CALGARY, Alberta — In a room packed full of international dignitaries within earshot of Calgary’s iconic Stampede rodeo, Canada’s historic run at the 2026 World Cup ended with an anticlimactic whimper.
Irish Ambassador to Canada John Concannon marked his country’s assumption of the EU Council presidency with a Stampede reception attended by a delegation of European envoys. “This must rank as the friendliest European invasion in history,” he quipped.
As the seconds ticked away in Canada’s knockout-round showdown with Morocco, few minglers at the Irish reception noticed the TV at the back of the room — set on mute — broadcasting the Moroccan victory. They were busy pressing the flesh, making small talk and planning their Stampede itineraries.
Back in Ottawa, in the park that hosted recent Canada Day festivities, fans gathered hoping to see Canada move deeper into the tournament. Instead, they cheered the Canadians at the end of an upstart run that will be remembered for years.
In a nation known for hockey, everyone seemed to be a soccer fan — for 22 days, at least.
After Canada’s first-ever men’s World Cup victory on June 18 against Qatar, Prime Minister Mark Carney paid a visit to the locker room. “You showed a level of character that some people never achieve in their life. And you showed it when the entire country and a good part of the world is watching,” he told the players. “I couldn’t be prouder as a Canadian,”
Secretary of State for Sport Adam van Koeverden brought the team an offering when he visited them at practice in Vancouver on June 24 — the Maple Leaf flag that had flown atop the Peace Tower on Parliament Hill on the day of Canada’s opening match.
“They are inspiring a generation and have brought an entire nation together,” he said.
On Canada Day, Governor General Louise Arbour used her first July 1 remarks as the king’s representative to connect the World Cup moment to the national celebration and beyond.
“Whether in FIFA soccer stadiums or at the Olympics, one thing is clear: We know who we’re cheering for,” she said. “And when we play ferociously … we don’t hate the other team, we just like them better when they lose!”
To that, she added: “This is us. We like to play. And we play by the rules.” Even the king’s representative can subtweet a trade war.
France’s national soccer team has become an unlikely barometer for the country’s leading far-right party, whose leaders' shifting rhetoric about the team reflects its broader attempts at moderation — from appeals around racial identity to working-class solidarity — and helps explain why the National Rally is now seen as having a genuine shot at the presidency after decades of falling short.
Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the party known during his lifetime as the National Front, became perhaps the most vocal domestic antagonist of France’s soccer team as it emerged as an international force in the 1990s. After the country assembled a formidable squad led by nonwhite players with heritage from across its former colonial holdings,Le Pen disowned them as “fake Frenchmen who don’t sing the Marseillaise or visibly don’t know it.”
“It’s a little bit artificial to bring in foreign players and baptize them ‘Equipe de France,’" Le Pen said in 1996, words he repeated even after the teamwon the World Cup two years later. “They put an Algerian in to please the Arabs, a Kanak who can’t even sing the national anthem, blacks to satisfy the Antillais. None of them has any place in a French team.”
As Marine Le Pen prepared to succeed her father as leader of the party, she echoed his critique of the team as an example of France’s new migrants refusing to assimilate,calling the 2010 World Cup squad a collection of "ethnic, religious clans that are creating a sort of apartheid within the team itself.”
“Most of these people consider themselves as representatives of France one minute, when they’re at the World Cup,”she said in a television interview at the time. “But the next, they feel like they belong to another country or have another nationality in their hearts.”
As France’s governing parties weakened over the 2010s, Le Pen saw an opportunity to win support from traditional center-right constituencies. She insisted her party was “not racist,”ejected her father after he repeated statements denying the Holocaust, and rebranded the movement under a friendlier National Rally banner (abbreviated as RN in French).
Even if she was not ready to be a fan of the French national team — Le Pen conceded she "knows absolutely nothing about football” and expressed a preference for rugby — she was ready to abandon her father’s loud tradition of naysaying its successes.
“It’s hard for the RN and far-right wing to be as blatantly critical of Les Bleus when the team has represented the nation well over the last decade in both their on- and off-pitch endeavors,” said Lindsay Sarah Krasnoff, a sports diplomacy expert who teaches at New York University’s Robert Preston Tisch Institute for Global Sport and isauthor of two books onsports in France.
When France won a World Cup for the second time, in 2018, Le Pen made her target not the champions themselves but politicians who latched on to the team’s successes. Emmanuel Macron, the centrist who had defeated her for the presidency a year earlier “should focus on the policies being implemented in France, about which there is much to say, and let Les Bleus go all the way to victory,”she told an interviewer. Sporting success, added Le Pen, “won't make worries disappear, it won't make the dangers of insecurity and terrorism disappear, it won't make the financial struggles disappear.”
It was part of a broader redirection of far-right resentments away from race and ethnicity to class and status, embodied by theyellow-vest protests that began months after that World Cup victory. Le Pen began to speak of France’s most famous athletes the way her father once dismissed Paris’ detached elites — “technocratic robots, graduates of the École Nationale d'Administration, and bourgeois bohemians,” he said in a 2006 address to a party convention — rather than as ungrateful immigrants representing the country’s restive suburbs.
The populist shift was evident in 2024, when several of theteam’s top strikers all joined a swift counterattack against the National Rally following its gains in regional elections. French captain Kylian Mbappé called the outcome “catastrophic” and cautioned that “the extremes are knocking at the doors of power.”
“When you have the luck to have a huge salary, be a multimillionaire, the chance to travel in a private jet, I am a little annoyed to see these sports figures giving lessons to people who struggle to make ends meet,” Jordan Bardella, a Le Pen protégé then leading the National Rally,responded to Mbappé.
Now Bardella and Le Pen are waiting to see who will be the party’s candidate in next year’s presidential elections, a choice likely to be shaped by alooming court decision this week about Le Pen’s eligibility to run due to an embezzlement conviction. Polls show either candidate would be in a strong position to win the presidency.
The two party leadersdisagree on plenty of policy and political questions, but when it comes to France’s national team — now seen as favorites to again lift the World Cup trophy — Bardella and Le Pen are united in their messaging.
“This tendency of actors, footballers and singers to tell the French how they should vote — particularly those earning 1,300 to 1,400 euros a month, while they themselves are millionaires or even billionaires — is starting to be very poorly received in our country,”Le Pen said after Mbappé stood by his anti-RN commentsin a widely discussed Vanity Fair interview published just before the World Cup began.
