{"id":99456,"date":"2026-06-11T03:45:03","date_gmt":"2026-06-11T07:45:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/?p=99456"},"modified":"2026-06-10T12:37:51","modified_gmt":"2026-06-10T16:37:51","slug":"faculty-historian-sees-geopolitics-on-the-pitch-in-fifa-world-cup","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/06_11_2026\/faculty-historian-sees-geopolitics-on-the-pitch-in-fifa-world-cup","title":{"rendered":"Faculty Historian Sees Geopolitics on the Pitch in FIFA World Cup"},"content":{"rendered":"

The University of Toledo\u2019s Dr. Shingi Mavima is used to rising before the sun to catch a highly anticipated soccer broadcast. One perk of this year\u2019s FIFA World Cup, which kicks off on Thursday, June 11? He won\u2019t have to.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen Qatar hosted in 2022, I had to be up at 3 a.m.,\u201d he recalled. \u201cBut this year the United States is hosting with Canada and Mexico, so the games will be at normal times for us.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Outdoors

Dr. Shingi Mavima is a lifelong soccer fan and an assistant professor of history at UToledo.<\/p><\/div>\n

Mavima is a lifelong devotee of the sport, as he describes in \u201cPashena,\u201d the novel he published in 2018. \u201cPashena\u201d reflects his upbringing in Zimbabwe, including the way that he and his peers made sense of their world through games on their community\u2019s dirt field \u2014 or pashena in the native language Shona \u2014 and the way that the international men\u2019s competition became a quadrennial timestamp for some of their most formative memories.<\/p>\n

But his interest extends beyond the personal and into the professional.<\/p>\n

As an assistant professor of history at UToledo, Mavima draws on his doctoral research into popular cultural expressions of identity in southern Africa. One prominent expression is sports, with major events like the Olympics and World Cup not only bringing the global community together amid bouts of nationalistic pride but serving as platforms in which countries have for decades negotiated sometimes complex geopolitical relationships.<\/p>\n

Consider South Africa, for example, as he encourages his students to do in his history course Sports, Race and Power in Apartheid South Africa. In response to its globally criticized system of racial segregation, FIFA did not allow South Africa to send a team to the World Cup throughout most of the 1960s, \u201970s and \u201980s.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe talk about that decision in class,\u201d Mavima said. \u201cWho took the lead in the campaign to ban South Africa? And what were their motives?\u201d<\/p>\n

Mavima, who has traced African participation in the World Cup from 1934 to 2022 on his YouTube channel Pan-African Conversations<\/a>, also points to the beyond-the-stadium significance of a 2002 match-up between France and Senegal \u2014 a first-time nation besting the defending champion, a former colony defeating its former colonizer.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor Senegal to defeat France in the opening match was almost hard to believe,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

And he\u2019s keeping an eye on the geopolitical stories that will no doubt emerge in this year\u2019s World Cup, which is already making headlines surrounding the participation of Iran and unequal access to visas for international fans to enter the United States.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s always a story when it comes to the World Cup,\u201d Mavima said.<\/p>\n

He’ll be paying attention \u2014 both to the matches and the bigger stories they tell.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m particularly excited for the Democratic Republic of Congo,\u201d he said. \u201cThey haven\u2019t been in the World Cup since 1978, so it\u2019s great to have them back. One of the other countries I\u2019m rooting for is Cape Verde, which is in its first World Cup. And I\u2019m excited to see what Haiti does.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBut other than that?\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m really just rooting for the game.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\"Outdoors<\/a>

UToledo\u2019s Dr. Shingi Mavima brings a personal and professional interest to the international competition beginning today, June 11.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":908,"featured_media":99457,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50,96,356,498,1,7],"tags":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99456"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/908"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=99456"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99456\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":99459,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99456\/revisions\/99459"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/99457"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=99456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=99456"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=99456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}