When Sport Meets Geopolitics — and Where Sports Media Fits in

From the 1936 Berlin Olympics to Iran’s players holding schoolchildren’s rucksacks before a World Cup warm-up, sport has always been a mirror held up to the world. The question for sports media professionals is not whether to look, it is how

The Iran Story is Unprecedented, but the Pattern is Not

To understand the present, it helps to look at the history, because sport has been entangled with geopolitics for as long as sport has existed at an international level.

The most instructive historical parallel for what is happening in 2026 may be the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime actively sought to use the Games as a global showcase for the supposed superiority of the Aryan race, commissioning film director Leni Riefenstahl to produce a cinematic tribute, constructing a vast new sports complex, and temporarily removing anti-Jewish signs from public spaces to present a sanitised image of Germany to the world.

Most newspaper accounts at the time echoed the New York Times report that the Games had put Germany “back in the fold of nations”. Only a handful of reporters, among them American journalist William Shirer, understood that the glitter of Berlin was a facade concealing a violently oppressive regime.

Jesse Owens, the Black American track and field athlete who won four gold medals at those Games, became the defining figure of the entire event, not despite the politics surrounding it, but because of them. His victories directly contradicted Hitler’s ideology of Aryan supremacy. He was, as ESPN later described it, credited with single-handedly crushing that myth.

Yet Owens himself noted that while Hitler acknowledged him with a wave, the then-US President Franklin Roosevelt never sent him a telegram or invited him to the White House. The politics of the 1936 Games played out on multiple levels simultaneously, and the sports media of the time was not always equipped, or willing, to see all of them.

The apartheid era in South Africa produced decades of geopolitical conflict within sport. South Africa was expelled from the International Olympic Committee in 1970. Rugby and cricket (the dominant sports of the white South African establishment) became focal points for international protest campaigns.

The Springbok rugby tours of Britain in the late 1960s and of New Zealand in 1981 were met with mass demonstrations. In New Zealand, over 2,000 protesters were arrested. The sporting boycott of South Africa became one of the most sustained and internationally coordinated campaigns in the history of geopolitics — and sport was its primary battleground. Whether the boycotts materially accelerated the end of apartheid remains debated, but few dispute their symbolic and cultural impact.

The Cold War produced its own chapters: the US-led boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the Soviet-led retaliatory boycott of the 1984 Los Angeles Games. In both cases, the athletes, many of whom had spent their entire careers preparing for those moments, became collateral damage in a diplomatic standoff that had nothing to do with sport and everything to do with geopolitics.

More recently, Russia’s exclusion from international competition following its 2022 invasion of Ukraine — Wimbledon banning Russian and Belarusian players, the IOC’s complicated journey to the Paris 2024 Games — demonstrated that these tensions had not receded in the 21st century. They had, if anything, intensified.

The pattern across all of these moments is consistent: sport becomes a stage on which geopolitical conflict is performed, contested, and sometimes resolved. And the media — including sports media — is both the camera and the commentator.

The 2026 World Cup and Iran: Uncharted Territory

The situation involving Iran and the 2026 World Cup is, by any historical measure, extraordinary.

Iran qualified for the tournament early, topping their AFC qualifying group for their fourth consecutive World Cup appearance. They were drawn into Group G alongside New Zealand, Belgium and Egypt, with their matches scheduled at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles and Lumen Field in Seattle.

Then, on February 28, 2026, US and Israeli military strikes began. Within days, the Iranian football federation was requesting that FIFA relocate its matches to Mexico. The Mexican president, Claudia Sheinbaum, said her country was prepared to accept Iran’s fixtures if needed.

FIFA’s response was unequivocal, at least publicly. President Gianni Infantino made an unannounced visit to Iran’s warm-up match against Costa Rica in Turkey on March 31, watching the team thrash Costa Rica 5-0 before declaring: “Iran will be at the World Cup. That’s why we’re here. There are no Plans B or C or D. Plan A is the only plan.”

He added the line that encapsulates FIFA’s perpetual position at these moments: “FIFA can’t solve geopolitical conflicts, but we are committed to using the power of football and the World Cup to build bridges and promote peace.”

Donald Trump, meanwhile, said that while Iran’s team was “welcome” to compete, it might not be “appropriate for their own life and safety”. Iran’s response was direct: “No one can exclude Iran’s national team from the World Cup. The only country that could be excluded is one that merely carries the title of ‘host’ yet lacks the ability to provide security for the teams participating.”

