Reconnection: For immigrant and diaspora communities especially, the World Cup is deeper than sport. It is reunion, memory, identity, homesickness, pride and belonging compressed into 90 minutes. Photo: Flickr
Last week, my fiancée was denied a visa to the US under the pretext that she is a “threat to the national interests of the United States of America”. She is not a terrorist. She is not a fraudster, a larcenist or a human trafficker. She is not violent and carries no hate in her heart.
She is not planning to disappear into the shadows of America to become a nuisance lurking in the corners of the welfare system. She is a telecoms consultant who has no interest in ever living in America but loves spending her money in outlet stores like the one in Deer Park, Long Island, near my mother’s house.
Her crime? She is from Zimbabwe.
In June 2025, President Donald Trump issued a presidential proclamation tied to Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act banning citizens of 19 countries from entering the US. Zimbabwe was not among them but in December he added 20 more countries, including hers.
To be clear about this: more than three dozen countries are banned from entering the US in the year it is hosting the World Cup. Twenty-six of them are African. That’s half of Africa. The decision was not based on who she is, what she has done or whether she poses any risk. It was based entirely on the passport she carries and the country in which she was born.
Suddenly, the World Cup became very, very personal. Who am I going to watch the games with now?
There are four World Cup teams from countries that are banned. Two of them are from Africa.
Unfortunately, Zimbabwe is not in the tournament because it appears there are exemptions to the policy for some people from Côte d’Ivoire and Senegal, although these are mostly for players and other official visitors, not fans. It’s all a bit confusing and even Ivorian and Senegalese nationals with tickets to the games might arrive at the border to find themselves shut out.
Isn’t the entire point of the World Cup to bring the planet together?
The World Cup creates something close to temporary global citizenship. A Korea supporter in New York, an Argentine family in Mexico City, a Tunisian fan in Toronto — for a few weeks, people are supposed to belong not only to nations but to the tournament.
For a brief period every four years, the planet imagines itself as a single field. Rich nations and poor nations stand side by side.
Former colonies defeat empires: first-timers Senegal beat defending world champions France 1-0 in the opening match of the 2002 World Cup, for example and Algeria defeated France in multiple contests. Tiny populations like Iceland and Cape Verde challenge superpowers.
Sport is one of the few systems humanity has built where symbolic equality inside diversity feels possible. Football, with its minuscule scores and wide-open fields, perhaps most of all.
Unlike many global industries dominated almost entirely by wealth and power, football has historically allowed countries from the margins to matter. Morocco beating both Spain and Portugal to reach the semi-finals in 2022 mattered not just because they played brilliantly but because millions across Africa, the Arab world and the Global South saw themselves represented.
Ironically, football itself became global partly through empire.
British sailors, merchants, missionaries, colonial administrators, dockworkers and migrants carried the game across continents. The sport spread through trade routes, occupations, railways and imperial systems before eventually being reclaimed and reinvented by the very societies once dominated by those empires.
European football depends profoundly on African talent. African players fill the rosters of the Premier League, Ligue 1, Serie A and La Liga. They are welcomed as stars, scorers, defenders, entertainers and billion-dollar assets.
The World Cup does not erase inequality. It suspends it.
Yet last week, an African woman was made to feel less than other humans. African mobility itself often remains conditional, restricted and suspect. There is a difference between being welcomed for what you produce and being welcomed simply as a human being.
Modern football often celebrates Africans economically while filtering Africans bureaucratically.
“For the Game. For the World,” Fifa once declared. It doesn’t bother with the slogan any more. The contradiction is bigger than us.
Over the past year, I have been immersed in my book World Innovators Cup, a project that imagines history’s greatest innovators as football stars competing in the “beautiful game” of ideas. Leonardo da Vinci shoots goals at Frida Kahlo. Tesla takes on Edison. Wangari Maathai patrols Africa’s defence.
The book asks a simple question: What would happen if humanity celebrated innovators with the same emotional intensity we reserve for athletes?
In constructing the manuscript, I actively ensured that it included an equal number of African and Asian innovators alongside Europeans and Americans.
For while the story of innovation is usually dominated by majority cultures, that does not reflect reality. Creativity and human possibility do not belong to a handful of wealthy nations. They emerge from privilege and struggle alike.
