Pakistan, June 13 -- Mexico's 2-0 win over South Africa at the Azteca gave the 2026 FIFA World Cup the release it badly needed. For 90 minutes, the tournament could look like what FIFA sells so well: colour, noise, flags, spectacle and shared emotion. Yet the first whistle did not dissolve the question that shadowed the build-up. If this is the biggest and most inclusive World Cup in history, why has access to it already begun to look conditional?

That is the real issue. Not whether politics should enter sport. That argument belongs to a more innocent age, if such an age ever existed. The World Cup has always been political, carrying national prestige, commercial power, race, migration, television money, soft power and security anxieties...