Caught between the positions of a governing body committed to inclusion and a host government whose country is at war with a participating nation, Iran’s players have done what athletes throughout history have done in these moments: they have found their own language.

The schoolchildren’s rucksacks before the Nigeria friendly were one statement. The black armbands were another. These are the same instincts that led the Iranian men’s team to fall silent during their national anthem at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, in solidarity with protesters following the death of Mahsa Amini in police custody. That moment was one of the most watched and discussed in the history of recent World Cups, not for anything that happened on the pitch, but for what happened before kick-off.

And there is a parallel story running alongside it. Iran’s women’s team, competing in the AFC Women’s Asian Cup in Australia in early March, also refused to sing their national anthem before their opening match against South Korea, just days after the strikes had killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

Iranian state TV immediately branded them “wartime traitors.” At least five players subsequently sought asylum in Australia. Activists warned that the label of traitor, in wartime Iran, could carry the death penalty. Some players eventually returned home. The story gripped global sports media — and human rights organisations, political commentators, and foreign governments — simultaneously.

This is the world that sports media now operates in.

The “Stick to Sports” Debate is Over

For decades, a cultural debate ran through sports journalism about whether political and social issues belonged in sports coverage. The argument for staying in the lane — covering the game, the result, the performance — had a certain clean logic to it. Sport was an escape from the world, and sports media existed to facilitate that escape.

That argument has not aged well. And the evidence from academic research confirms what most working journalists already know: the separation between sport and politics has never been real, and sports journalism is increasingly being asked to recognise that.

Research published in Journalism Studies found that sports journalists are moving towards an issue-based approach to coverage, covering socio-political topics when they occur on their beat, not because they have been instructed to, but because the stories demand it. The study found that sports reporters want to be seen as more than just sports reporters, and that those with more cultural capital are more likely to engage with political dimensions of the stories they cover.

The Iranian women’s team story in Australia was covered as a sports story, a human rights story, a geopolitical story, and a refugee story, often simultaneously and within the same publication. The schoolchildren’s rucksacks were photographed and published by the world’s major news wire agencies in the sports photography category. They then appeared on front pages of newspapers that had nothing to do with sport.

This is not a departure from the nature of sports media. It is sports media catching up with the nature of sport itself.

How Sports Media Positions Itself in These Moments

When geopolitics enters sport, different media organisations respond in different ways. Understanding those differences is important for anyone working in the field.

The first and most common approach is to anchor the story in the sporting context and let the political dimensions emerge from there. When Iran’s men’s team refused to sing the national anthem at the 2022 Qatar World Cup, the BBC, the Guardian, the New York Times, ESPN and Al Jazeera all covered it, but each arrived at the story from a different angle.

ESPN and CBS Sports led with the sporting context: this is the Iranian national team, here is what they did before their opening game. Al Jazeera, whose audience includes many people from the region, led with the political context: here is what is happening in Iran, here is what this gesture means. The Guardian integrated both. The information was the same; the framing reflected the outlet’s relationship with its audience.

For sports media specifically, the anchor is almost always the athlete or the event. The story of the Iranian women’s team in Australia was a sports story about a football team at a continental tournament. The geopolitical dimensions — the war, the government threats, the asylum requests — entered through the athletes themselves, through their choices and their jeopardy.

That is the model: sport provides the stage and the protagonists; the sports journalist covers what happens on and around that stage, including when what happens around it is devastating and politically charged.

The second approach involves the governing body’s response. FIFA’s position on the Iran situation — maintain the schedule, use football to build bridges, decline to take political sides — is consistent with the IOC’s traditional posture of political neutrality.

Sports media has a long history of covering that posture critically. In 1936, the IOC’s decision not to expel Nazi Germany was covered with a range of perspectives, from uncritical enthusiasm to sharp dissent. In 2026, FIFA’s insistence that Iran will play in Los Angeles and Seattle is generating similarly varied coverage, from those who see it as a principled stand for sporting inclusion to those who see it as political naivety or commercial self-interest.

Sports journalists covering governance bodies like FIFA, the IOC, the ICC and national federations are doing some of the most politically consequential work in the industry. It requires an understanding of power, institutional structures, and the gap between stated principles and actual behaviour. That is not fundamentally different from covering any other powerful institution, it just happens to involve football.

