The first observation is that it is rare for adversaries to compete in the same tournament. Across 23 World Cups, the percent of potential team pairings that involve adversaries in an active conflict has never topped 1.1 percent. The proportion of potential adversarial matchups was highest in the 1982 World Cup, which took place during the Falklands War.
The luck of the draw has brought protagonists into direct competition only four times in World Cup history, and the results are memorably infused with political symbols even if diplomatic breakthroughs go unachieved. The match between East and West Germany at the 1974 World Cup would be the only time the two Germanies would square off against one another before unification with East Germany, resulting in one of the biggest upsets in World Cup history. The 1986 match between Argentina and England became the prism through which both sides remembered the Falklands War and sparked an intense rivalry thereafter. The 1998 World Cup match provided a brief moment of goodwill in an otherwise antagonistic U.S.-Iran relationship. The two teams broke with protocol to take a combined team picture, and the U.S. team received white roses from the Iranian team, a Persian symbol of peace. The 2022 World Cup match between the United States and Iran became the stage for a show of resistance against Tehran when members of the Iranian national team refused to sing the country's national anthem, in support of anti-regime protestors at home.
Today, even with wars in Europe and the Middle East underway, the 2026 World Cup, co-hosted by the United States, remains a low-conflict field, with active adversaries making up 0.35 percent of the 48-team field. All four adversarial pairs in this year's tournament landed in different groups, so none can meet before the knockout rounds, and most likely never will. Iran and the United States are actively at war today but are not likely to face one another at the tournament, though a meeting in the knockout rounds is not impossible. Even before the games kick off on June 11, however, politics can still rear its head—the Iran soccer federation complained that FIFA had pulled its fan-ticket allocation for its three U.S. matches and that Washington had rescinded visas for some of its officials.
By raw count, 2026 has more adversary pairs, four, than any World Cup before it. But according to our data, even as the World Cup has grown in size from 13 teams to 48, larger and larger tournaments have not meant proportionally more adversary pairs; the share of adversarial matchups has held flat at roughly 0.3 percent, well below the 1982 peak. This says more about who qualifies than it does about the world: Teams reach the World Cup on footballing strength. The surprise is not that the world has grown calmer, because it has not, but that the World Cup field so rarely reflects the conflicts.
What this data does not account for is the use of sport sanctions, usually in the form of competition bans, that reduce the number of adversarial matchups on the field. In the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, the Soviet Union and Hungary clashed in the men's semifinal in water polo, famously termed the “blood in the water match,†which occurred just weeks after the Soviet invasion of Hungary. The dominant potential for peaceful matchups on the football pitch has been driven by the banning of revisionist actors from competition, for example, the Soviet Union in 1974, Yugoslavia in 1994, and Russia in 2026.
Figure 2 shows the adversary matrix for the 2026 World Cup, including all 48 teams. The field holds only four potential adversary pairs: Iran v. United States, Iran v. Saudi Arabia, Iran v. Qatar, and Morocco v. Algeria, or 0.35 percent of all possible pairings, still well below the 1982 peak of 1.09 percent.
