A World Cup for a Divided Continent

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Eight years ago, when FIFA selected the United States, Mexico, and Canada to host the 2026 World Cup, the organization imagined a sprawling tournament that would reflect a strong partnership and solidarity among the countries. Three nations would co-host the matches for the first time in the tournament’s history, and millions of fans would travel across borders to watch.

That vision of unity has not aged well. The games are set to start tomorrow, but immigration restrictions, trade disputes, security concerns, and a new wave of U.S. nationalism under President Trump have resulted in an unusual geopolitical experiment: a World Cup that will test how divided North America has become.

“Few things can connect societies like a joint World Cup bid,” Arturo Sarukhán, a former ambassador of Mexico to the U.S., told me. He had advocated for this joint tournament bid, and had understood it as a chance to show the “optimism” and “shared prosperity” of the continent. The tri-host tournament was proposed in 2017, in a document titled the “United Bid”—a name that seems quaint today. Jules Boykoff, a political scientist at Pacific University, in Oregon, and the author of a book about the 2026 World Cup, told me that in private conversations around the time of the bid, there was a sense that Trump wouldn’t be around by the time the World Cup commenced.

When that assumption didn’t pan out, the tournament faced a litany of new challenges. Since taking office again, Trump has disregarded long-standing continental alliances. The three countries, in some ways, were once closely tied: The now-defunct North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) knit their economies together for a quarter-century. They share borders, and the U.S. is home to the world’s largest Mexican expatriate community. “Even if some politicians would like to press ‘Control-Alt-Delete,’ you can’t erase one country next to the other,” Sarukhán said. Trump has repeatedly suggested that Canada should become the 51st state, posting on Truth Social a doctored map that showed our northern neighbor absorbed into the United States. He threatened Mexico with military strikes in January and declared a national emergency at America’s southern border last year to stop immigration. His mass tariff campaign also poses a danger to Canada’s and Mexico’s economies—all of which makes the timing of the World Cup even more uncomfortable.

In the middle of the tournament, on July 1, the three countries are set to renegotiate the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement—the free-trade pact that replaced NAFTA in 2020 and that forms the legal scaffolding of the North American economy. In December, Trump threatened to abandon USMCA entirely. If it collapses or is gutted, the supply chains, investment flows, and labor arrangements that connect the three signatories could unravel, right as the countries are supposed to be working together to pull off the games.

Co-hosting the World Cup has happened once before: In 2002, despite some minor diplomatic disagreements, South Korea and Japan successfully co-hosted the games, and FIFA has doubled down on the model since (the 2030 World Cup will span Spain, Portugal, and Morocco). Still, this year is “the most politically combustible World Cup we’ve seen,” Boykoff said. Since returning to power, Trump has ramped up immigration enforcement in ways that have already affected the tournament. Iraq’s star striker was held for seven hours by U.S. immigration officials on arrival; the team’s photographer was denied entry outright, as was a FIFA referee from Somalia. South Africa’s national team was forced to delay its trip over what the country’s sports minister called “embarrassing and grossly unfair” visa issues. At least 15 Iranian-team officials and staff were denied visas, according to the Iranian media, and the squad is training in Tijuana because players will be able to enter the U.S. only one day before each of their matches. The pattern is hard to miss: Many of these countries are ones that Trump has openly disparaged or gone to war with.

No World Cup has ever been entirely isolated from politics, but this one has become unusually entangled with a single figure. Trump has embraced the tournament as a showcase of American strength, and FIFA has been eager to oblige. The organization’s president, Gianni Infantino, has cultivated a close relationship with Trump. In a surreal demonstration of flattery, FIFAawarded Trump its newly created peace prize in December, months after he threw a public tantrum over not winning the Nobel Peace Prize. That an international tournament would become, in his hands, primarily a vehicle for U.S. triumphalism is not surprising.

Amid widespread deportation fears, the fans stand to lose the most. Even though the Department of Homeland Security insists that there will not be any large-scale ICE raids at World Cup matches, immigrants (or anybody worried about being racially profiled) have little reason to take the Trump administration at its word. The administration has not ruled out arresting people near stadiums, and any fear over ICE encounters may serve as a deterrent. There are also the logistical complexities that come with a tournament of this size. As my colleague Nick Miroff reported, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin compared the World Cup’s security operation to what it would take to protect “78 Super Bowls.” TSA officers are being deployed to stadium entrances and will be diverted from airports expected to be flooded with arriving fans. Prices for tickets, hotels, and transportation have drawn criticism over alleged price gouging.Even Trump reportedly said that if he had to pay those ticket costs, he wouldn’t go either.

“No one seems all that excited,” my colleague Jonathan Lemire wrote. But that could change—there are plenty of reasons fans’ enthusiasm could spike once the tournament starts. More nations are competing than ever before, including 10 African countries—the biggest showing for that continent yet. This is also almost certainly the last World Cup for some of the greatest players that soccer has ever seen.

There is a version of the tournament that works: The games happen, the teams play, and the politics fade into the background. Sporting events have a way of asserting their own temporary reality. But the fact remains that this World Cup started as an alliance between three countries, and is now a reminder of how fractured that bond has become.

Related:

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Today’s News

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth visited the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay to “engage with troops,” accompanied by the conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer. The visit comes amid rising tensions between the Trump administration and Cuba, which is suffering from a U.S. energy blockade.
President Trump said that the United States would launch new strikes on Iran later today and that the military would be “attacking them very hard,” following a day of reciprocal attacks by both countries.
Republican Senator Susan Collins and her Democratic challenger, Graham Platner, officially secured their parties’ nominations last night, setting up one of the most controversial and closely watched Senate races of 2026.

Evening Read

A GIF of a glitching search bar — Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani / The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Your Search Results Are Getting Sloptimized

By Will Oremus

According to Shopify, the best e-commerce platform is Shopify. On its blog, the company has published at least 60 different ranked listicles, including “10 Best Ecommerce Platforms for Small Business in 2026,” “11 Best Ecommerce Platforms for Your Business in 2026,” “The 11 Best Cheap Ecommerce Platforms for Small Business (2026),” and “Best Ecommerce Software 2026: Compare 11 Top Platforms.” The competitors that come in second and beyond vary, but the No. 1 pick is always Shopify.

If rankings produced by the very company at the top of the list seem unlikely to fool anyone, that’s because humans probably aren’t the target audience. Chatbots are. When I recently asked ChatGPT for the “best way to set up an online storefront,” the AI tool identified Shopify as the first option. It wasn’t immediately clear how ChatGPT arrived at that recommendation, but a list of citations that accompanied the answer yielded a clue: Shopify’s own rankings.

Read the full article.