The (not so) Beautiful Game

The World Cup, being held in Mexico, the US, and Canada, will “unite the people,” said Canadian soccer player, Jonatha Osorio. “The world will be invading Canada, Mexico and the USA with a big wave of joy and happiness,” said FIFA president Gianni Infantino, on a glitzy summer’s evening in New York.

The same countries are also currently holding talks to renew the USMCA North American free trade agreement for another 16 years. The USMCA, an update to the NAFTA, is codified empire, depriving Mexico of corn sovereignty, institutionalizing the US’s dominance and Mexico’s structural and economic dependence, while sacrificing Mexico’s rivers and soil to US and Canadian mines.

The giddy glamour of the World Cup spectacle is not unity but sedation, its stadium lights obscuring the negotiated details of imperialism and the unfestive realities of barbed borders, wage apartheid, and centuries of accumulated harm.

Tamara Pearson, “While FIFA Counts Goals, Mexicans Count the Disappeared” (Counterpunch, 12 June 2026)