From the Ashes: What the World Cup Teaches Us About Development When the Money Runs Out
By Zachary Manning | Director, The Diwan Institute for Humanity
The 2026 FIFA World Cup made history—and not only on the pitch. For the first time ever, ten nations from the Middle East and North Africa qualified for the tournament: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iran, and Türkiye. Ten teams, ten stories, and a combined statement about what decades of investment in human potential can produce.
It is worth pausing on what these ten countries have actually endured to arrive here. Each has been shaped, in some cases repeatedly, by conflict and upheaval over the past several decades. The 2011 Arab Spring and its aftermath touched Tunisia, Egypt, and Iraq and reverberated across the region. The 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq and the years of war and instability that followed reshaped an entire generation of Iraqi life. The October 7, 2023 attacks and the war that followed have cast a long shadow over the region's politics, economics, and security architecture. And the war between the United States, Israel, and Iran that began in February 2026 directly disrupted Iran's own World Cup campaign, as later sections explore in detail. Few regions of the world have absorbed this density and duration of political and economic shock. That ten nations from this region nonetheless built football programs capable of competing on the world's largest sporting stage says something important about resilience, institution-building, and the durability of human ambition even under conditions that would reasonably be expected to foreclose it.
This is not simply a sports story. It is a development story.
The Tournament in Review
Before exploring what these teams reveal about human development, it is worth acknowledging what unfolded on the field.
Morocco have been the region's brightest light. Drawn into Group C alongside five-time champions Brazil, they drew 1-1 with the South Americans, defeated Scotland 1-0, and closed the group stage with a commanding 4-2 victory over Haiti. In the Round of 32, they were pushed to the brink by the Netherlands: Cody Gakpo's 72nd-minute strike held until Issa Diop's stoppage-time header forced extra time, and Morocco prevailed 3-2 on penalties. After defeating Canada in the Round of 16, they were eliminated by France in the quarterfinals.
Egypt put in the tournament's most emotionally charged campaign. After drawing with Belgium 1-1 and defeating New Zealand 3-1—their first World Cup win in 92 years—Egypt drew 1-1 with Iran to advance. They then defeated Australia on penalties in the Round of 32, becoming the first Arab nation to win a knockout match at the World Cup. In the Round of 16, they faced defending champions Argentina, led 2-0 with twelve minutes remaining, and were eliminated 3-2 in one of the tournament's most dramatic and disputed matches.
Iran drew with Belgium 0-0, New Zealand 2-2, and Egypt 1-1—earning three points but finishing third in Group G. They were eliminated in agonizing fashion: a stoppage-time winner against Egypt was ruled out by VAR, and on the final day of group play, Algeria's 3-3 draw with Austria gave Algeria enough points as a third-place team to leapfrog Iran and send Team Melli home.
Algeria fell to Argentina 3-0 in their opener but rallied with a 2-1 win over Jordan before a breathtaking 3-3 draw with Austria saw them through as one of the best third-place teams. They were eliminated by Switzerland in the Round of 32.
Jordan made history simply by arriving. In their World Cup debut, the Nashama lost to Austria 3-1, Algeria 2-1, and Argentina 3-1. The results were difficult, but qualification itself was the milestone.
Iraq, returning to the World Cup for the first time since 1986, lost 4-1 to Norway, 3-0 to France, and 5-0 to Senegal. Eliminated, but their presence alone represented something significant for a country still carrying the weight of decades of conflict.
Saudi Arabia drew 1-1 with Uruguay, lost 4-0 to Spain, and drew 0-0 with Cape Verde. One point was not enough to advance.
Tunisia lost 5-1 to Sweden, 4-0 to Japan, and 3-1 to the Netherlands—eliminated after three defeats.
Qatar drew 1-1 with Switzerland before a 6-0 loss to Canada and a 3-1 defeat to Bosnia and Herzegovina sent them home.
Türkiye lost 2-0 to Australia and 1-0 to Paraguay before producing a stunning 3-2 comeback victory over the United States—too little, too late to advance, but a reminder of the talent in this squad.
