Jonathan Liew: World Cup ends with borrowed flags and diaspora squads

A photograph taken in Dhaka during the tournament showed a boy in an Argentina shirt studying a mural of the same team, a reminder that the 2026 World Cup’s most durable scenes often happened far from the stadiums. The final at MetLife Stadium ended a six-week event that, according to the Guardian’s Jonathan Liew, was watched through borrowed allegiances as much as inherited ones. In the stands, celebrities wore other countries’ shirts, and ticketing data suggested the crowd was overwhelmingly American.

Liew’s larger point is that the World Cup now sells national identity as something closer to a temporary consumer choice than a fixed inheritance. Bangladesh, he writes, backed Argentina “as an entire nation”, while a group of Central Asian friends in north London followed Uzbekistan; the Arab diaspora, he adds, rallied around Morocco and Egypt as the tournament progressed. In western Europe, he notes, far-right voices push nationalism while complaining their own teams field too many black players; in parts of Latin America, some leftwing supporters avoid the national shirt because it has been claimed by rightwing populists. The same garment can be a party symbol at home and a neutral sports costume abroad.

The squads themselves have moved in the same direction. Liew reports that forty of the 48 teams had at least one player born outside the country they represented, with some squads shaped more by diaspora networks than by domestic leagues. He cites Curaçao, where only one squad member was born on the island, and Cape Verde, whose team that drew Spain in the group stage included more players born in Rotterdam than in Cape Verde’s capital. Tournament expansion widens the field, but it also turns eligibility rules, migration histories and dual citizenship paperwork into part of the sporting infrastructure.

That mix of mobility and branding creates a different kind of unity from the one international football used to promise. A flag can still be a rallying point, but it can also be a single-use accessory: painted on cheeks for one match, then washed off on Monday. The World Cup’s commercial logic rewards this flexibility—more teams, more games, more markets, more shirts—while the politics of identity at home grows more brittle. A competition designed to compress nations into 90-minute stories ends up reflecting how porous those stories have become.

At MetLife, Liew writes, Mike Tyson wore an Argentina shirt and Trevor Noah wore a Spain shirt. The final whistle did not settle what a nation is, but it did leave behind six weeks of evidence that many fans now treat it as something you can put on and take off.