In the spring of 1983, perhaps bored out of his mind since retiring from his position as gray eminence, Henry Kissinger decided it was time for the United States to host a FIFA World Cup. The 1986 edition of the tournament was supposed to take place in Colombia, but the government in Bogotá was too broke to afford the stadiums it had promised to build and too weak to keep Pablo Escobar in check, and so the country had backed down from its commitment. Securing the vacant seat for the United States would be child’s play: The championship was only three years away and, as the Colombian fiasco had made abundantly clear, the task of organizing the world’s most important sporting event on short notice couldn’t be left to a banana republic. Once again, it was time for America to save the day.
There was only one issue with the US candidacy: “Soccer has never taken hold in the United States” Kissinger admitted in an op-ed in the Washington Post. But the former secretary of state knew well that, when it comes to global politicking, national character is less important than the temperament of those in power. “I have been an avid soccer fan ever since my youth in Fuerth, a soccer-mad city in southern Germany,” Kissinger explained. Besides, competition was slim: The only other countries bidding to host were Canada and Mexico. If the World Cup was coming to North America, it was only right that the undisputed regional hegemon would run the show. Delighted to have another opportunity to put his conspiratorial talents to use in an arena that was not exactly geopolitics but certainly resembled it—as the former diplomat put it, “soccer lends itself to a competition of national teams because it requires an extraordinary combination of individual skill, teamwork, and strategic sense”—Kissinger got to work, securing the support of football elder statesmen Pelé and Franz Beckenbauer.
But Kissinger soon ran into unexpected trouble: The Mexican negotiators were eating his lunch. Led by FIFA Vice President Guillermo Cañedo de la Bárcena, a veteran executive at the Mexican broadcasting giant Televisa and the architect of his country’s immense success as host of the 1970 World Cup, Mexico won the support of third world nations less keen on Kissinger. While the US presented elaborate prestige plans for expensive new stadiums, Cañedo relied on his alliance with FIFA President João Havelange and the network of international business relationships that gave Televisa the sort of leverage usually reserved for nation states. When FIFA announced that the World Cup would go to Mexico, Kissinger responded with bewildered resignation: “The politics of soccer make me nostalgic for the politics of the Middle East.”
The story of Cañedo’s victory over Kissinger thrills because it runs against the grain of the shared history of Mexico and the United States—a history of profound asymmetry dating back to the 19th century. While the US consolidated its hegemony over much of the western hemisphere, Mexico was hampered by internal instability and belated industrialization. The resulting divergence in per capita income, economic productivity, technological development, military might, and global influence has determined the relationship between the two nations to this day.
Football, however, tends to invert the disparities that usually determine a country’s place in the international hierarchy. Unlike sports in which the prowess of national teams reflects the wealth and organizational capacity of the governments they represent—consider the dominance of the US, Russia, and China in Olympic gymnastics—success in international football is less a function of state-sponsored infrastructure than of popular culture. Any nation can muster a handful of world-class gymnasts if it devotes enough resources to identifying, recruiting, and training them, but it takes a whole people to field a football team. Moreover, the dexterity, trickery, and cunning that distinguish great football players and coaches is perfectly compatible with economic underdevelopment. Consider Argentina and Brazil, though neither country holds anything resembling a hegemonic position in global politics or economics, both are superpowers in the world-system of football.
In the North American context, this symbolic inversion of hierarchies has long worked in Mexico’s favor. For much of the 20th century, football occupied a marginal place in US culture; in its place, baseball, basketball, and the degenerate form of rugby known as “American football” monopolized public attention and private investment. In Mexico, by contrast, football quickly became both a popular pastime and a central aspect of Mexican identity. The national team took on an importance that reached well beyond the pitch and embedded itself in the collective imagination: It was Mexico incarnate. It is hardly surprising, then, that Mexico’s standing in international football far exceeded that of the United States.
