Growing up in Canada, there was a travel tip you’d hear before almost every trip abroad: sew the maple leaf flag to your backpack. It was a way of signaling who you were, and just as importantly, who you weren’t. Sometimes, you will see Americans do the same. It was an early lesson in the power of symbols. They have meaning and this meaning can be easily borrowed. This tactic has long been used by the world’s biggest sporting events. Incorporating national symbols into event identities was once shorthand for recognition, pride and belonging. But what once functioned as a creative shortcut has become a hazard. As the 2026 FIFA World Cup and 2028 Summer Olympics prepare to arrive in the United States, those shifting strategies are playing out on the global stage.
These events are bigger than sports. They are rare global moments that are still capable of commanding collective attention across borders, language and political divides. The identities of these events elevate matches and contests to moments in culture. They affect how audiences see the host, how nations see each other, and whether those moments eventually earn their place in public memory and history. When they work, they create a sense of belonging on a global scale. When they fail, they push us further away.
For most of modern sports history, getting that right identity was relatively simple. The branding of events relied on national symbols – flags, emblems, familiar motifs – to communicate meaning quickly and clearly. The audience didn’t need much explanation. Seeing the simple red circle of the 1964 Olympic Games logo, viewers immediately knew they were looking at Tokyo. The symbolism was widely read and, at the time, largely uncontested.
Today it is not so simple for two reasons: space and time. The scale is unprecedented. The 2026 FIFA World Cup will span 16 cities across the three host nations and reach billions of viewers across fragmented media environments. Historically, major sporting events were smaller, more contained and usually rooted in a single host nation. The default approach, anchoring identity in national symbols, worked because of the question “whose identity?” there was an obvious answer. This clarity no longer exists.
And then there is time. Host countries are now being selected up to a decade before the event. This gap between the bid and the opening ceremonies is long enough to encompass multiple election cycles, leadership changes, geopolitical realignments, and major shifts in public sentiment. The political, cultural and social context within which an event identity is conceived is no longer guaranteed to be the one in which it will begin.
The LA28 Olympics will open at the height of a US presidential election season, perhaps one of the most contested symbolic settings imaginable.
What happens when an event spans multiple locations, each with its own internal divisions? When it unfolds before a global audience, each bringing different cultural interpretations? When meaning is shaped in real time through social media, rather than predetermined? At that rate, relying on symbols beyond your control becomes a risk.
The old playbook worked for a while. The last time the US hosted both the Summer Olympics and the World Cup back-to-back was in 1984 and 1994. Both leaned heavily on the stars and stripes for their logos, a clear shorthand for American identity that perfectly suited their moments.
What has changed since then is structural, not merely aesthetic. Social media has democratized the way identity is defined, interpreted and contested. Multinational hosting has complicated the question of whose symbols should dominate. And long planning cycles guarantee a mismatch between the world in which an event is delivered and the one in which it ultimately arrives. This tension is not new. The Olympics and the World Cup have always been shaped by wider social forces.
The 1936 Berlin Olympics turned national identity into propaganda. At the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, politics reached the podium when Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists, reshaping how the Games were remembered. Originally condemned, the gesture is now honored at the Smithsonian. The Olympic boycotts of 1980 and 1984 revealed another enduring tension: events given in a political climate (softening)submitted to another (Cold War).
The planning cycle problem has always existed. What has changed is the speed and rate at which meaning changes. So the question is: what replaces traditional national symbolism when it can no longer reliably carry that weight? For 2026 and 2028, the answer is not to abandon identity, but to rethink how it works.
Increasingly, major global events are shifting toward elements that can represent place without relying exclusively on fixed, contested symbols: the landscape, geography, and physical and cultural texture of a location. These are less vulnerable to political cycles and remain more stable over time.
You can see this playing out in recent international events. The 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup, co-hosted by Australia and New Zealand, was based on models developed with indigenous women artists who based visual identity on land, movement and cultural fabric rather than overt national symbolism. The result felt more rooted and specific than each nation individually, and, paradoxically, more universal.
The transition logo for the 2034 Winter Olympics in Utah has taken a similar approach, eschewing national and state iconography and instead drawing from the landscape and movement of the sport. These systems are designed to evolve: flexible enough to reflect different cities, voices and moments without collapsing into a single, rigid narrative.
On the scale of something like the 2026 World Cup, that flexibility is not just creative but also practical. Sixteen host cities and a tiered sponsorship model, where local markets sell regional partnerships alongside global ones, require a system capable of scaling across audiences and platforms, not a monolith. More than a challenge for 2026 and 2028, this is the future for all global events.
As audiences become more connected, more participatory and more vocal, expectations for authenticity and consideration of how identity is expressed will only intensify. The old shortcuts no longer hold. Every host nation will face the same question: how do you create something that feels authentic, inclusive and able to bring people together?
Because that is ultimately the point. When event identities rely heavily on national symbolism, they risk reading like tourism campaigns or the home team’s kit. They collapse the distinction between the event and the nation that hosts it. The most powerful expressions of national identity come from athletes and fans, in the flags they carry, the clothes they wear, the anthems they sing. This meaning belongs to them. The role of event identity is different. It is not to represent a nation, but to create a framework in which every nation feels welcome.
Getting that right carries high risks. These are multi-billion dollar platforms with once-in-a-generation visibility. There is no reset if something misses the mark, and in a global environment shaped by polarization, fragmentation and competing identity narratives, these events carry a rare potential for unification. The shift we are seeing, from designing around national identity to designing for the moment itself, is a response to this reality. A recognition that meaning today is fluid, contested and impossible to fully control. National symbols have borrowed meaning. The strongest identities construct their own meaning.
