My guest in this Substack Live conversation is Adam Sawyer, co-founder of Relevant Research and the visionary behind Relevant Football. We talked about our new project and about the political moment surrounding the 2026 Men’s World Cup. The full recording is available above, and here are some highlights of our conversation below.
Adam and I have been working together for a few years now, first as colleagues and eventually as co-founders of Relevant Research alongside Riwaj Chalise. In that time, Adam has introduced me to sports in a way I never really experienced growing up. We’ve been to basketball games and hockey games together where he has helped me to see the culture, data, and strategy underneath all the spectacle. What I’ve learned is that Adam thinks about sports as a set of stories and narratives, ones that data can help tell, and as a window into the social and political worlds that produced them.
Adam’s path to this work ran through teaching in Dallas public schools, a stint at the United Nations Migration Research Division in Geneva, and years of data work on immigration enforcement. That combination of classroom experience, international exposure, and research practice shapes how he thinks about what data is actually for. The impulse behind Relevant Football starts with something he noticed about himself during past tournaments. He described it this way:
“I think more about my international siblings and my international neighbors more during the six weeks of a tournament. Whether that be the Olympics, the Women’s World Cup, the World Baseball Classic, whatever it is, it naturally galvanizes my own attention in a way that makes me want to learn about other places. And I think I’m not the only one that experiences this.”
That observation drove the design of relevant-football.com: a platform that pairs tournament data with country-level information on economics, energy, geography, and demographics for all 48 competing nations, so the curiosity the World Cup naturally produces has somewhere to go.
The 2026 Men’s World Cup is unmistakably fraught, though. Last week, a Somali referee named Omar Artan was barred from entry to the United States on vague “vetting concerns,” a story that drew immediate attention because it illustrated the tension between hosting an event built on international participation and operating an immigration enforcement regime that treats foreign nationals as threats by default. Immigrant advocacy organizations have sounded alarms about rights violations ahead of the tournament, and Florida immigrant groups have raised specific concerns about ICE presenceat World Cup venues.
This is not a new pattern for FIFA. The tournament has a documented history of being hosted by governments with poor human rights records: Italy under Mussolini in 1934, Argentina under the Videla junta in 1978, Russia in 2018, Qatar in 2022. Adam pointed out that this 2026 edition follows a similar logic, with the added dimension that FIFA is explicitly trying to tap the U.S. consumer market in a way previous tournaments were not. As ProPublica reported in April, FIFA stands to make billions while host cities see relatively little return. As Adam explained, soccer governance is organized into six FIFA conferences, each run by delegates whose financial interests run toward Zurich rather than local youth soccer programs.
Adam’s argument is that FIFA’s financial architecture and the human experience of the tournament operate on separate tracks. The corruption runs upward, toward Zurich. The connections run sideways, between people. You don’t have to resolve that tension to engage meaningfully with one side of it. He drew on a phrase from soccer podcasters Michael Kaley and Mike Goodman—”football always wins”—that captures both the cost and the value of that dynamic.
“In a few days, all of the discussion about ICE and atrocities, it will probably get tossed out the window. People are going to move on to the game. That’s the sad part. The laudatory side is: despite the best efforts of governments, people are going to party and they’re going to celebrate and they’re going to make connections.”
That laudatory side—people making connections across barriers that governments have tried to construct—is something Adam has seen happen up close. He teaches English to adults, and the 2022 World Cup dropped into his classroom in real time. Morocco went on an extraordinary run that year, the first African and Arab nation to reach a World Cup semifinal, beating Portugal and Spain before falling just short against France. Adam described what happened in his classroom during those weeks:
“We were meeting as a class kind of during that run and she was so excited, and guess what—everybody in the class was so excited for her. And it was such a touching moment.”
The classroom was mostly Spanish speakers, rooting for a Moroccan student they barely knew, because Morocco was beating countries whose soccer histories they understood. What Adam witnessed in that classroom is something the polling data confirms at scale. A recent Pew Research poll found that 54% of immigrants in the United States say they are excited or mostly excited about the World Cup, compared to 23% of U.S.-born Americans. For many immigrants, the countries on the field are the countries their families came from, or that define identities a U.S. passport does not fully capture. Nearly one in four rostered players in the 2026 tournament were born in a different country than the one they represent, a fact that emphasizes the connective and collaborative potential of international sports.
Relevant Football was designed to make this connection visible. Adam describes what the comparison tool at the heart of the site is actually trying to do:
“We wanted to show that we’re all kind of facing some similar challenges, like inequality across the world is an issue, both internationally and domestically within each country, like deforestation, environmental issues, energy transition to renewable energy. These are common things that we all are grappling with. Honestly, it’s an international community.”
Adam also shared something more personal about why he wanted to build this. He and the Relevant Research team spend most of their time working with difficult data: detention reports, the pregnancy detention tracker, ICE enforcement dashboards. He was direct about it:
“We work with a lot of grim statistics. I needed, for my mental health, to work on something else. That was a personal mental health motivation.”
Anyone who works with enforcement data understands what Adam is describing. The work is exhausting, and building an outlet for it is something most researchers in this space think about. Years spent close to that data leave a mark on the people who work with it. Building something with genuine joy in it is how researchers like Adam sustain the capacity to stay close to the harder work over the long term.
The conversation closed with a commitment I think is worth keeping in view over the next six weeks. Adam said:
“I can’t control the actions of my government at all times, but at least I can control my disposition to others. No matter what I decide, I want to have a disposition of welcome to the people I interact with who are different than me, especially those who have traveled a long way to get to these games.”
That’s a commitment I share. Whatever else is true about this tournament and this political moment, the World Cup is going to bring fans, players, journalists, and families here from a long way away. The politics surrounding the event will not be resolved in the next six weeks, but how we show up as hosts is something we can decide right now. Extending genuine welcome to people who’ve traveled to be here, treating their presence as an expression of love for the sport and for the countries they represent, is one part of that. Turning that same spirit toward each other is the other part. Being a good host applies to how we treat our visitors and to how we treat the people already around us. I hope this conversation points in that direction.
The full recording is above. Check out relevant-football.com and reach out to Adam at adam@relevant-research.com with comments, feedback, or just shared fan enthusiasm. The team that built Relevant Football includes Riwaj Chalise, Nush Ojha, Bishal Timsina, Rashmi Singh, Sandesh Nilas Khatiwada, and Manashwee Kafley.
Thank you Gladwyn d'Souza, KarenC-Book Collector📚⚖️🗽🗳️🧿♒️, Detention Records Project, and many others for tuning into my live video with Adam Sawyer!
Follow Adam Online
Adam’s website and blog: adamjsawyer.com
Adam on Bluesky: @adamjst.bsky.social
Adam on Substack: Adam Sawyer.
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