The consolidation of Mexico’s preeminent place in the football world-system came in 1970, when it hosted the FIFA World Cup for the first time. The tournament was a turning point for Mexican football, but also for the newly globalized business of sports media. For the first time in the tournament’s history, satellite broadcasting allowed millions of people to follow the matches simultaneously across time zones, giving birth to both a worldwide audience and to one of the first celebrities that could be described without hyperbole as “world-famous”: Edson Arantes do Nascimento, better known as Pelé. A collective experience that had once belonged exclusively to those physically present at a particular place and time was now accessible to anyone, anywhere.
This liberation of football from the physical constraints of the stadium took place in an arena specifically designed for that purpose. Built between 1962 and 1966 in what was then the semi-rural southern periphery of Mexico City, the Azteca Stadium was conceived from the start as a media platform as much as a sports arena. Unlike Wembley, the Maracanã, and many other iconic football stadiums built or renovated with public funds, the Azteca was financed entirely with private capital raised by Guillermo Cañedo’s employer, Televisa, the broadcasting corporation that dominated Mexican media for decades. To secure its de facto monopoly over Mexican television, Televisa forged an alliance with the Institutional Revolutionary Party, the corporatist behemoth that emerged from the ruins of the Mexican Revolution and ruled the country as a one-party state for most of the 20th century, becoming something like the regime’s de facto ministry of propaganda. Televisa’s services to the PRI, however, were not limited to manufacturing domestic consent. Along with images of Pelé, the broadcasts from the Azteca Stadium showed the world a vision of Mexico as a nation worth taking seriously. For a few weeks, Mexico, not the United States, was the center of the world.
The World Cup’s transmutation of Mexico from an underdeveloped backwater into the epicenter of world history was so fantastical that many assumed it would never happen again—until, just sixteen years later, Cañedo defeated Kissinger and secured another chance to briefly become the most important country in the world. An earthquake that devastated Mexico City on September 19, 1985, seemed to cast doubt on the tournament’s viability, but the country saw the championship through, becoming the first nation to host multiple World Cups. The 1986 tournament confirmed the Azteca Stadium’s mythical status: It was there that Argentina’s Diego Armando Maradona secured his place alongside Pelé with the Hand of God and the so-called Goal of the Century. If Wembley symbolized the origins of football and the Maracanã embodied South American passion, Azteca—and by extension Mexico as a whole—became the stage for contemporary epics, a battleground where mortals become heroes and are crowned before the world.
By 1986, Mexico had taken part in eight editions of the World Cup; the United States, by contrast, had managed to qualify only three times, in 1930, 1934, and 1950. The disparity was even more stark in games won (Mexico had twenty-four wins; America had only two), goals scored (Mexico had 106 against America’s 27), and regional championships claimed (Mexico had taken home the equivalent of today’s CONCACAF Gold Cup in 1947, 1949, 1965, 1971, and 1977; the United States had yet to win a single time). The footballing disparity between the two countries was just as apparent at the club level. Beginning in 1943, Mexico had built a stable professional league with well-established institutions, historic rivalries, and a mass following comparable to that of the Catholic Church: Teams such as Guadalajara, América, and Cruz Azul were part of the daily lives and identities of millions of fans. The United States had no comparable structure. The North American Soccer League (NASL), founded in 1968, enjoyed a fleeting popularity driven by the arrival of international figures like Pelé, Franz Beckenbauer, and Johan Cruyff, but that momentum faded before football could take root within American popular culture, the league folding in 1984.
In the 1990s, however, the football relationship between Mexico and the United States began to shift. Though the US had no footballing tradition comparable to those of Europe or Latin America—recall that it no longer had an established professional league—FIFA belatedly granted Kissinger’s wish and chose the United States to host of the 1994 World Cup. The wager had everything to do with the economic possibilities the American market had to offer, marking football as a key front for economic globalization. The 1994 edition of the tournament was defined by unprecedented coordination between FIFA and the corporations sponsoring the cup: Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, MasterCard, and Budweiser all seized on the championship as a marketing opportunity—though some of them would later sour on the organizing committee, complaining that it had violated exclusivity agreements and allowed other companies to benefit from the Cup’s promotional machinery.
