So the great footballing carnival comes to North America, and what do we witness but a farce of bureaucratic pettiness. Fans, poised to cross oceans for the beautiful game, find themselves barred by the very nations supposed to host them. The United States and its neighbours, in a display of administrative paralysis, have unleashed a torrent of visa restrictions and travel bans that reek of nothing less than a civilisation in decay. The cry from the terraces is deafening: ‘This is a World Cup for them, not us.’ And they are right.
I have written before about the parallels between our age and the late Roman Empire, where the frontiers hardened not against barbarians but against the very citizens who sought to move within the empire’s bounds. Here, we see the same logic: a global event, meant to unite, becomes a symbol of exclusion. The World Cup, that supposed great leveller, is transformed into a privilege for the few. The fans are not mere tourists; they are pilgrims seeking a shared communion. And what do we offer them? A wall of red tape, a labyrinth of forms, and a capricious denial that smacks of a nation that no longer trusts itself, let alone the world.
Now, the apologists will bleat about security, about scarce resources, about the need to ‘manage’ the crowd. Nonsense. This is not management; it is abdication. It is the intellectual decadence of a bureaucracy that has forgotten its purpose: to facilitate, not to forbid. The Victorian age understood that the empire thrived on movement, on the passage of people and ideas. The great expositions of the nineteenth century welcomed the masses; they did not bar them. But we, in our supposed sophistication, have built a fortress of suspicion. We have made the grand festival a gated community. And the world notices.
National identity, that cherished notion I have defended time and again, is not expressed in the thickness of a visa stamp. It is expressed in the confidence to open doors, to say: ‘We are strong enough to welcome you; we are proud enough to share our soil.’ What we have now is the posture of a nation afraid of its own shadow. Small wonder that the fans rage. They see a hypocrisy that makes a mockery of the game’s unifying spirit. They see a ‘World Cup’ that has become a cipher for a world of closed visas, of ‘you can look but you cannot touch’.
And let us not pretend this is a minor technical matter. When the global south journeys to the stadiums of the global north and is met with a shuttered embassy window, it is a geopolitical signal. The World Cup is not just a tournament; it is a mirror of the international order. And that mirror now reflects an America and a Canada that have retreated into a fortress mentality. The ‘deplorables’ who champion such restrictions think they are protecting the homeland. They are, in fact, diging its grave.
The solution is simple: lift the bans, streamline the process, and trust that the goodwill of a billion fans outweighs the fears of a few petty officials. But I have little hope. Our age prefers the comfort of exclusion to the risk of embrace. So let the fans rage. Their anger is the first honest emotion in this farce. They see, perhaps more clearly than the bureaucrats, that the World Cup was never just about the game. It was about the idea that for a few weeks, the world could be one. That idea, it seems, is now as dead as the Roman dream. And we are all diminished for it.