The Athlete as Political Actor — and the Coverage That Follows

One of the most significant shifts in modern sports media has been the recognition that athletes are political actors, whether they choose to be or not.

The Iranian women’s team’s silence during their national anthem was a political act. So was their coach’s smile as she watched from the touchline. So was their decision, under subsequent pressure, to sing the anthem before their second match. So was the decision by several players to seek asylum in Australia. Each of those moments generated intense sports media coverage, precisely because athletes had become the human face of a geopolitical crisis.

This dynamic has precedents across modern sport. When Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists on the podium at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, they were doing something that the sports media of the time largely condemned. Sports commentators described their gesture as a desecration of the Olympics. Fifty years later, it is recognised as one of the most significant political acts in the history of sport, and the sports media coverage of it is viewed as having been largely on the wrong side of history.

When the Iranian men’s team stood in silence during their anthem in Qatar in 2022, the global sports media largely understood immediately what they were doing and why. The coverage was, on the whole, empathetic, contextualised, and aware of the risks those players were taking. That shift in how sports media approaches athlete activism — from suspicion and dismissal to contextualisation and respect — represents a maturation of the field.

For sports media professionals, covering athletes in these moments requires something beyond standard sports reporting skills. It requires understanding the political context without making the athlete a pawn in a coverage agenda. It requires being accurate about the risks those athletes face, which means drawing on sources beyond the standard sports beat.

It requires knowing when to ask questions and when a moment speaks entirely for itself. The image of Iranian players holding schoolchildren’s rucksacks was carried by Reuters, the Associated Press, and Agence France-Presse. Those images needed no caption. The sports media professionals who chose to publish them understood that their job in that moment was to get out of the way and let the image do its work.

Lessons for Sports Media Professionals: How to Navigate This Terrain

What does all of this mean practically for anyone working in or entering sports media? There are several lessons that the history of sport and geopolitics teaches, and that the current Iran situation reinforces.

Know the context before you cover the story

This sounds obvious, but it is the most common failure mode in sports media coverage of geopolitical issues. A journalist who covered the 2022 World Cup in Qatar without understanding the Iranian protest movement, its causes, and its risks would have produced coverage that was either superficial or actively misleading. A broadcaster covering Iran’s 2026 World Cup warm-up matches without knowing the background of the Minab school strike, Iran’s history of punishing athlete dissent, and the status of the women’s team’s asylum situation is not equipped to do justice to what they are watching. Context is not background colour. It is the story.

Understand the difference between covering sport and taking sides

Sports media operates in a politically contested space. Covering the fact that Iranian players held schoolchildren’s backpacks before a match is not a political statement, it is journalism. Explaining what those backpacks represented, and why those players chose that moment to make that gesture, is also journalism. What falls outside sports journalism’s proper territory is using that reporting as a vehicle for editorial positions on the war itself. The athlete’s story is the story. The geopolitical conflict is the context. The coverage should reflect that hierarchy.

Governing bodies deserve scrutiny, not deference

FIFA’s insistence that Iran will play in Los Angeles is a story, not a settled fact. The history of sports governance bodies in geopolitical conflicts is littered with decisions that were made for commercial or political reasons while being framed as principled stands for inclusion. The IOC’s position in 1936 helped legitimise a Nazi regime. The IOC’s complicated handling of Russian athletes since 2022 has been covered critically and continues to generate scrutiny. Sports journalists covering FIFA’s position on Iran should bring the same critical intelligence to that coverage that political journalists would bring to a government press conference. The governing body’s statements are the starting point for the story, not the end of it.

The athlete’s voice is primary

In all of the historical examples covered in this article — Jesse Owens in 1936, the South African boycott era, the Cold War boycotts, the 2022 Iran anthem protest, the 2026 women’s team in Australia — the most powerful and enduring journalism has been the journalism that centred the athlete’s experience. What did it mean for Jesse Owens to win four gold medals in Nazi Germany, knowing that his own president would not send him a telegram? What was it like for the Iranian women’s team to stand in a stadium in Australia, accused of treason by their own government’s state broadcaster, uncertain whether they could safely return home? These are sports stories. They are also stories about courage, jeopardy, identity, and the human cost of geopolitical forces that the athletes did not choose and cannot control.

