Museums must avoid reducing football into a sanitised corporate spectacle

With another World Cup firmly in the rearview mirror, and having returned to Britain from the US several weeks ago, I have found myself thinking about the cultural legacies left by the world’s greatest sporting tournament.

As is always the case with major tournaments, the World Cup 2026 has provided a landmark opportunity for museums, cultural institutions and galleries to leverage the cultural cache and cut-through of the world’s most popular sport with special collections, exhibitions and shows.

In my line of work as a heritage researcher specialising in football culture, I have long been fascinated by how cultural institutions seek to collect, curate and display football for their audiences. And this summer, my trip to the US gave me a potent opportunity to reflect on how museums may most effectively tackle football as a subject matter.

During the World Cup, I travelled to two football specific exhibitions that calcified the specific tensions at the heart of curating the beautiful game in museum spaces.

‘Heritage by numbers’

The first was FIFA’s pop-up World Cup museum at the Rockefeller Center in New York. This small but popular exhibition was one of the most galling and frustrating experiences of my three weeks in the states.

Essentially a glossy timeline of the men's World Cup, the show charts each tournament through predictable milestones, memorabilia and triumphalist storytelling, culminating in the (admittedly thrilling) chance to stand beside the World Cup trophy.

It is heritage by numbers: a corporate spectacle whose polished, sanitised presentation feels almost AI-generated in its relentless blandness and complete absence of critical thought.

What I saw at the Rockefeller was a textbook example of what leading heritage scholar Laurajane Smith calls an “authorised discourse” – a mode of heritage production that privileges official institutions, elite narratives, and carefully curated versions of the past while marginalising more contested histories.

FIFA presents itself not merely as the organiser of football’s greatest tournament, but as the self-appointed guardian and interpreter of global football heritage. The exhibition constructs a seamless narrative in which FIFA, the World Cup, and the emotional meaning of football become indistinguishable. In doing so, it transforms a complex social and political phenomenon into a sanitised corporate spectacle.

The exhibition’s central message (that the World Cup is a universal celebration capable of bringing humanity together) is less a positive message of inclusivity than a blunt, cynical narrative tool that serves to simplify and depoliticise the World Cup story.

It reduces football’s history to moments of joy, national pride, and shared passion, while avoiding the difficult realities embedded within the competition’s organisation.

Issues of labour exploitation, corruption, authoritarian partnerships, displacement, and the political uses of football are conspicuously absent. Rather than inviting critical engagement with football heritage, FIFA uses the museum space as a branding tool, presenting itself as the neutral custodian of a supposedly universal cultural good.

This selective storytelling is reinforced by claims that collapse under scrutiny, the most egregious of which was FIFA’s portrayal of the Qatar 2022 World Cup as carbon neutral.

Such pablum demonstrates how authorised heritage discourse can operate not only through omission but through active myth-making. The exhibition similarly ignores how World Cups have frequently provided platforms for authoritarian regimes seeking legitimacy and international recognition.

Ultimately, the exhibition is less a celebration of football heritage than an exercise in institutional self-justification. It presents a corporate fantasy of football while demanding that visitors accept FIFA’s authority to define what football means.

Football as a powerful social and cultural practice

In contrast to FIFA’s attempt to claim ownership over football heritage, my experience at the The People’s Game: Soccer and Human Rights exhibition at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta revealed a fundamentally different model of heritage production.

Rather than functioning as an authorised discourse that reinforces institutional power, the exhibition was a textbook example of what cultural scholars Hamzah Muzaini and Claudio Minca call “heritage from below”: a representation of football shaped by communities, activists, players and ordinary supporters rather than governing bodies.

The triumph of the exhibition lay in how it presented football as a powerful social and cultural practice shaped by the people who play, support and organise it.

Through immersive displays, artefacts and stories from around the world, the exhibition explores how football has been used to challenge injustice, inequality, racism and exclusion.

Rather than celebrating sporting achievement alone, the exhibition focussed on grassroots stories at the intersection of football, politics and social justice struggles, including the Afghanistan Women’s National Team, Didier Drogba and the Ivory Coast national team during the Ivorian civil war, prisoners organising soccer leagues on Robben Island during apartheid and the US Women’s National Team’s fight for equal pay.

In doing so, it demonstrates how the game has become a vehicle for dignity, resistance, solidarity and social change on a global scale.

The beauty and effectiveness of this exhibit lay precisely in its refusal to present football as the property of FIFA or the World Cup. Instead, it demonstrated that the true heritage of the game exists in the social relationships, struggles and collective identities created around it.

The exhibition’s grassroots focus offered a far richer and more truthful understanding of football’s meaning. Rather than reducing the sport to a series of tournaments, trophies, and carefully curated moments of national celebration, it explored football as a vehicle for human rights, social justice, and community empowerment.

The stories presented illuminated how the game has been used by marginalised groups to challenge inequality, build solidarity, and demand recognition. In doing so, the exhibition revealed that football’s greatest cultural significance often emerges outside official structures and beyond the control of institutions like FIFA.

This approach also complicates the familiar claim that football “brings people together.” Unlike corporate narratives that present unity as an uncomplicated outcome of major sporting events, the Atlanta exhibition showed that football’s capacity to unite people is not automatic or apolitical.

Its social power comes from the ways communities actively use the game to create belonging, resist oppression, and articulate collective identities. Football matters because people give it meaning, not because institutions declare its importance.

My experience at the exhibition therefore challenged the idea that football heritage must be gatekept, preserved and interpreted by those at the top of the sport. Rather, it showed that grassroots approaches can provide a far more authentic account of what football represents. By centring lived experiences rather than institutional narratives, the exhibition moved closer to the truth of football: not a corporate spectacle but a potent global social practice built by millions of people.

I have written consistently (and angrily) on my blog that football is fundamentally a people’s game. It is animated by the care, investment and intergenerational commitment of communities of participants – both players and supporters – from around the world, rather than the institutions who gatekeep it.

My takeaway from these deeply contrasting experiences is that football curation needs to reflect the fundamental nature of football culture itself. It should be people-centred, grassroots focussed and – ultimately – from below, as opposed to top-down and institutional.

Josh Bland is a postdoctoral researcher at the Cambridge Heritage Research Centre, specialising in football fandom cultures, industrial heritage and critical heritage studies. He is director of Research for Fair Game UK, a creative committee member at the National Football Museum and runs Against the Run of Play, a heritage-focussed Substack.