Mega-events and racialized governmentality: Reading the racial media subtext of Canada at the 2022 men's FIFA World Cup

Abstract

This study examines racialized governmentality through an analysis of media representations and athletes' discourses of Canada's participation in the 2022 FIFA Men's World Cup. The analysis of “racialized” discourses and categories in Canadian media reveals how sport can be both a site of resistance and reinforcement of racial hierarchies and identities. The Canadian context offers an opportunity to explore these dynamics, showing how the event has been used to generate ephemeral celebrations of multiculturalism while reinforcing ideas of Canadian success through a selective acceptance of diversity, re-conveyed within a nationalist discourse. This study highlights the complexity of the links between sporting mega-events and racialized governmentality and invites a critical rethinking of representations of diversity and national identity.

Keywords

diversity sport media national identity mega-Events racialized governmentality Canada

Over the past decade, Canada has intensified efforts to position itself as a “soccer nation” by hosting major international events, such as the 2015 FIFA Women's World Cup, the 2020 Confederation of North, Central American and Caribbean Association Football (CONCACAF) Championship, and co-hosting the 2026 FIFA Men's World Cup (FMWC) alongside the United States and Mexico. The cities of Vancouver and Toronto, as well as various levels of the Canadian government, are considering investing close to C$1 billion to host 13 matches during the 2026 tournament (Balocating, 2024).

Notably, while there has been increasing scholarship on the geopolitics of football, there has been little analysis on Canada's recent participation on the international stage. It emerges as a fertile ground for analyzing negotiations surrounding Canadian nationalism and multiculturalism. While the women's national side has historically achieved greater international success with a predominantly white, Canadian-born roster, the men's team embodies diverse migratory journeys that reveal underlying tensions between multicultural ideals and nationalist aspirations. This study offers a critical analysis of the discourses around the FMWC and how they contribute to “narrating” Canada to both international communities and its domestic audience. Using Bilge’s (2013) analytical framework of racialized governmentality, which highlights the often-invisible racialized power dynamics in public debates, this study examines how Canada's participation in the 2022 FMWC has been represented in relation to multiculturalism in the media.

This research examines the unique position of men's soccer¹ in Canada—a sport simultaneously popular yet perceived as “foreign”—as it navigates its place within the landscape of Canadian sport-spectacle. Specifically, this study investigates how this positioning is both reinforced and challenged during a mega-event such as the 2022 FMWC. Employing a critical discourse analysis (CDA) (Fairclough, 2010), the study analyzes media representations of Canada's national team during the 2022 FMWC. By critically examining the discourses surrounding Canada's participation in the FMWC, this paper contributes to the literature on racialized governmentality by demonstrating how multicultural celebration in sports media functions as a technology of racial governance that acknowledges diversity while simultaneously reinforcing unmarked whiteness as the normative standard against which difference is measured and managed.

Men's soccer in Canada: Between national identity, “ethnicity,” and multiculturalism

National identity is constructed through a complex process of imagination, reproduction, invention, and (re)construction of the nation (Arnold, 2021). While scholarship has extensively documented the relationship between sport, ethnicity, and migration experiences in Canada, this work has primarily focused on hockey, which has played an essential role in the symbolic construction of national identity, often to the exclusion of other sports and athletes, particularly women and racialized individuals (Gruneau and Whitson, 1993; Wong and Dennie, 2021). Within North America's broader sporting landscape dominated by baseball, basketball, and football (both NFL and CFL), each with their distinct racial/ethnic trajectories, soccer's role in constructing Canadian identity remains notably understudied, making it pertinent to examine men's soccer's unique position in Canada.

Symbolizing in part the multicultural reimagining of Canada (Fielding, 2017), this sport also highlights the limitations of Canadian multiculturalism policy. Established in 1971 and codified in the Multiculturalism Act of 1985, this policy aims to recognize and preserve different racial, national, ethnic, linguistic, and religious backgrounds, but neglects the economic, political, and cultural disparities that can hinder citizens’ engagement. Although Canada promotes diversity and acceptance of multiple traditions and customs, these ideals remain essentially white, and attitudes toward racial diversity have not significantly improved over the past three decades despite increased immigration (Besco and Tolley, 2018). Understanding multiculturalism, for this article, requires examining new ways in which power is exercised, the influence of neoliberal policies, and how nations are being reconfigured. In this sense, according to Joseph et al. (2022), the predominance of discourses on Canadian multiculturalism obscures issues of racialization and reduces concerns about racism. Soccer thus presents itself as a terrain for analyzing the negotiations of narratives surrounding nationalism and multiculturalism. By exploring Canadian multiculturalism through the lens of soccer spectacle, I seek to deepen our understanding of the underlying political, economic, and cultural dimensions.

