Brand America is broken
— and the World Cup is paying the price
by James Herring
The 2026 FIFA World Cup should be the easiest sell in the tournament’s history.
Forty-eight teams. English-speaking host nation. The biggest sporting event on earth, landing in the world’s most powerful media market.
And yet something is getting in the way. That something is Brand America — and right now, it is seriously tarnished.
Every country has its brand. America’s, for most of the past century, was the most powerful on earth — built on cultural dominance, democratic credibility and an almost natural ability to make the rest of the world want what it had. The films. The music. The politics. Commercial ambition. The sense that something important was always happening over there.
In January the Brand Finance Global Soft Power Index recorded the United States as suffering the steepest decline in soft power of all 193 nation brands — with China overtaking America for the first time on 19 of 35 measures of national brand strength.
A country brand that once defined ‘cool’ for the rest of the world is celebrating its quarter-millennium in a manner that has left even many of its own citizens struggling for words.
As the World Cup prepares to kick off, America is marking its 250th birthday — and the celebrations tell their own story.
To mark the occasion, Donald Trump is staging a UFC fight on the South Lawn of the White House, erecting a 5,000-seat octagon-shaped cage outside one of the world’s most iconic buildings.
The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, one of Washington’s most iconic landmarks and the backdrop to Martin Luther King Jr.’s I Have a Dream speech, has been drained and is being painted “American Flag Blue.” The Oval Office has been gilded in gold leaf. The Rose Garden paved over in stone. An Arc de Triomphe-style monument, dubbed the “Arc de Trump,” is planned for the Arlington Memorial Bridge.
The rebranding of America has not been limited to its monuments. Trump has reached deep into the country’s cultural institutions too, determined to leave his fingerprint on everything from the physical landscape to the performing arts.
The Kennedy Center tells its own story. Renamed by Trump’s board “The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts” — a living memorial to an assassinated president, quietly rebranded for a living one. Last Friday, a federal judge ruled that adding Trump’s name to the building violated federal law and ordered all signage removed within two weeks.
Trump is not the sole author of Brand America’s difficulties.
When he was sworn into office in January 2025, he was flanked on the podium by Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and much of Silicon Valley’s billionaire class - a tableau that struck many international observers as less a presidential inauguration than a corporate merger.
Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, lasted around four months as head of the Department of Government Efficiency before stepping back — but his damage to Brand America runs deeper than DOGE.
As owner of Twitter (now X), he has turned what was once the world’s town square into a platform synonymous with chaos and misinformation including interventions in British politics that caused diplomatic outrage.
The brand values have shifted. The brand messaging is contested. And as the 2026 FIFA World Cup prepares to open on American soil, British football fans are making clear exactly what they think of it.
New research commissioned by Famous Campaigns, conducted by leading polling company 3Gem, surveyed 2,000 UK adults in the final week of May.
Nearly half (49%) say their perception of the United States has worsened over the past five years, a period that maps closely onto Donald Trump’s political dominance, spanning his first term, the turbulence of the 2020 election cycle, and his return to the White House.
Asked to rate the strength and appeal of the United States as a country, a culture and a destination compared to five years ago, over a third (36%) say it is weaker.
These are not the numbers of a host nation riding a wave of goodwill. They are the numbers of a country burning through the positive brand equity it spent decades accumulating.
International visits to the United States fell 5.5% in 2025 (source: International Trade Administration) — four million fewer visitors, a spending loss of more than $8 billion, and the worst single-year decline in two decades outside the pandemic.
What makes the figure striking is the context: eighty million more people travelled internationally in 2025 compared to the year before. They simply chose other destinations.
“We used to be a country that others wanted to emulate,” said Juliette Kayyem, faculty chair of the Homeland Security Project at Harvard Kennedy School. “That narrative no longer exists.” (source CNN)
In a final twist of irony, Brand USA — the only American organisation that markets US tourism to international audiences — has had its government funding cut.
The World Cup tournament is feeling it. A report by the American Hotel and Lodging Association found that 80% of hotels across all 11 US host cities are reporting bookings well below initial forecasts, with 65% of operators citing visa barriers and geopolitical concerns as the cause.
European airline bookings into the US for July are down 14% year-on-year, according to aviation analytics firm Cirium. A weaker dollar should be making America more attractive to European visitors, not less.
Among the 49% of British adults whose view of America has soured, 56% say it has directly affected how they feel about the World Cup being held there.
One in six (16%) say the current political climate is an explicit reason they will not be travelling to watch matches in person.
Among UK fans who looked into going and walked away, 69% point to ticket prices as a barrier, with 25% describing the cost as having made attendance outright impossible.
FIFA introduced dynamic pricing for the first time in the competition’s history, pushing base Category 3 tickets to $1,120 for the US opener against Paraguay. New York and New Jersey’s attorneys general this week subpoenaed FIFA, accusing the governing body of ‘fake scarcity and impossibly high prices.
World Cup tickets are so expensive, Canadian airline Transat even built a travel marketing campaign around it.
Sam Hodges, Executive Director, Corporate Communications at The Romans agency (formerly at the BBC and Twitter) said; “The indulgence of both Brand America and FIFA in this instance has meant they’ve failed to explain the rationale behind many of their decisions. Higher prices, more games, tougher travel requirements and by proxy Trump validation have all landed in supporters’ laps, while the benefits feel abstract or invisible. As a result, those decisions and more are measured merely in dollars and disruption.”
“By allowing politics to become so intertwined with the tournament, FIFA have also exacerbated the crisis of trust affecting many institutions and leaders today.”
