Article: "Decolonizing Football: From Geopolitics to the Playing Field"
Written by Beatriz Carvalho
Reviewed by Josh Phillips, Balkis Chaabane MA MAS MCS, and Professor Tom Woodhouse
Beatriz is one of the coordinators of the pilot project of the Football Peace Academy in Bucaramanga, Colombia, and the Chief of Impact and Programs for Youth Transforming Narratives. Between both roles, she is committed to leveraging the power of football in the social space to bring about positive change and community peacebuilding and to decolonizing International Peace and Security.
This article merges both lenses and was written following reflections she has shared on the Football Peace Academy blog in the past 4 weeks, during the 2026 World Cup.
This article was written in collaboration with the team of Youth Transforming Narratives (YTN), a youth-led global movement committed to re-defining global responses to the world’s most pressing issues. Building on the principles of decolonization, localization, and youth leadership, YTN seeks to challenge the narrative, take the lead in transforming the current existing structures, and bridge the South-North gap to re-shape future engagement. Visit www.youthtransform.org to learn more.
Introduction:
"When analyzing the global power structures of international policy or institutional peace frameworks, we often find that dominant governance models are top-down, Eurocentric, and inherently fractured. Even today, they remain tightly bound to the interests of elite administrations that carry the legacies of colonial times. But what happens when the Global Majority doesn’t wait for an invitation to the table? What happens when they rewrite the rules on one of the world’s biggest stages?
Global football is not insulated from history, nor geopolitics. Its governing bodies, along with mainstream Western media, operate as elite, top-down institutions that frequently gatekeep the sport through colonial biases, swiftly shifting the narrative the moment traditional hierarchies are threatened. But the game itself isn’t owned by any country or anyone in particular; it exists in the global social fabric, and on the pitch, football is a powerful tool for decolonizing and reclaiming space.
This year’s World Cup was the largest in history, hosting 48 nations, but it was also one of the most politicized. Serious concerns regarding human rights violations have been raised both inside and beyond the stadiums, particularly given the current political landscape of the United States (the main host country) and along its borders with the other two co-hosts (Mexico and Canada) (Human Rights Watch, 2026). Moreover, the US is currently engaged in military conflict and diplomatic disputes with other participant nations, and worldwide geopolitical unrest is at its highest level in 50 years, according to the latest Global Peace Index by the Institute for Economics and Peace (2026a).
In many ways, this year’s tournament broke a few historical precedents and exposed the deep-seated double standards of the ‘football elite,’ both on and off the field. We want to show how the tournament and the game itself carry colonial-era legacies and biases, and how teams from the Global Majority, particularly from the African continent, are actively challenging the imposed hierarchies of global football."