World Cup 2026 - the Greater Game Is to Decolonize the Planet
World Cup 2026 - the Greater Game Is to Decolonize the Planet
From debt to existence, from the captured body to the body-territory, from money that charges to money that allows life
World Cup 2026 began as football.
But in this series, it became a portal.
A portal to speak about the ball before modern football.
A portal to speak about the 5D Body-Territory.
A portal to speak about the Atlantic Forest, UMBU, and Joinville.
A portal to speak about Weichö, APUS, Tekoha, and Jiwasa.
A portal to speak about betting markets, racism, collective allostasis, NIRS, EEG, and the metabolism of collective energies.
A portal to ask what kind of planet we are building when we transform hope into debt, fandom into market, and bodies into assets.
Now we arrive at the greater game.
The greater game is to Decolonize the Planet.
World Cup 2026 shows that the world still knows how to gather. It shows that billions of bodies can still feel the same event. It shows that humanity still seeks rhythm, belonging, dispute, beauty, surprise, catharsis, and future.
But it also shows that almost everything that gathers us can be captured.
Attention can be captured.
The crowd can be captured.
The athlete can be captured.
The child can be captured.
The dream can be captured.
Prediction can be captured.
The Forest can be captured.
Money can be captured.
The State can be captured.
The future can be captured.
To decolonize the planet is to interrupt this capture.
The colonial economy asks how much a body owes
The colonial economy begins with one question:
how much does this body owe?
Owes the bank.
Owes the credit card.
Owes the rent.
Owes the market.
Owes the app.
Owes the boss.
Owes the State.
Owes the algorithm.
Owes the betting platform.
Owes the future that never arrives.
In this economy, the body is born inside an accounting system that existed before it. Before fully existing, it enters a world organized by debt, collection, productivity, scarcity, fear, and comparison.
The body-territory becomes a client.
Becomes an indebted taxpayer ID.
Becomes a credit score.
Becomes a risk profile.
Becomes data.
Becomes labor.
Becomes user.
Becomes bet.
Becomes target audience.
Becomes statistic.
Becomes asset.
The colonial economy looks at a body and asks:
how much does it consume?
how much does it produce?
how much does it pay?
how much does it owe?
how much can it endure?
how much does it yield?
how much can it be exploited before breaking?
This is the logic that brought us here.
A logic that extracts from bodies, forests, rivers, childhoods, women, original peoples, workers, migrants, athletes, biomes, and future generations.
The colonial economy transforms life into obligation.
The decolonial economy asks what a body-territory needs to exist with dignity
The decolonial economy begins with another question:
what does each body-territory need in order to exist with dignity?
It needs to breathe.
It needs to eat.
It needs to sleep.
It needs to learn.
It needs to play.
It needs to belong.
It needs to care.
It needs to be cared for.
It needs to circulate.
It needs time.
It needs territory.
It needs language.
It needs health.
It needs Forest.
It needs water.
It needs future.
This question changes everything.
Because it shifts the center of the economy.
From debt to existence.
From the bank to the body-territory.
From profit to life.
From capture to care.
From financial abstraction to the materiality of bodies.
From groundless growth to planetary regeneration.
The decolonial economy does not first ask how much a body can pay.
It asks which material conditions allow that body to live, learn, care, create, belong, and participate in the planet with dignity.
This is the turn.
Body-territory as the minimum unit of the State
If we want to decolonize the planet, we need to begin with the minimum unit.
The minimum unit of the State should not be the contract.
Nor the company.
Nor debt.
Nor the bank.
Nor the algorithm.
Nor the financial market.
The minimum unit must be the living body-territory.
Each body-territory carries DNA, water, memory, language, affection, movement, culture, ancestry, desire, hunger, sleep, fear, hope, learning, and belonging. Each body-territory is born in relation: with another body, with territory, with air, with food, with care, with biome, with time, with community.
The decolonial State needs to start there.
Not from the abstract body of the spreadsheet.