Football Is Never Just Football
Every World Cup is a mirror. It reflects not only the sport, but the societies that produced the players standing on that pitch. The national teams we cheer—or quietly root for from across a diaspora—represent the cumulative result of decisions made decades before: the school that stayed open, the youth academy that received funding, the coach who spotted something in a ten-year-old, the family that sacrificed, the remittance that paid for boots and bus fare.
What does it take to produce a national team capable of competing on the world stage? What can humanitarian and development practitioners learn from football? And why do national teams so often reveal more about a people than about their governments?
Human Development Measured in Generations — and What Happens When the Investment Stops
There is a temptation in development circles to measure progress in annual GDP figures or quarterly disbursement reports. Football offers a corrective. The players competing in 2026 are, in large part, the product of investments made a generation ago—in schools, clinics, coaching academies, transportation infrastructure, and family stability. Development is cumulative, and its results rarely appear on the timeline that donors and governments prefer.
This matters enormously right now—because the investment is stopping.
According to the OECD, official development assistance fell by nearly 60 percent from the United States in 2025 alone, reducing American foreign aid to just 0.09 percent of gross national income—the lowest share in decades. Writing in Devex on July 21, 2026, journalist Elissa Miolene described what happened after the Trump administration dismantled USAID: "For months, the same question echoed through congressional offices, nonprofit teams, and United Nations agencies. What, if anything, would replace the largest aid agency in the world? For much of 2025, the answer appeared to be nothing. Programs were canceled, staff were fired, and billions of dollars in foreign assistance were frozen overnight." As of July 1, 2025, USAID officially ceased implementing foreign assistance programs. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that programs aligned with administration policy would henceforth be administered by the State Department, with an explicit shift from what he called a "charity-based model" toward trade and investment.
What has emerged in its place, Miolene reports, is a fragile and fundamentally different architecture: smaller, more transactional, and reliant on what officials describe as "vetted, trusted partners" to deliver what the 10,000-person USAID once did. Sam Vigersky, a former senior humanitarian adviser to the U.S. ambassador to the UN, put it plainly: "After a year of humanitarian free fall, 2025 ended in the great aid recession. We're still in a recession, but there are green shoots emerging from the ashes of USAID."
The collapse is not evenly distributed. The United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan, and France together accounted for roughly 96 percent of the total decline in official development assistance globally, with the United States alone driving about three-quarters of it. The scale of the American retreat was so severe that Germany became the world's largest bilateral aid donor in 2025 for the first time in history—not because Germany increased its giving, but because the United States fell so far so fast.
The consequences for the MENA region have been direct and severe. USAID had for decades funded major health, education, water, and refugee-support programs across Jordan, Iraq, Egypt, and beyond. The replacement architecture—transactional, State Department-administered, built around trusted partners selected for political alignment rather than programmatic track record—is not designed to replicate what USAID did. It is designed to do something different and smaller, guided by a logic of national interest narrowly defined rather than human need broadly construed.
Against this backdrop, the 2026 World Cup offers an uncomfortable but necessary paradox: at the very moment the world's most powerful nation is dismantling its investment in global human development, a tournament is underway that showcases exactly what sustained investment in people, made over decades, can still achieve.
Ten Teams: Ten Development Stories
Morocco: Institutions and Diaspora as Partners
Morocco's journey to the quarterfinals did not happen by accident. The Mohammed VI Football Academy has become one of the continent's premier development institutions. Equally important has been Morocco's diaspora in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Spain—players like Achraf Hakimi, Brahim Díaz, Noussair Mazraoui, and Hakim Ziyech shaped by both Moroccan identity and European professional pathways.
As Kareem Shaheen of Newlines Magazine observes, Morocco and Egypt represent polar opposite development models, and yet both were the tournament's most impressive Arab sides. Morocco's entire starting lineup against Brazil consisted of foreign-born players raised in European leagues who nonetheless chose to represent their ancestral home. Does that make Morocco an Arab team? Their coach Walid Regragui once said Morocco doesn't represent the Arabs, only itself—a comment that raised hackles. And yet, as Shaheen notes, the team's presentation is unmistakably regional in texture: players prostrating after goals, Hakimi's celebrated bond with his mother. Morocco may not claim to speak for the Arab world, but the Arab world claims Morocco regardless.
