However, for many people watching, including die-hard fans at WACC’s general secretariat, it will be hard to escape the feeling that something essential about the game may have been lost along the way.

At its heart, football is perhaps the most democratic game humanity has invented. All it requires is a ball, a patch of ground, and a few friends. It is played in the streets of Montevideo, on the beaches of Accra, in the narrow alleys of Naples, and on the dusty lots of Kathmandu. It is a game of neighbourhoods: children play on the corner, neighbours gather to watch and share a drink, and rivalries form between barrios.

In this sense, football fosters something precious: belonging, shared meaning, a local social fabric, and healthy competition. For Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano, whose book El fútbol a sol y sombra (Soccer in Sun and Shadow) is one of football’s greatest chronicles, the essence of the game was playing for the pure joy of playing, the way a child plays with a balloon. He even dedicated his book to children he once met coming home from a match, singing that whether they won or lost, they had fun all the same.

But Galeano also told the other story of the sport. He showed how football became “a sad journey from pleasure to duty” as the game became an industry where profit became central.

This year’s World Cup illustrates this point like no other tournament so far. For the first time, FIFA has introduced dynamic pricing, and tickets for the final were reselling through FIFA’s own system for around USD10,000, with prices going for much higher through informal reselling markets.  The pricing practices provoked such outrage that the attorneys general of New York and New Jersey even opened a joint investigation into the matter.

Also, this year’s tournament will also be a tournament marked by immigration enforcement, with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) having arrested at least 167,000 people in and around the 11 US host cities between January 2025 and March 2026, and more than 120 civil rights organizations issuing a travel advisory warning that fans, players, and journalists could face serious rights violations during matches in the United States.

From WACC’s perspective, the story of football holds up a mirror to the power dynamics surrounding today’s communication ecosystem. The late Michael Traber, a Swiss communication and journalism scholar and WACC laureate, argued that communication is inscribed in human nature. For him, language is the shared house in which we live and communication a human need “as basic as food, clothing and shelter.”

Traber was convinced that without communication, there is no community. There is no talking to your neighbour, no knowing what is happening in your town, no coming together around common ideas, no acting collectively to meet shared concerns.

In this regard, communication, like street football, is how social fabric gets woven, how belonging and meaning are made at the most local and human level. And, like football, communication has been hijacked by a commercial, for-profit logic.

Media systems that should bring people together and act in the public interest are now designed to capture our attention and sell it to advertisers. Digital platforms and their obscure algorithms reward outrage and polarization instead of promoting social cohesion and belonging. Much of today’s media landscape does not help communities build shared meaning from the ground up. Rather, it replicates power dynamics and turns the most human of processes into a machine for selling.

For WACC, the parallel with football is clear. In both cases, something that belongs to everyone has been captured, commodified, and sold back to us, and in forms that no longer build community.

However, neither story has to end this way. In his writings, Galeano recalled several moments of resistance to the dominant profit-driven model, like the famous case of the Brazilian club Corinthians, led by the mythical footballer Sócrates, that was run democratically by its players in the early 1980s.

Communication has its equivalent examples of resistance, like the hundreds of community radio stations, feminist communication collectives, and digital rights groups that WACC has spent decades supporting, and whose work is pivotal for democracy and social justice.

These experiences prove that another logic is possible, one where communication organized around community rather than profit, participation rather than consumption, and dialogue rather than confrontation becomes the norm.

Therefore, while we at WACC will be watching the World Cup, we will also try to remember that football belongs to the street much like communication belongs to the community. Recovering this grassroots, neighbourhood-based, profoundly human understanding of communication is critical not only for democracy but also for building a life that is worth living where we can all flourish.

We hope you will join us in reclaiming communication – and football for that matter! – as a common good.

Top image: (left) Children playing soccer in northern Ethiopia. Photo by Ericjohnsonvik/CC BY-SA 4.0. (right) A member of the Pickwe Ikh Indigenous community in Colombia during training in communication and free technologies. The Common School, hosted by WACC partner PAKKIRU, equipped communities to document the environmental and social impact that mining and similar activities have on their territories. Photo by PAKKIRU.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, arguably one of the most challenging crises humanity has faced in recent decades, we have seen just how critical transparent media and communication structures that serve the public interest are. The crisis has made us remember that access to information and communication platforms saves lives and helps keep decision-makers accountable, particularly at a time when important decisions have sometimes been made without public input.

It is also worth remembering, however, that at the root of communication rights, there is a much more human argument. It understands communication as an expression of both our individuality and our need for connectedness, and it invites us all to build community, affirm human solidarity, and foster belonging. And it is precisely in this understanding of communication that true transformational power lies.

During the pandemic, we have seen countless examples of solidarity and citizen efforts to support one another. For example, UNAIDS, the United Nations’ Agency tasked with tackling the development impacts of HIV/AIDS, recently shared a series of examples of solidarity during the Covid-19 lockdowns in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. They included a neighbourhood-based initiative that has kept 600 Armenian families from falling into poverty, a Moldovan initiative to provide retroviral drugs to people living with HIV, and a Kyrgyzstani online platform to help local charities coordinate their actions.[i]

WACC’s own research among its community media partners around the world showed that during the pandemic, in addition to using robust journalistic practices to ensure accuracy, and creative ways to address misinformation directly with their listeners and readers, many community media outlets had become critical platforms for people organizing food collection and delivery aimed at those left without an income.

As many parts of the world prepare for a second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, and as people’s frustration with possible new confinement and lockdown measures grows, we should all remember that the only way out of this crisis is to support one another and practice solidarity. This will necessarily entail moving beyond the expressions of collective support we have seen so far, which have of course helped us get through the first phase of the crisis, and towards citizen-led social movements that enable us to, together, build back a more just, environmentally sustainable, and inclusive world.

And for this to happen, we will need communication platforms and structures that allow connectedness and community building to thrive—a radically different form of communication to today’s market-driven, individualistic, and data-hungry model.

[i] https://www.unaids.org/en/resources/presscentre/featurestories/2020/july/20200728_insta_show

Photo above: Iryna Inshyna/Shutterstock