“Those people who are fortunate enough to live well, to be protected from insecurity, poverty and unemployment,” shetold CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, should “maintain a certain reserve.”
BRUSSELS — Destroying the EU’s environmental policies to boost manufacturing and keep Europe competitive with China and the U.S. is a mistake, says former Arsenal player and French international soccer player Mathieu Flamini.
Instead, the athlete, who is now the CEO of a France-based chemicals company, says the bloc should double down on moving away from fossil fuels, arguing that weakening rules like the EU's Emissions Trading System would not solve Europe's competitiveness problem.
"The reality is, if we believe we're going to remove the carbon tax in Europe and suddenly we're gonna be competitive with China or other [regions], we're lying to ourselves," Flamini told POLITICO in an interview.
Flamini co-founded GF Biochemicals in 2013, the same year he returned to north London to play for Arsenal for the second time, after a five-year stint in Italy with AC Milan.
Flamini won three caps for the French team, making his debut in 2007 against Morocco — a potential quarterfinal opponent for France at this World Cup. His company turns agricultural waste into bio-based chemicals used in everyday items such as paints, cosmetics and cleaning products.
The Frenchman believes the European chemicals industry, already under pressure from soaring energy prices and geopolitical shocks such as the Iran crisis, needs to accept its inevitable transition from fossil fuel-based ingredients towards bio-based alternatives.
The case against fossil fuels is two-pronged: They pollute the atmosphere with planet-warming CO2; and they are mostly imported from outside the EU, compromising the bloc’s strategic autonomy.
"We have to embrace and accept that there is an evolution like any other industry, from combustion engine to electric engine; [in the] chemical industry, from a petrol-based industry to bio-based," said Flamini.
But that's easier said than done. Lawmakers and member countries are already looking for ways to weaken the ETS, or even scrap it altogether. At a ministers' meeting in Brussels last month, a handful of member countries raised concerns over the impact of carbon pricing on their industries during a meeting of EU economy ministers.
CALGARY, Alberta — When their national team faces off against Morocco today in its first-ever knockout match in a men’s World Cup, Canada’s political class will be in cowboy hats and boots.
The annual Calgary Stampede extravaganza attracts politicians and lobbyists who fly in for Stampede’s first four days for dealmaking, team building and/or partying — sometimes all three. Ottawa’s fishbowl and Toronto’s power set are drawn west by chuckwagon races and grandstand acts. They fit serious meetings in between carbo-loading pancakes, gawking at the rodeo and schmoozing up and down the nonstop reception circuit.
Once they reach Canada’s largest inland western city, federal pols are under a microscope: Do they look the part? Can they flip a pancake? Does it seem like they really want to be there?
Those who want to latch onto the newest outlet for Canada’s emergent patriotism may struggle to do so today. One of Saturday’s big political events — the Canadian Chamber of Commerce’s Calgary Stampede Mixer — begins at noon, an hour after the Canada-Morocco match kicks off in Houston.
Scheduling would have been more straightforward if the cowboy cosplayers had stayed put in Ottawa. The federal Department of Canadian Heritage — whose mandate is to support "Canadian identity and values, cultural development, and heritage” — is hosting a watch party at LeBreton Flats Park.
“From coast to coast to coast, the country is rallying behind the team as they write an incredible FIFA World Cup story,” Canada’s secretary of state for sport Adam van Koeverden said in a press release promoting the event sponsored by a government that has seen the tournament as an exercise in soft power. “It’s undeniable in moments like these that sport is a great nation-builder, and we can build Canada strong through sport.”
POLITICO's Canada Playbook will publish special editions from Calgary Stampede this weekend. You can subscribe here.
Morocco's starting lineup against Canada may have closer personal ties to Europe than North Africa. A majority of the squad, in fact, were born in Europe: 18 of 26 players, many from France.
That heritage captures the essence of a 21st century World Cup team — shaped by diaspora scouting, evolved eligibility rules and a more fluid sense of national belonging.
Morocco is far from alone; the tournament has featured scores of teams featuring so-called dual nationals. That includes Canada, a onetime soccer doormat that has leveraged its multiculturalism by explicitly prioritizing the recruitment of dual nationals from across the globe.
Stephen Eustáquio, the Canadian midfielder whose goal against South Africa secured the country's place in today's match against Morocco, could have also played for Portugal, which he represented at youth level before declaring his allegiance to Canada.
But few countries have mastered modern roster construction practices like Morocco, a semifinalist in 2022. Historically, top players of Arab and African descent — following decades of migration shaped by colonial empires — reinforced European national teams, which held a disproportionate share of World Cup slots. But this year’s 48-team expansion has altered that dynamic, nearly doubling the number of Asian and African tournament seats.
That, in turn, has offered more options to Europe-based players who either wanted to play for their ancestral nation or saw a clearer path to playing in the World Cup that way. Country switch rules have also eased iteratively since 2004, allowing players to qualify through birthplace, citizenship or heritage and, conditionally, switch countries later in careers.
Talent from European diaspora communities have also been incentivized to consider their heritage teams by the backdrop of ongoing clashes over immigration, integration and Muslim identity across France, Belgium, the Netherlands and beyond.
In some ways, this tournament serves as a hinge for Morocco; it confirms that the team’s 2022 World Cup breakthrough — marked by Madrid-native Achraf Hakimi eliminating Spain in a penalty shootout — was no fluke. And it conveys a more self-assured Moroccan stature, ahead of its status as a 2030 World Cup co-host. Morocco is no longer just a regional football power — it’s a team on shared terms with European heavyweights and a vessel for solidarity across the Maghreb, Arab world, African continent and global Muslim public.
MAGA-friendly Abelardo de la Espriella's decision to make Colombia's national soccer jersey a defining feature of his victorious right-wing presidential campaign has sparked a debate over the political ownership of national symbols.
While the yellow shirt has long been associated with moments of collective celebration, critics argue that its prominent use by a partisan candidate risks recasting it as a marker of political identity. A Bogotá judge even banned de la Espriella from wearing the jersey while campaigning before the June 21 vote.
After hearing from fans in Miami on Saturday night vociferously in support of de la Espriella and his unflinching law-and-order policies, POLITICO spoke to two experts on Colombian politics who say the episode reflects a broader pattern seen in populist movements, where patriotic imagery is deployed to blur the line between support for the nation and support for a political project.
