Every institution was once a design decision. Pierre de Coubertin didn’t stumble into the creation of the modern Olympic Games, he painstakingly designed them around a clear civic purpose: that sports could model fair play, international respect, and the ethics of effort over victory.
Within two years of proposing a reestablishment of the ancient games, he convened leaders from around the world to codesign the International Olympic Committee; that first Olympic Congress led to the first modern games in Athens in 1896. Eight years after that, FIFA’s founding charter echoed the same ambition in service of administering the global game of soccer toward “friendly relations.”
Today, both institutions have drifted so far from those origins that the contrast is almost darkly comic: De Coubertin worked without pay for decades; his spiritual successors at FIFA were convicted of accepting $150 million in bribes. Yet the underlying idea—that the power of sports to transcend political and cultural divisions gives them a unique social responsibility—has never been more relevant or more needed.
The world’s largest shared cultural event, the FIFA World Cup, is anticipated to draw 5 billion viewers this summer. It comes to the United States (as cohost alongside Mexico and Canada) at a time when capacity for shared civic experience is at a historic low. That is either a tragedy or an opportunity. Where we go from here depends, as design decisions always do, on intentionality. On whether people with influence over sports choose to ask, seriously, what are sports actually for?
A vision dedicated to humanity
De Coubertin was not naive. He delivered his first public lecture on athletic chivalry in 1892, to an unsuspecting audience of French officials and academics, in full awareness that he was fighting against both the commercialism of the age and fractious national politics. It was a time of wars, political violence, and the technology-induced economic uncertainty of the Industrial Revolution.
His core insight—borrowed from classical antiquity, British public schools, and the ceremonial sporting traditions of Native American tribes, who used lacrosse to settle disputes and honor shared beliefs—was that competitive sports create moral architecture. That when people play by the same rules, concede defeat with dignity, and respect excellence in an opponent, they are practicing something rarer and more valuable than entertainment. They are practicing civilization.
He spent the next four decades building that vision without a salary or institutional backing, funding the early Olympics from his own inheritance until it ran out, and then from donations. When he died in 1937, his heart was buried separately at Olympia, Greece, at his request. It is hard to imagine a more literal expression of a life dedicated to an idea—though it was left to others in more enlightened times to expand his vision beyond his own prejudicial views on race and gender.
FIFA’s founders understood the same thing. When they formed the federation in Paris in 1904, they were explicitly building infrastructure for international respect: a curated space where nations would compete and, in competing, learn to coexist. The World Cup, launched in 1930, was a physical expression of that: countries that could not agree on much else agreeing to show up and play by the same rules.
What happened next is well documented: The institutions designed to model civic virtue became, over decades, vehicles for the concentration of private wealth and geopolitical power. FIFA’s Zurich headquarters became synonymous with corruption, culminating in the 2015 Department of Justice indictments.
The most recent World Cup host selections have been defined more by lobbying, sovereign wealth, and geopolitics than by any coherent vision for the game’s civic code. The IOC has navigated its own version of the same drift. Scandal may be more associated with these organizations than civility. The founders would find the current state of their institutions not just disappointing, but structurally the opposite of what they designed. The 2026 tournament, with its eye-watering ticket prices and geopolitical posturing, is the latest chapter of that drift.
The last shared space
And yet 5 billion people will watch the World Cup this summer. That number demands to be taken seriously, as a responsibility and opportunity.
While religion plays a smaller role in modern life and town squares have been replaced by algorithmic feeds, the U.S. surgeon general called loneliness a public health crisis in 2023. Gallup’s global employee engagement data shows most people feel disconnected from their work, their colleagues, and their communities. In this landscape of fragmentation, sports—specifically global sport at its largest scale—may be the strongest magnet we have to coalesce people around a shared experience that is genuinely emotional and cross-cultural.
When Brazil’s Rebeca Andrade won gold in the gymnastics floor competition at the Paris Olympics, Americans Simone Biles and Jordan Chiles—who had just competed against her—spontaneously bowed to her in a gesture of deep respect and admiration. In front of a global audience, elite athletes discarded competitive or national animosity and instead modeled a refreshing generosity of spirit.
