2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup - Paradoxes in a Story that Paradoxically Wasn’t Told

 

1248 players from 48 countries participated in the FIFA Men’s World Cup 2026. Not one of them was publicly gay. That single fact is the real story of this year's Men's World Cup — and paradoxically nobody told it.

A World Cup of Stories – The FIFA Men’s World Cup held in Mexico, US and Canada was one that had some wonderful stories.

     Stories of Hope - The exploits of Cape Verde put a nation of 5 million on the map and brought smiles to millions. The heroics of their 41-year-old Goalkeeper Vozinha who worked as a bus driver and an electrician earlier in his life, gave hope to millions that “nothing is impossible”.

    Stories of Joy – The Tartan Army (Scotland’s fans) provided immense joy to the Boston area including ensuring that the pubs ran dry one weekend, quite literally. They also ensured that their flight from Scotland ran out of beer!!

     Stories of the Power of Influencers – Tim Payne, the New Zealand footballer went from having 4000 followers on Instagram to nearly 5 million in a matter of days. The reason behind it was Argentine influencer Valen Scarsini, known as "El Scarso," who called Payne the "least known" player at the World Cup and asked his fans to boost his following.  

Even without getting into the political shenanigans around visas there were enough stories that were not uplifting.

Stories of the Invisible Hand – Folarin Balogun of the US, got a red card for a foul on Tarik Muharemović during the game against Bosnia Herzegovina. It mysteriously got rescinded before the next game against the Belgians after the President of the United States asked the President of FIFA to “review” the decision.

Stories of Greed – The “hydration breaks” were widely derided by the fans as being an attempt to allow broadcasters to monetise more time. And then there was the issue of insanely high stadium ticket prices and even more ridiculously priced public transport.

The Story that Wasn’t Told – I had followed the previous edition of the FIFA Women’s World Cup in 2023 very closely. So, I noticed a story that was missing at the 2026 Men’s World Cup.

There were a lot of stories around LGBTQ+ in the last Women’s World Cup. By contrast, at the Men’s World Cup, the conversation around LGBTQ+ was conspicuous by its absence with the exception of the conversation around the pride match being held between Egypt and Iran – two countries where homosexuality is outlawed.

According to Outsports, 13% of all players in the 2023 Women’s World Cup were publicly out as being Lesbian, Bi-sexual, Trans or Queer. In addition, the head coaches of Brazil (Pia Sundhage), Canada (Bev Priestman) and Norway (Hege Riise) were also publicly members of the LGBTQ+ community. 22 of the 32 teams had at least one player belonging to the LGBTQ+ community and 8 of the captains are from the community. 8 out of the 23-person English squad was a lesbian or bisexual. These are amazingly statistics for a competition at the highest level especially considering these do not include players who are not publicly out and accounting for the fact that homosexuality is still illegal in a number of the countries that played in the World cup. 

There were a number of couples playing for different countries – Sam Kerr (Australia) & Kristie Mewis (US); Ellie Carpenter (Australia) & Danielle van de Donk (Netherlands); Pernille Harder (Denmark) & Magdelena Eriksson (Sweden); Ann-Katrin Bergen (Germany) & Jess Carter (England).

A study done by IPSOS in 2021 across 27 countries found that 3% identified as gay or lesbian while 4% identified as bisexual. Each of the 48 countries fielded 26 players. Using the IPSOS estimate of 3%, there should be around 37 gay players representing the 48 countries. Even if we remove the players from the 14 countries where being gay is illegal, we would expect 19 players to be gay. Alas, there is not one single player who has come out as being gay.

Unpeeling the Paradox –We live in a world where there is seemingly an openness to accepting the LGBTQ+ community. Research from Pew Research and Gallup would suggest this to be the case.

Football, especially during a World Cup, is a microcosm of the world as almost everyone watches it (22% claimed to watch Football only during major tournaments like World Cup). So, football gives us a microcosm to pressure test this assertion of openness to accepting the LGBTQ+ community.

I partnered with the team at Bolt Insight to unpeel this onion. This is a complex issue where no one research methodology by itself would give us the full picture. So, we used a combination of Quantitative research, Social Listening and Qualitative research. Given the sensitive nature of the conversation, we used AI moderation for the Qualitative research. We did this across three countries UK, US and Brazil with a quantitative sample size of 3000, 150 Qualitative AI interviews moderated by an AI and Social listening that analysed more than 89,500 posts.

The Paradoxes – To start with we looked at the hypothesis that maybe there are no gay players in men’s football and the hypothesis does not hold true.  

Men identifying as LGBTQ+Q+	UK (%)	Brazil (%)	US (%)
Football Players	9	11	7
Non-player	15	14	13

 As unpeeled the paradox, we uncovered five paradoxes.  

·     Paradox of Progress – 92% said it should be safe for a male football player to come out as gay. Yet only 15% encouraged him to come out now. This is unsurprising since the social media sentiment is overwhelmingly negative as exemplified by the post below on X.

In the abstract there is acceptance and a veneer of progress on acceptance. But the reality is that safety doesn’t exist yet. Which is probably why we don’t see a single player in any of the European top leagues being openly Gay.

“Fans will target whatever gets a reaction.” Football fanatic

“If it was that easy, there would already be loads of players out.” Football fanatic

“The fact that nobody does it tells you what players think would happen.” LGBTQ+ participant

People are saying “I have progressed but the world has not” which suggests that progress is more performative than internalized.