“In my view, he was very deliberately politicizing the national team’s shirt,” Eduardo Gamarra, professor of politics and international relations at Florida International University, said. “The Colombian jersey is one of the few symbols that can still claim to belong to all Colombians, across region, class and ideology. That is precisely why it is attractive to a populist campaign: it allows a partisan political project to present itself as the nation itself.”
“This is not unique to Colombia. Populist politicians around the world routinely try to appropriate national symbols. In the United States, MAGA politics has turned the American flag and other patriotic symbols into markers of partisan identity. In Venezuela, Chavismo also understood the power of national colors, patriotic imagery and sporting symbols such as the Vinotinto [the national team],” Gamarra added. “De la Espriella’s use of the shirt was effective because it transformed the emotion around the national team into a signal of political belonging.”
“But to me the real surprise is not that de la Espriella tried to use the jersey, or even that it worked. The surprise is how ineffective opposition groups were in defending the shirt as a shared national symbol. They allowed a symbol that should belong to the whole country to be claimed by one political camp,” Gamarra said.
The jersey’s appeal, however, went beyond nationalism — helping to reinforce de la Espriella's carefully crafted populist image ahead of the election final round that he won in mid-June.
“Abelardo de la Espriella used the national team's shirt, traditionally a symbol of unity and celebration throughout the country, especially at the time of the World Cup, to associate his campaign with strong patriotism,” said Julian Gerez, assistant professor of criminology, law and society and political science at the University of California, Irvine. “But I think more importantly, it's about de la Espriella's own image: he is a multimillionaire lawyer but it is essential to his brand to appear as a man of the people. And as opposed to wearing a suit jacket or other formal attire, which is what might be expected, the jersey and hat play an important role in the way he portrays his image.”
“Ultimately, I think it was an effective tactic, but [leftist candidate] Ivan Cepeda's campaign ironically made it more effective by coming out against its use, which led to greater awareness of the jersey as linked to de la Espriella's campaign — and stronger defiance among his supporters in wearing the jersey,” Gerez added.
Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas has participated in three Super Bowl parades and one World Series parade celebrating his hometown Chiefs and Royals.
None compared to when Netherlands fans marched through downtown Kansas City, Missouri, ahead of their team's June 25 game at Arrowhead Stadium.
“It is special and different,” Lucas said, with a politician’s reluctance to get on the wrong side of a beloved hometown team.
Kansas City will host its knockout round game Friday: a match between Colombia and Ghana. Lucas was instrumental in making it happen, a key player in Kansas City’s bid to bring the World Cup to Missouri. Now he is basking in the moment — dancing to “Links Recht” with the Dutch, waving around an Ecuadorian flag and dancing with Mexican fans.
Like nearly every host city, Kansas City faced criticism ahead of the games over the challenging logistics of herding thousands of fans to a stadium that’s used to tailgaters instead of international tourists, the sky-high price of tickets and underwhelming hotel bookings.
“I think it’s a huge win for us,” Lucas said. “I know there's some discourse and scuttlebutt on the wisdom or not of some American cities, and not applying to be World Cup host countries. I have never regretted it, and I certainly don't regret it right now.”
Kansas City is the only Midwestern city to host games, after Chicago passed on making a bid. Lucas said the experience of serving as the representative for the middle of the country has allowed Kansas City to be “central diplomats” for the United States, welcoming in foreign fans with barbecue and block parties.
“Say what you will about what happens in corridors in Washington, Brussels or beyond,” Lucas said. “We've had the chance to share the best of America. And I think the best of America is its welcoming environment.”
NEW YORK — New York City has begun one of the busiest weekends in its history — Taylor Swift’s wedding celebration at Madison Square Garden today, a series of air, land and water celebrations for America’s 250th birthday tomorrow and a World Cup match in northern New Jersey on Sunday.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani, NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch and a top Coast Guard official outlined their weekend plans Tuesday by sharing heat advisories, noise warnings, road closures and security precautions for land, air and sea.
“We have a comprehensive security plan in place for each of these events to ensure that everyone can enjoy the festivities safely,” Mamdani said.
Mamdani and Tisch, standing side by side, said that there are no specific or credible threats against the city but that they’re operating in a “heightened threat environment.” The comments came shortly before a couple scaled the top of the Empire State Building and unfurled a banner.
Police will be out in force and on 12-hour shifts. They’ll be deploying bomb-sniffing dogs, conducting security screenings at designated viewing areas and continuing to use anti-drone technology, which has so far intercepted nearly 100 drones that have flown into restricted air space since the World Cup’s outset.
The NYPD expects to spend about $92 million in overtime and other expenses for major events this summer. During the press conference at police headquarters, Mamdani ducked a question about whether Swift should be picking up the security tab for her wedding. Tisch described it as “an event that we are tracking” and said the “NYPD will, of course, have a detail in place.” Swift canceled a series of concerts in Austria in 2024 because of a terrorist plot.
It will be unusually noisy. A naval review Saturday morning, which Vice President JD Vance is expected to attend, will include a series of warships that will each conduct a 21-gun salute. The Macy’s fireworks show will be the biggest ever, with 85,000 fireworks shells, Tisch said.
It will also be hot. Mamdani has separately announced a plan to help cope with record temperatures expected to hit the city in coming days — officials have warned it may feel as hot as 112 degrees. The city plans to open cooling shelters across the five boroughs, along with a first-ever fleet of vans to help people get to them.
The weekend will be capped by Sunday's knockout match between Brazil and Norway at MetLife Stadium, although the attendant celebrations by the winning team's fans will probably cross the Hudson River. Some may even try to row.
If you want to trace Cape Verde’s emergence as a soccer power, you might go back to 2009, when the country beat Portugal on its way to a gold medal at the Jogos de Lusofonia.
The Lusofonia Games were a junior varsity Olympics for remnants of a common empire, an effort by the 12-country Association of Olympic Committees of Portuguese-Speaking Countries to mimic the Commonwealth Games or Jeux de la Francophonie, an upstart competition for former French colonies. On its face, all of these competitions were an experiment in geographically unlikely camaraderie — could tae kwon do artists from Equatorial Guinea bond with East Timorese ping-pong players? — but beneath, they were an exercise of raw global sports politics.
