By Cheché Vidal
(La versión en español de este artículo la encuentra aquí)
The recent final draw for the 2026 World Cup presented a scene without precedent:
for the first time in history, the presidents of the three host countries appeared together to unveil the tournament groups.
In every previous World Cup draw, that role had been carried out by FIFA executives, celebrities, presenters, or football legends, never by heads of state.
Traditionally, presidential presence was reserved for the opening match or the World Cup final, not for a draw. That is why what occurred in 2026 constitutes a true cultural milestone: football has reached such a level of relevance that even in countries which, only a few decades ago, did not consider themselves footballing nations, like the United States, it has become a matter of presidential interest.
For me, this moment carries deep personal meaning. As someone who served as Vice President of the 1994 World Cup, devoted much of his life to advancing football in the U.S., and helped shape the vision that brought the 2026 World Cup to North America, seeing this transformation unfold is profoundly meaningful.
Sport Is Not Really a Game, It Is Competition
Yet beyond the anecdote, this moment reveals something far more profound: the enormous, and often underestimated, influence that competitions exert on contemporary culture.
To understand what we today call “sport,” we must recognize an essential truth. The critical activity of sport is not sports club life nor fan activities, it is competing and the organization of human competitions.
And yet, in everyday language, we speak almost exclusively of “playing,” as if that were the structural core of sport. But the reality is quite different, what we do as individuals and societies is compete… and learn to compete. In other words, what we do is not “play soccer, or baseball, or basketball,” but “compete in soccer, baseball, or basketball.” And we do it also because competing is, quite simply, fun as well.
To this conceptual confusion we must add a linguistic one: in much of the Spanish-speaking world, competition is confused with competence (“competencia”), and in English, competition is often reduced to mere “rivalry.” This reduction impoverishes our ability to understand the true nature of this millennia-old associative human system.
Competition: The System That Helped Humanity Achieve Peace
In my book, Fair Competition, I analyzed these confusions and proposed a conceptual reframing: sport is not defined by the game nor by the fan, but by the system we know as the sport competition, an exclusively human association created to measure, compare, and classify performances with a higher purpose: the pursuit of physical, mental, and moral excellence in the individual and in the community.
Among the findings that emerged from my research, there is one that still astonishes me: discovering that sporting competition was perhaps the first social association through which humanity learned to secure peace. The ancient Greeks understood this with extraordinary clarity. Competition, the agôn, was not entertainment; it was a civilizational system.
Greek cultural life was interwoven with athletic, musical, philosophical, and poetic competitions, each conceived as a space to manifest the pursuit of human excellence —what they understood as virtuous competitiveness, or areté. I explore this idea of virtuous competitiveness in greater depth in my article From the Agon to the Modern Sports.
For more than eleven centuries, the Greeks organized annual competitions that suspended conflicts and promoted coexistence. Even the historical chronology makes it possible to argue that democracy itself evolved from the agonistic spirit and philosophy, a structure that allowed citizens to compete with arguments rather than weapons. A ritual designed not only to train the body and the mind, but also to train peace.
The Modern Multiplication of the Competitive Spirit
What is most surprising, however, is not what the Greeks achieved then, but what we have come to do today. To grasp the true scale of this phenomenon, I conducted, using AI support, an estimation of the global ecosystem of sports competitions, a vast network in which an immense portion of humanity participates as athletes, organizers, and also as those who live the sport through fandom.
The figures (*), although approximate, are striking:
Between 6 and 11 million formal competitions are organized each year.
That equals 16,000–30,000 competitions per day.
Between 700 and 1,200 per hour.
Or one new competition every 3 to 5 seconds.
And this does not include recreational tournaments, school leagues, community circuits, university competitions, corporate events, marathons, eSports, or emerging sports. The real number is far greater.
If we were observing ourselves from another planet, we would see humanity constantly competing. In light of global data, including Ipsos studies on sports participation and conservative estimates derived from the sheer volume of competitions held each year, it is reasonable to state that between 20% and 50% of humanity takes part annually in the global ecosystem of sports competitions, whether as athletes, organizers, volunteers, family members, friends, or fans.
But, when we examine how participation is distributed in that ecosystem, we understand that perhaps the most telling piece of information is this:
only 0.5% to 2% of all competitions on the planet are professional.
the remaining 98%–99.5% belong to the amateur, school, community, and federated ecosystem.
This pattern aligns with the evidence presented in The Global Economics of Sport, which shows that the professional sports sector represents barely 20% of the global sports economy, while recreational and developmental sport accounts for the remaining 80%.
And although the purpose of this essay is not to calculate the full size of the economy generated by this worldwide system of competitions, a simple thought experiment is enough to grasp its magnitude: if just the 20% to 50% of humanity that participates each year in the global ecosystem of sports competitions were to spend US $10 per year, whether to compete (“pay to play”) or to watch others compete (“pay to see play”), we would already be speaking of an economy that, in its most conservative form, reaches tens of billions of dollars. In other words, sports competition is not only one of the great cultural structures of our species; it is also one of its most widespread, enduring, and democratic economic engines.
National realities also confirm this pattern, and one of the most fascinating ecosystems I have studied is Argentina, whose extraordinary density of competitions I described here: From Argentina’s Neighborhood Clubs
In conclusion, sports competition is one of the great cultural rituals of our species, a structure that involves, directly or indirectly, an immense portion of humanity. In its structural and cultural essence, global sport is a popular, local, and developmental phenomenon, deeply aligned with the Greek ideal of the agôn as a school of virtue.
Rethinking Sport from the Ground Up
As I argue in Fair Competition, if we truly want to understand and safeguard the sports industry, we must invert the direction of our analysis. That means understanding sport first from the inside out, from the sports competition itself toward the participant, toward that agôn and áthlios that the ancient Greeks recognized as the very core of the human experience of competing, and from the participant outward toward the fan.
And we must stop viewing sport exclusively from the top down (from professional sport toward the amateur ranks), a perspective that distorts its true nature. It is equally essential to understand it from the bottom up: from development and recreation, where virtue and everyday excellence are forged, all the way to high performance, which is merely the visible tip of the system.
Only then can we:
Truly protect the future of professional sport.
Recognize that sport is, above all, a global school of character, respect, and human excellence.
Design ethical, technological, and educational structures that respond to 100% of the ecosystem—and not just the 1% we see on television.
Because elite sport exists only if the foundations beneath it are strong. And excellence at the elite level emerges only when the pursuit of excellence is cultivated during development.
That is why, today more than ever, we need an ethical framework capable of preserving the spirit of the agôn.
The Greeks gave us the system. We have given it magnitude. Now we must understand its relevance, and give it the proper intention it deserves.
Toward a Civilization of Virtuous Competitiveness
If the Greeks built their civilization upon the agôn and areté, we, with millions of competitions each year, have built a planetary agôn.
The task of the 21st century is to continue its evolution: to give it purpose, direction, and meaning.
To honor human dignity. To ensure that every competition, large or small, becomes a space to cultivate virtue, areté.
That is the purpose of Fair Play. That is the purpose of Fair Competition.
That is the purpose toward which the planetary agôn system we call sport must aspire in the 21st century.