Paradox of Acceptance – 89% of people say they are comfortable with a player being gay but only 28% believe other fans are comfortable with a player being gay.

 “I wouldn’t care personally, but you know some fans would use anything.” Football fanatic

“Football likes the idea of inclusion more than the reality of it.” LGBTQ+ participant

People are saying “I am accepting but others are not” which suggests that a lack of acceptance at the subconscious level. 

Paradox of Support – 89% say they are comfortable with a gay player at their favorite football club. 80% say they would in public support a player to come out. However, in private only 14% would support. 45% believe coming out as gay would impact the career of the player negatively. Those who support publicly but not privately would say “wait for the right moment” or “wait till your career is over” or “its your decision, I’m not so sure”.

“I would tell him that it's an opportunity to support other gay people who also like football, but that he would have to think about how this would affect his career, due to prejudice in the male world.” Football fan

“As much as I defend the cause, I would recommend that he not go out and tell the world, as it would bring him and his career a great deal of disdain from colleagues, fans, and national teams.” Football fan

People are saying “I support you” but the support is shallow. They are supportive of the player being gay but not supportive of them coming out as being gay.  

Paradox of Fame – For a male football player, coming out as Gay, it becomes his whole identity. It completely changes the narrative, and becomes the headline. It’s no longer about skills or performance; it’s about his sexuality. In essence, sexuality would replace skills as the story.

 “It’s not that everyone would be openly horrible. It’s that it becomes a thing all the time.”​ Male footballer

“It wouldn’t just be football anymore. Every interview would be about that.” Male footballer

“I’d be more worried about the crowd, the tabloids, and social media than one or two teammates.” LGBTQ+ participant

“Once you come out, you can’t control how the game talks about you.” LGBTQ+ participant

“It’s not just your own supporters. It’s every away ground, every comment section.” Football fanatic

 People are saying “You will become famous” but they mean you will be infamous as “the one who came out”.

Paradox of Stereotypes – The contrast between acceptance of lesbians in the women’s game and rejection of gays from the men’s game is palpable. It’s a testament to how women’s football has accepted LGBTQ+ athletes as many of these players are stars in their countries and we don’t see many big “coming-out” moments.

Women’s football is known to have public displays of affection amongst couples. The scene of Kristie Mewis consoling Sam Kerr after the US beat Australia to the Bronze in the Tokyo Olympics broke the internet. We did have similar scenes during the last Women’s World Cup. In addition, we had a scene from a romantic novel when Ruesha Littlejohn (Ireland) refused to shake hands with Caitlin Ford (Australia) because she had gone on holiday with her ex.

The men’s game seems to operate under a different set of (unwritten) rules to the women’s game. To play in the men’s game there is an, unwritten, expectation that you need to suppress emotions. You need to be tough, be masculine and ideally be a womanizer. 77% of fans agree that male footballers need to be tough, confident and emotionally controlled.

“He has to be a strong man, he can't show vulnerability, he can't show weakness. He has to be like a rock, without feelings.” BR, Female Fan

“The rules are that they have to act like "men," without showing feminine mannerisms, without showing fragility.” — LGBTQ+, Male participant

“Football is still very much ‘be a man,’ ‘be tough,’ ‘don’t show weakness.” Male footballer

“Being gay gets read as not fitting that image, even if that makes no sense.” LGBTQ+ participant

People are saying “You can be you” but they mean as a football player “You can be you, as long as you conform to the macho male stereotype”.

Implications for brands – Any cultural or societal fault line is an opportunity for brands to step in — and the paradoxes above offer several different angles to do it. The aim should be to make coming out as gay, as a male footballer, "non-newsworthy" — normalized rather than remarkable. One way to do this could be to decouple identity from performance, making sure football remains the story. The other could be with nudges to indicate omnipresence of acceptance.

However, campaigns treated as a single creative moment — including tokenistic gestures like a rainbow armband — are unlikely to move the needle, and are the most exposed to backlash. Brands that treat this as ongoing infrastructure instead — grants, allyship programs, recurring campaigns — are better placed to absorb it. Rainbow Laces' 2026 shift from a single annual matchday activation to a sustained, longer-term footing is a case worth drawing inspiration from.

What does this mean for the World of Insights – There are three learnings for insights

·     1. Always have a Human in the Loop – The absence of the story on LGBTQ+ at the world cup was not spotted by an LLM. The “unexpected surprises” like Febreeze’s insight that “A messy home can be clean but a smelly home cannot be clean” will only come from humans observing things (in Febreeze’s case people’s homes). AI has a role to play in the research process but it needs to be human led, AI enabled.

2. Use AI led moderation for sensitive topics – For sensitive topics like sexual orientation, people are more comfortable speaking to a “bot” than they are to speaking with trained moderators. A good AI moderator should be able to ensure that you are able to probe appropriately. What we lose in terms of depth of probing, we more than make up for in the generosity of responses.

3. Use variety of methodologies and sources – The best insights come from looking at a variety of methodologies and sources. Each methodology has its strength and weaknesses but when looked together across methodologies you are able to paint a more holistic picture.

 

My Sincere Thanks to Vatsala and Melek from Bolt Insight for their partnership on the research.

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