My father was born in 1951, only three years after my family lost its home in Lifta, its country, and the future they had imagined. In the outskirts of Amman, he and the neighborhood kids did what kids everywhere do: they formed a football team. They made jerseys from Hanes undershirts, dyed them blue, and drew straws for who got to be the ball keeper — the one trusted to take the ball they had pooled their pennies to buy home for the night. When my grandmother stabbed that ball flat to make the point that school came first, the devastation on his face said everything about what the game meant to a preteen in the Arab world.
Decades later, the game still means everything. But the institutions built to govern it are losing their hold over what that meaning is allowed to be. They can control tournaments, sponsorships, and television rights. They can punish players and fans. What they can no longer fully control is what football represents to the people who live within it. When Lamine Yamal raised a Palestinian flag after Barcelona’s league victory, the moment reflected a reality football’s institutions have struggled to contain.
Yamal plays in La Liga, the same league where Vinícius Júnior has spent years facing racist abuse from the stands, with Spanish football authorities reacting more aggressively to his protestations than to the abuse itself. The response from many was: he makes millions, shut up and play. That is precisely the irony — the idea that because a player earns a certain salary, the abuse he endures becomes less urgent, even as the institutions profiting from his labor generate exponentially more because of him. When his own federation failed to protect him, Vinícius filed lawsuits of his own.
After Kylian Mbappé's penalty eliminated Paraguay last week, Paraguayan senator Celeste Amarilla called him a "colonised Cameroonian" pretending to be French. Mbappé responded that he would not allow people to spread hatred unchecked. The insult was not really about a match. It was about whether someone like him belonged on the pitch at all. That question has become central to the modern game. Nearly a quarter of players at this World Cup represent a country other than the one where they were born — the highest share in tournament history. FIFA's own eligibility rules, created to accommodate migration, have helped build the modern football landscape.
Yet the institution that benefits from this global movement has struggled to confront the racism directed at the players who embody it. The same tension appears when borders enter football itself. Cape Verde goalkeeper Vozinha wept after a historic result because his mother could not afford the bond required for a visa application. It took public pressure for the fee to be waived. The rule did not change because it was wrong. It changed because it became visible. Then the story moved in the opposite direction.
When American striker Folarin Balogun received an automatic one-match ban after a red card, the president called FIFA's president to request a reversal. Within days, FIFA suspended the suspension — the first such reversal at a World Cup in decades. The irony was hard to miss: Balogun's American citizenship came from circumstance, his mother unable to board a flight back to London while pregnant, so he was born in Brooklyn instead of the UK. That same kind of birthright citizenship had become the target of an executive order later blocked by the Supreme Court. The system that almost questioned his belonging was the same one mobilized to keep him on the field. It only requires institutions preserving their authority and applying rules selectively.
Days later, that inconsistency stopped needing an explanation. Egypt's elimination by Argentina made it legible to people who had never followed football's politics before. A goal was disallowed for a foul upstream; minutes later, a foul on Salah inside the box wasn't reviewed at all. Then Hossam Hassan crossed his arms into an X — FIFA's own signal for reporting racist abuse — directly in front of the referee, and was shown a yellow card instead. Egypt's federation called it a breach of "integrity, fairness, and transparency" and demanded the referee be removed. Players called it fixed. Fans called it rigged. True believers have long understood corruption in the game. This time, a casual American audience — people who watch soccer once every four years, if that — didn't need football's politics explained to them to see it too.
If racism exposes football's selective moralism, Palestine exposes the limits of institutional neutrality altogether. FIFA's own rules (Article 64.2) prohibit member associations from playing matches on territory outside their jurisdiction without consent. And yet at least six illegal Israeli settlement football clubs compete in a league built on land FIFA itself assigns to the Palestinian Football Association — a violation the PFA has formally raised since 2013, thirteen years of a complaint FIFA has acknowledged and never resolved. UEFA, meanwhile, funds the Israeli Football Association directly through its own European development structures. In March 2026, when asked to rule on the legality of it all, FIFA called the situation "unresolved and highly complex."
For Palestinian footballers, there is nothing complex about it. Many need Israeli military permits simply to reach their own stadiums. One of those stadiums was turned into a detention center by the Israeli military — and bulldozed shortly after, as if erasing the evidence of what it had been. Over 1,000 Palestinian athletes have been killed since the genocide began. More than 500 of them were footballers. And yet, amid the devastation of a genocide, children in Gaza gathered around a television joyfully to watch El Clásico — Yamal and Vinícius were on the screen. That feeling has never required an institution's permission.
The deeper crisis facing football's institutions is not criticism. Institutions have always been criticized. The deeper crisis is the erosion of the belief that they are the rightful guardians of the game's values. FIFA, UEFA, federations, and governments still control the rules, the money, and the platforms. But authority is not the same as legitimacy. Legitimacy depends on whether people believe rules are applied fairly, whether principles are consistent, and whether institutions represent something beyond their own interests. Increasingly, that belief is what is being contested.
The resistance to institutional overreach has been clearest in the stands, where the barrier to entry is low, and solidarity continues. Celtic supporters have repeatedly defied UEFA penalties for Palestinian flags, crowdfunding to pay off fines and returning with more flags. Across Europe, supporters have sustained protests, boycotts, and flag displays despite sanctions.
In the early 1960s, my father's childhood team painted a pyramid symbol onto their jerseys — a nod to Gamal Abdel Nasser, whose anti-imperialist movement had captured the imagination of a displaced generation. During South Africa’s apartheid, supporters helped push for sporting isolation despite institutional resistance. The game has always exceeded its governors. What has changed is scale. Football's commercial architecture is now enormous, but so is the visibility of its contradictions. Ironically, every case that reaches a wider audience through the machinery of capitalism and entertainment makes the next one harder to explain away, and every contradiction chips away at the belief that football's authorities alone get to decide what the game represents. Institutions rarely lead change. More often, they respond only after the culture around them has shifted enough that resistance becomes harder to sustain. Money still controls football’s institutions. But their legitimacy to decide what football means — who it belongs to, and where it goes — is no longer theirs to contain.
