The ball keeps rolling : World Cup ends but war does not

As the 2026 FIFA World Cup looks at packed stadiums and a global television audience, another football story has been written. In Gaza, Palestinian goalkeeper Saleem Khader Al Ashkar was killed in an Israeli strike while trying to secure food for his family, becoming one of five hundred footballers the Palestinian Football Association says have lost their lives since the war began. Iranian players had found themselves navigating the politics of conflict in the USA. They represented two realities at once. Football has always travelled with conflict. It marched with armies in two World Wars, divided nations in the Balkans, reunited Rwanda and Liberia, and today continues to shape the lives of children growing up in places where war arrives long before opportunity. If the World Cup celebrates the game at its grandest, its history is equally written in refugee camps, bombed neighbourhoods and forgotten playgrounds.

In the stands, one man, Michel Nkuka Mboladinga, refused to move for ninety minutes, his stillness echoing the memory of Patrice Lumumba, whose dream of an independent Congo outlived his assassination. Sometimes, football does not merely celebrate a nation—it remembers the one it is still trying to become.

For decades, countries like the Democratic Republic of the Congo have been defined less by the games their children play and more by the wars they inherit. Armed groups have fought over territory and the richest deposits of cobalt, coltan and gold, turning villages into frontlines and displacing millions. Childhoods have unfolded against the backdrop of checkpoints, militias and flight. Yet, amid the debris of their own homes and the destruction, another ritual refuses to disappear. Somewhere in a clearing, on a patch of uneven earth, with dust and mud all over, a football begins to roll. There are no manicured pitches, no roaring crowds—only children who, for a few fleeting moments, could suspend the weight of a conflict they did not choose. The game does not erase the war. It merely insists that childhood has not surrendered to war.

This image is not unique to Congo. It finds itself across Afghanistan, Sudan, in refugee camps across Africa and Palestine, and in countless communities where violence has interrupted life. Long before footballers stand beneath the floodlights of a FIFA World Cup, many encounter football in places where survival, rather than sport, defines everyday existence and endurance. After all, what is seen on the football ground is often a reflection of the inherent conflicts and contradictions of modern societies.

The stories that emerge from these battlefields are often told as tales of resilience. But they invite a deeper question—one that stretches far beyond any tournament or trophy: why does football keep returning to societies where so much else has been destroyed? Why, after war demolishes homes, schools and institutions, does a ball so often become one of the first things to move through gunned-down terrain?

The story of Eduardo Camavinga (French Central Midfielder) resonates with this. Born in a refugee camp in Angola to parents who had fled the conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, his earliest inheritance was displacement rather than stability. His family sought refuge in France when he was two, only to lose their home years later in a devastating fire that reduced everything they owned to ashes. You are the hope of this family, his father told him. Football, from that moment on, ceased to be merely a childhood pastime; it became a promise. The child whose family had escaped one catastrophe and endured another would grow into one of world football's brightest midfielders, carrying with him a history that began not in a football academy, but in exile.

Camavinga's journey echoes those of Luka Modrić and Victor Moses, thousands of miles away from each other, shaped by different conflicts yet connected by the same thread. Modrić's childhood was interrupted by the Croatian War of Independence, forcing his family into displacement as football became a fragile refuge amid uncertainty. Moses was eleven when religious violence in Kaduna claimed both his parents, leaving him to rebuild his life as an orphaned asylum seeker in Britain before football offered a sense of continuity. Their stories are often celebrated as triumphs over adversity. Yet they reveal something more—across continents and generations, war has repeatedly interrupted childhood, while football has repeatedly become one of the few things children carry with them across borders, battlefields, languages and loss.

Perhaps soccer is one of the basic ways in which conditions of radical desocialisation can be reversed. Indeed, children who had been forced to fight in the war at the beginning of their lives began to use football as the means of integration following the war.

Why Does Football Always Come Back?

History shows us that football has rarely existed outside politics. Under Japanese rule, Koreans found in the game a rare space to assert a suppressed national identity. In Nazi-annexed Austria, Matthias Sindelar's legacy came to embody resistance to dictatorship. Across Latin America, football became a vehicle through which working-class and racially marginalised communities imagined freedom, mobility and race. The likes of Pelé and Garrincha transformed it into a symbol of aspiration.

