A World Cup crowd with election energy
Outside the stadium in Miami, before Colombia’s match against Portugal, the sidewalks were packed with yellow jerseys, along with blue caps and red scarves. Flags hung off shoulders, draped over railings, and kept appearing in phone cameras. People talked about the starting XI, then slid straight into the election back home, as if the two belonged in the same sentence (and that’s no small thing). The football was the official reason for being there. The mood said otherwise.
When a stadium starts acting like a ballot box, every chant comes with a message attached.
For a lot of supporters, Colombia’s tournament run had already been folded into the country’s political moment. They weren’t treating it as a neat little sports story with a bracket and a scoreline. Quick aside. They were reading it as a public cheer for the incoming hard-right order, a loud, colorful show of approval for a country that, in their telling, had finally tired of the old drift. The election result and the World Cup run sat next to each other in their heads (for better or worse). One was the vote. The other was the celebration.
Naturally, the language around it was blunt, sometimes almost comically so. Win on the field, fix the country. Clean up the streets, harden the state, move on from the years of frustration. There was little patience for nuance in that crowd, and even less appetite for the idea that a football match should stay safely inside football. In Miami, where politics tends to travel fast and arrive already half-argument, the Colombia shirts felt less like fan gear than public declarations. It wasn’t subtle, and it wasn’t supposed to be.
That’s what gave the afternoon its odd charge. A stadium entrance can look like pure celebration until you listen closely. Then it starts sounding like a rally with better footwear. The same clips that would usually end up in tech news or digital culture feeds as harmless fan content picked up a different tone once the crowd started talking about the election as if it had already changed the country’s mood. Makes sense. A phone camera records the same yellow jersey either way. The caption does the political work.
And maybe that’s the real question hanging over the whole scene. When the crowd starts cheering the team as proof that the nation has turned a corner, where does fandom stop and political theater begin? (which is worth thinking about). Point taken. In Miami, the line was blurry enough to miss if you weren’t paying attention. For the people in those colors, though, it seemed perfectly clear. Broadly speaking, they had come to watch Colombia play Portugal, but they were also there to celebrate a new order back home. The man at the center of that new order had a nickname built for moments like this.
Who is El Tigre, and why did he win?
Then Abelardo de la Espriella arrived in politics as a newcomer, not a fixture. Before voters knew him as a presidential candidate, they knew him as a defense lawyer, a businessman, and a man who liked his public image with some bite. The nickname El Tigre did a lot of work for him. It told people he wanted to be seen as aggressive, untamed, and unfussy about manners. That mattered in a race where plenty of Colombians were tired of hearing careful speeches while violence kept showing up in daily life.
He won by squeezing through a runoff against a left-wing senator, a result that pulled Colombia hard away from the Petro era. It wasn’t a landslide, which makes the whole thing more revealing, not less. He did not need one. A narrow victory was enough to put a blunt new tone in charge of the presidency.
In this race, fear sold better than moderation, and de la Espriella knew it.
Plus, His campaign leaned on a simple promise: make the state tougher on violence and less fussy about everything else. More or less, he said he would stop dialogue with armed groups, a break from the negotiating language that had defined much of the Petro period. He said he would stop dialogue with armed groups, a break from the negotiating language that had defined much of the Petro period. He also talked about shrinking the state, cutting back on red tape, and opening more room for deregulation and growth. That mix was pretty easy to read. On public safety, he wanted force, and on the economy, he wanted speed.
The appeal was not subtle. De la Espriella spoke to voters who wanted fewer kidnappings, fewer extortion rackets, fewer armed men deciding who gets to move, trade, or sleep in peace. Worth noting. He made order sound like a service that had been out of stock for too long. Some of his pitch was ideological, sure, but a lot of it was practical. A candidate doesn’t need a 90-page manifesto, when people are annoyed by crime and distrustful of government. He needs a hard voice, a small set of promises, and enough confidence to make it all sound executable on Monday morning.
That is also where his admiration for Nayib Bukele came in. De la Espriella praised the Salvadoran president’s prison model, which has become the region’s most famous example of punitive, no-apologies security politics. Bukele’s approach gave de la Espriella a ready-made reference point: jail first, along with questions later and no sentimental speeches about the social roots of crime. For supporters, that sounded like adult supervision. It sounded like the state reaching for the biggest bat in the room, for critics.