“The lesson extends far beyond football. Stakeholders don’t have to agree with every decision an organisation makes, but they do need to understand why it was made, who benefits and why the trade-off is justified. Fail to tell that story, and you’re quickly on the back foot, with a reputation defined by reaction rather than strategy. The US has made massive strides in football since Diana Ross’s famous penalty miss when it last hosted the World Cup in 1994 - here’s hoping 2026 doesn’t set them back.”
The consequences for Brand America extend beyond empty hotel rooms.
Just 30% of fans think the US is a natural home for the tournament, and only 57% don’t believe America has a genuine passion for football.
Three quarters (75%) agree the tournament feels more authentic when held in football-obsessed nations. A fairly robust rejection of the host nation’s footballing credentials.
Six in ten British adults (61%) still describe themselves as ‘excited’ about the tournament — a testament to football’s enduring pull regardless of geo-political context.
But the research points to a meaningful undercurrent of disengagement: 18% say they will not watch at all, and among those who do feel less enthusiastic than usual, political concerns about America are the most cited reason (28%), ahead of a lack of football culture in the US (18%), fixture scheduling (16%) and, in a very British addition to the list, uncertainty about the England team (12%).
The political backdrop has hardened further in recent weeks. More than 120 organisations, including the American Civil Liberties Union and Amnesty International, issued a joint travel advisory urging fans, players and journalists to “exercise caution” when travelling to the tournament, citing what they describe as “the Trump administration’s violent and abusive immigration crackdown” and warning that minority groups are “vulnerable to serious harm.”
FIFA responded by citing its commitment to human rights. The US Travel Association called the advisory “sabotage.”
The geopolitical complications run deeper still. Iran, amid ongoing military conflict involving the United States and Israel, is participating in the tournament but has based its squad in Tijuana, Mexico, commuting across the border on matchdays after Washington declined to guarantee visas for the team to remain on US soil throughout the competition.
It is a situation that throws into sharp relief FIFA president Gianni Infantino’s close relationship with Trump — cemented last December when Infantino created a brand new FIFA “Peace Prize” and awarded it to the US president at the World Cup draw in Washington, without, reportedly, consulting FIFA’s own council.
It has looked no less incongruous since.
Then there is the question of what brands are doing there.
42% of respondents say they would be put off buying from a brand that sponsors a World Cup they feel uncomfortable about politically, and 75% agree that sponsors are implicitly endorsing the host country and its politics.
In previous cycles, World Cup sponsorship was safe ground — associated with football, excitement and summer.
Sports marketing expert Henry Chappell founder of Pitch said; “Sponsors of the World Cup will do whatever they can to distance themselves from any controversies around the staging of the event. They are partnering with the world’s biggest cultural event. More than 3.5 billion people will watch some of the tournament on TV, and we estimate it will generate more than 10 billion engagements across all media. Nothing comes close for the sheer size of the global audience and the level of engagement across every market and multiple generations. That is what FIFA’s partners are investing in – the eyeballs. For brands like adidas, Coca Cola, McDonald’s and Visa, there is simply no alternative to the World Cup. If Coke did even think about walking away, they know they would only be presenting Pepsi with an open goal”
There is one group seemingly unbothered by all of this. Among UK 18 to 24-year-olds, just 9% say their view of America has significantly worsened, compared to 25% of the broader population.
They have grown up in a world where American political chaos is entirely normal. For them, the current moment carries less emotional charge.
For everyone else, the calculation is harder.
Qatar 2022 generated similar pre-tournament discomfort over human rights and the treatment of migrant workers. In the end, most watched anyway.
But America carries a different kind of weight — a country whose politics dominate the news cycle in a way Qatar’s never did, and about which British fans hold strong, long-formed opinions. Asking them to set those aside for a month is proving harder than the tournament’s organisers might have hoped.
Mark Borkowski, leading crisis and reputation consultant, puts it more bluntly; “For a century, the trick was making the rest of us want what America had without ever needing to decipher the dream. That spell is broken, pulled apart by the Wizard himself, the small man at the end of the Yellow Brick Road who mistook the smoke machine for the magic. What’s left is the machinery without the wonder: the world’s most powerful media market discovering you can own the stage, own the cameras, own the FIFA Peace Prize you invented for yourself, and still not make anyone fall in love with you on cue.”
“The tribal religion of football may yet save it — the game usually performs that miracle. But make no mistake, the love affair is over. Behind the curtain there was never a wizard — only a sweating salesman in a too-long tie, working dead levers and calling the silence a standing ovation.”
Run Brand America through a standard agency health audit and the results would certainly make for uncomfortable client reading.
Awareness: Unmatched, still the most famous country on earth.
Consideration: Falling sharply.
Preference: Collapsing across key international markets.
Brand values: Contested internally and externally, with no resolution expected soon.
Visual identity: Constantly redesigned by the client without briefing the agency, with a heavy emphasis on gold and a fondness for re-painting national monuments in primary colours.
Tone of voice: Wildly skittish. Unpredictable. Delivered primarily via social media. Often in capitals. At 3am.
The 250th anniversary campaign: The moment a brand of this scale would normally use to remind the world of its founding purpose — currently centres on a cage fight on the front lawn.
Fewer than half of British fans (39%) surveyed believe hosting the World Cup will result in the United States improving its global image.
All said… the football, when it comes, will probably cut through. It usually does.
But what hosting this tournament does for Brand America’s cultural standing in the world, or reviving tourism, that perhaps, is the most interesting question of the summer.