairs; the share of adversarial matchups has held flat at roughly 0.3 percent, well below the 1982 peak. This says more about who qualifies than it does about the world: Teams reach the World Cup on footballing strength. The surprise is not that the world has grown calmer, because it has not, but that the World Cup field so rarely reflects the conflicts.
What this data does not account for is the use of sport sanctions, usually in the form of competition bans, that reduce the number of adversarial matchups on the field. In the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, the Soviet Union and Hungary clashed in the men’s semifinal in water polo, famously termed the “blood in the water match,” which occurred just weeks after the Soviet invasion of Hungary. The dominant potential for peaceful matchups on the football pitch has been driven by the banning of revisionist actors from competition, for example, the Soviet Union in 1974, Yugoslavia in 1994, and Russia in 2026.
Figure 2 shows the adversary matrix for the 2026 World Cup, including all 48 teams. The field holds only four potential adversary pairs: Iran v. United States, Iran v. Saudi Arabia, Iran v. Qatar, and Morocco v. Algeria, or 0.35 percent of all possible pairings, still well below the 1982 peak of 1.09 percent.
While the World Cup is bound to captivate a global audience, create memorable moments, and produce some goodwill, it is unlikely to pave a path to peace absent additional factors. Even in the famous case of ping-pong diplomacy, U.S.-China rapprochement would not have been possible without the substantive secret talks between the Nixon administration and its Chinese interlocutors seeking a diplomatic breakthrough. Ping-pong diplomacy, and the positive reaction among the U.S. public, accelerated Nixon’s diplomatic efforts with China, as sports helped illustrate that the American electorate would likely have a positive response. Meanwhile, U.S.-Iran wrestling exhibitions have created temporary goodwill but have fallen short of resolving long-standing political tensions.
In the end, sport can help to facilitate a peace breakthrough only if quiet diplomacy is already underway and if there is political will by relevant leaders. Absent substantive efforts from both sides, political leaders are unlikely to find the golden-goal diplomatic breakthrough thanks to a soccer match.
This study’s methodology is available here.
Victor Cha is president of the Geopolitics and Foreign Policy Department and Korea Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C., professor of government at Georgetown University and author of Beyond the Final Score: The Politics of Sport in Asia (Columbia, 2011) and “A Theory of Sports and Politics” (2009). Andy Lim is deputy director and fellow with the Korea Chair at CSIS.
The authors appreciate Phillip Meylan's and William Taylor’s work in publishing this commentary.
