Summary
This essay considers sportswashing in relation to the 2026 FIFA World Cup and its North American hosts. It asks how FIFA’s rhetoric of unity, political staging and the pleasures of watching football can coexist even when spectators recognise the tournament’s contradictions. Using the psychoanalytic idea of disavowal, it argues that enjoyment can help keep those contradictions at a distance. The essay invites a more attentive form of spectatorship, one that remains conscious of the political arrangements through which the event is produced.