Be honest about what you do not know

In rapidly developing geopolitical situations, a significant amount of information is contested, unverified, or subject to revision. Responsible sports media coverage acknowledges this explicitly. The school strike in Minab was widely reported as being caused by a US Tomahawk missile, based on preliminary US military investigation findings reported by the New York Times. The US neither accepted nor denied responsibility publicly. Sports media covering the Iranian players’ tributes to the school victims should reflect that level of certainty accurately, rather than overstating or understating what is known.

Social media amplifies both the story and the responsibility

The images of the Iranian players holding schoolchildren’s rucksacks circulated on social media before most news organisations had filed their reports. The video of the Iranian women’s team standing silent during their anthem in Australia was watched millions of times within hours. Social media managers and content creators working in sports media are often first responders to these moments, with the responsibility and the platform to shape how audiences receive them. The instinct to engage rapidly must be balanced against the responsibility to be accurate and contextually aware. In geopolitically charged moments, the question “is this true?” is as important as the question “is this shareable?”

The Larger Picture: Sport as Soft Power and Sports Media as its Mirror

What makes the current moment so significant is not just the specific situation involving Iran and the 2026 World Cup. It is the broader pattern of which that situation is a part.

Geopolitics has been reshaping global sport at an accelerating pace. Russia’s exclusion from international competition following its Ukraine invasion created precedents that now colour the conversation about Iran. The IOC’s complicated attempts to maintain political neutrality while confronting the reality of state-sponsored conflicts is an ongoing story. The FIFA Peace Prize awarded to Donald Trump in January 2026, followed by the same man telling Iran’s football team it might not be safe to travel to his country’s World Cup, is a story that would have seemed extraordinary in any other era of sports governance.

For sports media professionals, this landscape creates both challenge and opportunity. The challenge is navigating genuinely complex, fast-moving, and politically dangerous territory with accuracy, empathy, and editorial intelligence. The opportunity is that stories at the intersection of sport and geopolitics are among the most significant and widely read stories that sports journalists produce. They reach audiences far beyond the traditional sports consumer. They are covered by sports outlets and general news publications simultaneously. They generate the kind of journalism that endures.

The image of Jesse Owens on the podium in Berlin in 1936 is still reproduced nearly ninety years later. The image of Tommie Smith and John Carlos with raised fists in Mexico City in 1968 is still one of the most recognisable photographs in sports history. The image of Iran’s women’s team standing in silence in Australia in 2026, or their men’s counterparts holding pink and purple school rucksacks in a Turkish resort town, will be reproduced for decades.

Sports media professionals who cover these moments with intelligence, care, and the full weight of their craft are producing some of the most important journalism being made. The field has never been asked to do more significant work than it is being asked to do right now.

What This Means for Your Career

If you are building a career in sports media, the intersection of sport and geopolitics is one of the most important areas to develop literacy in, regardless of your specific role.

For journalists and reporters, it means investing in contextual knowledge that goes beyond the sport itself. Understanding the political history of the countries and governing bodies you cover is not an optional extra. It is the infrastructure that allows you to produce coverage that is accurate, proportionate, and genuinely useful to your audience.

For broadcasters and on-air talent, it means being prepared for moments when the story on the pitch is secondary to what is happening around it, and having the editorial judgment to recognise those moments and handle them with gravity and care rather than reverting to reflex sports commentary.

For producers and content creators, it means building editorial processes that can absorb geopolitical complexity quickly. Knowing when to pause, when to seek expert input, when an image or a gesture requires explanation and when it speaks entirely for itself.

For PR and communications specialists working in sport (with governing bodies, national associations, teams or athletes) it means understanding that communication strategies built for normal sporting circumstances often fail in geopolitical ones. The Iranian football federation’s communication around its teams’ protests has been contested, reactive, and sometimes contradictory. The contrast with FIFA’s carefully managed public statements is instructive. Crisis communications in sports, when the crisis is geopolitical, requires a different set of skills entirely.

For social media managers and digital content creators, it means building the editorial judgment to handle moments of genuine gravity, to recognise when the normal content rhythm should pause, when images require careful framing, and when the responsibility of platform reach is at its most acute.

Sport has always reflected the world around it. The best sports media has always known this and acted accordingly. In 2026, with Iran’s football team preparing to play in Los Angeles and Seattle, that truth has never been more immediate, more consequential, or more demanding of serious professional engagement.

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