The World Cup as a Racial Rebuilt Project

Scholars, particularly Critical Race Theorists, have written trenchantly about the law’s role in racial formation. Yet, while instrumental in this process, the law does not stand alone as a conduit of making race. Particularly for misrepresented groups, like Arabs, who struggle to find existential self-determination between imperial identity impositions, ethnic cleansing, and clashing racial ascriptions, the law fails to create racial categories that reflect their lived realities. Beyond the asymmetrical landscape of legal ordering, sport stands as a powerful site of racial formation. Sport is where racialization can unfold indigenously, rebelliously, and “from the bottom.” Particularly soccer, a game of unvrivaled global resonance, especially within Arab societies where the “beautiful game” provides a venue for protest, possibility, and redefinition. This was on full display at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar when the host nation and the historic performance of the Moroccan National Team rebuilt a transnational Arabism that contested colonial divides and contemporary legal designations, ultimately unveiling the sport’s capacity to remake race. This Article centers the World Cup as a counter-narrative that reconstructed Arabism in the native image of the host nation, Palestine, and the Moroccan team, and against the stigmatized racialization ascribed by Western laws. The 2022 World Cup did so by: (1) demystifying imperial and War on Terror constructions of Arab identity; (2) reconstructing an indigenous modality of transnational Arabism in its stead; (3) curating a generative setting for a “mosaic racialization” that harmonized the diversity of a peoples who found common existential ties as Arabs; and (4) providing a template for rebuilding Arab identity within the shifting