This expression of moral beauty was celebrated around the world, and became one of the highlights of the Games. As an Olympics moment true to de Coubertin’s ideals of mutual respect and civility, it follows a legacy of athletes challenging popular prejudices, as Jesse Owens, John Carlos, Tommie Smith, and Cathy Freeman all did in prior Olympics.
These moments demonstrate what’s possible. The question is whether we will protect the conditions that make them possible, or whether we will continue to strip them away in the pursuit of political gain, maximizing revenue, gambling integration, and the next broadcast rights deal.
The stakes couldn’t be higher as the 2026 World Cup arrives in the U.S., a nation whose civic fabric is under extraordinary strain. Institutions are distrusted, and common ground is scarce. Consider that 8 in 10 people in the U.S. say they can’t agree on basic facts with the opposing political party. Almost every shared cultural space, from news media to social platforms, seems designed to drive us further apart in pursuit of “engagement.”
The appetite for real, joyful shared experience is enormous and largely unmet. Whether sports step into their full potential or slide into commercial transactionalism is not predetermined by fate, but a product of design choices.
The redesigners are already at work
The good news is that the counter-design is already underway, in places where leaders chose long-term purpose optimization over short-term commercial optimization.
After moving with his family to Oakland, California, one of the coauthors of this piece, Mike Geddes, experienced how a fiercely proud community was torn apart by the loss of every single one of its professional sports teams, who each abandoned the city for richer pastures over the course of a decade. In response, he cofounded Oakland Roots & Soul. Designed from the ground up to be the first purpose-driven professional soccer club in America, it raised nearly $4 million by offering fans equity in the team—the most successful community investment round in American sports history.
The team now occupies the Oakland Coliseum, an iconic community anchor that would otherwise have sat empty. Having demonstrated that a community will embrace a sports team built around values, the urgency now is for the broader sports industry to redefine success, from profit extraction to long-term community and organization vitality.
Other organizations are doing the same: Parkrun gathers more than 10 million people weekly in 2,500 communities across 23 countries: free, inclusive, and built entirely around participation. Unrivaled, the professional women’s basketball league cofounded by Olympians Napheesa Collier and Breanna Stewart, opened with the highest average salaries in women’s professional basketball history and full equity ownership for every player in the league. Savannah Bananas have taken baseball by storm, redesigning the game-day experience around a “fans first” philosophy to make it more affordable and appealing to families. In doing so, they have become a revenue and marketing sensation valued at more than $500 million.
These are not charities. They demonstrate that a different architecture produces different outcomes, for fans, communities, and for the business itself. Simone Biles, who has defined herself as much by moral courage as athletic brilliance, was named the world’s most marketable athlete as recently as 2024. It turns out the civic instinct and the commercial instinct are more aligned than the current structure of global sports would suggest.
A narrow window—and a clear purpose
In a survey of 1,000 CEOs, 7 in 10 said they understood purpose as a strategic driver of business success. Sports leaders have been slower to catch up, but the logic is identical: The enduring, world-spanning power of sports owes everything to their encapsulation of humanity’s highest aspirations. Strip those out and you are left with an entertainment product competing in an extremely crowded market, with no particular reason for the emotional hold it currently has over billions of people.
De Coubertin’s great insight was not sentimental. From an era of deep instability, distrust, and violence, he saw the potential to design sport as a space where shared humanity is practiced, with joy and celebration. Once again, that is one of the scarcest and most valuable things in the world.
This summer will be a mirror held up to our culture, but it need not be the blueprint for what comes next. What we do with that reflection will depend on the choices made now, by sponsors, broadcasters, city governments, leagues, and the millions of us who decide what we show up for. Indeed, any future vision of boundless extraction based on how the planet’s people, economy, and environment have operated for the last 100 years will not survive the changes to come.
The future of sports is not preordained. They will be defined by what we design—or by what we leave to chance.