ACOLOP, as the association is known by its Portuguese abbreviation, was created in 2004 and hosted its first, nine-sport Jogos de Lusofonia the next year in Macau, the Chinese region that was a Portuguese colony until 1999. Around the business meetings that accompanied the second games in Lisbon, the conversation among the national Olympic officials who ran ACOLOP focused on Brazil’s effort then underway to claim both the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics for Rio de Janeiro, the first in South America. Both successful bids were built on a Portuguese-speaking coalition that crossed the traditional geographical bases within FIFA and the International Olympic Committee.
The next Lusofonia Games were held in 2014 in Goa, the Indian city where Portuguese traders planted their flag in the 16th century. Then the games stopped, leaving behind a series of canceled plans for follow-up encounters and an archipelago of never-updated web pages.
“To be honest, I think the games ended,” João Malha, a Lisbon-based sports communications specialist who served as press officer for the 2009 games, told POLITICO. “At least, I’ve never heard anything about them since Covid.”
This era of competitive Cape Verde soccer — which has twice reached the quarterfinals of the African Cup of Nations — can be traced to the 2009 Lusofonia Games in Lisbon. The under-21 Cape Verdean side began with a bang: a 1-0 victory over host Portugal, from which the small Atlantic island nation had won its independence in 1975. It then stampeded through the five-country, round-robin tournament, defeating Mozambique and drawing against Angola en route to the country’s only gold medal, a task made admittedly easier by the fact that Brazil didn’t compete in soccer even as it was the leading medalist across the games.
For those of us who were at the José Gomes Stadium, the most eye-catching player on the pitch that month for Cape Verde was Ianique “Stopira” Tavares, a 21-year-old left back who rampaged down the opposition flank. Three years later Stopira — nicknamed for a French great — moved to a Hungarian club where he spent most of his career. He retired in 2023 and then reversed himself a year later so he could help Cape Verde qualify for the World Cup.
Stopira’s return was a success by any measure, marked by critical goals at every stage despite never having been much of a goal-scorer prior to his retirement. His winner helped second-tier Torreense defeat heavyweights Sporting Clube de Portugal in Portugal’s Taça cup final, becoming the first non-top flight club to reach the UEFA Europa League in its current incarnation. And last October, Stopira scored the most celebrated goal in his country’s history — an extra-time strike which sealed the win over Eswatini that sent Cape Verde to a World Cup for the first time.
Today, the team faces Argentina, and 38-year-old Stopira is likely to start on the bench, as he did in the three group-stage matches. But for at least one more day Stopira’s Cape Verde stands where the Jogos da Lusofonia imagined the country belonged: as a sporting peer to Portugal and Brazil.
CANBERRA, Australia — Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told a Sydney audience Thursday that he’d urge state governors to declare a weeklong holiday if Australia wins the World Cup.
Albanese’s enthusiasm for the Socceroos' prospects — when Australia plays Egypt in their first knockout match — isn’t shared by many of his colleagues: POLITICO approached a dozen ministers and members of Parliament for comments, favorite players and travel plans regarding today's match, but all declined to respond.
The underlying reason: a 2025 travel spending scandal involving Sports Minister Anika Wells, which nearly cost her the ministry. The scandal left most MPs afraid to travel during Parliament's sitting weeks, leaving Jerome Laxale, a second-term member, as the unexpected face of the ruling Labor Party during group matches.
Laxale’s rise to fame was likened Wednesday during a roast at the Australian Parliamentary Press Gallery Midwinter Ball — the local version of the White House Correspondents' Dinner — to “subbing in Lionel Messi for a midfielder from Curaçao.”
Three MPs from the conservative opposition Liberal Party told The Sydney Morning Herald they were either paying their own way to the World Cup or able to join only because of existing unrelated travel plans.
The weeklong public holiday upon Australia's lifting the trophy — which, let's be honest, is probably not worth clearing one's schedule for — requires state governors to make official. The last time Albanese declared unilaterally declared one was upon the death of Queen Elizabeth II.
MIAMI — As fans battle the summer scorch to watch Argentina and Cape Verde today, local officials know what they are trying to avoid.
The last time Argentina played a major tournament was also in Miami Gardens, in July 2024, when the team was crowned Copa América champion after defeating Colombia. Before kickoff, thousands of fans — including those who didn’t have tickets — stormed the stadium gates and rushed past security. Dozens of people were ejected or arrested, and the game’s start time was delayed by more than an hour.
An after-action report from Miami-Dade County found that the incident was caused by a lack of intelligence gathering, insufficient security perimeters and large numbers of unticketed fans on site.
“Miami-Dade Emergency Management has conducted various training and exercises across a wide range of threat scenarios to enhance coordination, strengthen preparedness, and ensure a coordinated response among local, state, and federal partners during major events,” Dianne Fernandez, a spokesperson for county Mayor Daniella Levine Cava, said in a statement.
Fernandez referred specific questions on what protocols have changed since Copa America to the Miami-Dade County Sheriff’s Office, which did not respond to a request for comment.
Miami-Dade Sheriff Rosie Cordero-Stutz said in a June press conference that the sheriff’s office would be using specialized training and equipment to control crowds. Fans will have to present their tickets multiple times before they “get anywhere near the stadium,” Cordero-Stutz said.
There is one new variable in the mix this time: triple-digit “feels like” temperatures and oppressive humidity Friday as a heat dome wallops the eastern U.S. Sweltering South Florida weather has already caused dozens of heat-related emergency calls during World Cup games this summer.
Miami Stadium’s Friday match is set to start at 6 p.m., only slightly outside of the day’s highest temperatures. Public health experts have flagged that searing summer weather could prove dangerous for players and fans alike, especially in open-air stadiums like Miami’s or street parties with copious amounts of alcohol, which can contribute to dehydration.
The county has installed cooling stations at Miami Stadium where fans and employees can access air conditioning and advertised a public network of libraries, parks and government buildings where other residents and visitors can cool down. The county will also have water trailers and water refill stations at public transit stops for fans to stay hydrated.
"Miami-Dade is proud to welcome the world to our County to celebrate this historic moment, and we want every resident and visitor to enjoy the experience safely," Levine Cava said in a June press release. "Heat is not a game — and in Miami-Dade, we know it.”
Switzerland is busy selling itself as a premier venue for international sports competitions — and the government is throwing its weight behind the effort.
In June, Bern backed plans to fund international sports competitions from 2027 to 2029, and two weeks ago, it approved $247 million in funding for the 2038 Winter Olympics, which it is moving toward securing the right to host.
