On Thursday evening, Germany’s national team will play Ecuador. For ninety minutes, something will happen in this country that has become increasingly rare. Millions of people who share little in political outlook, cultural background, or personal experience will look at the same screen and hope for the same outcome.
It is a brief and fragile moment of collective certainty in a society that disagrees about almost everything else. For that reason alone, it is worth examining what still sustains such moments and what has begun to weaken them from within.
The notion that football represents the last source of cohesion in a fragmented society is both familiar and exhausted. It seemed plausible in 2006, when Germany reinvented itself through the narrative of the “Summer Fairy Tale.” It seemed plausible again in 2014, when the fourth star on the national team’s shirt briefly suggested a country at ease with itself.
Twelve years and two early World Cup exits later, little remains of that story beyond a lingering nostalgia for it. What remains is a more pressing question: does football still perform the function so often attributed to it, or have the very qualities that once distinguished it already been eroded by forces that have little to do with politics?
The Promise of Effortless Belonging
What made football such an effective social adhesive was the ease with which people could belong. One did not have to take a position in order to be included.
Unlike religion, party politics, or even questions of artistic and cultural taste, football required only a shared occasion. The match itself was enough to create a sense of belonging that had become increasingly rare elsewhere. Public viewing was the natural continuation of this casual inclusiveness in public space. There was no membership requirement, no formal affiliation, and no barrier to entry beyond simply showing up. Anyone could celebrate together, suffer together, and shout themselves hoarse.
To a remarkable extent, that openness remains intact. Contrary to what one might expect in an era marked by constant political tension, public viewing during the 2026 World Cup has not become a significant arena for ideological conflict.
That in itself is noteworthy. In a country that argues fiercely about migration, heating systems, and transport reform, the town square with a giant screen remains one of the few places where people can still stand side by side without dispute. The fault line lies elsewhere.
When Shared Experience Becomes a Commodity
What undermines football’s traditional inclusiveness today is not political appropriation but economic fragmentation.
The Bundesliga is now dispersed across a growing number of streaming platforms. A single subscription no longer provides access to football as a whole. Viewers must decide how much the shared experience is worth to them, and not everyone is equally able to make that choice.
An experience that was once universally accessible through free television has become a tiered product, divided into premium packages, individual match purchases, and subscription bundles. As a result, public viewings and free-to-air tournaments such as the World Cup have become more valuable, not less. They remain among the last occasions on which the original promise still holds true. Everyone watches the same event, at the same time, without a paywall.
A second shift follows from the first. Watching football has itself become an event.
Over recent years, public viewing has evolved from spontaneous gatherings around a television outside a neighbourhood kiosk into carefully organised spectacles complete with security checks, ticketing systems, sponsor branding, and commercial entertainment programmes.
The economic rationale is obvious. Such events are safer and better organised than before. Yet their character has also changed. A space that people once entered by chance has become something designed and marketed for consumption.
The casual openness that once defined football has increasingly become a service in its own right. It may be professionally delivered, but it is also less spontaneous, less open, and less clearly available to everyone without condition.
What Remains of the Promise
It would be mistaken to conclude that football has therefore lost its capacity to bring people together.
In many respects, the opposite is true. Precisely because shared experiences have become economically scarcer, their value has become more apparent. When fan zones and living rooms fill once again on Thursday evening, this will also represent a quiet response to the fragmentation of the rest of the year. For a few hours, people will set aside the logic of tiered access and simply watch what everyone else is watching.
This is ultimately a more revealing story than the question of political instrumentalisation. The principal challenge to football’s integrative promise comes not from ideology but from economics.
Every additional subscription model and every new streaming tier separates people a little further from something that once belonged to everyone as a matter of course. Anyone standing in front of a screen on Thursday, whether in a stadium, at a fan zone, or at home watching free-to-air television, is participating in one of the last free mass experiences this society still knows.
Whether this model will survive another twelve years is a different and more sober question. Yet it may also be the more important one. For the essay is ultimately about more than football. It is about what happens to a society when even its shared experiences become scarce goods, distributed through increasingly selective forms of access. Once the moments that everyone can participate in without condition begin to disappear, something larger than a game is at stake.