Father Chase Hilgenbrinck, a 44-year-old diocesan priest in Peoria, Ill., is the rare cleric who is also an elite athlete. Before he was a defender of the faith, Father Hilgenbrinck was a defender for Clemson University and later the New England Revolution. He played only four games of Major League Soccer, all during the 2008 season, before he followed his calling to attend Mount St. Mary’s Seminary in Emmitsburg, Md.
With the 39-day World Cup kicking off on June 11, I needed Father Hilgenbrinck’s help to make sense of what might be the only global institution that rivals the Catholic Church in popularity, passion and pride.
The Catholic Church and soccer “are both universal languages, but they’re also universal businesses,” Father Hilgenbrinck said. “I like to say I worked in the two biggest international businesses in the world: professional soccer and the Catholic Church.” The priest finds meaning in the fact that his vocational path led him through an apprenticeship of tackles, free kicks and wind sprints. Soccer players run over five miles a game, so like another European favorite, cycling, it’s an aerobic sport with a lot of suffering. He was also inspired by another ex-soccer player, Pope John Paul II, who frequently made speeches on the virtue of playing sports: “There are virtues that are learned and practiced by being an athlete that are then transferable to Catholicism or just living a Christian life,” said Father Hilgenbrinck.
And just like the rest of the planet’s billion-plus soccer fans, Father Hilgenbrinck is very excited for the 2026 World Cup and the prospect of the U.S. team making a run for the championship. “That’s not only about the game; it’s also about patriotism,” he said. “It’s also about people who love their flag, love their country, want to be proud of where they’re from, and on the field, that just brings out the best in everyone.”
To be sure, this World Cup in particular is fraught with geopolitical tension, and FIFA’s never-ending corruption scandals recall the worst of the Renaissance popes. The United States is at war with one of the tournament’s entrants, Iran, and has cracked down on visas for visitors. Fans from Haiti and Iran will not be given visas. However, this month, the Trump administration said it would waive visa bonds as high as $15,000 for other World Cup fans.
But for all the institutional messiness, it’s impossible to ignore the World Cup. Here are 10 reasons for America readers to watch the 2026 World Cup:
A Catholic-majority country will probably win: There have been 22 World Cups, but only eight countries of the 80 countries that have competed have ever won, and six of them are majority Catholic: Spain, France, Italy, Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina. Then there’s Germany, which is partly Catholic, and England, which was until Henry VIII decided otherwise. It might seem odd that only European and South American countries have won, and that the world’s most populous countries have fared so poorly. Of the world’s five most populous nations, China has only qualified once, losing all three games it played in 2002, and India, Indonesia and Pakistan have never qualified. (Although Indonesia did make it in 1938 when it was the Dutch East Indies.) The United States has fared a bit better, finishing third at the first-ever tournament in 1930 and reaching the quarterfinals in 2002.
The tournament was invented by a Catholic: Jules Rimet (1873-1956) fought for France in World War I and returned home from the carnage determined to help build a more peaceful world. Rimet was “determined to leverage soccer as a force for good,” said Leander Schaerlaeckens, author of The Long Game: U.S. Men’s Soccer and Its Savage, Four-Decade Journey to the Top, or Thereabouts, an authoritative new book about the history of the U.S. Men’s National Team. “He saw around that corner and understood that there was soft power in sports and that there were geopolitical gains to be made through these mega tournaments.”
In part, Rimet was inspired by Catholic social teaching and Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical “Rerum Novarum,” which advocated worker rights. Soccer would be a game for the working classes to play and to watch. Unlike other sports leaders at the time, Rimet supported professionalizing sports.
In the 1920s, Rimet became president of the French soccer association and of FIFA, but the main forum for global soccer was another international event invented by a Frenchman, the Olympics. Rimet thought the Olympics were too restrictive. Soccer should have its own event. In 1928, FIFA voted to hold the first World Cup and to make it open to professional athletes, at the time a revolutionary concept. “Rimet helped establish international football as a commercial pursuit, played and watched mostly by working-class men,” Simon Kuper, author of World Cup Fever: A Soccer Journey in Nine Tournaments, writes. (The World Cup comes along every four years, and so do a bunch of new books about soccer.) “There was nothing inevitable about this. When the World Cup was conceived, professional football still hadn’t been legalized in France.”
It’s a reason to get together with friends: As Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, “Magnificat Humanitas,” argues, it is more important than ever in the age of artificial intelligence for humans to engage with each other in person, even if it is to watch sports on a screen. “We want to embrace sports as a cultural activity because it’s an extraordinary thing that attracts people around the world and gets people out of their rooms,” Bishop Paul Tighe, the secretary of the Section for Culture at the Vatican’s Dicastery for Culture and Education, said. There won’t be any big screen TVs at the Vatican, added Bishop Tighe, who’s made headlines as the Vatican’s liaison with Silicon Valley. “But there’ll be a lot of good-natured ribbing in the halls of the Vatican about whose country won last night.”
It’s community in action: I have covered one World Cup as a journalist. In 2010, The Wall Street Journal sent me to South Africa for two weeks. I crisscrossed the country, exploring one fascinating place after another. But what I really remember was my first dose of high-level soccer. Compared to American sports, it offers a broad canvas of possibility. The field is much bigger than basketball, the action more free-flowing than American football and the structure of the game more open than baseball. In soccer, teams construct long attacks that almost always fail. They then have to start over, kicking the ball forward, running alongside the other attackers, creating a new form of community with every ball up the field.
“You rely on that team,” Father Hilgenbrinck said. “You have a place on that team. And every member has its own job, as Paul says in 1 Corinthians, like, every member forms a part of the body, and everybody’s got their own job. Like people say, ‘Were you a goal scorer?’ No, I wasn’t a goal scorer.… I had a special job that I had to perform…for the body to be well, right? Just like in our church community, everybody’s got their own apostolate or ministry that they’re working on.”