There is a thread of commentary worth engaging here: the idea that many of Morocco's diaspora-born players were passed over by European national teams—deemed not quite good enough for France, Spain, the Netherlands, or Belgium. It does not hold up evenly across the squad; several stars, including Hakimi, chose Morocco deliberately, out of identity and conviction. But for others, Morocco offered a path that a crowded European pipeline did not. Either way, the result is the same: a federation that built the infrastructure and the invitation to welcome that talent home, and players who turned what might have been a closed door into a World Cup quarterfinal run.
The development lesson is that institutions and diaspora do not compete—they reinforce one another. Remittances from abroad and domestic institutional investment can complement each other. There is no panacea, no singular strategy. It is a fluid system, and Morocco's model embodies that truth. The new U.S. foreign assistance architecture—transactional, bilateral, and hostile to the kind of long-term institution-building that produced the Mohammed VI Academy—cannot replicate it.
Algeria: Human Capital Moves Across Borders
Algeria's relationship with France is one of the most complex in the postcolonial world. The France-Algeria football pipeline—Algerian-origin players navigating French academies before committing to the Desert Warriors—has given Algeria access to some of the continent's best-developed talent. Players like Riyad Mahrez embody this transnational formation. So does Luca Zidane, the 28-year-old goalkeeper who served as Algeria's starter throughout the tournament. Born in Aix-en-Provence, raised partly in Madrid through his father's career at Real Madrid, Luca progressed through French youth teams before switching international allegiance to Algeria—the country of his paternal grandparents, who hail from the Kabylie region. His father, Zinedine Zidane, won the World Cup with France in 1998 and became one of the most celebrated players in football history. His son chose a different path entirely, building his own identity under a different flag. He arrived at the tournament having recovered from a fractured jaw and chin, competing through the final weeks wearing a protective mask.
Algeria's base camp in Lawrence, Kansas—a college town of about 96,000 people centered on the University of Kansas—became one of the tournament's most unexpected human stories. The community embraced the team with an enthusiasm that surprised everyone, including the Algerians. The University of Kansas marching band played the Algerian national anthem. Local artist Stan Herd created an enormous Algerian flag from organic materials on the university grounds. Some 2,500 fans turned out to watch a community training session, and locals adapted the university's famous chant—"Rock Chalk, Jayhawk"—into "Rock Chalk, Algeria." Riyad Mahrez posted simply: "Respect. Thank you for the warm welcome." Coach Vladimir Petkovic admitted he almost shed a tear at the reception. When Algeria's 3-3 draw with Austria secured their knockout berth, Massachusetts Street in Lawrence was packed with fans, flags, and a kind of joy that locals said they had never seen before.
One Kansas City resident named Mollie McAuley captured something larger in the moment: "Watching all of the people from outside of this country coming in and realizing we aren't what you see on the national stage. We are not that. We are kind, we are welcoming, we want you here."
The development lesson: colonial history, whatever its horrors, produced human connections and movement patterns that did not disappear at independence. Migration, shaped by history, can become a source of national capability—and when it flows both ways, as it did in Lawrence, it produces something neither side could have manufactured alone.
Tunisia: Education as the Foundation
Tunisia consistently ranks among Africa's most educated nations, and that investment shows. Despite a difficult group stage in 2026, Tunisia's seventh World Cup appearance reflects the durability of societies where education has been taken seriously. Lessons in a classroom can infiltrate the football pitch—and the workshop, the clinic, and the civil society organization. Education remains one of the most reliable long-term investments a society can make. Its returns compound in ways that rarely appear on the timelines donors prefer. This is precisely the kind of investment that the new U.S. foreign assistance framework, with its emphasis on short-term transactional results, is structurally ill-suited to make.
Egypt: Demographics Become Opportunity Only Through Investment
Egypt has Africa's largest population and one of its youngest. The Pharaohs' 2026 campaign—their deepest ever—shows what can happen when demographic scale is matched with genuine sporting culture, institutional support, and individual talent.