Ruth Metzler-Arnold, president of Switzerland's Olympic committee, said at the time that the 2038 bid "is bringing everyone together behind a concerted vision that will bolster Swiss sport in the long run and inspire generations to come."
Switzerland already has a sizable sporting footprint. Many international sports organizations — including FIFA, the International Olympic Committee, European football governing body UEFA and the Union Cycliste Internationale — are already headquartered in the Alpine country.
In early June, the Swiss approved more than a million dollars each to support the 2027 World Rowing Championships in Lucerne and the 2028 European men’s Handball Championships in Zurich. Government money will also flow to swimming, figure skating, basketball and bobsled championships.
Switzerland is currently in a "privileged dialogue" with the IOC over its 2038 Winter Games bid, meaning that it holds exclusive rights to organize a bid until the end of next year. Karl Stoss, the chair of the IOC’s Future Host Commission for the Olympic Winter Games, said in February that a host election could happen as soon as April 2027.
On the soccer field, Switzerland hosted the 2025 Women’s European Championship and co-hosted the 2008 men’s European Championship. Progress in its long-shot 2026 World Cup campaign — which continues tonight in Vancouver against Algeria — will only bolster Switzerland's sports credentials.
Many of the countries that failed to advance in the World Cup are seeing the normal cycle of accountability: angry fans, finger-pointing media, fired coaches. Uruguay’s sports officials have gone further, reportedly cancelling a team charter plane and making players take commercial flights home as a form of punishment. In Turkey, where a stunning crash-out was greeted with rage from many fans, the nation’s football boss has asked the justice minister to imprison citizens who criticize the team.
Yet nowhere have the political recriminations gone further than in South Korea, where the president has called on the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism to investigate the country’s failure to advance to the round of 32, one of South Korea's most disappointing World Cup campaigns in decades.
“I feel not just confusion but utter bewilderment at this unexpected outcome,” President Lee Jae Myung wrote on X on Sunday. “I am deeply sorry for causing such profound disappointment to the public over this absurd affair. We will swiftly push forward with reforms to sports administration to ensure such a thing never happens again.”
The issue at hand is clear, according to Lee’s post: “When favoritism and cronyism take precedence over competence in selecting a commander, the result is as predictable as fire burning paper,” he wrote — pointing back to head coach Hong Myung-bo’s controversial appointment in July 2024.
The selection of Hong sparked speculation about favoritism because the Korea Football Association abruptly selected him after months of pursuing foreign candidates. Critics questioned the transparency of the hiring process, and a government audit later found that the KFA had violated several of its own hiring procedures, fueling allegations of preferential treatment. The audit, however, did not conclude that Hong himself had acted improperly, and Hong himself denied receiving special treatment.
Ultimately, Hong remained as head coach because the authorities concluded that while the appointment process was procedurally flawed, there was no legal basis to cancel his contract. But it explains why the public’s criticism against their national soccer team has been so concentrated on the coach, whom many view as an illegitimate appointment. Hong has already announced his resignation, but that hasn’t soothed the ire of Korean fans. Many believe that the results would have been different if a coach had been selected through a proper hiring process — and it seems the president may believe so as well.
While the political repercussions of South Korea’s team losing may seem shocking, it isn’t an unreasonable overstep: Public funds account for about 30 percent of KFA’s budget. In addition, one of the defining goals of Lee's presidency has been to strengthen transparency and accountability in both private and public sectors, which is why the opaque procedures of KFA were more likely to catch the administration’s eye. Despite Korea’s political divisions, lawmakers from across the political spectrum have voiced their common desire to reform KFA.
While South Korea is the most far-reaching example of political fallout from a World Cup exit, it is not the only country where politicians have become involved in the messy aftermath. In Turkey, football federation president İbrahim Hacıosmanoğlu reportedly called on Justice Minister Yılmaz Tunç to prosecute fans who insulted the national team following its elimination.
The incident also came after the national team's official account shared a promotional video from President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's ruling Justice and Development Party, prompting accusations that the federation had blurred the line between sport and politics. The team's elimination only deepened that political entanglement.
The two cases reflect different understandings of accountability, but with one common denominator: the belief that the World Cup is more than just a run-of-the-mill sporting event.
Foreign-born players are increasingly a fixture of teams across the World Cup. In Switzerland, which faces off against Algeria tonight, the politics of a progressively diverse population have literally been on the ballot as the tournament unfolds.
Last month, just days after the first World Cup games kicked off, voters in Switzerland weighed in on an initiative from the right-wing Swiss People’s Party that would have capped Switzerland’s population at 10 million people until 2050. Under the proposal, a series of strict immigration controls would come into place as soon as the population crossed the 9.5 million mark. (It’s currently around 9.1 million.)
The vote came as the country’s national team took the field reflecting one of the soccer world’s most ethnically diverse player pools. Sixteen of the 26 players, or 62 percent of the team, have family roots from abroad, according to data compiled by the Institute for Economics and Peace. (Only France, England, Canada and Australia had higher percentages in that category.) Three of Switzerland’s 26 players were born abroad themselves.
It’s a distinctive feature of Swiss politics — and its robust system of direct democracy — that proposals like the “No to a Switzerland with 10 million!” initiative appear directly before voters. As often as four times a year, voters are confronted with federal, state and local proposals. (In 2024, they even weighed in on whether to ax public funding for Eurovision.)
In the end, 55 percent of voters rejected the initiative. For the time being the question of Switzerland’s multiculturalism will be on the field but off the table.
Despite Cristiano Ronaldo’s travails, Portugal heads into tonight's World Cup knockout match against Croatia as a strong contender to win this year’s tournament. Victory in Toronto tonight would keep it on track for the latter stages — and reinforce a national brand that has consolidated the Atlantic country as a powerhouse far beyond the soccer field.
Portugal is home to just over 10 million people and has a modest economic footprint, but the small European nation has a remarkable track record when it comes to placing its candidates in top posts around the world.
Within the EU, Portugal stands out as having had more of its candidates occupy top institutional posts than any of the bloc’s other member countries. Since 1986, Portuguese citizens have served as president of the European Commission, the Court of Auditors, the Eurogroup, the Committee of the Regions — and former Prime Minister António Costa currently presides over the European Council. There has also been a Portuguese EU ombudsman, a vice president of the European Central Bank and nine vice presidents of the European Parliament.
