Finding Unity in a Divided World Cup

With the World Cup having finished, I want to reflect on how it has given me hope in a world that has become increasingly bleak. As a researcher, my day involves independent lab work, often just me and the data. That’s exactly why I’m drawn to watching sports outside of work. The camaraderie feels like the perfect counterbalance. I love the World Cup for how it brings everyone in and fosters a sense of community in a way that few things still do.

But beyond that, I’ve found myself thinking about how the World Cup serves as a social commentary. More than any other sporting event, it parallels the world: joy and ugliness, unity and division. You can learn about where we are as a society by simply paying attention to what happens around a football tournament.

Photo by Fauzan Saari on Unsplash

Clinging to the Past

The most memorable World Cup for me was the one played in South Africa in 2010. It holds a special place partly because of where I was in life. I was in primary school, year 6 to be exact, on the edge of secondary school. I was at an age where being into sports at an inner-city London school made you ‘cool.’ I vividly remember coming in one morning to find flags of different nations plastered across the walls. Sports days were reframed around unity. I particularly remember one where we were split into teams representing the nations competing in the World Cup and made to play football like those countries. I was devastated to get Slovakia as I knew they weren’t going to win. Pretty uncool happenings for an 11-year-old.

The fact I still retained that memory demonstrates how there is so much nostalgia wrapped up in sport. For me, that nostalgia also points to something else. It was a time when diversity felt, at least in my little bubble of London, like something worth celebrating. I know it wasn’t a utopia, and perhaps I’m probably looking back through rose-tinted glasses. But I know that the feeling of unity was real.

A plethora of things have changed since 2010. And perhaps these things are what have contributed to making the community feel a little harder to replicate, and if you were to ask me personally, I think it’s intertwined with the cost-of-living crisis, political polarisation and the rise of social media.

Photo by Luciano Oliveira on Unsplash

Pricing Out Community

The World Cup creates free, accessible, and collective joy. In the UK right now, that matters more than ever as communal life is being priced out. Pubs are closing; funding for local sport clubs is running dry, and the casual social spaces where communities used to form are disappearing. And when you do get to watch football out, you’re being charged £20 to stand in a fan-zone or paying to watch the Premier League at home. According to the Office for National Statistics, 41% of adults who pay energy bills struggle to afford them, with many cutting back on leisure and social activities entirely. When people are choosing between heating and eating, a trip to the pub to watch a match or being present in social spaces becomes a luxury.

What makes this feel more personal is that my nostalgic memories of the 2010 World Cup were really describing a time before austerity came to bite. Those flags on the walls, the sports days built around inclusion. This kind of investment in communal school life feels almost unimaginable now. School budgets in England have faced significant real-terms cuts since 2009, and the visible casualties are the kinds of enrichment activities I described: the theme sports days, the cultural celebrations, the small moments that made a child feel like the world was bigger than their postcode. Those things cost money, and that money is gone.

The consequences aren’t just social; they are psychological too. Financial stress is one of the biggest drivers of poor mental health, and the UK is living through an extended period of it. The World Cup, in this context, offers something valuable. If you have a satellite dish (and pay for a TV licence), you can watch from home for free, and if you watch with others, it provides the kind of social connection and belonging that genuinely protects mental health. When third spaces like the pub, the sports club, or after-school clubs are being displaced, moments like the World Cup start carrying more emotional weight than they should have to. If money explains why we’ve stopped gathering as a community, politics also explains why we’ve stopped wanting to.

The Unity I Thought Was Solid

I’m not saying polarisation is new. It has existed as long as humans have fought for power and control. But something has shifted. We live in an era where celebrating together across nationalities, ethnicities and religions has silently become countercultural. Perhaps I was a naive child who didn’t understand how adults really thought, but the inclusive spirit I remember from 2010 didn’t just fade with childhood. It is actively contested.

Take the Euros 2020 final back in July 2021. I recall the silence that fell when Marcus Rashford, Jadon Sancho, and Bukayo Saka missed their penalties against Italy. All three players, who are Black, were met with a torrent of racist abuse. Supporters who had been cheering them on for hours turned on them instantly. That night was a reminder of the grip that football has on the mood of its watchers. The same emotion that unites people in celebration has also been linked to spikes in domestic abuse. Neither racism nor domestic abuse in football are new problems, but it was a painful reminder that unity in sports is always provisional, and always fragile.

Photo by Jannes Glas on Unsplash

Who Wasn’t Allowed In

Let me be completely honest. I was worried about a World Cup taking place in the United States. Fans were arriving in their millions, from every continent, every background, and this was all happening against a backdrop of Immigration and Customs Enforcement detaining undocumented migrants, tourists, and even American citizens in detention centres. I was concerned for fans who might find themselves caught up in that.

And those concerns weren’t unfounded. Somali referee Omar Artan was refused entry to the US and was unable to officiate a single game. The support staff of the Iranian squad were denied visas entirely. These weren’t fringe cases. They were people with a direct, legitimate reason to be there, only to be turned away before the tournament even began. It’s fair to assume those are just the cases we heard about.

Finding Hope Anyway

Despite everything I’ve described, it isn’t all doom and gloom. And funnily enough, it was doomscrolling on TikTok that reminded me of that.

Scrolling through my feed, I kept stumbling across moments of genuine, uncomplicated joy. The one that stuck with me most was a small town in Kansas called Lawrence, which had been chosen to host the Algerian national team for training. What followed was something beautiful. Locals turning in droves to the training ground, cheering for a country thousands of miles away, embracing them as though they were their own. Then there were videos of England fans dancing with Ghana fans on the streets of Boston, despite both teams having just drawn 0-0. Nobody won, yet nobody seemed to care.

That kind of warmth and willingness to celebrate with each other despite our differences is exactly what makes the World Cup unlike anything else. It’s what I recognised from those school days in 2010. It’s people choosing connection in a world that keeps giving them reasons not to. And in an era when the news rarely offers anything positive, I’ll happily take it.