Kareem Shaheen puts the historical weight plainly: Egypt's 3-1 victory over New Zealand was the country's first World Cup win in 92 years of trying—since their debut in Italy in 1934. Then came the penalty shootout victory over Australia: the first time an Arab nation had ever won a knockout match at the World Cup. Each milestone, arriving in sequence over three weeks, produced a cumulative effect across the Arab world that transcended football. Videos circulated of Palestinians gathered outside the ruins of their homes in Gaza, celebrating Egypt's victory over Australia. Arabs from Saudi Arabia to the Levant to Algeria screamed in joy. Shaheen describes being moved to tears by the footage—surprised by his own reaction—finding in it a reminder that what unites the Arab world runs deeper than the calculations of regional geopolitics.
Coach Hossam Hassan added another dimension. At his pre-match press conference before the Argentina match, he implored FIFA to use its soft power to highlight Palestinian suffering and dedicated Egypt's knockout victory to the Egyptian and Palestinian peoples, appearing wrapped in a Palestinian flag. It was a moment that landed with particular weight: a World Cup being hosted in the United States, in a summer when the war in Gaza continued, and on the same day—Shaheen notes with quiet devastation—that Israel killed Mohammed al-Wahidi, an aid worker who had organized screenings of Egypt's matches for displaced Palestinians in Gaza.
Egypt's model differs sharply from Morocco's. The squad is built predominantly from domestic talent. The exception who illuminates the rule is Haissem Hassan—a winger born in France to an Egyptian father and Tunisian mother, who plays club football in Spain but chose to represent Egypt. In the Argentina match, with the score 2-0 and the footballing world in collective disbelief, it was Haissem Hassan who dribbled past two Argentine defenders and provided the assist for Egypt's second goal. His presence in an Egyptian shirt, by deliberate choice, speaks to the same questions of identity and diaspora that run through Morocco's story from the other direction.
And then, twelve minutes from the end, Messi woke up.
What followed—two Messi goals and a third by Enzo Fernández, a disallowed Egyptian goal that Shaheen describes as among the best of the tournament—eliminated Egypt 3-2 in a match that left a complicated emotional residue. Shaheen is clear-eyed about the gap in quality, but the manner of the elimination—a soft foul call that disallowed Egypt's goal while similar contact in Argentina's favor was waved through, an Argentina side that played without a booking despite numerous hard challenges, a coach booked for complaining about racist fan behavior—left the kind of sour taste that does not fully dissolve even in the warmth of what Egypt achieved.
That achievement is real, and historic. Egypt set records that will not be quickly broken. Salah created chances at an extraordinary rate in what may be his final tournament. And the joy this team produced—across Egypt, across the Arab world, in a bombed city in Gaza where people gathered to watch football among the ruins—is itself a form of development evidence. Human hope, expressed collectively through sport, is not a minor thing. It is one of the things development is ultimately for.
Jordan: Resource-Poor, Human Capital-Rich—and Watching the Funding Clock
Jordan's World Cup debut is extraordinary in context. This is a small, resource-poor country that hosts one of the world's highest concentrations of refugees per capita, serving as a regional anchor for displaced populations from Palestine, Iraq, and Syria for decades. That role depends directly on international humanitarian funding—precisely the funding now in freefall.
USAID had been one of Jordan's largest bilateral partners, supporting refugee services, water and sanitation programs, and economic resilience across the kingdom. The dismantling of that architecture has not been replaced by an equivalent. What Miolene's Devex reporting describes as a "smaller and more transactional" approach—administered through "vetted, trusted partners" selected in part for political alignment—is not designed to shoulder the kind of long-term, multi-sector humanitarian presence Jordan requires. Jordan's World Cup qualification tells a story about what focused investment in human potential can yield even in constrained circumstances. But the question it now raises is urgent: as the global humanitarian architecture contracts, can Jordan sustain the institutions—including the social stability that allows sports infrastructure to exist—that made this debut possible?
Iraq: Recovery Itself Is Development
Iraq's return to the World Cup for the first time since 1986 was greeted with celebrations across Baghdad. The Lions of Mesopotamia were eliminated in the group stage, but their presence represents something that transcends any scoreline. A country that has endured war, occupation, sectarian conflict, and ongoing instability has rebuilt enough national coherence to qualify for the world's most competitive sporting event.