Mega-events and racialized governmentality in the Canadian sport/media landscape

Central to this article is an examination of the concept of “racialized governmentality” (Bilge, 2013) and how it intersects in the media coverage of the 2022 FMWC. Mega-events like the FMWC and the Olympics are powerful moments of cultural production, actively shaping national identities (Gruneau and Horne, 2015). The intense media coverage surrounding these events, which blends sport, commercialization, and nationalism provides nations with a powerful platform to dramatize their uniqueness and thus provides rich sites for examining the construction and transformation of national identities (Wenner and Billings, 2017). While some studies have examined the ways in which mega-events are leveraged for political and economic gain (Cha, 2009), more recent scholarship has explored their use in promoting forms of nationalism framed as inclusive, multicultural, cosmopolitan, and open to otherness (Baker and Rowe, 2014; Grainger, 2009; Kobayashi et al., 2023). This paper builds on this research by aiming to detect the racial subtexts that underpin such discourses, potentially reorganizing perceptions of the “other” and reaffirming the dominance of the majority.

Drawing upon the critical sociology of Canadian nationalism and the concept of racialized governmentality (Bilge, 2013), the mediatization of Canada, as embodied in the men's national soccer team, during the FMWC can be understood as a ritualized enactment of national belonging. Following Bilge's work (2013), which is grounded in the Foucauldian notion of power, I conceptualize governmentality as the “art of government” (Foucault, 1992) —a rationality that extends beyond traditional state power to encompass the diverse techniques and strategies used to guide human conduct by “structuring the possible field of action of others” (Foucault (2001[1982]: 341). This perspective reveals how national identity, rather than being a top-down imposition, operates through subtle mechanisms that encourage individuals to internalize particular ways of being national subjects. Within this framework, “legitimate” subjects of the nation reaffirm their power and assert their right to govern the conduct of others. Racialized governmentality encompasses not only overtly discriminatory regimes but also more subtle forms of governance influenced by race (Bilge, 2013). For example, multiculturalism can contribute to racialized governmentality when it manages diversity without challenging structural racism and without being complemented by transformative anti-racist policies. As O’Bonsawin (2013) and Forsyth (2016) demonstrate regarding the asymmetrical relationship between Indigenous peoples and the Olympics, these “constructed celebrations” of diversity often serve as a “politics of distraction” that maintains rather than challenges historical patterns of unequal power relations between majority and minority groups. As Kalman-Lamb (2012) demonstrates in his analysis of the Vancouver 2010 Olympics, seemingly inclusive representations can work to maintain white hegemony through different yet interconnected mechanisms. As he argues, Indigenous peoples are prominently featured as “founding peoples” in ways that paradoxically reinforce white dominance, while other racialized groups are rendered completely invisible or positioned as outsiders.

Several critical scholars have shed light on the underlying operations of Canadian multiculturalism, characterizing it as a “significant site of racialized governmentality” (Francis, 2011: 160), and emphasizing its limitations in subtly reproducing the logic of such governance (Ahmed, 2012; Francis, 2011; Thobani, 2007). To grasp the contours of racialization as it unfolds through the presentation of a “multicultural” and “diverse” Canadian soccer team, I borrow from Bilge (2013) to suggest that viewing this presentation as a “nationalist practice.” This practice entails (a) the animation of a national space; (b) an image of the nationalist as the master of this space; and (c) an image of the “ethnic/racial other” as an object within this space. A racialized governmentality perspective encourages a critical examination of how spaces of representation, like the FMWC, function as key sites for the actualization of the nation.

This framework finds resonance with Carrington’s (2011) notion of the “white sports/media complex” wherein the mediatization of sport has historically played a crucial role in translating collective anxieties about the “other” and organizing categories such as nation, race, and gender. This sport complex is a powerful institution for the circulation of racial ideas and discourses, demanding critical attention to both textual production and meaning-making processes. Within the “sport cultural media complex” (Rowe, 2013), racialized athletes are constantly referred to in terms of their otherness, a process that goes beyond explicit racism. Some media narratives about Black and minority Canadian athletes have contributed to maintaining them in a marginal position, presenting them as “foreigners” or emphasizing their difference (Abdel-Shehid, 2005; Jackson, 1998; Lorenz and McKenzie, 2022). The sport/media apparatus operates as a regulatory system that perpetually marks and remarks these athletes as foreigners or non-citizens.

