2026 World Cup: What the FIFA archives reveal about representation on the pitch

As the expanded 48-team FIFA Men's World Cup kicks off June 11, much will be made about the increased representation of teams from the Global South. But the road to inclusion was paved by years-long struggles for recognition and representation.

Bright Alozie, an associate professor of Black Studies at Portland State University, is currently combing through the official FIFA archives in Zurich, Switzerland. As a 2025-2026 FIFA Research Scholar, Alozie is investigating how African actors navigated the politics of global football governance between 1945 and 1975 to challenge exclusion and demand recognition.

"I've spent months immersed in the archival record of how Africa fought its way into this tournament, and that history changes how you watch," Alozie says. "When an African country takes the pitch, I'm not only watching the match but the product of decades of collective struggle and strategic coalition-building that most commentators know nothing about."

For the Nigerian-born Alozie, watching the 1994 World Cup debut of the Super Eagles planted a lifelong conviction that African football belonged at the center, not the margins, of the global game.

"I did not know then that I would eventually find myself in the FIFA archives in Zurich tracing the history of how Africa fought its way into that tournament, but looking back, the thread is very clear," he says.

We caught up with Alozie to unpack how that history manifests on the pitch today.

FIFA often frames the World Cup as a force for global unity and peace. How accurate is that narrative, and in what ways does the modern tournament still reflect unequal global power dynamics?

Alozie: FIFA's framing of the World Cup as unity and peace captures something real, but only partially and selectively. The tournament creates genuine moments of shared global attention, where borders feel thinner and people participate in the same emotional rhythm. When underdog teams succeed, the world watches and cares in ways that cut across familiar divisions. In that sense, the "unity" claim is real. But that narrative smooths over the deeper structures that make the tournament possible. The modern World Cup is shaped by unequal global power in its hosting decisions, commercial structures and governance. Founding confederations continue to exercise disproportionate influence over commercial arrangements and broadcasting deals, even as African and Asian federations represent the majority of FIFA's membership. Bidding processes reflect geopolitical influence, and revenue remains heavily centralized. Many nations contribute talent but receive a smaller economic return. Ultimately, the World Cup is both a space of real emotional connection and a reflection of an unequal global order.

What storylines should viewers pay attention to beyond the matches themselves?

Alozie: Beyond the matches, the most compelling stories are what the tournament reveals off the pitch - how global football mirrors migration, power, and identity. The tri-national hosting is a major storyline. Canada, Mexico, and the United States are staging a World Cup across borders that are politically charged, economically unequal, and deeply shaped by migration. Questions of visa access, border mobility, and who actually gets to experience the tournament will shape the event as much as anything on the pitch. There is also a strong diasporic dimension, especially in North America, where many national teams will be followed not only by distant supporters but by immigrant communities watching their home countries play in their backyards. The tensions this creates - who is "home," who is "away" - are worth watching closely. And then there is the political storytelling that shadows global sport: which nations are framed as rising powers, which players become symbols of national identity, and how narratives of unity coexist with global inequalities. The matches are the surface; the tournament tells a larger story about how the world moves, works and imagines itself right now.

What are you personally most interested in watching, researching or analyzing during this World Cup?

Alozie: I am interested in the World Cup as a global social laboratory; less the matches themselves, and more what the tournament exposes about movement, belonging, and inequality. How does migration show up in team composition and fan identity? How do diasporic communities in host countries experience watching their teams play in their own backyards? And whether the expanded 48-team format translates into genuine institutional power for previously marginalized confederations, or simply more representation without structural change. The pitch and the archive, for me, are in constant conversation.

Your work as a FIFA Research Scholar focuses on African voices petitioning FIFA for football recognition between 1945 and 1975. What were African football leaders and advocates seeking from FIFA during that era of decolonization?