Football in Iraq has long served as one of the few spaces where national identity transcends sectarian and ethnic division. The development lesson here is about resilience: recovery is development. The capacity of a society to rebuild collective meaning and aspiration after catastrophe is one of the most important and least measurable forms of human progress. It is also, notably, exactly what the new U.S. foreign assistance model—with its focus on transactional partnerships, strategic alignment, and short-term results measurement—is least equipped to support.
Saudi Arabia: Institutional Investment and Ambition at Scale
Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030 has placed sports at the center of a national transformation strategy—professional league development, international partnerships, stadium construction, and global coaching talent. The group stage results in 2026 were modest, but the trajectory is upward. The development question Vision 2030 poses is one economists debate seriously: can state-directed institutional investment, even in the absence of broader civic freedoms, produce sustainable human development? As Gulf states increasingly step in to fill the funding gaps left by retreating Western donors—including in Jordan, the Palestinian territories, and across the Sahel—Saudi football may not be the most important experiment Vision 2030 is running.
Qatar: Can Globalization Become a Development Strategy?
Qatar's Aspire Academy has been one of the most ambitious experiments in football development in history. The 2022 World Cup was a forcing function for infrastructure development on a remarkable scale. Qatar's group stage exit in 2026 was painful, but their qualification through merit—rather than as hosts—represents genuine progress. The deeper question Qatar poses: by embedding themselves in global networks of expertise, capital, and coaching, can globalization itself serve as a development strategy? As Gulf states fill the vacuum left by the retreat of traditional Western donors, Qatar's model is increasingly relevant beyond football.
Iran: National Identity Survives Political Conflict
No team at the 2026 World Cup carried as much weight—or as much ambiguity—as Team Melli.
According to in-depth reporting by Laurie Whitwell and Jacob Whitehead for The Athletic, the war between the United States, Israel, and Iran forced Iran's federation to relocate its entire training base from Tucson, Arizona, to Tijuana, Mexico—a scramble confirmed only a week before the tournament began. Fourteen Iranian staff members, including senior federation officials, were initially denied U.S. visas. Players were restricted to entering the United States no earlier than a day or two before matches and required to leave immediately afterward. Team captain Mehdi Taremi and an assistant coach were detained for questioning at the border on separate occasions.
FIFA president Gianni Infantino visited Iran's locker room after their opening match and offered warm words before adding, in an attempted joke, that he would come play as an attacker if the coach needed one. The levity did not age well. By the final group match, Taremi had grown openly frustrated, telling reporters it had become "a disaster World Cup" and that Infantino's promises had gone unfulfilled. Head coach Amir Ghalenoei was more pointed still, telling Infantino on camera that he believed Iran had been "the most oppressed team in the history of the World Cup."
Selection controversy compounded the logistical strain. Sardar Azmoun, one of Iran's most prolific scorers, was left off the squad after a social media post seen as critical of the government; he was reportedly told he would need to publicly apologize to the regime to be selected, which he declined to do. A legal dispute reached a Los Angeles courtroom over whether fans could bring pre-revolutionary "Lion and Sun" flags into the stadium. Outside training sessions, protesters gathered to oppose the team while counter-demonstrators defended the federation.
And yet the team played on—drawing with Belgium, New Zealand, and Egypt—before being eliminated not by a defeat, but by Kalajdzic's equalizer for Austria in Kansas City, watched from a hotel room in Tijuana, in the tournament's final seconds. The team left handwritten notes in their dressing rooms after each match about competing with pride and leaving with dignity. In Tijuana, the community embraced them: artists made commemorative shirts blending Iranian and Mexican motifs, business leaders organized a pre-dawn farewell, and a banner outside their training facility read simply, "The Team Without Borders."
Journalist Holly Dagres, who has covered Team Melli with extraordinary depth, has consistently illuminated this complexity: ordinary Iranians are not politically monolithic. Many simply wanted to watch football—to feel, for ninety minutes, the uncomplicated pride of cheering for their team. Most occupied the vast middle ground that political reporting rarely captures.