As Aladejebi et al. (2022) demonstrate in their analysis of the Toronto Raptors’ “We The North” campaign, processes of racial governance can simultaneously deploy traditional nationalist narratives while appearing to embrace diversity. This work reveals how seemingly inclusive representations can paradoxically maintain whiteness at the center of the nation while dictating the specific terms under which racial “Others” can engage with it. Similarly, while previous studies of sport and Canadian identity representation have examined how media discourses construct or reflect national identity through multicultural celebration, a racialized governmentality approach allows us to examine the complex ways in which different forms of racial hierarchies operate simultaneously. As Sirois-Moumni and St-Louis (2023) assert, the celebration of racialized soccer stars presented as figures of diversity in Canada reveals attempts to reproduce and maintain racial asymmetries, socio-economic inequalities, and power disparities. These propositions suggest that analyzing racial discourses in Canadian sport requires examination of both their persistence and subtle evolution beyond simple binaries, while recognizing how multicultural celebrations can simultaneously reinforce and complicate racial hierarchies.

A governmentality framework builds on these insights by examining how these multiple forms of racial management operate as techniques of power. Rather than simply analyzing representation as symbolic content, this approach reveals how celebratory discourses about diversity in sport participate in governing different racialized groups in distinct yet complementary ways—from the strategic incorporation of some groups to legitimize the nation, to the complete erasure of others. Governmentality illuminates how this process becomes racialized, as ethnic and national identity markers function as technologies for managing diverse populations through the cultivation of racialized subjectivities. Previous works on the Canadian sport/media landscape show how racial meaning-making remains contingent on the interests of the nation, where inclusion is granted not through structural change or genuine reckoning with histories of exclusion, but through selective incorporation that maintains existing power relations. Consequently, discourses on the Canadian men's FMWC team can be understood as a key governmental strategy that shapes how different groups are positioned within the national imaginary and, crucially, how they learn to “govern” themselves accordingly. This theoretical lens thus provides analytical possibilities for understanding how multicultural celebrations in the sport media can simultaneously deploy multiple strategies of racial governance while appearing inclusive. This is especially pertinent in examining mega-events like the FMWC, which generates significant media attention before, during, and after the event.

Critical discourse analysis

Following Sveinson and Wagner (2024), this study employs CDA (Fairclough, 2010) as both a theoretical framework and methodological path to examine media coverage of the 2022 FMWC, with particular attention paid to discursive constructions of Canadian identity, multiculturalism, and racialization. The main corpus consists of 312 Canadian news articles published between October 2022 and January 2023, retrieved from the OCI database² using bilingual search terms (e.g. “FIFA World Cup,” “Canada,” “multiculturalism,” “immigration”). This includes coverage from major national outlets (CBC, Globe and Mail, National Post), regional newspapers, and French-language media (La Presse, Le Devoir, Radio-Canada), representing diverse editorial perspectives and approaches to these issues. This corpus was complemented by contextual materials, including 52 international news articles, official FIFA communications, and promotional materials, enabling broader interdiscursive analysis and contextual inferences. The analytical framework follows Fairclough’s (2010) three-dimensional CDA approach, integrating textual, discursive practice, and social practice analyses. The textual analysis examines how language constructs representations of race, nationality, and multicultural national identity in media coverage. The discursive practice analysis examines intertextual chains between national and international media coverage, interdiscursive relationships between sporting, political, and cultural discourses, including the genre conventions of sports journalism and their ideological implications. The social practice dimension investigates power relations embedded in multicultural discourse and the socio-political context of Canadian multiculturalism, with particular attention to racialized governmentality.

Central to this methodological approach is the examination of cultural meanings conveyed through media discourses constructed around Canada and its sporting figures. Drawing on discussions of the discursive uses of “race” and racialization (Devriendt et al., 2018), this study investigates how Canada, its sports celebrities, and related events are portrayed within sports media discourse. This analysis reveals racial discourses that often remain concealed in sport media. Racialization is understood as a process of signification and production of categories that creates otherness and minoritization—a process embedded in power relations. This understanding allows us to examine how discursive practices participate in the social processes through which people are categorized and position themselves in relation to racialized categories. Rather than limiting the scope of “racialization” to explicitly racist discourse, this framework considers the various ways in which race is addressed tacitly (Bilge, 2013). This approach is particularly crucial within a context of racial colorblindness, where race is only alluded to indirectly, requiring careful attention to the diverse modalities through which race is evoked without being explicitly named (Bhopal, 2018).

