With five billion fans, soccer is less the world’s favorite sport than its largest religion, and the FIFA World Cup Finals (which begins on June 11 across North America) its ultimate pilgrimage. Strip away the theology, and the structural resemblance is hard to miss. Like the Hajj, which has just finished its annual cycle, the World Cup is a journey toward a symbolic center: millions of people save for years, travel across continents, wear clothing to signal affiliation, and perform communal rituals. Travelers enter spaces charged with meaning, for events that will live with them forever. Ordinary time is suspended and made sacred; strangers compete and embrace; opposing voices merge into a single rhythmic chant of call and response. Stadiums, like the mosques in Mecca or churches in Rome, become temporary places of passionate focus, where the world gathers to witness something larger than any individual.
Coaches take on the authority of priests or imams. Players become saints, martyrs, or villains in an unfolding sacred drama. Even the language surrounding the tournament reveals this subconscious understanding. Fans speak of “dreams,” “destiny,” “belief,” “faith,” “redemption,” and “miracles.” The World Cup trophy is not merely won; it is pursued like a relic.
Early theorists of pilgrimage (yes, pilgrimage studies exists!) Victor and Edith Turner argued that pilgrimages create what they called “communitas”: an intense feeling of togetherness among participants temporarily removed from ordinary hierarchies and routines. Their view that “a pilgrim is half a tourist if a tourist is half a pilgrim” perfectly describes the World Cup experience. You cannot remove the holy mission at the heart of those traveling to attend a World Cup match.
Anyone who has traveled during a World Cup recognizes the phenomenon immediately. In Qatar in 2022, metro carriages filled with Saudis, Argentinians, Nigerians, Americans, Japanese, and Brazilians became temporary experiments in global coexistence. Simon Kuper captured the atmosphere in his recent World Cup Fever (Pegasus Books, 2026), describing English fans joking alongside Iranians, women in hijabs mingling with women in shorts, and exhausted supporters tolerating each other’s sweat, songs, and grief long into the night. “Maybe there was something to the old canard,” Kuper wrote, “that if you just brought ordinary people from different countries together without politicians getting in the way they’d get along.” In moments like these, soccer creates a vision of humanity more integrated than politics ordinarily permits.
But contemporary pilgrimage theorists—particularly Michael Sallnow and John Eade—point out something darker. Pilgrimages are not merely occasions for harmony. They are also moments of contestation. Different groups fight over meaning, legitimacy, authority, and ownership of the sacred event itself. Pilgrimage can indeed produce solidarity, but it can also produce schism.
Geoffrey Chaucer knew this nearly a millennium ago. In English’s most famous book about a group of pilgrims, his Canterbury Tales, some travel for religion, some for other reasons. The Cook goes to cook, the Wife of Bath journeys for company and to show off her wealth, even the Monk seems to be there for the lulz—less compelled by the relics of St. Thomas Becket than by opportunities like “huntyng for the hare.” Given these varied motivations, it is unsurprising that the Friar and the Summoner are constantly verbally sparring and the Pardoner and the Host nearly come to blows.
That insight is crucial for 2026.
The North American World Cup arrives at a moment when all global governance seems to be reaching a crisis of trust. Soccer pilgrims will be arriving in America at a time when both the world’s physical and political climates have heated up to an unprecedented level and when FIFA is facing deep opposition within soccer. Mexico and Canada each have domestic politics to contend with, but in the United States, where most of the games will be played, the situation is especially fraught. Because of choices by FIFA and local committees, costs to visitors will be financially prohibitive, either because of various forms of price gouging (just like at the Hajj) or the regular high cost of many host cities.
Pilgrimages, like the World Cup, are not merely occasions for harmony. They are also moments of contestation.
FIFA’s legitimacy is already deeply compromised. The organization is widely viewed by supporters as corrupt, self-enriching, politically cynical, and detached from the grassroots culture that made soccer powerful in the first place. The awarding of the 2018 World Cup to Russia and the 2022 tournament to Qatar destroyed much of FIFA’s moral credibility. Both decisions were inseparable from bribery scandals, opaque financial dealings, and geopolitical maneuvering. On top of that, Saudi Arabia—a country with the same number of stadiums as London—won a no-contest bid to host the 2034 World Cup, making a mockery of the claim that an expansion of teams from 36 to 48 would “need” multiple countries to host (2030 will be hosted by Spain, Portugal, and Morocco).
FIFA has so far survived those scandals, partly because authoritarian hosts in Russia and Qatar could suppress dissent through force, partly because soccer money and oil money has continued to pour in, and partly because the Qatar World Cup became mostly a television event after distance, expense, and political discomfort deterred many ordinary supporters from attending. Compared to historic tournaments, the atmosphere was, by all accounts, strange, heavily managed, and oddly bloodless.