But from the real body that breathes.
The body of the child who learns.
The body of the mother who cares.
The body of the elder who remembers.
The body of the young person searching for a future.
The body of the athlete who regulates millions.
The body of the original people protecting territory.
The body of the worker sustaining the city.
The body of the forest producing water, shade, soil, climate, and life.
When the State forgets the body-territory, it becomes a machine of debt.
When the State recognizes the body-territory, it can become a technology of life.
World Cup 2026 showed the map of capture
The World Cup allowed us to see several layers of capture.
Betting markets capture human prediction.
The supporter tries to feel the future before it happens. The bet enters this gesture and transforms hope into odds, anxiety into clicks, near-wins into return, loss into recovery, and the idol into an emotional bridge.
Racism captures the Black body.
It tries to reduce power to insult, art to threat, joy to provocation, dignity to target. When Vini Jr. confronts racism, he shows that the body-territory can respond to the system and create symbolic future for millions.
The market captures the athlete.
It transforms image into campaign, body into asset, influence into contract, belonging into funnel. The athlete who could symbolically regulate the population can be used to make the population ill.
Debt captures time.
It makes the future arrive first as collection. It organizes the month, sleep, breathing, fear, family, and desire. The body lives today trying to pay yesterday with tomorrow’s money.
Colonialism captures the planet.
It transforms living territory into resource, forest into commodity, people into labor, river into infrastructure, child into consumer, State into guarantor of extraction.
That is why the greater game is decolonization.
APUS: feeling where the body is on the planet
APUS appeared in the series as extended proprioception.
In football, APUS allows the player to feel the field before discursive consciousness. The body perceives position, risk, empty space, opponent, teammate, line, ball, pressure, and opportunity. The great player does not merely search for space. The great player feels space being born.
On the planet, we need civilizational APUS.
We need to feel where we are.
Feel that the urban body depends on the Forest.
Feel that food depends on soil.
Feel that the city depends on water.
Feel that climate depends on biomes.
Feel that money depends on living bodies.
Feel that childhood depends on a breathable future.
Feel that a country does not exist outside its living territory.
Colonial civilization lost APUS.
It walks like a player who runs while looking only at the ball, without feeling field, line, teammate, risk, and space. It thinks it is advancing, while destroying its own territory of play.
To decolonize the planet is to recover APUS.
To feel the larger field.
Tekoha: feeling culture, territory, and belonging inside the body
Tekoha appeared as extended interoception with culture.
The athlete feels muscle, breathing, and heartbeat. But the athlete also feels jersey, country, crowd, history, pressure, joy, trauma, and belonging.
A society also has Tekoha.
It feels its language.
It feels its music.
It feels its food.
It feels its festivals.
It feels its forests.
It feels its dead.
It feels its rivers.
It feels its wounds.
It feels its dreams.
When colonialism imposes a single truth, it wounds the Tekoha of peoples.
When the market transforms everything into consumption, it impoverishes Tekoha.
When betting platforms transform football into a gambling platform, they capture the Tekoha of the crowd.
When debt-money organizes life, it squeezes Tekoha until the body forgets how to exist beyond collection.
To decolonize the planet is to return Tekoha to bodies.
It is to allow each people, each territory, and each body-territory to recognize its own way of living without being crushed by an economy that measures everything by financial yield.
Adversarial Jiwasa: conflict inside a common field
In Blog 11, we asked whether two opposing teams can participate in something common.
The answer was yes.
Even in opposition, they share field, rule, ball, time, risk, score, and event. The match creates a third body: the living body of the game.
This idea serves the planet.
Humanity is also in adversarial Jiwasa.
Peoples, States, companies, markets, religions, technologies, biomes, and generations dispute the future inside the same planet. There is real conflict. There are different interests. There are historical asymmetries. There is exploitation. There is violence. There is capture.
But everyone shares the same material field.
The same atmosphere.
The same water cycle.
The same dependence on food.
The same climate crisis.