Popes love soccer: Pope Leo, it is well known, is a baseball guy, but he follows Italian soccer. Two recent popes have been nutty soccer fans. Pope John Paul II played soccer in Poland and embraced the 1990 World Cup in Italy, blessing the tournament in a speech that invoked the spirit of founder Jules Rimet: “the World Cup can become a celebration of solidarity between peoples.” Pope Francis was a lifelong supporter of San Lorenzo, a soccer club in his native Argentina. As a boy in the Flores quarter of Buenos Aires, the young Jorge Mario Bergoglio played street soccer. He wasn’t very good, earning the derogatory nickname “Hard Foot,” according to an autobiography. San Lorenzo, incidentally, was founded in 1908 by a priest named Lorenzo Massa. In 2023, RAI, Italy’s TV station, asked Francis to decide between Lionel Messi and Diego Maradona as the greatest soccer player of all time. Francis’ answer: “Pelé.”
Messi’s last hurrah: The World Cup’s leading man happens to be a Catholic. Lionel Messi has a tattoo of Christ wearing the crown of thorns on his right arm, and after he scores, he points to the sky to thank God. Messi led Argentina to victory in the last World Cup; after winning, he made a pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady of the Rosary of San Nicolás. Like many athletes, Messi credited God in part for his triumph. “I knew that God was going to grant this gift to me; I had a feeling that it was going to be this,” he told a reporter after the game.
Pope Francis even addressed the habit of soccer fans referring to Messi as God. One of his nicknames was D10S, spelled with his uniform number in the Spanish word for God. “People can say he is God, just as they may say ‘I adore you’; but only God can be worshipped,” the pope said. “Of course, he is very good, but he isn’t God.”
Other Catholic heroes: Messi is not the only soccer star to wear his faith on his sleeve. U.S. star Christian Pulisic credits his faith for sustaining his motivation to become a great soccer player. Croatian star Luka Modrić, who won the Golden Ball award in 2018 as the tournament’s best player, walks around with a rosary and has images of Jesus and Mary on his shin guards.
Father Hilgenbrinck says it’s O.K. to pray for victory. “I always pray for victory because that’s the passion that’s in my heart,” he says. “That doesn’t mean that God’s going to grant that, because I prayed for it, but I don’t hold back anything from God. St. Ignatius says we pray with our thoughts, feelings and desires, and I have a passionate desire that every time I step on the field, I want to win.”
When Mauricio Pochettino, the coach of the U.S. Men’s National Team, was playing in Spain, he was spotted hiking to visit a shrine of the Virgin Mary to pray for his mother to recover from breast cancer; but soccer fans who saw him later credited the intervention for his team avoiding being relegated to a lower league. “Belief is a word that is powerful,” he said once, according to Schaerlaeckens’s book. “You can have an enormous talent, you can be clever, but in football you need to believe, believe all that is possible.”
The U.S. could…win?: With stars who have honed their games in Europe’s top leagues, like Christian Pulisic (Milan), Weston McKennie (Juventus) and Antonee Robinson (Fulham), hopes are high for the U.S. team in 2026. Home squads always get a boost at the World Cup, Schaerlaeckens said. Smaller countries, he said, are better at organizing training for talented young athletes. China, Russia and Indonesia have also never come close to winning a World Cup, despite having more people, and soccer players, than, say, Belgium. The SC Dallas Academy, for example, has been successful at training future American pro players, such as McKennie and Ricardo Pepi. The problem, Schaerlaeckens told me, is that the Dallas club can’t train all the good young players. “The Dallas market is roughly the same size and has the same population as that of Madrid,” he said. “Madrid, at any given time, has about a dozen professional soccer teams, which is to say that it has a dozen professional youth soccer academies.” Dallas, meanwhile, just has one: “The next closest one is in Houston or Austin,” Schaerlaeckens said.
You can also root for a David: Two tiny Catholic majority countries, Curaçao (pop. 160,000) and Cape Verde (pop. 500,000), are making World Cup debuts in 2026. The bookmakers have set the odds of Curaçao winning the World Cup at 2,500 to 1. Cape Verde fares a bit better at 2,000 to 1. But let’s be real. Cinderella is for other sports; a glass slipper is no good for scoring goals. There have only been a few memorable underdog runs, including Bulgaria in 1994, South Korea in 2002 and Morocco in 2022 all reaching the semifinals. However, as a Belgian who has seen his soccer-made country reach the semis twice, in 1986 and 2018, let me tell you: Getting that far is really fun.
You’ll learn about suffering: There is nothing more cruel in sports than following a soccer team for a game or a tournament and watching its fate come down to penalty kicks, an exercise of pure anxiety that feels like flipping coins for your life. It’s enough to make you wonder if God is just. In February, before the Winter Olympics, Pope Leo issued On Abundance, a letter about sports. He warned against “pay to play” youth sports and said that team sports should not be “polluted by the worship of profit.”
Working together with peers, Leo added, “sometimes involves dealing with conflicts and managing frustrations and failures. They even have to learn to forgive (cf. Mt 18:21-22). In this way, fundamental personal, Christian and civic virtues take shape.”
In other words, the World Cup is about more than just soccer. In 1990, recalled Bishop Tighe, his home country of Ireland made its World Cup debut. It drew with England, Egypt and the Netherlands in the group stage, good enough to qualify for the second round, where it defeated Romania on penalties to reach the quarterfinals. Although Ireland was then knocked out by Italy, its success shocked the world and inspired a country and its diaspora.
Ireland has never gotten that far since, and only qualified for two of the subsequent nine World Cups. Its team is not coming to North America this summer. In March, it was eliminated from the qualifying tournament by Czechia on penalties.
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