The 1994 World Cup featured another episode signaling a new phase of world football, the suspension of Maradona for alleged doping. The sanctions, which Maradona himself summed up with the phrase “they cut off my legs,” would be called into question years later, when a number of sports medicine experts pointed out that the concentration of illicit substances detected in the Argentine’s system would be considered rather low under contemporary anti-doping standards. Nevertheless, the fall of Maradona heralded the end of the epic period of football stardom. The globalization of Europe’s regional and national leagues lured Latin American talent away from their popular roots in the working classes with promises of wealth and fame. As the joy of football became increasingly subordinated to the demands of the globalized market, the game’s potential as a locus of political defiance was gradually foreclosed.
Not coincidentally, the political neutralization of football coincided with the economic integration of North America: NAFTA came into effect just months before the 1994 World Cup began. As economic borders grew porous and regional interdependence intensified, football was similarly transformed. When the neoliberal policies imposed by NAFTA forced millions of Mexicans to immigrate to the US in search of work, Mexican football authorities were quick to recognize a business opportunity. The diaspora remained emotionally tied to their country and were in desperate need of reaffirming their identity, so the Mexican national team was thus transformed into an export product, a nostalgic palliative for the damaged life of globalized capitalism.
Just as the United States worked to claim for itself a sport that remained at the margins of its popular culture, Mexico began to project its own footballing tradition onto American soil. The Mexican national team’s friendly matches were increasingly staged north of the border, transforming the stadiums of Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, Dallas, and Phoenix into ritual spaces where thousands of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans performed rites of collective belonging in support of their national team. The footballing relationship increasingly mirrored the political economy of North America, ceasing to be merely a rivalry between two national teams and instead becoming a regionally integrated business. The United States offered the infrastructure and a vast community of Mexican origin willing to pay for a chance to cheer for their homeland; Mexico contributed the popular-cultural substrate and a national team actually capable of drawing crowds. This transnational synergy found its institutional expression in 2002, when the Mexican Football Federation formally established the MexTour, an annual slate of friendlies on American soil.
That same year brought one of the most painful episodes in the history of Mexican football, at the 2002 World Cup in Korea and Japan. The Mexican team led by Javier Aguirre beat Croatia and Ecuador, drew with Italy, and finished the group stage as an undefeated leader, seemingly ready to carry on Mexico’s historic footballing preeminence. The United States had arrived with more modest expectations, but when the two sides met in the Round of 16, the result overturned a decades-old relationship. With an outstanding performance from Landon Donovan and the disciplined coaching of Bruce Arena, the Americans won 2–0 and knocked Mexico out of the tournament. The match heralded a shift in the two countries’ relative standing in the footballing world-system. After the 2025 Gold Cup final, the all-time record between the Mexican and American national teams stood at thirty-eight Mexican wins, twenty-four US wins, and seventeen draws. Since the Gold Cup’s founding in 1991, the Americans have claimed seven regional championships against Mexico’s total of ten—five of which predate 1986. Between 1934 and 1985, the US managed only two wins over Mexico; between 1986 and 2025, the American team defeated Mexico twenty-two times. The decades-long footballing disparity between the two countries has all but vanished.
The evolution of the two countries’ national leagues has further altered the regional footballing balance of power in North America. Since its first season in 1996, US Major League Soccer has succeeded where the NASL failed, building soccer-specific stadiums, developing youth academies, attracting private investment, and consolidating infrastructure that ranks among the best on the continent. This growth was accelerated by the arrival of international figures such as David Beckham, Zlatan Ibrahimović and, above all, Lionel Messi. The Argentine star’s move to Inter Miami in 2023 confirmed the American league’s capacity to draw big names and its intention to reach global audiences.