The same threatened biodiversity.
The same finitude of the body.
The same need for care.
The planet is the common field.
Coloniality tries to win by destroying the field.
Decolonization understands that true victory preserves the field where life keeps playing.
EEG, NIRS, and the next step of body-territorial science
EEG and NIRS appeared in this series as tools for studying the body in relation.
EEG shows electrical brain activity with high temporal resolution. It can help observe how body and cognition reorganize when physical effort and mental task happen together.
NIRS allows the measurement of cortical hemodynamic changes in more mobile and social contexts. With hyperscanning, it can study several bodies at the same time: players, opponents, coaches, perhaps supporters in experimental layers.
These technologies point toward a scientific shift.
Moving away from the isolated brain.
Entering bodies in relation.
Moving away from the abstract individual.
Entering the situated body-territory.
Moving away from performance as number.
Entering the collective metabolism of attention, breathing, gesture, emotion, space, rule, risk, hope, and belonging.
Decolonial science does not reject technology.
It asks:
does technology serve life or capture?
Does it serve to protect athletes or exploit them?
Does it serve to understand collectives or control bodies?
Does it serve to reduce suffering or increase surveillance?
Does it serve to create care or sell performance to predatory markets?
The data of the body-territory must belong to the life of the body-territory.
Collective allostasis: populations need public regulation
The World Cup also showed that a society regulates itself through symbols.
Athletes, artists, leaders, and politicians regulate collective affects. They can open courage, belonging, and hope. They can also sell fear, cynicism, obedience, and anxiety.
Collective allostasis is this capacity of many bodies to adjust tension, breathing, expectation, and meaning around a common event.
The World Cup can offer this.
Tired populations find rhythm.
Anxious populations find catharsis.
Indebted populations find pause.
Humiliated populations find symbolic dignity.
Fragmented populations find common language.
For this reason, the athlete’s image has a public function.
It regulates.
When the athlete’s image is delivered to betting markets, something serious happens: the existential tool of public healing becomes a bridge toward illness.
This is one of the central points of the series.
The athlete is not only an advertiser.
The athlete is a symbolic technology of collective regulation.
Official Drex and Citizen DREX: distinguishing infrastructure from decolonial horizon
Here we arrive at money.
The Central Bank of Brazil presents Drex as the Brazilian digital currency in testing phase, associated with secure transactions involving digital assets, smart contracts, and new digital financial products and services.
This is official Drex.
But what we propose here is another layer:
Citizen DREX.
Citizen DREX is not presented here as an official program that already exists.
It is a proposal for a decolonial economic design.
A horizon.
A question:
what if the digital infrastructure of money could first serve the existence of body-territories, and not only the sophistication of the financial market?
What if a public digital currency could help remunerate care, preservation, regeneration, belonging, education, health, standing Forest, and dignified existence?
What if programmable public money could guarantee that each body-territory receives minimum conditions to live before being pushed into debt?
What if the center of the monetary system moved beyond credit, interest, collection, and intermediation, and began to include existence, territory, biome, and care?
This is the question of Citizen DREX.
From debt to the right to exist
Current money is born, to a large extent, in relation to debt, credit, intermediation, and the promise of future payment.
The body enters this logic as debtor.
But a decolonial economy needs to recognize that existence comes before owing.
Before paying, the body needs to eat.
Before producing, it needs to sleep.
Before performing, it needs to learn.
Before consuming, it needs to belong.
Before competing, it needs to breathe.
Before being a client, it needs to be a body-territory.
Citizen DREX would be a way of imagining public digital money linked to existence.
Not as charity.
As material recognition that each body-territory is a living unit of the State and part of the planet.
The colonial economy asks:
how much do you owe?
The decolonial economy asks:
what do you need in order to exist with dignity and contribute to common life?
Standing Forest, PSA, carbon, and body-territory
Brazil already has important legal bases for thinking about payment for environmental services and a regulated carbon market.