With the prospect of another fiasco like the African Cup of Nations, whose final, in January, remains undecided and in the court of arbitration, soccer governance is at an all time low. Europeans distrust FIFA. Africans distrust FIFA. South Americans distrust FIFA. Even many soccer supporters who adore the sport now openly loathe its governing class.
All of this creates the conditions for schism.
If something goes badly wrong during the World Cup—a crowd disaster, a policing scandal, an infectious disease, an immigration fiasco, a transportation collapse, corruption allegations, extreme weather failures, manipulated refereeing controversies, or fan deaths—the backlash could become existential for FIFA. UEFA, the powerful governing body of European soccer, is already resentful of FIFA’s expansionist ambitions and ready to spearhead opposition. Any problems with Infantino’s World Cup and his naked opportunism could find itself under pressure from clubs, supporters, broadcasters, and domestic federations to challenge FIFA’s authority more openly.
And when that crisis comes, FIFA will desperately search for a narrative that protects its legitimacy. The easiest narrative will be sectarianism. The tactic has worked before: Saudi authorities blamed unauthorized pilgrims and Sunni/Shi’a fighting for deaths at the Hajj in 2015 and 2024, and police falsely blamed Liverpool fans for the Hillsborough tragedy in 1989 and for crowd crushes, use of tear gas, and robberies in Paris in 2022.
However, with teams from a record 12 Muslim-majority countries at the tournament, there is scope for one specific, disturbing narrative. If there are clashes involving supporters from these nations, or if immigration enforcement disproportionately affects Arab or African fans, FIFA and local authorities will be tempted to frame any unrest primarily as Islamophobia or as a “clash of cultures.” That explanation will be politically convenient, because it externalizes blame. It suggests the problem lies in intolerant publics rather than failed governance.
But that diagnosis would fundamentally mischaracterize the real crisis. The central problem is likely to be not Muslim supporters but rather the alliance between corrupt petrostate autocracies and corrupt international bureaucracies, as Gulf monarchies—especially Qatar and Saudi Arabia—have used their immense oil wealth to purchase influence within global soccer governance.
FIFA’s legitimacy is already deeply compromised. The organization is widely viewed by supporters as corrupt, self-enriching, politically cynical, and detached from the grassroots culture that made soccer powerful in the first place.
Criticism of these arrangements is frequently collapsed into accusations of Islamophobia. But objecting to the political behavior of feudal petrochemical monarchies is not hostility toward Muslims, any more than criticizing the Vatican constitutes anti-Catholic bigotry. Qatar’s labor abuses, Saudi Arabia’s sportswashing campaigns, and FIFA’s financial opportunism are political problems, not religious ones.
What makes the situation especially dangerous is that FIFA’s bureaucratic class and Gulf elites need each other. The autocracies gain prestige, legitimacy, and soft power through soccer. FIFA officials gain money, influence, and political insulation. Together they have hollowed out the moral authority of soccer governance, while still depending on the devotion of billions of supporters.
That contradiction is under immense pressure. Pilgrimage systems become unstable when ordinary believers lose faith in custodians. Medieval Europe understood this dynamic well. Corruption among clergy produced reform movements, anti-popes, schisms, and revolts. The same underlying psychology applies here. Soccer supporters still believe passionately in the game; what they increasingly do not believe in is FIFA.
Timing and location may mean that the North American tournament exposes the contradiction more dramatically than previous tournaments. Especially in the United States, the pilgrimage infrastructure itself will feel unusually fragile. This is not a compact World Cup concentrated in one country. Fans will travel immense distances across a continent with generally weak public transportation, with expensive hotels, severe climate conditions, and politically volatile borders. Immigration authorities in the United States are already conducting aggressive enforcement campaigns that disproportionately affect exactly the kinds of international visitors the World Cup depends upon, and have confirmed they will continue throughout the tournament’s duration.
At the same time, FIFA’s relentless pursuit of revenue has inflated ticket prices, hospitality packages, sponsorship demands, and commercial extraction to extraordinary levels. Like the Hajj, pilgrimage is becoming increasingly stratified by wealth. The sacred experience remains emotionally democratic but materially oligarchic.
And the tension—between universal belonging and financial exclusion—is combustible.
The irony is that the World Cup still genuinely produces moments of transcendence. That is why people care so much. Millions will still come searching for what Chaucer’s pilgrims sought in The Canterbury Tales: fellowship, adventure, transformation, meaning, distraction, spectacle, community. Some will arrive for faith. Others for tourism. Most for some inseparable mixture of both.
But every pilgrimage contains the possibility of disillusionment.