The United as One bid, for the United States, Mexico, and Canada to co-host the 2026 FIFA World Cup, articulated visions of harmony and peace through football and sought to counter Donald Trump’s divisive discourse. However, the event has also become a tool for the US President’s geopolitical ‘power plays’ and authoritarian populism, while Canada and Mexico contend with threats to sovereignty and economic challenges from their dominant co-host. In this charged political context, a new research project explores how (geo)political instability and tension around the World Cup shape media audience experiences in Canada and Mexico, the two smaller players in the bid which have distinct political, media, and sports systems. The aim is to develop and test a new theoretical framework for understanding the soft power of such events in a context of power dynamics between centre and relative periphery.

Titled “Soft 'power play' at the 2026 FIFA World Cup: Audience perspectives in contexts of political conflict,” the project received the AUFF Nova grant in December 2025. It is led by Principal Investigator Prof. Kirsten Frandsen and postdoctoral fellows Cecilia Arregui Olivera and Vitaly Kazakov, all from the Media and Journalism Studies Department at Aarhus University.

Theoretically, the project combines interdisciplinary insights from sports diplomacy, emotion-driven politics, mediatization, and media systems theory to analyse mediatized political tensions in sports mega-events. The qualitative research design combines media framing analysis of mainstream media and fieldwork with Canadian and Mexican media audiences during the 2026 World Cup. This includes observations and focus group interviews with 3-4 groups watching live games, representing varying levels of engagement—from dedicated football fans, mainstream interest, and politically engaged. Follow-up interviews, surveys on their event-related media diet, and data donation of their digital communication flows will further enrich the findings.