Alozie: At the most immediate level, they were seeking equitable World Cup representation: a guaranteed berth in the tournament commensurate with the number and quality of Africa's football associations. But reading the actual petitions and memoranda in the archives, what strikes me is how much larger the claim was. African football leaders were not simply asking for a seat at the table; they were contesting the terms on which that table had been set. They invoked FIFA's own charter language of universality and equality of membership and used it as a weapon against the organization's practice of treating African federations as subordinate. There is a letter from the Confederation of African Football from the early 1960s that is, in effect, a decolonial manifesto in sports administrative language. The ask was for slots in a tournament; the argument was for recognition as equals in a global institution.

You have been combing through the official FIFA archives in Zurich, Switzerland. What has surprised or moved you most during your time in those archives?

Alozie: What has moved me most is the sheer articulateness and sophistication of the African petitioners. There is a tendency, even in sympathetic scholarship, to frame African actors in this period as reactive, as responding to exclusion rather than driving agendas. The documents tell a very different story. These were men who understood parliamentary procedure, international law, and the internal politics of FIFA with remarkable precision. They wrote in multiple languages, they coordinated across borders, they strategically timed their communications to align with FIFA congress meetings. What surprised me, practically, was finding documents I had not expected to be preserved at all, especially internal annotations on African petitions, FIFA officials' handwritten margin notes responding to African correspondence. Those marginal notes tell you what the institution actually thought, behind the formal responses. That gap between official reply and internal reaction is where the real history lives.

How has African football influenced and shaped the global game despite longstanding institutional barriers?

Alozie: By consistently pushing it beyond the limits institutions originally set for it, both on and off the pitch. On the political side, its influence is foundational. The 1966 World Cup boycott, when all eligible African nations withdrew from qualifying, remains one of the most consequential collective actions in football governance. It forced FIFA to confront questions of representation and directly shaped later expansions of African participation, culminating in today's increased World Cup slots. African federations did not simply wait to be included; they compelled structural change from the margins. On the sporting side, African football has shaped the aesthetic and tactical vocabulary of the global game; the technical creativity, positional fluidity, and physical expressiveness associated with West African football in particular have traveled across continents through player migration and the global circulation of playing styles. Yet this influence has often traveled through unequal systems of recognition and reward. African football has been deeply constitutive of the modern global game, even when it has not received proportional institutional credit or power within it.

How do the historical struggles for recognition and representation that you study still manifest in the structure of the World Cup today? Have those "bumpy roads" been smoothed out, or have they evolved into new battles?

Alozie: Smoothed in some places, rerouted in others. The most visible gains are real: African federations went from fighting for a single guaranteed berth in 1970 to nine slots in the 2026 expanded tournament. But gains in tournament access have not translated evenly into gains in institutional power, and that gap is where the contemporary battles are being fought. The terrain has shifted from representation to resources - how broadcasting revenues are distributed, which national programs receive FIFA development investment, and who holds meaningful authority within FIFA's governance structures beyond the voting booth. African federations have numbers; converting those numbers into proportional economic and institutional influence is the unfinished work. What my research makes clear is that these are not new battles; they are the same argument, updated. The language has changed, the architecture of exclusion has adapted, but the underlying demand, to be counted as full and equal participants in the global game, is continuous with everything I am reading in the archives from sixty years ago.

Why is it important to recover and center African voices within the history of global football governance?

Alozie: Because the standard narrative is not just incomplete - it misrepresents how the modern game actually developed. For much of FIFA's history, African actors were cast as peripheral figures, even though they were actively shaping outcomes through lobbying, petitions, boycotts and coalition-building. The 1966 boycott, for instance, reflected sustained political engagement by newly independent African states challenging inequitable representation and governance structures. The archival record shows Africans were strategic political agents who understood FIFA's contradictions and leveraged them to force change, from voting reforms to World Cup expansion, while raising enduring questions about fairness and inclusion. Centering these voices also reframes the present: Today's debates about expansion, resources, and representation are continuations of long-standing African claims. Recovering this history is therefore not just inclusion; it is accuracy, and a clearer understanding of how global football was actually built.

Looking for more World Cup insight? Read our companion Q&A with PSU communication scholar Tanner Cookeon media, fandom and host cities.