The development lesson is about identity, and about the asymmetry between elite mobility and the bureaucratic friction that defines ordinary movement across borders. National identity survives political conflict. The Lion and Sun controversy, the competing understandings of what it means to be Iranian, the people of Tijuana opening their city to a team treated with suspicion everywhere else—all of it points to a truth humanitarian practitioners must understand: a people is not its government.
Türkiye: Development at the Intersection
Türkiye's stunning 3-2 win over the United States—too late to advance, but thrilling nonetheless—captured something essential about this team. Sitting at the intersection of Europe and Asia, its football reflects that position: technically sophisticated, physically competitive, tactically hybrid. The Turkish diaspora across Europe has fed talent back into the national system for decades. The development lesson: the most productive environments are often those at cultural intersections.
A Note on Africa: What Expansion Reveals About Access
One statistic from this tournament deserves brief but pointed attention. Africa sent a record ten teams to the 2026 World Cup and nine of those ten advanced to the knockout rounds—obliterating the continent's previous record of two. That leap did not happen because African football quietly became twice as good in four years. It happened because FIFA expanded the tournament from 32 to 48 teams and, in doing so, expanded the qualifying slots available to African nations. A continent that had long produced world-class individual talent—but rarely enough seats at the table to prove it at scale—immediately filled the additional space with competitive, well-organized teams.
This is worth naming plainly. Expanding access, broadening who gets a seat at the table, and building structures that intentionally include historically underrepresented participants are, in some corners of American political discourse, treated as suspect concepts—dismissed as lowering standards. The 2026 World Cup offers a clean natural experiment that suggests otherwise. Given more access, African teams did not dilute the quality of the tournament. The lesson for international development and humanitarian assistance is direct: deliberately expanding access for underrepresented countries and populations is not charity extended at the expense of merit. It is frequently how merit that already exists finally becomes visible.
Migration Is Development
Look across the squads of these ten teams, and a pattern emerges immediately. Morocco's Hakimi grew up in Madrid. Algeria's Mahrez developed at Leicester. Luca Zidane grew up in Spain. Tunisia's Hannibal Mejbri came through Manchester United's academy. Iraq's Ali Al-Hamadi plays for Ipswich Town. Iran's Mehdi Taremi developed at Porto.
A viral moment during the tournament crystallized this reality. A tweet asked what was missing from Saudi Arabia—a country with vast sovereign wealth, a star-studded domestic league, and enormous institutional ambition—that Morocco possesses. The answer that spread across Arab social media was a single phrase: "Illegal migration."
It was tongue-in-cheek, as Shaheen acknowledges. But the joke contained something real. Morocco's diaspora in Europe was not the product of policy design. It was the product of families seeking better opportunities, of workers crossing borders under precarious conditions, of communities building lives in France and Spain and Belgium while maintaining deep ties to home. That movement—unplanned, driven by necessity, sometimes irregular—ultimately produced the most competitive Arab football team in history.
In development discourse, migration is often framed as a problem—brain drain, population displacement, the loss of educated workers from countries that need them most. Football tells a different story. Migration produces remittances, educational exchange, professional networks, and cultural connection. Remittances from migrants already constitute one of the largest forms of financial transfer to developing countries, dwarfing many bilateral aid programs—and unlike bilateral aid, they do not disappear when a government decides they are no longer strategically convenient. Football simply makes these networks visible. Identity, like development, rarely respects the borders we draw around it.
The Border Players Cross That Ordinary People Cannot
The 2026 World Cup exposed one of the most uncomfortable contradictions in the global order. Elite footballers travel freely. Millions of ordinary people from the same countries cannot.
The circumstances surrounding Iran's participation made this especially stark. Reporting from The Athletic documents how the Iranian delegation was required, for most of the tournament, to cross the U.S.-Mexico border on the same compressed timeline facing ordinary migrants: entry no earlier than a day before a match, departure required immediately after the final whistle. Fourteen staff members were denied visas outright. The team's own captain was detained for questioning at the border. These were elite athletes with the backing of a national federation and the scrutiny of a global media apparatus, and even they could not move freely. For ordinary Iranians attempting to visit family, pursue an education, or seek asylum, the same machinery operates with far less visibility and far less accommodation.