The analytical process proceeded through three recursive phases. The first phase involved micro-level coding, conducting detailed linguistic analysis using open coding to identify discursive patterns and features at the textual level. The second phase organized these patterns into broader themes, examining how discourses of multiculturalism operate within nationalist frameworks. The final phase engaged in critical interpretation, examining how identified discursive patterns reproduce or challenge existing power relations within the Canadian context. This approach enables examination of how media discourse around the FMWC constructs and maintains versions of Canadian identity and multiculturalism, while revealing how seemingly inclusive narratives can reproduce unequal power relations, remaining attentive to how discourses of openness and inclusivity can mask and perpetuate discriminatory processes.

Media discourses do not merely reflect existing identities but actively shape them in numerous ways. In the context of sports journalism, this discursive power serves nation-making under favorable political conditions (Wodak, 2009). This process shapes fundamental concepts of nation and national identity that are not accomplished political facts as much as they are products of discourses. Through Fairclough’s (2010) CDA framework, we can examine not just linguistic features but the broader interactional and sociocultural contexts shaping these discourses. These discursively constructed national identities are thus fluid, context-dependent and dynamic.

Results

The following sections examine the two core discursive patterns in Canadian media coverage of the Canadian men's soccer team during the 2022 FMWC: 1) I analyze how discourses construct and celebrate Canadian multiculturalism through the team's diversity, presenting it as evidence of successful integration and immigration policies; 2) how these celebratory discourses operate alongside persistent patterns of othering, where players’ non-Canadian origins and ethnic backgrounds are continuously emphasized.

“United in their diversity,” discourses of national and international celebration of Canadian multiculturalism

The significant proportion of international players on the Canadian men's national soccer team garnered attention from Canadian media even before the start of the FMWC. Several major daily newspapers, such as Le Devoir and Radio-Canada/CBC, promoted a perspective emphasizing multiculturalism and immigration. In many ways, such coverage was warranted given the diversity of the team. Of the 26 players selected for Canada's 2022 World Cup squad, seven were born outside Canada, while 14 of the team were Black (Kloke, 2022). Moreover, coach John Herdman is a British citizen.

Despite not being a World Cup favorite, media coverage portrayed Canada optimistically through its team's unity, described by one reporter as: “a band of unselfish brothers who play for each other and country” (Houpt, 2022). The “united” nature of the Canadian team was presented in relation to “its diversity” and “multiculturalism” with several articles entirely dedicated to the team as “symbols of diversity,” a “New Canada” (Kloke, 2022), representing the Canadian model of integration (Desrosiers, 2022), or even as the result of successful immigration policies. A dozen articles explicitly linked immigration and multiculturalism to team success. For example, this is evident in a piece from the Ottawa Citizen in which the author asks: “Is it coincidental that more than 70 per cent of the squad members are immigrants or the children of immigrants? Maybe. After all, Canada is the home of immigrants, but considering the current top 10 players either immigrated or their parents did, a coincidence is very unlikely” (Omotoye, 2022). This perspective is particularly evident in a The Daily Hive journalist's suggestion that the team's success was: “because they boast a diverse group of 26 players whose families have emigrated from all over the world, making them truly representative of the country's multicultural makeup” (Devji, 2022). Players themselves reinforced this discourse. For example, defender Richie Laryea noted: “That's the beauty of this country and this national team. It's so diverse and multicultural, and we come together as one” (Kloke, 2022). Goalkeeper Milan Borjan, in an article in the newspaper Le Devoir, similarly declared: “This remarkable diversity is the fruit of a country with ‘generous immigration policies’” (Desrosiers, 2022). Several sources directly credited these policies for the team's first FMWC qualification in 36 years (Omotoye, 2022; Sivakumar, 2022). This media coverage helped establish a coherent nation where team diversity and athletic excellence were intrinsically linked to Canadian multiculturalism.