The National Policy for Payment for Environmental Services recognizes the possibility of remunerating those who contribute to conservation, recovery, and sustainable environmental management. The Brazilian Emissions Trading System creates a regulated structure for emissions and climate assets.
The decolonial question is:
how can these structures reach the body-territory that lives near the Forest, cares for water, preserves biodiversity, protects soil, maintains ecological corridors, and sustains common life?
If the standing Forest generates climatic, hydrological, food, cultural, and planetary value, this value needs to reach the communities that live with it.
Citizen DREX could be imagined as infrastructure to connect:
taxpayer ID;
territory;
biome;
environmental service;
public payment;
care income;
preserved carbon;
protected water;
standing Forest;
material dignity.
This proposal requires protection against capture.
Because the market can also capture carbon, biodiversity, and payment for environmental services. It can transform Forest into abstract asset without guaranteeing justice for those who live in the territory. It can sell “green” while maintaining inequality.
Therefore, the central question is:
does regeneration money reach the body-territory or remain trapped in financial engineering?
Betting markets are the anti-Citizen DREX
Betting markets show the opposite.
They use digital technology to extract from the vulnerable body.
Citizen DREX would use digital technology to guarantee existence.
The bet says:
deposit.
Citizen DREX would say:
exist.
The bet says:
recover your loss.
Citizen DREX would say:
your life does not begin in loss.
The bet says:
you can beat the machine.
Citizen DREX would say:
the public machine must protect your life.
The bet monetizes prediction.
Citizen DREX would sustain future.
The bet transforms hope into individual risk.
Citizen DREX would transform care into public infrastructure.
The bet captures the body-territory.
Citizen DREX would recognize the body-territory as center.
This opposition summarizes the series.
Decolonizing money
Decolonizing money means asking where it comes from, where it goes, and what kind of life it produces.
Money can produce infinite debt.
It can produce concentration.
It can produce environmental destruction.
It can produce dependency.
It can produce anxiety.
It can produce war.
It can produce predatory markets.
But it can also produce care.
It can produce income of existence.
It can produce regeneration.
It can produce standing Forest.
It can produce school.
It can produce health.
It can produce free time.
It can produce community sport.
It can produce culture.
It can produce protected childhood.
It can produce dignified old age.
Money is not neutral.
It organizes the body.
It organizes sleep.
It organizes hunger.
It organizes the house.
It organizes the city.
It organizes desire.
It organizes haste.
It organizes violence.
It organizes hope.
It organizes the future.
For this reason, decolonizing the planet requires decolonizing money.
Decolonizing the State
The colonial State protects property before protecting existence.
It protects contracts before protecting living territory.
It protects financial flows before protecting water flows.
It protects abstract growth before protecting concrete childhood.
A decolonial State needs to invert this order.
First, body-territory.
Then, market.
First, life.
Then, contract.
First, Forest.
Then, asset.
First, water.
Then, logistics.
First, childhood.
Then, productivity.
First, existence.
Then, debt.
This inversion is not poetry.
It is institutional design.
It is budget.
It is law.
It is technology.
It is currency.
It is data.
It is education.
It is health.
It is biome.
It is food security.
It is public infrastructure.
It is fiscal policy.
It is monetary policy.
It is civilizational imagination.
The planet as common body-territory
The series began with football, but ends with the planet.
Because the planet is also body-territory.
It has water.
It has cycles.
It has breathing.
It has forests.
It has soils.
It has fevers.
It has wounds.
It has geological memory.
It has species.
It has rhythms.
It has limits.
It has regenerations.
It has possible collapses.
Colonial modernity treated the planet as a field to be conquered.
Now we need to treat it as a common body to be cared for.
The planet is not a stage.
It is condition.
Without field, there is no game.
Without biome, there is no economy.
Without water, there is no State.
Without body, there is no future.
To decolonize the planet is to remember that life precedes property.
