Football is the world’s most popular sport,
and soon enough millions will descend upon Qatar for the latest edition of the World Cup.
But at the risk of raining on FIFA’s parade,
weirdly enough, the event may contribute to the worst of human activities:
war. For evidence of this, look no further than the Football War
—that’s its actual name—between Honduras and El Salvador in 1969.
The short version: El Salvador beat Honduras 3-2 during World Cup qualifying,
the parties broke all diplomatic ties,
a war began with El Salvador invading, and around 3000 people died in the process
before El Salvador retreated. This, sadly, is not an exaggeration.
There was some sanity in the apparent insanity here.
The real issue at stake was land ownership rights.
Honduras is much larger than El Salvador,
but El Salvador had a much larger population.
For decades, Salvadorans moved to Honduras and used the surplus space to set up farms.
Long story short, the United Fruit Company—
a business not well known for its humanitarian convictions—convinced
Honduras to reassert ownership over that land. []
Against this backdrop, Honduras advanced past Costa Rica and Jamaica in the first
round of CONCACAF’s 1970 World Cup qualifiers.
Meanwhile El Salvador stood atop Suriname and Netherlands Antilles,
setting the stage for a pair of matches between the two victors.
The first match took place at Honduras’ Estadio Nacional.
Fans surrounded El Salvador’s hotel,
setting off firecrackers and mashing car horns
to prevent the team from sleeping. El Salvador lost the next day 1-0.
One week later, the teams traveled to El Salvador’s Estadio Jorge "Mágico" González
for the second match. Not to be outdone, Salvadoran fans got their
revenge by throwing stones at Honduras’ hotel and assaulting Honduran fans.
El Salvador won 3-0.
With the records square, the teams met for a winner-take-all match thirteen days later
in Mexico’s Estadio Azteca. The winner would advance to the next round, loser would go home.
Given the heated situation, tournament organizers had to take special caution.
Salvadoran fans got one side of the stadium.
Honduran fans got the other.
Meanwhile, tons of Mexican police officers resided in between.
El Salvador won 3-2 in extra time and advanced to the next round,
while Honduras was eliminated.
Then the sides broke diplomatic ties. Two weeks later, El Salvador invaded Honduras.
Four days and a few thousand fatalities afterward, the war ended due to a combination of Honduran
president Oswaldo López guaranteeing the safety of Salvadoran immigrants
and the Organization of American States threatening
to implement sanctions against El Salvador if it did not withdraw.
(That’s right—sanctions can end wars.)
Of course, the Football War is just one case where it just so happened that things went awry.
It is possible that on net international sporting competition promotes harmony—
whether it is the World Cup, the Olympics, or otherwise.
World leaders routinely attend matches together and we do not often see them coming to blows.
It even gives them an opportunity to initiate diplomatic chats
that they might not find time for otherwise.
Here are the presidents of France and Croatia during the 2018 final.
They are still friends and still NATO partners.
It also does not address the possibility that football makes a country
more or less war like in general, not just against their opponents.
But actually estimating the net effect is difficult.
To examine that, let’s look at something known as militarized interstate disputes.
This is a lower threshold of conflict,
going down to at least a threat or use of force. It can result in casualties,
but it does not have the 1000 battle death threshold that political scientists place on war.
As a first pass, it would be tempting to look at countries that make the World
Cup and countries that do not and then compare how frequently each type ends up in a dispute.
However, Brazil and Germany have qualified for more World Cups than any other country.
And if we look further down the list to Italy, Argentina, Mexico, Spain,
France, and England, we see a clear pattern: they tend to be larger countries.
Unfortunately, larger countries also tend to have more disputes.
We could try going deep into the research
and statistically control for those sorts of confounders.
If we do, we find that qualifiers start
.4 more disputes than non-qualifiers overall in the few years afterward.
However, there is still no guarantee that clearly better teams
are not systematically different in a way that is hard to measure.
Fortunately, political scientists have figured out a clever way to try to solve that problem.
Let’s go back to Europe’s 1986 qualifiers.
Group 2 consisted of
Czechoslovakia, Malta, Portugal, Sweden, and West Germany.
The format was double round robin, with the top two teams qualifying.
After eight long games played, West Germany topped the table and went to Mexico City for the final.
Czechoslovakia and Malta were gone.
And Portugal just squeaked by Sweden with one additional point.
That meant Portugal went to Mexico,
and Sweden went home.
Yet difference between those two is getting pretty close to random.
Often, what separates them is a single ball going just wide of the net or just inside of the post.
Thus, we can use teams like Portugal as a part of a “treatment” group.
Teams like Sweden are as part of a “control” group.
And exclude the rest from our faux experiment.
Here, Portugal receives the “treatment” because it is exposed to the World Cup.
And Sweden serves as a control because it does not.
As another example, for this 1994 qualification tournament, Bulgaria and France are included.