The “team united in its diversity” discourse resonated beyond Canada's borders, with foreign media celebrating Canada's FMWC qualification as a multicultural moment. The Los Angeles Times published three articles praising Canada as a symbol of “big-hearted immigrant policies,” highlighting that “eight of the 38 ministers in Justin Trudeau's cabinet are immigrants” (Baxter, 2022). One article juxtaposes winger Alphonso Davies’ refugee background with the trajectories of politicians at the highest levels of government, projects an image of immigrant success and Canada's commitment to integrating people from diverse backgrounds. Davies is presented as a figurehead of “Canada's Refugee Resettlement Project” (Baxter, 2022). His refugee-to-star-player journey is portrayed as an emblem of success applicable to the experiences of many other refugees in Canada. Moreover, Davies serves as a metonym for showcasing pro-immigration policies and structures. One New York Times article focused on Brampton's seven national team players, highlighting the city's cultural diversity. Jonathan Osorio, one of the players interviewed, attributed the city's soccer talent in this way: “the cultural melting pot that is Brampton was a reason it had produced so many top-level soccer players” (Wagner, 2022). International media thus reinforce the image of Canada as a nation thriving through diversity, immigration policies, and refugee resettlement programs. Widely echoed in the local media, the celebratory discourse from foreign media only strengthened a sense of appreciation for the Canadian political context as a space favorable to immigration, multiculturalism, and diversity.

As Ahmed (2012) has pointed out, however diversity is used, it seems to be employed not just as a descriptive term, but to accrue value, because it adds value to something (p. 58). Ahmed's argument is particularly apt when considering how “diversity” creates something, as it allows us to talk about “Canada,” its racialized, immigrant, refugee, and diaspora inhabitants, and their ability to add value to the country's soccer team and to the country itself. This becomes clearer in an Athletic headline that suggests: “Canada has become a team that reflects the country: ‘Our greatest strength is our diversity’” (Kloke, 2022). In this sense, this mobilization of the Canadian team's diversity aligns with a form of multiculturalism that understands the contribution of migrants almost exclusively in terms of labor and the resulting economic and, in this case, athletic benefits for the nation. This effect seems even more evident in The Star article, in which the author suggests: “One is left to wonder how many future stars, both girls and boys in any endeavor, are among the 400,000-plus immigrants Canada plans to welcome every year” (Brown, 2022). Here, with a prospective view on immigration, it is suggested that, among the many immigrants Canada welcomes each year, there may be future stars capable of helping the nation. This discursive emphasis on diversity's “value” to the nation coincides with unprecedented immigration levels in Canada, which welcomed over 437,000 permanent residents in 2022 and saw its population grow by over one million people for the first time in its history during the year of the tournament (Statistics Canada, 2023). The timing of this celebratory discourse on the national team's diversity thus aligns with broader state policies positioning immigration as key to Canada's economic and demographic growth. There also seems to be a belief that immigration produces citizens who are the “talents” of today and tomorrow. This belief extends to the potential recruitment of dual-national players for the Canadian team in the future: “Canada's strength is its diversity. There are countless dual nationals who are in some of Europe's biggest academies who may want to represent Canada” (Galindo, 2022). This is supported by Herdman: “The next quadrennial is about really pushing hard to recruit those players that are on the bubble, on the dual passports. We’ve given them a reason to believe that Canada can compete now and that we are a football nation” (Rebelo, 2022). Through the idea that diversity is Canada's strength, it is also imagined that many professional players with dual nationality would now choose to represent Canada.

Despite the celebration of the diversity of Canada's national soccer team, few articles take a critical perspective on this issue. Only two articles highlight the discrepancy between the positive image projected by the participation of players with immigrant backgrounds and the reality of restrictive migration policies and the challenges faced by migrants in Canada (Adjekum, 2022; Desrosiers, 2022). While a CBC piece (2022) points out how Canada has “normalized the mass incarceration of migrants through the practice of arbitrary detention” even while celebrating its diverse national team, one journalist from Le Devoir (Desrosiers, 2022) questions the selective nature of these celebratory narratives: “What is striking […] is that this narrative focuses only on the players’ sporting successes without paying attention to the obstacles they and their families have undoubtedly encountered in Canada.” However, such critical perspectives remain exceptional in the broader media discourse around the team's diversity.

Echoing Ahmed’s (2012) observations, the majority of the articles demonstrate how diversity transforms into an attribute, even a strength, that leads to the creation of a singular body (Ahmed, 2012). While the Canadian players come from different countries, they are presented, understood and treated as diverse yet productive bodies. Diversity creates a particular type of body, one that emerges through the media's discourses on the Canadian team. In this sense, diversity as a technique of attribution becomes a container, enabling the presentation of a body “unified in its diversity” as a “symbol of Canada” and, moreover, “Canada's strength.” This echoes what Hage (2014) refers to as an image of “the ethnic/racial other” as an object within this national space valued for what it can contribute to the nation.

