The World Cup, that great modern carnival of tribal loyalty and globalised commerce, is stumbling into a farce of its own making. News arrives that fans seeking entry to the host nation are being met with Kafkaesque visa delays, arbitrary denials, and a pervasive sense that this tournament belongs to ‘them, not us’. One cannot help but detect the musty odour of imperial hangover in all this. The organisers, in their haste to stage a spectacle, have forgotten the first rule of nation-building: you cannot invite the world to your door and then treat it like a trespasser.
We have been here before. The late Roman Empire, bloated on its own grandeur, found that the very barbarians it sought to impress were increasingly denied entry to its cities. The result was not security but suspicion, not unity but fracture. Today’s visa chaos is a symptom of a deeper malaise: the divorce between a state’s administrative machinery and its aspirational rhetoric. The host nation wants the revenue, the prestige, the global gaze. It does not want the actual humans who come bearing flags and wallets. This is the moral bankruptcy of modern bureaucracies: they treat the foreigner as a problem to be managed rather than a guest to be welcomed.
And what of the fans? They are the foot soldiers of this global jamboree. They spend their savings, endure the indignities of travel, and arrive expecting a rite of connection. Instead they find themselves in a labyrinth of forms, interviews, and unexplained rejections. The message is clear: you are tolerated, not wanted. This is not merely administrative incompetence; it is a philosophical statement. It says the nation is a fortress, not a home. It says the World Cup is a product to be consumed from a distance, not a shared human experience.
Critics will say I am overthinking a logistical hiccup. They will point to the pandemic, to security concerns, to the sheer scale of the event. But scale is precisely the point. If you cannot manage the doors, do not build the stadium. The Victorian era, for all its faults, understood that great exhibitions required great openness. The Crystal Palace did not ask visitors for biometric data. It welcomed them as proof that civilisation could be a common project. We have regressed. We build walls in the name of efficiency and call it progress.
The deeper irony is that this chaos serves no one. The host nation’s image suffers. The fans’ goodwill evaporates. The tournament becomes a source of resentment rather than celebration. We are witnessing the slow death of the idea that sport can transcend politics. It cannot. It never could. But it used to be a decent pretence. Now the pretence is gone. The visa desk exposes the lie: we are not one global family. We are a collection of suspicious tribes, clutching our passports like medieval amulets against the plague.
Perhaps this is the final lesson of the modern World Cup. It was never about the beautiful game. It was about the ugly business of managing multitudes. And we are failing. The fans are warning us: ‘them not us’. They are right. Until we learn to treat the stranger as a fellow traveller, every tournament will be a half-built monument to our own smallness. The game goes on, but the soul has already left the pitch.
