The 2026 World Cup: sport and conflict

The first observation is that it is rare for opponents to participate in the same tournament. Across the 23 World Cups, the percentage of potential team combinations involving opponents in an active conflict has never exceeded 1.1 percent. The proportion of potential opponents was highest during the 1982 World Cup, which took place during the Falklands War.

The luck of the draw has brought the key players into direct competition only four times in World Cup history, and the results are memorably steeped in political symbols even if diplomatic breakthroughs are not achieved. The match between East and West Germany at the 1974 World Cup would be the only time the two Germanys would face each other before reuniting 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 hostile relationship between the US and Iran. The two teams broke protocol to take a combined team photo, and the American 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 scene of a show of defiance against Tehran when members of the Iranian national team refused to sing the country’s national anthem in support of anti-regime protesters at home.

Even with wars raging in Europe and the Middle East, the 2026 World Cup, co-hosted by the United States, remains a low-conflict field, with active opponents making up 0.35 percent of the 48-team field. All four opposing pairs in this year’s tournament ended up in different groups, so no one can meet before the knockout rounds, and most likely never will. Iran and the United States are currently actively at war, but they are unlikely to meet at the tournament, although a meeting in the knockout rounds is not impossible. Even before the Games start on June 11, however, politics could still rear their ugly head, with Iran’s soccer federation complaining that FIFA had withdrawn the allocation of fan tickets for its three U.S. matches and that Washington had revoked visas for some of its officials.

According to raw figures, 2026 will have more opponent 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, increasingly larger tournaments have not resulted in proportionately more opponents; the share of hostile matchups has remained stable at around 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 football strength. The surprise is not that the world has become calmer, because that is not the case, but that the World Cup pitch so rarely reflects the conflicts.

What this data does not take into account is the use of sporting sanctions, usually in the form of competition bans, which reduce the number of hostile matches on the pitch. At the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, the Soviet Union and Hungary clashed in the men’s water polo semi-final, dubbed the ‘blood in the water match’, which took place just weeks after the Soviet invasion of Hungary. The dominant potential for peaceful duels on the football field has been driven by the exclusion of revisionist actors from competition, for example the Soviet Union in 1974, Yugoslavia in 1994 and Russia in 2026.

Figure 2 shows the opponent matrix for the 2026 World Cup, including all 48 teams. There are only four potential opponent pairs in the field: Iran versus United States, Iran versus Saudi Arabia, Iran versus Qatar, and Morocco versus Algeria, or 0.35 percent of all possible combinations, still well below the 1982 peak of 1.09 percent.