Majority discourse: Between domestication and othering

Highlighting the players’ immigration journeys is particularly prominent in reports on the Canadian team. As a journalist from The Daily Hive states, players are depicted as “truly representative of the country's multicultural makeup” (Devji, 2022). This symbolic inclusion is also accompanied by a persistent form of othering. A “double logic” of “racial assignment” and “racial identification” is regularly applied (Devriendt et al., p. 13), as when a La Presse journalist specifies that player Ismaël Koné “was born in Côte d’Ivoire in 2002” and “arrived in Canada at the age of 7, fleeing the civil war” (Téotonio, 2022), or when a Le Devoir journalist presents Samuel Adekugbe as a “Canadian defender born in England to parents with Nigerian roots” (Desrosiers, 2022). Through these different framings and portrayals (of the team, the players, and even Canada), a perspective is offered on the players’ origins outside of Canada, positioning the country as a “welcoming land” for immigrants and refugees.

Some articles provide space for the players themselves to share their experiences with immigration. Their testimonies are marked by gratitude, appreciation, and deference towards Canada. This is particularly evident in a testimony from goalkeeper Milan Borjan, who states: “Canada is a multicultural country. It gave us peace, better schools, a better life. [Our efforts on the field] are just a way for us to give back” (Desrosiers, 2022). As a media process, these appreciative testimonies from players reinforce the impression that Canada is not only a welcoming land for immigrants and refugees but also that it offers opportunities for these individuals, even saving lives. The FMWC generates a form of national assignment that represents the domestication of these athletes for a local/Canadian audience, while also being subject to constant tension related to their perception as “foreigners” in the country. In articles discussing Canada's roster, players are labeled as Caribbean (Barbados, Haiti, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago), African (Ivory Coast, Ghana, Liberia), European (Northern Ireland, Portugal, United Kingdom, Yugoslavia), South American (Argentina), first- or second-generation “immigrants,” “refugees,” “Black,” and/or “mixed.” These identity markers reveal and elide complex geopolitical histories and hierarchies that are not narrated, explained, or detailed in the media coverage of these players’ backgrounds. White players like Stephen Eustaquio (Portugal), Steven Vitoria (Portugal), David Wotherspoon (Scotland), Alistair Johnson (Northern Ireland), and James Pantemis (Greece) receive significantly less attention regarding their immigrant background, with Borjan being an exception primarily framed through his refugee narrative rather than his European origins.

The insistence on the players’ extra-Canadian origins (or [hyphenated identities] Jackson, 2004), whether real or assumed, tends to present them as potential “foreigners.” This tension is reflected in the players’ testimonies, which oscillate between pride in representing a multicultural Canada and reinforcing conditional belonging. For example, Samuel Adekugbe's statement that “Young Black kids can see themselves … We’re a bunch of different people from different societies and different backgrounds” (Davidson, 2022) promotes a vision of Canadian nationhood as fundamentally plural, yet reaffirms blackness and suggests parallel rather than integrated communities. Similarly, Alphonso Davies’ declaration that “A kid born in a refugee camp wasn’t supposed to make it!” (Davidson, 2022), while inspirational, implicitly suggests refugee success as exceptional rather than normative in Canadian society, reinforcing the very barriers his story appears to challenge. While celebrating players’ immigrant and refugee journeys, these testimonies obscure the complexities of their Canadian experiences. Davies’ family's story, for example, resembles those common to many recent African refugees and immigrants in Canada, characterized by employment challenges, discrimination, cultural adaptation, and family separation (Stewart et al., 2015). These struggles can occasionally be seen in media coverage—for example references to Davies’ father working in a poultry plant and his mother as a university janitor, or Davies caring for siblings and having to change diapers and cook meals at 10 years old, while his parents worked consecutive work shifts in their low-income neighborhood (McBride, 2022). Similarly, stories of Ismael Koné's inability to reunite with siblings who were left behind in Ivory Coast briefly surface but never disrupt the dominant “success story” narrative. This silence extends to well-documented patterns of systemic and everyday racism affecting racialized communities in Canada, where empirical research demonstrates persistent racial disparities across institutional settings, from discrimination in education, healthcare, and employment (DasGupta et al., 2020; Husbands et al., 2022) to disproportionate rates of incarceration compared to the general population (Walker, 2022).