The United States’s newfound status as a rising football world-power was confirmed in 2026, when MLS contributed more players to the World Cup than any other league in the hemisphere. While the Liga MX retains its high attendance, deep traditions, and capacity to draw Mexican communities living in the United States, it’s clear that the developmental gap between the two increasingly integrated leagues has shrunk dramatically. This is evident in the creation of the Leagues Cup, which pits Mexican and American clubs against one another, as well as in the adoption of increasingly similar organizational models, the suspension of promotion and relegation in Mexican football bringing its structure in line with the franchise logic that has historically characterized US professional sports. Like the rest of the Mexican economy, Mexican football is now organized in American terms.
The contours of the 2026 World Cup serve as a clear indicator of just how much the footballing relationship between Mexico and the US has evolved over the four decades since the Azteca Stadium last hosted the tournament. While much remains to be seen—the Mexican national team has so far exceeded expectations and could well outperform the US—one thing seems clear: Football is no longer an exceptional realm that inverts the hierarchy of Mexico’s subaltern relationship with its northern neighbor.
On the surface, the decision to have Mexico, the United States, and Canada co-host the tournament appears oddly anachronistic—a celebration of North American integration and transnational friendship that might have made sense in 1994 but is almost comically out of place in today’s world. When it comes to the actual allocation of matches, however, the 2026 World Cup is a perfectly accurate reflection of our present, both in terms of the balance of power in North America and globalized football’s unmooring from popular culture. The US hosts the majority of the matches and the decisive phase of the competition—not because of its footballing culture, but because of its sporting infrastructure and logistical capacity. The corollary is that Mexico plays at best a secondary role: not the center of the world but an unimportant satellite. It’s no coincidence that the Azteca Stadium was chosen as the venue for one of the opening ceremonies rather than for the final match: Its legacy deserves polite acknowledgment and nothing more. Kissinger would have been delighted.
The pro-globalization discourse that surrounded the 1994 World Cup in the United States promised open borders, integrated markets, and a growing circulation of people. The rhetoric that frames the current tournament is the negation of that sunny neoliberal cosmopolitanism: a dark ethnonationalism that promises immigration restrictions, trade warfare, purges of foreigners, and a revival of military adventurism. The case of Iran is especially telling, as the American government denied the Iranian national team permission to remain on US soil overnight and forced it to operate out of Tijuana—a situation that entailed additional travel and less favorable conditions than those enjoyed by every other team and might have played a role in the team’s failure to qualify for the Round of 32. The equalizing power of football, it appears, is no match for American imperialism.
The fact that not a single football star protested the treatment of the Iranian players suggests that the defanging of the sport is now complete. Whereas figures like Maradona were once capable of defying sporting institutions, the media, and even political leaders, their contemporary equivalents seem to have no convictions beyond their reflexive compliance with the demands of the global market. As the finest player in the history of football, Lionel Messi has the capacity to speak directly to millions of people about any issue, yet his recent visit to the White House, where he was photographed clapping and smiling as Trump spoke to reporters about his unprovoked war against Iran, illustrates the difficulty of defiance when one’s professional career depends on corporate and political networks. Kylian Mbappé, the Frenchman seen by many as Messi’s successor, has on occasion taken a stand against the rise of the far right in France, but even his most outspoken comments are timid compared to Maradona’s. The reason for this tepidness is not hard to divine: Mbappé is one of the leading stars on Real Madrid, a club historically associated with the most reactionary sectors of Spanish society. Alienating Francoists could cost him millions of dollars.
The transformation of football stars from popular heroes to risk-averse financial assets is just one part of a process that began in 1970, accelerated in 1994, and may reach its culmination in 2026: the integration of football into the global market. For much of the 20th century, football was one of the few realms where international disparities could be called into question and even inverted, if not materially, then at least symbolically. Today the sport is more global than ever, but the football world-system increasingly mirrors the national hierarchy of the geopolitical order. The 2026 World Cup has brought the world together, giving the weak a chance to turn the tables on the strong, but it has done so under the hegemonic auspices of of the United States—a country that doesn’t even like football all that much, but can’t stand the thought of letting any other nation briefly become the center of the world.
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