Sweden, Austria, Finland, and Israel are excluded because none of them were on the cusp.
All of the teams from this group are excluded as well,
because second place Russia had a large lead over third place Iceland.
Statistically, the averages of those barely in and those barely out
are identical in things like total population,
urban population, democratic institutions,
great power status, and year of state formation.
Their tendency to initiate disputes prior to qualification is also similar.
This red line represents the number of disputes that all
barely-in qualifiers start in the years leading up to the World Cup.
Barely-out non-qualifiers are similar,
sometimes initiating more disputes and sometimes initiating fewer.
Qualifiers may be overall slightly more violent over the five year period,
but the difference is hard to distinguish from statistical noise.
In fact, at qualification time, they initiate the same number.
Come World Cup time, a rift forms. And it continues in the years afterward,
with qualifiers spiking in violence and non-qualifiers staying relatively flat.
Eventually, they merge back together.
Overall, a single qualifier starts .38 more disputes than a non-qualifier,
very similar to the .4 from the full sample.
And to further underscore how football is likely at fault,
the entirety of the effect is from countries where football is the most popular sport.
If we look at countries where baseball, cricket, non-soccer forms of football,
or something else is more popular, the difference is literally zero.
Isolating the football-loving countries increases the difference from .38 to
.41 disputes per country.
The increase in dispute frequency also holds if we focus only on
fatal disputes—situations where someone dies.
There is still a .23 increase there,
meaning about every fourth qualifier leads to at least one person’s death.
Perhaps some bad news for when the World Cup expands to 48 teams for the 2026 tournament.
To be clear, faux experiments like this
only estimate the effect of just barely qualifying versus just barely not qualifying.
For 2022 as an example, we can’t have the same causal confidence
about the difference between Brazil and Laos.
Brazil is the number one ranked team in the world and breezed through qualification,
with a 21 point cushion above the cutoff.
Meanwhile, Laos didn’t even score a goal
en route to being eliminated from the first round of Asia’s qualification tournament.
It also doesn’t tell us anything about Russia from 2018,
even though the story is consistent with the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. As host of the World Cup,
Russia automatically qualified, so it is not a borderline case.
Meanwhile, it’s also hard to project the statistical study into modern day qualifying
because of how much it has changed over the years. However, some of the teams
that fell just short by one interpretation are: Sweden, North Macedonia, Peru, and New Zealand.
And some countries that just barely made it are: Poland, Portugal, Australia, and Costa Rica.
That’s something to keep an eye on for the next few years.
And while we are looking at this, the data do not tell us about Russia for 2022.
The country was kicked out of qualification as punishment for the invasion of Ukraine.
That’s such a different pathway that the statistical inference is meaningless here.
But in any case, the countries that just barely qualify for the World Cup
get into more dispute than countries that just barely do not.
What the statistics don’t tell us is why. And the answer is not obvious. To begin,
we need to explain why qualifying itself causes states to initiate more conflicts.
Some of these conflicts are against the rivals from qualification,
similar to what happened with El Salvador and Honduras.
But remember that most are not. They are situations like when
Senegal qualified in 2002 and later initiated a dispute against
The Gambia, whose football paths never crossed.
Thus, it seems that qualification makes countries more war-prone in general.
Taking a step back, the central puzzle of war
is that, if the expected outcome of the war is evident ahead of time,
both states are better off if they just implement that without fighting.
No one pays any costs in the process and therefore peace improves everyone’s welfare.
In fact, those costs mean that there exists a range of mutually acceptable alternatives to war.
That’s why war is a two-step process: states need some object to fight over
and a bargaining friction that prevents them from negotiating a solution instead.
The World Cup is not a bargaining friction,
and it’s an object that can only be won or lost in the metaphorical war that is a football match.
Thus, whatever is causing the influx in conflict is interacting with those in some weird way.
One possibility is that World Cup participation rouses nationalist sentiments,
reducing how states internalize the physical costs of war.
But settlements still make both better off even when that is the case.
However, it could make them more inclined to gamble
if they do not know exactly how powerful their opponent is.
Or it might make them more sensitive to the threats
of long-term shifts in the balance of power.
Another explanation is that it gives leaders more leeway
in terms of corrupting domestic institutions.
Combined with some other direct benefit a leader may receive from fighting,
that could collapse the range of settlements that would otherwise lead to peaceful outcomes.
A final possibility is that we are just seeing spurious correlation—pure
randomness—and that nothing is actually driving the difference—though the yawning gap between
qualifiers and non-qualifiers is unlikely to have arisen purely by statistical chance.
And that is where the mystery ends for us. Why do you think World Cup
qualifiers are more likely to initiate conflicts? Let me know in the comments.
And if you are interested in conflict more generally,
you’ll love my book on the causes of the war in Ukraine. Check below for more
information on that. If you have already read it, please leave a review. It really helps out.
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