Following Hage (2014), seemingly celebratory discourses maintain an imagined privileged relationship between majority and minority groups, where players are symbolically included in the Canadian “we” while the complexity of their lives in Canada remains peripheral to their success stories. This is also reflected in the way the media covers Canadian fans from immigrant communities. In a La Presse article, a columnist suggests about the competition: “Usually, we watch this as tourists. Joining our French, Italian, Spanish, or Brazilian friends, depending on whether we like to drink wine, eat pasta, paella, or dance the samba. It's exotic” (Laporte, 2022). Beyond the clichés and stereotypes, the author asserts, on behalf of a majority readership, that Canadians who follow the event are generally aligned with specific diaspora communities. Reports detail, with anthropological fascination, how these communities experience the competition, but tend to relegate them to an unwavering loyalty to their “country of origin.” For example, a Radio-Canada article is entirely devoted to presenting “the Moroccan community” at the Montreal-Nord Recreation Center during the match between Morocco and Portugal. It details the atmosphere, passion, and intensity of the crowd for soccer and “its” national team. Through descriptions of places, atmospheres, and “their passions,” the attachment of different diaspora communities to soccer is narrated, as in this article from Le Devoir: “Tunisians and Algerians come and go in the string of Maghreb establishments on Jean-Talon Street. In a nearby alley, young people play soccer in the street, betraying the identity of the most popular sport in North Africa. The loyalty of all those Le Devoir met goes to their country of origin” (Bordeleau, 2022). In this excerpt, the author suggests that soccer is the most popular sport for certain diaspora communities and that these bi-national citizens may not necessarily have the same allegiance to Canada as to their country of origin. Beyond the exoticizing gaze on these diasporas, these community gatherings during World Cup matches represent more than what the mainstream media portrays; they are spaces where communities actively construct their own sense of belonging on their own terms, where they can feel emplaced within Canada while maintaining connections to multiple national identities (Nya and Scherer, 2024). However, articles with titles such as “Canada, a good second for some soccer-loving dual nationals” (Bordeleau, 2022) or “Who is your ‘home team’ this World Cup? For many Montrealers, it's complicated” (Lapierre, 2022), reduce the issue to divided loyalties by suggesting “the difficult choices” (Lapierre, 2022) that bi-national soccer loving citizens of major Canadian cities will have to make.

Media discourses reveal tensions between symbolic inclusion and persistent othering. While diversity is celebrated, it is perpetually suggested as foreign, implicitly defining “normative” Canadianness through an unmarked white majority that “manages” (Hage, 2014) national symbolic borders. In this sense, certain racial and ethnic identities are continuously marked as external to an implicit core Canadian identity. This marking occurs through the constant highlighting of non-white players’ origins, migration stories, and ethnic backgrounds. Following Ahmed's ideas (2000), the figure of the “stranger” is constructed not as what we fail to recognize, but as what we have already recognized as “foreign.” Soccer, its athletes, and its supporters are still represented in their various links to otherness in popular and media language, which participates in reifying organizing categories between majority and minority groups (Juteau, 2015). The majority is rarely specified, while minority groups are constantly reconstructed in these terms (Buu-Sao and Léobal, 2020). This assignment manifests and materializes in the portrayals of players who are labeled based on their country of origin, ethnicity, or cultural heritage, which has the effect of presenting them as different and potentially foreign.

As Hage (2014) points out, the racializing effect of these types. of discourses is inseparable from governmental national belonging and therefore from a concern for maintaining the role of managing the national home: “what motivates the production of categories (…) is the wish to construct or preserve not just a ‘race,’ an ‘ethnicity,’ or a ‘culture,’ but also an imagined privileged relation between the imagined ‘race,’ ‘ethnicity,’ or ‘culture’ and the national space conceived as its own” (p.44). Regardless of journalistic intent, these media portrayals function as mechanisms for negotiating belonging, revealing persistent ideas about race and national belonging that position team members as “contingent Canadians.” This differential treatment in media coverage reveals how the discourse of diversity operates through racialized markers: while players of color are consistently framed through their immigrant backgrounds or “diverse” origins—even after multiple generations—white immigrant players are more readily absorbed into an unmarked Canadian identity. This suggests that media representations continue to construct “Canadianness” through a racial lens where whiteness serves as an implicit norm, even as the discourse celebrates diversity. Following Jackson (1998), their “Canadianness” is never guaranteed as it remains contingent to their contribution and fealty to the nation, upon their athletic achievements and ability to generate national pride.

