Photo: LaGrange College undergraduates Akajah Burton, Jonathan Wible, and Katie Cunningham.
The big winner of the FIFA World Cup Games was not Ranch Dressing, Norwegian Rowers, or partying Scottish fans.
Democracies dominated the sport, as they have done since the middle of the Cold War. And in the new battlefield of authoritarians versus democracy waged everywhere from the pitch to posting online, it matters. Here’s why.
Newspapers from Seattle to Miami and at least a half-dozen countries carried research my undergraduates (now graduates) and I compiled for the publication “The Conversation,” published just before the 2026 World Cup. We showed 71.4 percent of participants in the final games were democracies using Polity data from 1930-2022. Nearly 90 percent of the finalists, and most of the winners of the FIFA games from 1974-2022 were “free” states.
That soccer success by democracies continued during the 2026 FIFA games. First of all, a new group of LaGrange College undergraduate researchers using Freedom House data found that while “free” countries make up less than half of the world’s 195 states, they made up 62.5 percent of the 48 qualifiers. Of these 30 teams who made it, 76.7 percent qualified for the knockout round. “Not free” countries only made up 10 of those FIFA countries who made it to the next level. And of these, three qualified for the knockout round, and only one (Egypt) won at least two games.
Partly free countries weren’t too bad. Six of eight made it to the knockout round, but most only did so. Two of these teams (Morocco and Mexico) had four wins, which made up the majority of all partly free wins. Only two partly free teams won three or more games. Ten “free” countries won three or more games. In fact, seven of the eight in the quarterfinals were “free” countries (the other was Morocco, eliminated by France). “Free” countries dominated their “partly free” counterparts too.
Critics of our earlier research claimed we should have also looked at where the games were hosted, not just who won, to see the power of authoritarian countries. Researcher Katie Cunningham did just that. Using Freedom House, she found that 70.5% of FIFA host sites from 1974-2026 were “free” countries, with 11.7% “partly free” and 17.6 percent “not free.” She didn’t even mind extending her summer work to include the 2030 and 2034 host sites. Even then, “free” countries still make up 2/3 of FIFA host sites, with “partly free” and “not free” splitting the other third. That matches my work using Polity data to find that from 1930 to 2022, which shows that democracies hosted 65% of all FIFA games.
All across social media, authoritarians are doing everything they can to show off why they are a superior form of government. And we know from the Hitler Olympics of 1936, the Mussolini FIFA Games of 1934, the Argentine military junta of the late 1970s and rampant cheating by the Russians and East Germans, that they’ll use sporting events, and intimidation and bending the rules, to try and prove their prowess, in the hopes of wining converts. The continued success of democracies shows how true freedom, not rule by one or a few, is the best form of government, and better for sports.
LaGrange College graduates Daniel Cody, Jenna Pittman, and Eli Rogers contributed to the research, along with LaGrange College undergraduates Akajah Burton, Katie Cunningham and Jonathan Wible.
John A. Tures is Professor of Political Science and Coordinator of the Political Science Program at LaGrange College, in LaGrange, Georgia. His first book, “Branded”, is available on Amazon. He can be reached at jtures@lagrange.edu.