Authoritarian Regimes and World Cup Performance: A Research Overview

FIFA President Gianni Infantino and a wide range of other public figures often describe soccer as the world’s “most democratic sport.” This widely shared belief draws heavily from the game’s unmatched global appeal and its long history of widespread popularity that cuts across class and racial divides.

But whether that long-held saying actually holds true for the quadrennial FIFA World Cup tournament is a far more open question. Time and again across modern history, authoritarian governments have leveraged the high-profile global tournament to strengthen domestic support for their repressive regimes. Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini famously set this precedent when Italy hosted the 1934 World Cup: he manipulated tournament rules, handpicked biased officials to stack the deck for his home team, which ultimately went on to defeat democratic Czechoslovakia in the tournament final.

Nearly half a century later, Argentina’s brutal military dictatorship followed the same playbook in 1978. The junta used its hosting duties and the national team’s surprise tournament victory to engage in “sportswashing” — whitewashing the violent mass repression that followed its illegal seizure of power. Strikingly, in both of these well-documented historic cases, the national team from the authoritarian host nation won the entire World Cup.

As a political scientist and lifelong soccer enthusiast, I wanted to move beyond these isolated examples to examine how teams from authoritarian regimes have performed at the World Cup over the full history of the tournament, compared to teams from democracies. In the lead-up to this year’s tournament, I analyzed full match records from all 22 previous World Cup editions, and extended my analysis to also cover the expanded 48-team field that will compete at the 2026 tournament.

For World Cups held between 1930 and 2018, I relied on Polity Project data, a widely used resource that measures how concentrated political power is within a country’s governing system. Polity uses a scale ranging from -10 (fully autocratic, concentrated power) to +10 (fully democratic, open power sharing). Under this framework, democracies are defined as states with a Polity score between +6 and +10, autocracies score between -6 and -10, and anocracies — partially free states with mixed governing systems — fall in the middle range of -5 to +5.

Most political scholars agree that analyzing regime type requires cross-checking data across multiple sources to avoid bias. To meet this standard, I also incorporated Freedom House rankings for tournaments from 1974 through the upcoming 2026 World Cup. Freedom House is an independent non-profit that publishes an annual global index tracking the status of civil liberties and political rights in every country worldwide, categorizing all nations as free, partly free, or not free.