Conclusion

This study sheds light on the complex intersection between mega-events and racialized governmentality in the context of Canada's participation in the 2022 FMWC. Through a critical analysis of media discourses, this article highlighted how racial discourses and categories shaped the understanding of this mega-event. By drawing on an analysis of the media coverage of the Canadian team during the 2022 FMWC, this project showed how the event provided an occasion to generate ephemeral moments of celebratory multiculturalism, while simultaneously reproducing a nationalist discourse that excludes the non-white “other.” These dynamics echo the analyses of Hage (2014) and Bilge (2013) on “nationalist practice” and show how such ideas can be used to understand the exclusionary nature of national identity as shaped in the realm of mega-events. Presenting the Canadian team as multicultural is part of an attempt to “animate a national space,” where the “ethnic/racial other” is constructed as an object (Bilge, 2013). During the tournament, journalists organize and orchestrate the Canadian identity narrative by presenting a cohesive multicultural team. Moreover, these journalists speak on behalf of a majority, making these texts “ritual acts of national self-determination” (Bilge, 2013), allowing the majority population to renew its sense of control in the face of a society marked by multiculturalism and immigration. While it may be challenging to identify a singular orchestrating force, its manifestation emerges more organically through media discourse that collectively constructs a cohesive multicultural story. The journalistic process operates through a grammar that simultaneously celebrates diversity while maintaining power to define “Canadianess” and who is included in the symbolic “we,” participating in the ongoing work of constructing and actualizing the nation. Without explicit material traces of coordination, journalists across various outlets reproduce similar nationalist frameworks and multicultural tropes, suggesting a deeper embedded structure of majority discourse. This decentralized yet consistent production reinforces a vision of Canadian diversity and multiculturalism.

This study also highlights how mega-sporting events, such as the FMWC, are sites for the reproduction of national identities and the reinforcement of racialized identities. For players from diverse backgrounds, this manifests through a discourse about their “foreign origins” that tends to essentialize them and function as a reductive explanatory power. The discourse on “diversity” and “multiculturalism” thus operates as a power of negation, where players become embodiments of these values without critical interrogation of how these discourses are organized within what Coulthard (2014) describes as “interrelated discursive and nondiscursive facets of economic, gendered, racial, and state power” (p. 6–7). This celebration of diversity and multiculturalism, when divorced from concrete anti-racist action that challenges and transforms discriminatory systems and institutions, ultimately reinforces existing power structures. The superficial embrace of diversity and multiculturalism through the Canadian men's soccer team paradoxically diverts attention from structural problems related to racism, immigration, and settler colonial relations in Canada. Far from reflecting the complexity of this diversity, its conditional celebration obscures systemic barriers affecting marginalized groups, including women, racialized minorities, Indigenous peoples, and people with disabilities. Confined to this narrow horizon, this conception of diversity merely masks the players’ racialization by reshaping their experiences to fit the imaginary vision of the tolerant, post-racial society that Canada seeks to project.

By examining the deployment of racial categories in these discourses, this work reveals how the sport/media complex operates as a site for reproducing relations of domination and exclusion. As Boykoff (2022) argues, major sporting events have become sites of “increasingly ‘hegemonic social legitimation discourse’ for autocrats and democrats alike” serving to “help resolve the tensions that arise amid 21st-century precarity, whether material or discursive, whether culturally appropriative or reinforcing” (p. 349). While Boykoff notes that previous studies have focused largely on authoritarian contexts on the global scale, this study examines how similar legitimation processes operate within democratic, multicultural societies and domestically in the local/national contexts. In doing so, this research shows how the notion of racialized governmentality can be employed to better understand the cultural politics of national identity embodied in media coverage of mega-sporting events within purportedly multicultural democracies. While this study has focused on the media, it would be relevant, in future research, to examine in more detail the role of public institutions and the Canadian state to better understand the complex dynamics between political will, institutional interests, and media representations in reproducing the image of an inclusive and multicultural Canada. At the very least, this research calls for further critical research on these issues, including an analysis of how future mega-sporting events hosted by Canada, such as the 2026 FMWC, can be an opportunity to rethink superficial celebrations of multiculturalism and an exclusionary vision of national identity.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Bachir Sirois-Moumni

Notes

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