Populists Have Always Used the World Cup. Some Rewrote Its Rules.
You could stand in the Plaza de Bolívar in Bogotá on almost any July this decade and watch the same trick performed twice: once by the crowd, once by the man on the balcony. The crowd wears the yellow of the national team because it has always worn the yellow of the national team; Colombia's flag and its kit share the palette, so the loyalty was never partisan to begin with. Then the president steps out in the same shirt, over a suit, and the two loyalties merge on camera. Nobody forced the merger. Nobody had to.
Sport is supposed to be the one civic space that survives the rest of the argument, the place where a taxi driver and a finance minister sing the same anthem for the same reason and mean it about equally. That is a real and durable fact about football, not a naive one, and it is why the trick above works at all: you cannot borrow legitimacy from something that has none. Every leader photographed in a jersey is spending down an account of trust he did not open, usually one built by mediocre civil servants and underpaid youth coaches over decades. Governments with the worst records on corruption or press freedom are frequently the most eager to stand beside the trophy, and the applause for the team gets misread, deliberately, as applause for the government sitting next to it. All of that is true.
None of it explains why some of these maneuvers dissolve after the final whistle while others survive the tournament and start showing up in statute books and federation bylaws. The ranking below runs from the merely theatrical to the structurally permanent, from a borrowed jersey to a rewritten eligibility code, because that distance is the argument. A photo op fades by August. A rule change governs the next World Cup and the one after it.
6. Paraguay's Superstitious President
Santiago Peña told reporters ahead of Paraguay's September 2025 qualifier against Argentina that he would not be watching, that he had not watched a Paraguay match live since taking office because he considered himself, in his words, "gafo" — a jinx. Paraguay won that night, ended a sixteen-year absence from the tournament weeks later, and Peña kept his streak intact, following the decisive result by radio from another room. The habit reads as a fan's private ritual rather than a state strategy, and that is the whole appeal. A president too nervous to watch is claiming membership in the same suffering fraternity as everyone else outside the stadium gates.
5. Colombia's Borrowed Colors
The shirt-and-suit routine photographs well because the colors were never really borrowed in the first place. Wearing the national jersey reads as patriotism rather than partisanship precisely because the flag got there first. That is what makes the tactic durable as a habit and forgettable as an event: no institution moves, no law changes, only a camera angle repeats itself every four years with a different face inside the collar.
4. Canada's Unity Rhetoric
Prime Minister Mark Carney used the opening of Toronto's expanded BMO Field in June to describe co-hosting 2026 as proof that "this country can still build something together, on time, across every province that has to agree to it" — a line aimed less at soccer than at the pipeline and rail fights sitting underneath it. It is a gentler species of the same borrowing, aimed at national cohesion rather than a leader's personal brand, and it costs a government little beyond enthusiasm it may not be able to sustain once the closing ceremony packs up and the provinces go back to arguing about everything else.
3. America's Security-State Populism
In March 2025, President Trump signed an executive order creating a White House Task Force on the 2026 FIFA World Cup, chairing it himself and naming Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to a lead operational role. The order was framed around stadium safety. In practice it became the legal scaffolding for expanded federal enforcement in host cities well before kickoff, immigration sweeps and National Guard deployments justified in the name of protecting a tournament nobody had proposed protecting that way before. A jersey photo lasts one news cycle. A task force with subpoena-adjacent authority outlasts the trophy ceremony.
2. France's Far-Right Pivot
For two decades the French far right ran one play against the national team: question the loyalty of players with immigrant roots, and use the locker room as a proxy argument about who counts as French. Marine Le Pen made versions of that case explicitly after 1998, when she said the team "did not really represent France." The play stopped working as the team kept winning with the same roster, so the argument moved. The newer line is not about who is French; it is about who is out of touch, recasting foreign-based millionaires in the squad as a symbol of a detached elite rather than a demographic threat. Same anxiety, new target, and the willingness to abandon a losing frame for a winning one is the tell of an operation built to outlast any single tournament.
1. Morocco's Rewritten Eligibility
Every entry above changes optics. This one changed rules. FIFA's 2020 and 2021 amendments to Article 8 loosened the one-time nationality switch, letting players who had appeared for one federation at senior level under certain caps and age thresholds move to another. Morocco's federation, backed by scouting offices it opened across Europe to track the children of its diaspora, used the new rule to recruit Munir El Haddadi away from Spain in 2019 and Sofyan Amrabat's generation of dual nationals in the years after. The payoff arrived in Qatar in 2022, when a Morocco squad built partly from that pipeline reached the World Cup semifinal, the first African or Arab team ever to do so. The other five entries on this list borrow a symbol for an afternoon. This one wrote the borrowing into the eligibility code, where it now governs squad selection for 2026 and every tournament after it, regardless of who holds office when the anthem plays.
The jersey comes off after the final whistle. The rulebook doesn't.