The World Cup has never been purely a sporting contest. From its earliest editions, it has served as a stage on which nations perform versions of themselves for a global audience — and the history of that performance, as the Guardian traces in a new piece, stretches back well before the first tournament was held in Uruguay in 1930.
The Guardian's account begins in the 1920s, with Uruguay's entry into international football driven less by sporting ambition than by diplomatic improvisation. The country's foreign minister, who also led one of its two rival football associations, worked with a diplomat posted in Switzerland to secure Fifa membership and, crucially, to enter Uruguay into the 1924 Olympic football tournament in Paris. The decision was made without consulting anyone back home. When word reached Montevideo, the reaction was closer to alarm than enthusiasm. Nobody had planned for it, and nobody had arranged the money. A federation official eventually used his own home as security on a loan to fund the squad's passage to Europe.
What followed confounded the sceptics entirely. Travelling through Spain before reaching Paris, Uruguay won nine friendlies and arrived at the Olympic Games as unknowns. They left as the tournament's most celebrated side. Their passing football — fluid, coherent, unlike anything European crowds had seen — drew large and devoted audiences. The French novelist Colette was sent by the newspaper Le Matin to profile the squad at their villa, a measure of how far outside football their reputation had already spread. Uruguay took the gold medal.
That combination of accident, diplomacy and on-pitch excellence laid the groundwork for 1930, when Uruguay hosted and won the first World Cup, cementing a national story that the country had been building for a decade through sport. The Guardian's wider piece draws a line from those beginnings through Italy's use of the 1934 tournament under Mussolini to the more recent host nations — Russia in 2018 and Qatar in 2022 — each of which arrived with a particular image to project and spent considerable effort and resource projecting it.
The pattern the Guardian identifies is consistent across very different political contexts: hosting or winning a World Cup has repeatedly been understood by governments as an opportunity to shape how a country is seen, both internally and abroad. The sporting result and the political ambition have not always aligned, but the ambition has rarely been absent. As the 2026 tournament approaches, shared across the United States, Canada and Mexico, the question of what images those three nations will choose to present — and to whom — sits in the background of preparations already well under way.