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The World Cup always brings to the fore what is sometimes seen as obvious and straightforward: national identity.
But the 2026 tournament has shown, perhaps as clearly as any international event can, that the identity of the modern world is complex, contradictory and inconsistent.
The formation of the Moroccan World Cup squad provides a useful context.
Nineteen of the 26 players on the team were born outside Morocco, most of them in Spain or France, the two European powers that dominated the country. The composition of this group has raised interesting questions about dual citizenship and loyalty, national identity, foreign countries, and the effects of colonialism.
Similar challenges appear throughout the game. Most of the players in the national teams of the United States, Canada, France, England, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and Australia come from immigrant families.
In an era of increasingly global politics in North America and Europe, some of the most contested national identities are being represented on the world’s biggest stage by multicultural teams.
The classics are hard to miss. Most of the players representing the European countries come from the regions that came from the countries that were once controlled by the same countries. The composition of these groups shows that the identity of the modern world cannot be easily separated from colonialism, empire and immigration.
In addition, in many teams in North America and Europe, many players from immigrant families and ethnic minorities live in white teams. It is at this intersection of national and ethnic identity that conflicts and contradictions are most clearly visible.
After the Netherlands were eliminated by Morocco on June 29, three Black Dutch players who missed penalties were immediately subjected to online abuse. The incident exposed a recurring contradiction at the heart of contemporary identity: minority players can be included as part of the nation when they win but treated as outsiders when they fail.
The controversy of the US
The case of the US, which is hosting the competition with Canada and Mexico, is very illustrative.
The political agenda of US President Donald Trump has been defined, perhaps, by the politics of white grievances and an anti-immigrant agenda.
Trump has repeatedly promoted the idea of white supremacy and began his second term with several measures that Amnesty International said reinforces the dominant narrative of white supremacy that “whiteness equates to the identity of the United States of America”.
After suspending the US refugee program on the first day of his second term, Trump issued an executive order prioritizing the resettlement of whites from South Africa. His administration recently expanded the program, creating another 10,000 refugee places for white South Africans, excluding non-white refugees.
The Trump administration has also launched an unprecedented attack on the majority of non-whites. In 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested nearly 400,000 people, and deported many of them. ICE recently ramped up its efforts, detaining 10,000 fugitives for five days in late June.
The massive damage has led to fears that the 2026 World Cup will be interpreted more indiscriminately than inclusively.
In the weeks leading up to the tournament, more than 120 prominent civil rights groups, including Amnesty International, the NAACP and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), jointly issued travel advice for the World Cup.
It seems the fear was understandable. The Trump administration denied entry to Omar Abdulkadir Artan, an award-winning Somali referee, imposed strict sanctions on the Iranian team, and detained Iraqi player Aymen Hussein for seven hours after he arrived in the US.
Against these odds, the USA reached the last 16 before being eliminated by Belgium.
Six members of the team were born outside the US, and more than half of the players hold dual citizenship.
Some of the white American fans in football stadiums in Boston, Dallas, Atlanta, Houston, Los Angeles, Seattle and other US cities almost included Trump supporters. There is a strange phenomenon in the members of the political group that is defined in some way by the politics of the complaints of white people standing in the stadiums and shouting “USA” to the national team that has Folarin Balogun, Alejandro Zendejas, Haji Wright and other players from immigrant families.
Nowhere are these contradictions more apparent than in the host country. This World Cup, perhaps more than any other in the past, has revealed the instability and contradictions of the modern world. Political parties may think that countries are united by race and ethnicity, or as cultural groups, but the groups that represent those countries tell a very different story. International football teams are objects of migration, diaspora, colonial history and conflicting ideas about “us” and “them”.
Perhaps, in the end, the most important lesson of the 2026 World Cup has nothing to do with football talent, performances, or training methods. Perhaps the lasting lesson of this race will be that national identity is not as fixed or fixed as many people think.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.