During the two World Wars, football wove itself into military life—not merely as recreation, but as a means of maintaining discipline, physical fitness and morale among soldiers. The game travelled with armies because commanders understood that even in war, people needed rituals that preserved a sense of normalcy. Yet the same sport that prepared young men for combat would, decades later, become one of the first instruments through which communities would attempt to reclaim peace.

This contradiction runs through the modern history of football. The matches between El Salvador and Honduras during the 1969 World Cup qualifiers reflected the ethnic tensions that would later erupt into war, claiming around 6,000 lives. In Korea, football became a diplomatic language between divided states. In Liberia, Sierra Leone, Rwanda and Côte d'Ivoire, community football was deliberately used after civil wars to reconnect children torn apart by violence—not because the game could erase political grievances, but because it created one of the few shared public spaces where new political narratives could take shape. Scholars of sport repeatedly caution against romanticising this. Football cannot negotiate ceasefires or rebuild institutions. It does something quieter: it restores routines, trust and the possibility of living together again.

The contradiction has not disappeared. It is unfolding in real time. Since October 2023, in Palestine, even amid the devastation, local clubs and football officials have insisted on restarting youth leagues wherever possible, describing the effort not simply as rebuilding sport but as rebuilding the human.

Perhaps that is why football keeps returning. Not because it is stronger than war, nor because it heals wounds. It returns because war dismantles institutions while leaving behind few human ways to gather, to play and to imagine a future larger than survival. Long before parliaments regain public trust or borders cease to be contested, children begin marking goalposts with stones, passing a worn-out ball between themselves and reclaiming the rhythms that violence had tried to suspend.

Yet football's endurance tells only half the story. The game does not simply return after war; it also reshapes what people return to. Across the last century, football has travelled with empires, armies and nation-states, carrying ideas of loyalty, identity and belonging wherever it went. Colonial administrations introduced it as a civilising pastime, militaries embraced it to sustain morale in wartime, and newly independent nations later reclaimed it as a language of selfhood. If war fractures the meaning of home, football often becomes one of the first places where that idea finds expression again—not through treaties, but through shared colours, familiar chants and a badge stitched onto a jersey.

That is why the stories of footballers shaped by conflict cannot be read simply as stories of sporting success. They are also stories about migration, exile and memory. Many of the players who eventually stand beneath a national flag first encountered the nation in a far more uncertain form—as a place they fled, a homeland remembered through their parents, or an identity reconstructed in exile. In football, representing a country is rarely just an act of citizenship. For many, it is an attempt to answer a far older and more difficult question: where, after war, does one grow older to find freedom and a flag?

The Refugee Jersey Beyond Resilience

Every World Cup is shaped as much by those absent as those who compete. Russia remained excluded from the 2026 tournament, Iran's participation unfolded under the shadow of geopolitical tensions, and in Gaza, hundreds of footballers have been killed, according to the Palestinian Football Association, their careers ending long before they could imagine a World Cup. For every refugee who found a jersey, countless others were lost. The tournament celebrates survivors. War is remembered by those who never reached the pitch.

The final whistle on 19 July will bring the 2026 FIFA World Cup to a close. The stadiums will empty, the champions will be crowned, and another tournament will pass into football history. Yet history itself refuses to end with a trophy. Somewhere in eastern Congo, Gaza, Sudan, or another place where conflict continues to redraw life, another ball will begin to roll across uneven ground. Another child will mark goalposts with stones, gather friends on an empty street, and play a game that has outlived empires, survived world wars, crossed refugee camps, and returned to cities long after the guns fell silent. Whether that child ever wears a national jersey is unknowable. Most never will. History remembers only a handful. It forgets countless others whose games ended with displacement, poverty, or death before they ever reached a stadium. And yet, the ball keeps rolling. Not because football defeats war. But because, long before nations rebuild institutions, before borders settle into maps, and before politics finds reconciliation, children reclaim something quieter: the act of play. That may be football's oldest victory—not that it survives history, but that it returns wherever humanity begins again.