“Official history ignores football,” the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano once complained. “Contemporary history texts fail to mention it, even in passing, in countries where football has been and continues to be a primordial symbol of collective identity.”

In this course, we will address that oversight. With the 2026 Men’s World Cup as our focus, we will explore how football is increasingly being shaped by geopolitics, especially now that it has come to the attention of Donald Trump.

Spread over three countries (though the US will dominate) and featuring a record 48 teams, this will surely be the most extravagant World Cup in history – for better or for worse. Trump has his fingers all over it. One moment he wants to withhold games from Democrat-controlled cities; the next he is threatening to invade co-hosts Mexico. Rather than defend the sport’s dignity, FIFA’s spineless President Gianni Infantino has awarded Trump a bespoke “Peace Prize”. As their bromance continues, some fans are calling for a boycott, comparing this edition to the 1978 World Cup – held in Argentina at the height of the Videla dictatorship.

A deeper irony is that the US Men’s team has never been all that good at football – and the sport has never been all that popular among Americans (though interest is steadily growing). So why did FIFA choose the US to host its showcase tournament? Then again, the previous edition was hosted by Qatar, and the 2034 one will travel to Saudi Arabia. So perhaps 2026 is not so much an anomaly as a symptom of a broader transformation.

Even if the American political scene is going to be a big distraction, this World Cup retains enough pure sporting interest, not least because of surprising debutants like Cape Verde, Curaçao, Jordan and Uzbekistan.

In this course, we’ll explore:

• The World Cup’s origins and its century-long history
• The US’s fraught and contradictory relationship to football
• How climate change is affecting the sport – and harming players
• Favourites, outsiders and newcomers among the teams
• What World Cup 2026 portends for the future of football