World Cup Thoughts 2026

Football, or soccer depending on where you live, carries great lessons for life. More than just about any other popular sport, it lives in the uncertainties of life. Until the advent of VAR, it relied completely on a flawed human perspective to judge what happened in the game. If the referees didn’t see something, it didn’t happen. This led to exaggerated and performative reactions from players. It is hard to tell if someone gets injured, playing as they do without much protective gear, or if they are simply trying to argue the case for a foul that might have gone unnoticed.

More than that aspect, however, is the way that football is a lesson in dealing with the disappointments in life. Your team is often going to lose. There are very few teams that succeed reliably. This makes the victories more precious, but it also helps fans understand that life is not always going to go their way.

The atmosphere around World Cup 2026 felt pretty different, though. Now that there is video review for a lot of play, fan culture has begun to treat failure differently. Instead of acceptance, there is justification. Instead of disappointment, there is an embrace of conspiracy theory and corruption. It may be that FIFA is a flawed, corrupt organization, but that is not why your team lost!

All of this reinforces something I have thought about football for decades. It is a great eye opener to our desire for justice and truth. All the complaints about referees not seeing something. The examples are ageless: Every goal disallowed due to flawed perspectives. Every handball goal allowed. It all shows us that we do not like the fact that our world is flawed. We do not want good to go unrecognized. We do not want people to get away with wrong. Unless, perhaps, when it comes to us. We tend to give ourselves more grace than we do others.

And this all underscores a key biblical theme. We want the world to be repaired. We want truth and justice to reign. But we don’t want to be held to a perfect standard, because none of us can measure up. We need the holiness, justice, and yet grace of the cross that allows for a perfect correction of the world’s wrongs to be carried out that does not destroy us in the process. We need things to be made right, starting with us.