Citizen DREX manifesto
Citizen DREX, as a decolonial concept, could follow some principles:
1. Existence before debt
Every body-territory needs a material base for life before being pushed into the logic of collection.
2. Biome as living infrastructure
Forest, water, soil, biodiversity, and climate need to be treated as infrastructure of life, not as externalities.
3. Payment for real care
Those who preserve, regenerate, educate, care, and sustain common life need to participate in the wealth generated by that care.
4. Technology with privacy and dignity
Public digital currency needs to protect data, autonomy, and freedom, avoiding surveillance, predatory control, and exclusion.
5. Body-territory as the center of the State
Every economic policy must answer the question: does this increase or reduce the material dignity of body-territories?
6. Children as temporal compass
A just economy needs to be judged by the future it creates for children, and not only by the yield it delivers to investors.
7. Standing Forest as value generation
Preserving and regenerating biomes must generate concrete income for those who live with them, ensuring that climate markets serve territory rather than speculation alone.
8. Sport, art, and culture as symbolic public health
Athletes, artists, and popular cultures need protection from capture by products that make the population ill.
9. Body data belongs to the life of the body
EEG, NIRS, biometrics, tracking, and artificial intelligence must serve care, health, cooperation, and knowledge, always with consent and protection.
10. The planet as common field
Every economy needs to remember that adversaries also share the field. Destroying the field destroys the possibility of any victory.
Football as teacher of decolonization
Football teaches.
It teaches that nobody plays alone.
It teaches that rule creates common field.
It teaches that the opponent is part of the game.
It teaches that talent needs collective.
It teaches that the crowd regulates the body.
It teaches that lived time is different from clock time.
It teaches that hope moves crowds.
It teaches that a goal changes states.
It teaches that the body knows before the word.
It teaches that the beautiful game is born when technique, joy, territory, and belonging meet.
The colonial economy unlearned this.
It thinks victory means accumulating while the field dies.
It thinks intelligence means extracting faster.
It thinks the future is well-calculated debt.
It thinks technology is control.
It thinks the body is a resource.
It thinks the planet is an object.
Football shows something else.
It shows that the field needs to exist for the game to continue.
Final neurochallenge of the series
World Cup 2026 will be watched by billions.
Some will see only goals.
Others will see markets.
Others will see national narratives.
Others will see athletes.
Others will see advertising.
We propose seeing the deep field as well:
body-territories trying to feel the future together.
The final question of the series is:
what future are we training when we cheer?
A future where children learn that hope becomes a bet?
A future where athletes sell their image to anxiety machines?
A future where forests become assets without territorial justice?
A future where money is born to collect from bodies?
A future where the State serves debt before serving life?
Or a future where the body-territory returns to the center?
Where standing Forest generates dignity.
Where technology serves care.
Where public currency sustains existence.
Where athletes protect children.
Where science measures collectives to strengthen life.
Where adversaries share the field without destroying the field.
Where the economy asks, before any collection:
what does this body-territory need in order to exist with dignity?
The World Cup is the portal.
The greater game is the planet.
True victory will be to shift the center of the world:
from debt to existence.
from capture to care.
from predatory market to body-territory.
from colonial economy to decolonial economy.
It is time to decolonize the planet.
Post-2021 references and commented foundations
Central Bank of Brazil. (2024–2026). Drex — Digital Real and Drex FAQ.
Official basis for distinguishing existing Drex, still in testing phase, from the conceptual proposal of Citizen DREX. The Central Bank presents Drex as infrastructure for secure transactions with digital assets, smart contracts, and new digital financial services.
Brazilian Federal Court of Accounts. (2026). Drex: creation of the digital Real by the Central Bank is evaluated by TCU.
Institutional source that reinforces public discussion on smart contracts and programmable money in the Drex context.
Tan, B. J. (2023). Central Bank Digital Currency and Financial Inclusion. IMF Working Paper.
Discusses how retail CBDCs may relate to financial inclusion, especially in developing countries, by expanding access to central-bank money and financial services.