Beyond the bloc, former Prime Minister António Guterres currently serves as United Nations secretary-general. And just last month the country scored a fresh diplomatic victory by beating out the larger, wealthier and more globally influential Germany to secure one of the vacant, nonpermanent seats on the U.N. Security Council.
According to former Portuguese Secretary of State for Internationalization Bernardo Ivo Cruz, Lisbon’s decision to go after top jobs on the global stage is an existential matter.
“After democracy was restored following the 1974 Carnation Revolution, we realized that our survival as a country depended on multilateralism: we’re too small to guarantee our strategic interests, and those of our citizens, on our own,” he said. “To do that, we needed to guarantee the world remained a place governed by the rule of law.”
The former diplomat said Portugal had worked hard to establish itself as a fair player that is capable of speaking with everyone on equal terms. “Being a small country is actually an advantage, because no one is afraid of us, and that makes us nonthreatening interlocutors,” he noted.
Thanks to its nearly 900-year history, Portugal has long-standing relationships with nearly every other nation. The bonds are especially strong with Portuguese-speaking former colonies like Brazil, Macau and Cape Verde, parts of the world with which Lisbon has worked to forge ties based on equal terms. And those good vibes among allies have been instrumental in having Portuguese candidates confirmed to posts where neutrality and a respect for the rules of diplomacy are paramount.
“The candidates that secure these top posts aren’t supposed to unfairly benefit their home countries,” Cruz noted. “But they benefit Portugal in a broad sense because they defend that multilateralism that benefits all countries, including our own.”
The matter, he added, was taken so seriously in Portugal that the country’s politicians had a habit of backing their candidates for international posts no matter what their politics might be.
“Our stance is that we never mix up internal drama with things happening beyond our borders,” he said. “You may hate someone in Lisbon, but the moment they’re up for an important post it becomes a matter of defending the interests of the state, and personal issues have no relevance there.”
Beyond political institutions like the U.N. or the European Council, Cruz said Portugal had a vested interest in the kind of soft diplomacy that plays out in sporting events like the World Cup.
“Evidently, if we end up winning this match, it only reinforces our country’s international prestige, and is a cause for celebration,” But, he added, “whatever happens, I think this edition of the World Cup is turning out to be a success for everyone.”
“Rather than hooliganism, what we’ve seen are the Scots marching through U.S. cities with their bagpipes and kilts, the Norwegians delighting American spectators with their rowing rituals,” he noted. “At a moment of such immense global tension, we all win by having this competition be defined by friendly celebration.”
Indeed, in much the same way that the small European nation is a force to be reckoned with when it comes to football, it also punches far above its weight in terms of broad international influence.
Every day, FBI intelligence officials, weather forecasters, diplomats, security coordinators and people from more than a dozen federal agencies gather on a conference line for what has become one of the most unusual meetings in Washington.
It’s dubbed the “WISLE call” — an acronym that stands for Warning/Weather, Intent, Safety/Security, Logistics/Communications and Event Operations. And it happens every morning around 10 a.m. Eastern during the FIFA World Cup, which is about to enter its fourth week.
From a secure operations floor inside FEMA’s Washington headquarters, officials spend about 30 minutes running through the day’s World Cup matches, touching on everything from extreme heat advisories and fan festivals to cartel activity in Mexico, drone threats, visa issues and stadium security.
On Tuesday, when Brazil played Japan in Houston and Germany faced Paraguay in Boston, the biggest concern on the call wasn’t terrorism. It was the weather.
“The main story over the next couple of days is going to be building heat across the central and eastern United States,” a National Weather Service official told the group. Philadelphia, Boston and New York were all under heat watches, while Houston officials reported temperatures nearing 95 degrees with a heat index above 100.
The daily briefing offers a rare window into the machinery and threat assessments that underpin the largest sporting event ever hosted in North America.
The command center resembles a national emergency operations center more than a sports headquarters. Ten Homeland Security agencies including TSA, Customs and Border Protection, and FEMA work side-by-side on a watch floor staffed around the clock. The State Operations Coordination Center for Event Response — yes another “SOCCER” acronym — is also involved.
About 50 people occupy the physical operations center during 12-hour shifts, from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. and again overnight, monitoring every match, fan festival and emerging threat across the United States. The center works closely with the International Police Cooperation Center in Leesburg, Virginia, where law enforcement officials from participating countries work alongside U.S. officials. Monday’s WISLE call began with intelligence — and, again, concerns about extreme weather.
An FBI official updated participants on the coming heat wave, noting the bureau was coordinating with federal, state and local partners ahead of the July 4th holiday while also tracking security implications as national teams exited the tournament and closed their training camps.
From there, officials moved city by city. In Boston, clear weather for the sellout crowd of nearly 66,000 for Germany-Paraguay. In Houston, preparations were underway for heat-related illnesses for the Brazil-Japan match.
The State Department’s representative dialed in from the Joint Coordination Center at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City with an update spanning three countries. Mexican police had dismantled a criminal group targeting tourists around World Cup venues, Vancouver’s fan festival had reached capacity during Canada’s match, and officials were monitoring large fan gatherings expected later that evening in both Mexico City and Monterrey.
Despite the long checklist of potential problems, nearly every operational report ended the same way: “All teams are green.”
Andrew Giuliani, executive director of the White House World Cup Task Force, used his remarks to thank FEMA and Homeland Security personnel while highlighting accomplishments across the federal government that extended well beyond soccer.
He praised U.S. Marshals for recovering 35 missing and endangered children during Operation Yellow Card in Boston, noted DEA fentanyl seizures in Kansas City and public health operations led by Health and Human Services and the CDC. He also announced that the mother of the Capo Verde goalkeeper had successfully received a visa to travel to the United States.
“The behind-the-scenes work that goes into it,” Giuliani said, “is one of the reasons we’re able to talk now halfway through the World Cup about the incredible success.”
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin pointed to what he called the largest counter-drone operation ever assembled for a sporting event in the United States, saying officials had confiscated more than 500 drones while also using the tournament’s security posture to pursue human trafficking networks, fentanyl traffickers and counterfeit operations.
Because stadium security has remained stable, he said, law enforcement has been able to focus resources elsewhere.
“Because you guys are doing such a good job making sure that the games are going off without any major issues,” Mullin said, “we’re able to focus on other things.”
Dangerously hot temperatures are blanketing the central and eastern United States as the soccer tournament enters its knockout rounds, putting tens of millions of people at risk.
