Promising Futures: Risk, Rights, and the World Cup
By Salah Hamdoun | January 24, 2025
During the summer of 2024, I asked my students in the course FIS 337—Innovation in Global Development to critically examine how large global sports events operate within the broader context of modernization. We were particularly drawn to the 2030 FIFA World Cup, a tournament Morocco, Portugal, and Spain recently secured the rights to host, which is a complex endeavor requiring extensive coordination. The 48 teams competing in the cup are at the center of the action and spanning 39 days across 10 cities. Building on 95 years of tradition FIFA is able to capture the attention of billions worldwide, generating significant financial revenue and leaving a deep mark across cultures.
The bid book offered by the organizing committee to FIFA emphasized a vision of a tournament grounded in inclusivity, environmental care, and technological advancement. The 24th edition of the tournament is therefore celebrated as an improved design addressing both the tournament's structure and the vision of the game. FIFA President Gianni Infantino himself described the decision as a unification of "two continents, Africa and Europe, not only in a celebration of soccer (here after football) but also in providing unique social and cultural cohesion. What a great message of peace, tolerance, and inclusion." This event draws therefor on the historical relationship among the tripartite. A relationship that, for much of human history, has been shaped by persistent involvement in each other's affairs through war, peace, colonization trade, art, culture, music, , and language.
This brings us to a more straightforward question: What can the promises of sustainability, inclusivity, and innovation truly mean in practice? Much of what people will experience in 2030 will be shaped by the effects of climate change and the global need for consensus on development agendas. With this in mind, we began with the understanding that beneath the economic projections and deterministic outcomes lies a complex system of human experiences and societal dynamics that is often overlooked, despite being essential to fulfilling the promise of modernization. In other words, sustainability and inclusion carry significant weight but risk becoming hollow rhetoric if not backed by substantive action.
We, therefore, structured our inquiry to cover five parts. Each part is designed to peel back the layers of rhetoric surrounding inclusion, sustainability, and innovation, examining how these concepts align with underlying realities. Primarily, it seeks to bring structure and coherence to what initially seems fragmented but ultimately represents a deeply connected effort to shape future directions.
Five Critical Questions
1. Our first inquiry focused on the role of large sports events as catalysts for modernization and urban development, particularly in emerging economies. With the FIFA World Cup announcement finding tremendous popular support in the three countries, we remained with the question: what does such popularity mean for the ways in which the event is able to extend state imaginaries? In other words, expanding the way people conceptualize or perceive the state (nation) and its role in society. Particularly in the context of social cohesion, economic growth, foreign policy, marketization, and the introduction of other symbolic capital. But also governmentality and the organization of society via modern technology.
2. Secondly, the organizers praised the integration of advanced technology "on and off the pitch" as a key feature designed to engage and excite fans. This includes innovations in broadcasting, fan experiences, and operational logistics. For instance, stadium technologies, such as smart ticketing systems, real-time analytics for crowd management, and augmented reality (AR) tools to enhance the experience, are expected to elevate the tournament experience.
Success in that sense requires more than just technological tools for administrative solutions, it demands a highly integrated strategy. This includes aligning tourism initiatives to streamline international travel and accommodation, enhancing national security frameworks to safeguard large-scale events, and ensuring robust infrastructure across the host cities. Coordination across three nations, each with distinct systems and protocols, presents unique logistical challenges.
3. The third question focused on the societal impacts associated with modernization. While innovation is celebrated, it's essential to situate technological advancement as potentially disembedding people's practices. Including the collection and extraction of biometric data, and surveillance of non-formal economic activities. But so do changing legislation often needed as part of the hosting agreement. Coding obligations and rights that may question the relevance of one's capacity within the modernizing state's context. In other words, does innovation equate to social progress, or are there ways in which progress will serve as a veneer that can mask or keep intact the underlying complex social issues?
4. Risk Distribution: Modernity brings change but not always equitable benefits or, more importantly, equitable distribution of risk. That is also where the inclusion dilemma resides. In the sense that inclusion rhetoric has a deep commitment issue. Hence, to what extent does the promise regarding inclusion think about the preconditions that have shaped throughout history? Particularly as a result of leaving the discrepancies formed in correspondence to ongoing societal changes and occasional accelerations from which some groups have benefitted and others less so.
5. Resistance: The first four questions led us to the fifth and perhaps most challenging question. How do people respond to the imbalance of risk produced as a result of accelerators of modernization? The social precondition under which people are sent out to navigate the same society means that after accounting for technological advancements and infrastructural developments, how do individuals and communities assert their rights in the face of changes that may not serve them?
The goal was not to find specific answers to a single problem or moment in time, but rather to explore a process of integrating societal characteristics that could shape the 2030 event into an accelerator of development, better suited to the challenges of the future and weave unconnected matters. Because what should become clear, however, is that integrating inclusive, sustainable, and innovative changes requires linking societal transformation to a critical examination of people's practices.
Therefore centering resistance as a language that presents a sense of the overall societal direction can contribute to better understanding the value that innovation can deliver and understand to what extent societal change is experienced as inclusive or exclusive. From the protests in Valencia, Spain, in the aftermath of the flood disaster to the demonstrations in Figuig, Morocco, as a result of the privatization of water sources during years of extreme heat. Or the protests against tourists in Barcelona and the local housing crisis stemming from digital platforms. Or the taxi drivers in Casablanca at war with Uber, Kareem, InDrive or any other digital platform. Or the storming of the EU border wall by refugees and other categorized migrants who took the Western Mediterranean route after border control in the Eastern Mediterranean security increased. Dissent appears to be as integral to modernization as the risks it generates, offering valuable insights into processes of change.
Conclusion
To conclude, the beautiful game, as Pelé once said, is pure joy, but it transcends sport. It has always been more than a sport. It is a form of resistance, a way to express dissent, discuss strategies, and a way to deeply imagine fairness. In the 1950s for example, the Moroccan football club Raja Casablanca was founded amid the struggle against French colonial rule. The game embodied the fight for independence, an energy of life in the simple act of gathering and thinking deeply about the strategies unfolding. The founders and fans were committed to hope for a future that was nearly impossible to imagine. And yet it happened.
Nietzsche saw art, and by extension, culturally significant activities, as a way for humanity to affirm life and celebrate vitality. Football embodies the Dionysian energy of life, struggle, passion, and triumph.
Hence, FIFA's preparation for a 2030 future requires a more bolder vision for the landscape wherein it settles. A tone and energy that prioritizes inclusion, human rights and sustainability that honors those who used football as a technology for change that sustained both life and dignity of people. One that links societal change to societal response. But also commit to people's ongoing experiences. Because when people disagree with the referee's call, it unleashes broader societal grievances against perceived injustices, and large gatherings amplify these sentiments. Football serves as a conduit for feedback, dissent, and the assertion of rights. An essential lesson emerges that will serve the 2045 development agenda; much like the game, life must now be fair play.
