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How The World Cup Builds Nations<br>Football may seem like just entertainment, but it helps build national identities.

Nominal News<br>Jul 01, 2026

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We’re in the midst of the 2026 World Cup, with the first matches of the round of 32 now being played. As football fans worldwide know, the World Cup is an emotional event, with victories bringing immense joy to countries. I got to experience it first hand on the streets of New York – during a recent Egypt victory, the streets in Astoria erupted with celebrations. But, it turns out that the impact of football games may be more than just short-lived celebratory moments. Winning football matches may help with reducing ethnic tensions and boosting nationhood within countries.

Photo by Krzysztof Dubiel on Unsplash<br>Building Nations Through Shared Experiences: Evidence from African Football

Football has been anecdotally known to unite nations – the qualification of Ivory Coast to the 2006 World Cup is considered to be one of the reasons the First Ivorian Civil War came to an end. Depetris-Chauvin, Durante and Campante (2020) (“DDC ”) decided to investigate how the performance of national teams in sub-Saharan Africa impacted citizens’ perspectives on ethnicities within their country and how it impacted ethnic violence.<br>Ethnic Perceptions Data<br>To look at the ethnic perceptions within the sub-Saharan countries, DDC used the Afrobarometer, which is a set of nationally representative surveys covering many African countries. The Afrobarometer is conducted in local languages and includes various questions on attitudes towards democracy, political actors, markets, and civil society. The questions DDC focused on asked about the individual’s identification towards the nation compared to their own ethnic group. To give an example of how attitudes change over time over ethnic vs. national identification, DDC showed the graph below:

The graph shows the fraction of people that identified more closely with their ethnicity than their nationality. In 2002, 30% of Malians identified themselves based on their ethnicity rather than the Malian nationality. Interestingly, the share dropped in 2013, when Mali achieved their highest finish in the African Cup of Nations (AFCON). Similarly, Zambia saw a drop in ethnic identification when they won the AFCON in 2012.<br>Football Matches Data<br>The main matches looked at by DDC involved games related to the African Cup of Nations (AFCON), the main African tournament, and the World Cup. To study the impact of matches on people’s identification, DDC looked at situations when the Afrobarometer interviews, by coincidence, were conducted between 15 days before or 15 days after one of these matches.<br>Results<br>If a person was interviewed after a victory of their national team, the individual was 5.3 percentage points less likely to state a strong sense of ethnic identity than a similar person (an individual of the same language group) that was interviewed in the 15 day window before the victory. This is a 37 percent reduction in the average probability of identifying as ethnic rather than as a national. Interestingly, if the national team drew or lost the game, there was no difference in ethnic identification. DDC conducted several other tests with the following results:<br>Defeating a ‘traditional’ rival further reduced ethnic identification;

Whether the match was played at home or away did not matter;

A victory in a friendly match did not matter;

Larger victories did not matter;

The total number of goals in the game did not matter;

If the composition of the winning national team was more diverse, ethnic identification was reduced.

This last point suggests that team diversity in itself can be an important determinant of national unity.<br>Reduced Interethnic Tensions<br>The above results focused on self-identification. So how did perceptions of others change? The Afrobarometer asked questions about trust in others within your country. DDC found that trust in fellow countrymen increased by 6.3 percentage points after a win of their national team. Even more promisingly, trust in people of other ethnicities in the country goes up by even more – by around 14 percentage points. This is a 30 percent increase in interethnic trust.<br>Hostility to Others?<br>The above evidence suggests that winning matches has real impacts on national unity, as people view other ethnicities more positively, and self-identify with the nation more than their own ethnicity. But could this positivity be driven by increased hostility to foreigners? Turns out, probably not. The Afrobarometer also asked questions about attitudes towards...