Roughly a quarter of all matches since the start of the games are expected to be played in hazardous heat, according to an analysis by World Weather Attribution, which models how climate change influences extreme weather events. It also warns that the wet bulb global temperature — a measure of temperature, humidity and factors affecting heat stress in the human body — could rise high enough to justify postponing some games. Sticky, hot weather is not unusual in North America during summer. But extreme heat has intensified since the U.S. last hosted the World Cup in 1994.
“Around half of human-caused climate change has occurred since the World Cup was last hosted in North America in 1994. As a result, the climate that the tournament is being played in today has fundamentally shifted in just 32 years,” Joyce Kimutai, an extreme weather and climate change researcher at Imperial College London and lead author of the WWA study, said in an email.
Players aren’t the only ones that are affected. Fans often spend hours in stifling heat while attending outdoor celebrations or watch festivals. Stadium workers are also at risk. Organizers have attempted to reduce the threat by installing cooling stations and scheduling some games at off-peak heat hours. But the current heat wave could hit the games hard.
The National Weather Service estimates that more than 175 million people will endure temperatures this week that put them at major or extreme risk of heat-related health impacts. Some of the places facing the greatest dangers include World Cup host cities like Philadelphia, New York and Atlanta, where street parties filled with sweaty crowds and free-flowing alcohol put fans at greater risk of heat illness.
“A whole bunch of warm bodies standing close to each other does make it more difficult to cool down,” said Kristie Ebi, a scientist at the University of Washington who specializes in climate change and public health. “And alcohol of course is not a fluid one drinks for hydration. It tends to dehydrate people.”
Some host cities, like Kansas City, are bracing for this week’s heat after enjoying cooler-than-average temperatures during the tournament. Others, like Miami, have been sweltering since the games began.
“Pretty much every game in Miami has been played under oppressively hot and humid conditions,” said Tom DiLiberto, media director at Climate Central, which reports on the impacts of climate change and has been tracking its effects on the World Cup games.
Three games at Miami’s open-air stadium have been held at 6 p.m., when the sun is near its hottest point of the day. Climate Central estimates that there is a “high likelihood” that heat could impact player performance at all seven matches in Miami’s stadium and that climate change is increasing the odds of such heat by up to 20 percentage points.
Officials in Miami-Dade County say they’ve been tailoring their heat protocols since the World Cup began, adding new interventions as they experience the matches. The county’s emergency management department has added additional hydration stations near the stadium and elsewhere in the city, as well as cooling and misting stations, after observing a lot of people in need of relief. Officials have also tailored the languages on signs directing international visitors to cooling stations.
“We’ve learned from each of these matches,” said Jesse Spearo, assistant director of Miami-Dade’s department of emergency management. “Each one has changed a little bit.”
Other host cities have turned to Miami for advice. “Weather has always been kind of a big talking point with this group because Miami is always hot,” Spearo said. “We have been coordinating with them … saying this is what we’ve been doing for people, this is what we’ve learned, this is what you should be emphasizing to fans.”
Public health agencies that track heat-related hospitalizations in host cities say they haven’t seen statistical spikes directly linked to the World Cup. But fan celebrations have offered cautionary tales: 110 heat-related medical incidents were reported at a Houston fan festival on the World Cup’s opening day, FOX Weather reported. And Miami-Dade’s fire rescue teams have reported an uptick in heat-related illnesses among people requiring medical transport, Spearo said.
The extreme temperatures this week could put host cities under strain.
State and county emergency management agencies in most host cities affected by the heat wave did not respond to requests for comment on their heat action plans. A spokesperson for the Dallas emergency management office referred questions to the city’s FIFA organizing committee, which referred questions to FIFA.
A FIFA spokesperson said climate-related risks “are assessed as part of overall tournament planning and managed in close coordination with the host cities, stadium authorities and national agencies.” It’s working with medical experts and national meteorological and emergency management authorities on contingency plans, the spokesperson said.
Ebi, the public health expert, said the biggest challenges around the collision of extreme heat and international sporting events often revolve around communication strategies.
“The protections that need to be in place for periods of high temperatures are the same for all human beings,” she said. “What’s different is how do you reach people who may not be watching the news? How do you reach people who may not have English as a first language?
As public health experts worry about spectators in this week’s heat, some scientists also worry that FIFA isn’t doing enough to protect its players.
It’s “absolutely ridiculous” for FIFA to be hosting games at 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. in a place like Miami, said Douglas Casa, a kinesiology professor at the University of Connecticut and head of the Korey Stringer Institute, which researches ways to prevent athlete deaths from things like extreme heat.
“We can anticipate the risks, and there's a lot of strategies you can have in place to absolutely minimize the risks,” he said, pointing to holding games later in the day, extending hydration breaks when temperatures are high and having aggressive cooling strategies during halftime.
Casa signed onto a May letter to FIFA with more than 20 climate and public health experts that called FIFA’s current guidelines on heat stress mitigation “inadequate” and “impossible to justify,” saying they could put players at risk of heat injury.
FIFA’s heat guidelines for players only mandate cooling breaks if the wet bulb global temperature, or WBGT, exceeds 32 degrees Celsius (89.6 degrees F). It leaves the decision to cancel or suspend a match to the organizers.
That doesn’t line up with guidance from the global players’ union known as FIFPRO, which recommends breaks once the WBGT exceeds 26 degrees and says matches should be delayed if the WBGT temperatures top 28 degrees.
“FIFPRO believes that FIFA’s guidelines do not do enough to protect the health and performance of players,” the organization says on its website.
“FIFA continues to monitor conditions in real time, integrating Wet Bulb Globe Temperature and Heat Index surveillance, and stands ready to apply established contingency protocols should extreme weather events occur,” the FIFA spokesperson said. “Outdoor matches during the hottest parts of the day have been strategically limited, kick-off times adjusted in certain markets, and matches expected in warmer windows prioritised for covered stadiums where possible.”
When Qatar hosted the last men’s World Cup in 2022, FIFA moved the matches to November to avoid the hottest time of year. But summers elsewhere are quickly becoming a concern as climate change accelerates.
Temperatures are forecast to be close to 100 degrees on Saturday when Paraguay takes on France in Philadelphia. Even Toronto, which isn’t used to such extreme heat, is expected to see temperatures in the 90s for its Thursday game.