The systems that restrict human movement—visa regimes, refugee processing backlogs, family reunification delays, work authorization barriers—do not pause for sporting excellence. They shape the lives of ordinary people with the same bureaucratic indifference regardless of how many goals their compatriots score. In the same season that U.S. development assistance fell by nearly 60 percent, the United States also became the country whose border policies defined the Iran story at this tournament. These are not unrelated developments. They are two expressions of the same posture toward the world.
What Football Teaches Humanitarians
Humanitarian and development work necessarily focuses on crisis: conflict, displacement, disaster, acute poverty. This is necessary work. But it is incomplete work.
Development also means creating the conditions in which people can flourish—not simply survive. Behind every player at this World Cup stand parents who sacrificed, teachers who stayed engaged, coaches who believed, neighborhoods that provided a space to play, clinics that kept children healthy, and civil society organizations that maintained community fabric when governments could not. The Devex reporting on what replaced USAID describes a system built around "vetted, trusted partners"—a phrase that, in practice, tends to mean large contractors with established government relationships, not the local coaches, community clinics, and grassroots organizations that actually form the development infrastructure behind a World Cup squad. The new architecture may deliver some things. It is not built to deliver the things that matter most.
Aid agencies negotiate with governments. But development ultimately happens between people.
Iran's farewell from Tijuana carried its own grace note: business leaders organized a pre-dawn gathering outside the team's hotel, and residents who had followed the squad turned out to wave goodbye. Lawrence, Kansas changed the story of what a Midwestern community and a North African football team could mean to each other. Jordan's locker-room note. Players exchanging jerseys with opponents. Supporters helping one another navigate unfamiliar cities despite profound political disagreements. These moments accumulate into something important: football repeatedly demonstrates that human relationships often transcend political conflict.
As Holly Dagres has observed through her reporting on Team Melli: political conflict often obscures the ordinary hopes, frustrations, humor, and humanity of individuals. The person cheering from the stands in Seattle is not a political category. They are a person.
Beyond the Scoreboard
Ten teams. Ten development stories. No single model, no single lesson, no single path.
But common threads run through all of them. Institutions matter. Migration matters—not as a problem but as a dynamic process of exchange that builds capability across borders. Education matters, compounding over generations in ways that are difficult to measure and easy to undervalue. Diaspora communities matter, maintaining connections that no government policy fully creates or destroys. Humanitarian investment matters, even when its returns appear decades later and in unexpected forms. Communities matter—the parents, neighbors, coaches, and local clubs that form the invisible infrastructure behind every World Cup squad.
And above all: people are not their governments.
Sam Vigersky described what emerged from the dismantling of USAID as "green shoots from the ashes." The metaphor is apt, but its implications extend further than he may have intended. The World Cup has been showing us green shoots too—in Lawrence, Kansas, where a college town fell in love with Algeria; in Tijuana, where a community wrapped its arms around a team the United States government was treating as a security threat; in Gaza, where people gathered among ruins to watch Egypt play football and felt, briefly, the uncomplicated joy of a shared thing.
These are the shoots that development is actually made of. Not the vetted partners and transactional architectures and strategic alignments, but the coaches and classrooms and families and remittances and community training sessions that are the real infrastructure of human progress. They have been built over decades, often with international support that is now being withdrawn. They will survive that withdrawal—because human ambition, as these ten teams have demonstrated, survives conditions that would reasonably be expected to foreclose it.
But they would flourish so much more with it.
This article draws on reporting by Holly Dagres on Iran's Team Melli and the Iranian diaspora; on Laurie Whitwell and Jacob Whitehead's reporting for The Athletic on Iran's tournament experience, published June 30, 2026; on three essays by Kareem Shaheen published in Newlines Magazine during the tournament; and on Elissa Miolene's reporting in Devex, "The Ashes of USAID: America's New Architecture of Foreign Assistance," published July 21, 2026. It also draws on the OECD's April 2026 preliminary data release on official development assistance; FIFA, ABC News, KCTV5, KSHB, and KCUR reporting on the Lawrence, Kansas story; and ESPN and CBS Sports reporting on African teams' knockout-stage results.