Di Iorio, A., Kosse, A., & Mattei, I. (2024). Embracing diversity, advancing together: results of the 2023 BIS survey on central bank digital currencies and crypto. BIS Papers No. 147.
Presents a global survey of central banks on CBDCs and cryptoassets, situating Drex within a broader international movement of digital monetary experimentation.
OECD. (2023). Central Bank Digital Currencies and Democratic Values.
Helps frame CBDCs through trust, privacy, democratic governance, institutional design, and risks of control.
Brazil. Law No. 14,119, January 13, 2021. National Policy for Payment for Environmental Services.
Establishes the PNPSA, allowing discussion of remuneration for conservation, recovery, and sustainable environmental management as a legal basis for an economy of territorial care.
Brazil. Law No. 15,042, December 11, 2024. Brazilian Emissions Trading System.
Establishes the SBCE, offering a legal basis for thinking about regulated carbon markets and the need to ensure that climate assets benefit territories and caretaker communities.
Brazilian Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change. (2024–2026). National Policy for Payment for Environmental Services.
Summarizes PNPSA as a policy aimed at recognizing, valuing, and remunerating those who contribute to conservation, recovery, and sustainable environmental management.
IPCC. (2022). Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change. Working Group III contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report.
Climate foundation for discussing mitigation, land use, forests, agriculture, and the need for structural changes in energy, territory, and economy.
World Health Organization. (2024). Gambling.
Presents gambling as a source of health harms, including mental distress, suicide, poverty, diversion of essential household spending, and relationship breakdown.
Wardle, H., et al. (2024). The Lancet Public Health Commission on gambling. The Lancet Public Health.
Frames digital gambling as a global public-health threat, with social, economic, and mental-health harms amplified by digitalization and marketing.
McGrane, E., et al. (2025). What is the impact of sports-related gambling advertising on gambling behaviour? A systematic review. Addiction.
Reviews evidence that exposure to sports-related gambling advertising is associated with increased gambling behavior, reinforcing the critique of betting markets in sport.
Theriault, J. E., Young, L., & Barrett, L. F. (2025). It’s not the thought that counts: Allostasis at the core of mental life. Neuron.
Supports allostasis as a core of mental life, helping us think about body, prediction, regulation, and economy as bodily processes.
Delgado, M. R., et al. (2023). Characterizing the mechanisms of social connection. Neuron.
Helps ground the idea that social connection regulates internal states, important for collective allostasis, crowds, and public symbols.
Czeszumski, A., et al. (2022). Cooperative Behavior Evokes Interbrain Synchrony in the Prefrontal and Temporoparietal Cortex. eNeuro.
A systematic review and meta-analysis of fNIRS hyperscanning showing interbrain synchrony during cooperation, an important basis for thinking of true Jiwasa as an operational hypothesis.
Zhang, H., Liu, H., Li, Z., & Zhang, D. (2025). Distinct fNIRS Inter-Brain Coupling Patterns for Cooperation versus Competition in a Tennis Game. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience.
Brings fNIRS hyperscanning closer to sports contexts and helps think that competition can also generate specific interbrain couplings.
Bourgeais, Q., Charrier, R., Sanlaville, E., & Seifert, L. (2024). A temporal graph model to study the dynamics of collective behavior and performance in team sports. Social Network Analysis and Mining.
Offers a basis for modeling team sports as dynamic systems through temporal graphs, integrating behavior, space, and performance.
Pitt, H., et al. (2024). Young people’s views about the use of celebrities and social media influencers in gambling marketing. Health Promotion International.
Supports concern about celebrities, influencers, athletes, and the normalization of gambling marketing among young people.
Zaragocin, S., & Caretta, M. A. (2021). Cuerpo-Territorio: A Decolonial Feminist Geographical Method for the Study of Embodiment. Annals of the American Association of Geographers.
Complementary reference for the body-territory concept, used here as a dialogue with decolonial epistemologies of body, territory, and belonging.