It also doesn’t end with this year’s matches, said DiLiberto from Climate Central. The next men’s World Cup in 2030 will be in Morocco, Spain and Portugal — areas that saw a major heatwave this month and have much less access to air conditioning.
“If you take these sorts of huge events and put them in incredibly hot conditions in places without air conditioning, you can expect to see a whole host of other health issues,” DiLiberto said.
Americans are breaking the bank to attend the FIFA World Cup.
This year’s tournament is historically expensive for fans looking to support their favorite teams in person. Tickets for group stage matches routinely cost more than $1,000 in the months before tournament kickoff, reportedly even drawing the ire of President Donald Trump.
Ticket problems don’t end there. A number of states have launched investigations into whether FIFA misled fans over the location and quality of seats they bought to attend matches. Many fans who bought tickets on resale sites have fallen victim to ghost ticketing, in which resellers flog tickets they don’t actually have.
To get a better sense of it all, POLITICO talked to Florian Ederer, a professor of markets, public policy and law at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business — and a soccer super fan. He’s written extensively about World Cup ticket pricing and access during the tournament, and hopped on the phone the day before his beloved Austria takes on Spain in a knockout match Thursday.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
Why are World Cup tickets so expensive this year?
Well, there are several factors in this. Number one is that this is the biggest sports event in the world. There's tremendous demand for it. It only happens every four years. FIFA basically has a monopoly on this biggest sports event, there's nothing that sort of can supplant it. You can't start a rival league or anything of that sort. Secondly, the event is being held in the United States and in Canada and in Mexico, in particular the U.S. and Canada. These are some of the richest countries in the world, they have also very, very, very large populations, and Mexico does too.
You also talk about another phenomenon, that FIFA has realized this is an opportunity to maximize profits.
It has also adopted two additional things. One is price discrimination, which is that all the group stage matches of previous World Cups were all priced exactly the same. And here, FIFA has taken the approach, well, England vs. Croatia is a more interesting match than Algeria vs. Jordan, and so we're going to set prices higher for England Croatia than for Algeria Jordan.
They’ve also introduced dynamic pricing, so the price that I get charged for buying a ticket, even if it's the same ticket for the same game, is going to be different depending on when I buy. Basically like buying a ticket for an airline.
The third tactic that FIFA has engaged in — in addition to price discrimination, dynamic pricing — is that they've also done some very opaque supply management, where they've not made it clear at all as to how many tickets are actually available at any given time, and they've created a little bit this artificial scarcity where they want to keep fans in the dark as to whether they should buy now at higher prices, or just wait until the very end, and maybe get a good deal close to the start of a game.
Then there’s ghost ticketing and other practices out on the secondary market that sometimes leave fans outside a World Cup stadium arena with no tickets, even though they spent the money on a resale platform.
This is something that I think is separate from FIFA. I think the problem there is that the platforms have not used sufficient fines and punishment for resellers that are not fulfilling these promised transactions. The reason they are not fulfilling those transactions is because they resold those tickets for a potentially very interesting match already three months before, and then the prices increase even further, and then the temptation is, of course, to not deliver on that transaction, and instead resell it on another platform for even higher markups. And this is, of course, when these platforms should step in and say, look, you know, somebody was deceived here. We need to institute fines to keep those non-reputable sellers off our platforms.
Are there any steps the federal government could take to make things easier for consumers next time around?
I think there should be much clearer guidance that gives consumers information about how many seats are actually available and what are the prices, and then I think that's an issue of just consumer transparency and lack of deception that can absolutely pass with legislation. Similarly, with those ghost tickets, I think you should be able to hold the platform liable for these issues, rather than just any particular seller, and the platforms should have to compensate these buyers for other charges that they incurred. If I'm buying a vacation to Dallas to see Austria vs. Argentina, then I'm not just buying the ticket on a platform, but I'm making everything else reliant on that ticket.
“We have to look at the market — we are in the market in which entertainment is the most developed in the world. So we have to apply market rates,” Infantino said. “In the U.S. it is permitted to resell tickets as well. So if you were to sell tickets at the price which is too low, these tickets will be resold at a much higher price.”
A peculiar family rivalry will play out today in Inglewood, California, where Spain and Austria battle it out on the soccer field.
For hundreds of years of history, both countries were ruled by members of a common dynasty: the Habsburgs. Thanks to an extensive, deliberate strategy of dynastic intermarriage, the Germanic clan progressively accumulated territories across Europe, and eventually ended up with members of the family sitting on the thrones of both the Spanish and the Holy Roman Empires (as well as its later, smaller iteration, the Austro-Hungarian Empire).
For centuries, the branches of the clan respectively ruling from imperial courts in Spain and Austria routinely wedded cousins — and sometimes even nieces and uncles — with one another in an effort to keep the family’s lands and riches intact. A lasting testament to the politically-motivated inbreeding policy is on display in both Madrid’s Prado Museum and Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, which are home to portraits that served as calling cards for prospective mates within the dynasty.
The policy helped keep the dynasty in control of their vast territorial possessions but also contributed to hereditary physical deformities — among them, the iconic protruding lower chin and receding upper jaw which is today described as the "Habsburg jaw" — and diseases. Indeed, the clan's Iberian branch went extinct in 1700 following the death of the final Habsburg king of Spain, Charles II, whose jaw was so massive that he struggled to chew and swallow.
The Austrian line of the family lasted substantially longer, thanks in part to its move away from inbreeding and merge with other noble houses. They remained on the throne in Vienna until 1918, when the Austro-Hungarian Empire was dissolved after World War I and Austria became a republic.
Even though it’s been ages since the Habsburgs ruled in Spain or Austria, their presence can still be felt in both countries. Both Madrid and Vienna still bear the imprint of Habsburg rule with monumental squares like the Plaza Mayor or the Heldenplatz and imperial art collections that continue to draw thousands of tourists each year.
When it comes to football, the Habsburg legacy on the pitch is somewhat darker: In Spain, for example, some far-right sports fans have made use of the imperial Cross of Burgundy to promote ultranationalist messages during matches.
But ahead of Thursday's game, fans in both countries evoked their common heritage with memes referencing the most powerful Habsburg, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, who between 1519 and 1556 ruled over Spain, Austria and other realms included in the vast "empire on which the sun never sets."
One of the dynasty's modern-day members, diplomat Eduard Habsburg, retweeted a post in which his most famous ancestor is informed that "there is to be a Spain-Austria match."
In the caption, the emperor coyly responds, "Against whom?"
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