Innovation is global. So is football. Visas to America, apparently, are not. Because deep beneath the Fifa spectacle, beneath the sponsorships and slogans about unity, the modern world is becoming increasingly conflicted about movement, borders and belonging.
We live in a strange era. Information travels freely. Capital moves instantly. Brands become global overnight. A football highlight can circle the planet in seconds.
An idea can spread from Lagos to London to Los Angeles before breakfast. But human beings do not move so easily. Passports have become invisible hierarchies. Some — like Singapore’s — are like golden tickets. Others — like Zimbabwe’s in the US today — are warnings.
Two people might possess equal intelligence, kindness, integrity and love for the game but the accident of birthplace determines how freely they can cross the world and attend their team’s games.
The World Cup depends on movement. There are 16 host cities for the 2026 World Cup across North America, 11 of them in the US. Bouncing around among these metropolises will be not only players but also fans, journalists, performers, businesspeople and couples like myself and my future wife.
Fans are not decorative extras added around the edges of football. They are the sound, emotion, tension, memory, mythology and atmosphere of the game.
Increasingly, even attendance is becoming unequal. Flights, accommodation, internal travel between host cities and now, in some cases, visa bonds running into thousands of dollars, mean the modern World Cup is becoming financially inaccessible to many supporters long before politics enters the picture.
A train to the stadium in New Jersey, for instance, usually $15 (R245) for a round trip, is now going for more than $100. Never mind game tickets, which are selling for thousands.
A World Cup without global fans is not fully a World Cup. It becomes TV content rather than culture. Stadiums without invested supporters are bereft.
The modern World Cup is not merely a tournament. It is a giant temporary migration. Entire populations travel physically and psychologically in one shared global experience. At least, that is the promise.
But what happens when large groups of people feel unwelcome before they even arrive?
For immigrant and diaspora communities especially, the World Cup is deeper than sport. It is reunion, memory, identity, homesickness, pride and belonging compressed into 90 minutes. Entire generations gather around matches to reconnect with countries they might no longer physically live in but still emotionally carry.
The US has the sovereign right to manage its borders, sure. Every country does.
Governments make decisions based on complex political calculations, data, fears, risks and national priorities that citizens don’t see or understand.
But symbolism matters. The symbolism of hosting the world while banning 20% of its countries and population cannot be ignored.
America has long understood the power of spectacle. Hollywood, music, technology and sport — these are forms of soft power as influential as military strength. The World Cup is part of that machinery that America doesn’t usually leverage. Now it has the opportunity and this is how it uses it?
Hosting the World Cup is supposed to announce: the world gathers here. But a fifth of the world is not invited. For no clear reason either. Why Zimbabwe and not, for example, the Democratic Republic of Congo, a country that seems less desirable given its years of civil war and human rights violations?
According to the proclamation itself, Zimbabwe’s cited B-1/B-2 visa overstay rate was nearly 8%, with student and exchange visa overstay rates listed at more than 15%. This seems to have something to do with it — individual misbehaviour, not government policy. Hello, racial and national profiling.
The policies are not abstract. Behind every proclamation, regulation, restriction or denial is a human story. I don’t get to experience the World Cup with my partner. She is not a geopolitical theory. She was told no, not because of her character but because of her geography.
The contradiction becomes even sharper when one remembers that the 2026 tournament was expanded from 32 teams to 48 partly in the name of inclusion and global representation. Fifa widened the field at the exact historical moment America is shutting countries out.
We thought Fifa was in charge. We thought Fifa owned the planet. But I guess it’s nation-states or at least the one whose president won Fifa’s Peace Prize. It’s somehow nice to know there are greater forces than Fifa. It’s just too bad they are also uglier. Today, even the world’s most global sport stops at the border checkpoint.
It’s not just football. In two years, in Los Angeles, the Olympics are coming. An event even more focused on world peace and harmony than the World Cup. Every banned country will be participating — all 39, not just four. Will 20% of the planet be banned from coming to cheer on their national heroes? Including half of Africa?
Michael Brian Lee is the Mail & Guardian’s US correspondent in New York.