The Empire Strikes Back: FIFA 2.0, Global Peacemaking, and the 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup

Abstract

In October 2016, Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) announced a landmark reform package that ushered in a new era of global football governance known as FIFA 2.0. Despite decades of profitability for its most visible event - the Men’s World Cup (MWC) - FIFA’s leadership had come under intense scrutiny following a corruption and bribery scandal over the MWC selection process and hosting approaches. In this article, we use a critical investigative framework to examine the conjunctural politics of FIFA 2.0 through a critical analysis of official FIFA documents, published media reports, and official bid documents for the 2026 MWC - the first in the FIFA 2.0 era. By selecting the United 2026 bid, FIFA seemingly moved beyond market expansionism and urban redevelopment strategies, seeking instead to functionally and symbolically (re-)imagine the event’s purpose as a principal agent for promoting global peace, unity, and international diplomacy. We offer a rich genealogy of FIFA’s growing presence in global geopolitics – an approach we theorize as global peacemaking – and argue that FIFA’s approach is a rationally and purposefully constructed organizational strategy aimed at exploiting the material and symbolic value(s) of global unity, peace, and international diplomacy as a means of capital accumulation, neoliberal marketization, and an intensification and consolidation of FIFA’s global football empire. We discuss how FIFA’s global peacemaking has accelerated the commercialization MWC and led to an increasingly interdependent and mutually constitutive relationship between the MWC and FIFA.