World Cup is Heaven on Earth

Here's a piece I wrote for the Calgary Herald today—on how helping others makes everyone richer:

Soccer is the great equalizer—all you need is a ball and a few friends to play. It’s simplicity allows for it to be naturally picked up by children around the world.

It’s this global nature of soccer that always captures my imagination whenever the World Cup comes around. Fans from around the world, dressed in cultural attire, filling stadiums with their nation’s songs. Players from every walk of life forming elite athletic squads for an audience of billions.

I think of the incredible story of Canada’s team captain Alphonso Davies, who spent his early years with his family in a Ghanian refugee camp, fleeing war. I imagine him playing soccer with other children in that very challenging place, and then continuing to play the game after his family immigrated to Canada.

In a recent BBC interview, he expressed gratitude for his adoptive nation, "Canada means a lot to me...  going to school for the first time, being able to play the sport that I love and being able to make friends... they welcomed us in with open arms... they gave me the opportunity to be who I am and to be what I want to be in life."

This is why we need to love our global neighbours and make room for them when they have no home—so that they can have a chance to make a life... and so that we can become more fully ourselves as a nation (and have a world-class captain for our national men’s team!).

It’s such a compelling story; a child we welcomed to Canada as a refugee has now become a source of national sporting glory. If you take a look at the Canadian squad, you’ll see that it is filled with the children of first-generation immigrants.

Let this lesson sink in—caring for people is not a zero-sum game. When we make room for others, we become bigger people and a much richer nation.

This is why we can’t afford to let the current wave of xenophobia win out. The world is a bigger place and more itself when it embraces the dignity of every human being.

When the residents of Lawrence Kansas adopted the 2026 Algerian World Cup Team, they became bigger. Local artist Stan Herd created a giant organically-composed copy of the Algerian flag on the University of Kansas school grounds, and as a crowd of people gathered around the flag to celebrate the visiting team the school’s marching band played the Algerian national anthem. In a CBC interview, Herd shared about the beauty and hope of seeing all of the Algerian immigrants from the local area, along with their children, gathered together with other residents and students at the event.

Given all of the anti-immigrant sentiment that has saturated US media over the past year I wondered what it was like for a local Algerian resident to attend a public event where they weren’t just included but were also honoured and celebrated!

This is the kind of big community vision that the World Cup offers humanity. It’s an opportunity for all of us to move from acceptance to embracing, from inclusion to belonging.

So, when tiny Cabo Verde tied tournament favourite Spain in their first ever World Cup game, we all shared their underdog achievement. Before the game I didn’t know that Cabo Verde even existed—with its half-million residents, who like any of us, long for a good life.

In our increasingly polarized world too many of us know far too little about the rest of the world and that is a big part of the problem. This ignorance makes us vulnerable to fearing the unknown. It’s only as we come to really know and hear the stories of our global neighbours that we can begin to see our shared humanity and live together in peace.

Of course, this is what we all want— the opportunity to be who we are and to be what we want to be in life.

For much of our history Canada has welcomed our global neighbours with open arms. As we do this in a formal way as hosts of the World Cup, let’s use this time to remember who we are as a country—a loving multicultural nation where the world has always been welcome.