He also leaned into a Trump-friendly posture. De la Espriella cast himself as the sort of regional law-and-order partner Trump would understand immediately, which is a tidy way of saying he knew exactly which political crowd he was courting beyond Colombia.
When a soccer jersey becomes campaign ammunition
By the time Abelardo de la Espriella, the lawyer-turned-politician known as El Tigre, was turning up in Miami, the Colombian national shirt had already stopped being just fan gear. On the campaign trail, the bright yellow jersey showed up as a visual shortcut for everything his camp wanted to say without saying it out loud: country first, order now, chaos later. It was patriotic shorthand with a campaign manager’s grin.
Supporters treated the shirt the way campaigns love to treat symbols that already belong to everyone. Wear it, and you were saying you loved Colombia. Wear it, and you were signaling hope that the country could arguably be made safer, tougher, less embarrassing at home and less fragile abroad. Wear it, in other words, and you were joining the sort of national mood music de la Espriella wanted to conduct. Arguably, for voters who liked his hard-edged pitch, the jersey did a lot of work. It wrapped his message in something familiar, and it did so without the need for a long speech about security, growth, or the state.
A national jersey can turn into campaign material the second a politician treats it like a badge of ownership.
At the same time, that was also what made the shirt such a useful prop for El Tigre. He could stand in its color and borrow some of its goodwill. And let the symbolism do the heavy lifting, he could pose in it, speak around it. The shirt is a national object, but it’s also a flexible one. In a World Cup year, especially one with Colombia’s team on a run that had people talking as if the country itself had been refurbished, the line between fandom and political branding got very thin.
Not everyone was amused. A Bogotá judge moved to stop de la Espriella and his movement, Defensores de la Patria, from using or displaying the jersey in campaign material. The ruling went after the obvious point: the national team shirt doesn’t belong to one politician, one movement, or one election slogan. It belongs to the public. The judge’s order, covered in an AP report on the dispute, barred the shirt from being turned into a partisan accessory, which is a very Colombian way of saying that some symbols can still survive the campaign season without being dragged through it (if we are being honest).
The ban also exposed how aggressively de la Espriella had tried to fold national feeling into his brand. His supporters wanted the jersey to mean discipline and restoration. Critics saw something else entirely. To them, the shirt was being used as a shortcut around actual argument, a way to wrap a hard-right message in shared national pride and hope nobody noticed the seam. That may sound cynical, but politics tends to make cynics out of otherwise cheerful people. Especially when a symbol that can unite a stadium starts getting used like a yard sign.
Iván Cepeda, the left-wing senator who lost to de la Espriella in the runoff, pushed back on exactly that point. The national team, he said in effect, belongs to all Colombians and should arguably not be turned into partisan ammunition. That objection matters because it goes beyond a jersey. Cepeda was drawing a line between a collective symbol and a campaign machine. Once that line blurs, everything gets drafted into service. A shirt becomes a slogan. A chant becomes a loyalty test. A match becomes a stump speech with better lighting.
For de la Espriella, of course, that blur was part of the appeal. The whole point of El Tigre’s politics is that he sells force of personality as force of state. The shirt fit neatly into that package. It said he was the kind of man who could stand under the national colors and claim them as his own, even if the courts had other ideas. And once a symbol gets pulled into that kind of fight, it rarely goes back to being just a symbol.
The next question was whether that same instinct for spectacle would stop at the jersey, or follow the team all the way into the VIP section.
Washington, FIFA, and the optics of endorsement
By the time the crowd settled into the stands in Miami, the match had already started doing double duty. Yes, there was soccer. But there was arguably also the unmistakable glow of political approval, the kind that follows a candidate around long after election night. Donald Trump had already given Abelardo de la Espriella a public nod, praising his strength and toughness in Trump’s praise of de la Espriella, and that kind of compliment travels fast in circles where image matters as much as ideology.
In politics, a stadium seat can matter almost as much as a speech.
Because of this, the visual was hard to miss. Marco Rubio and Kash Patel were in the stands in Miami with FIFA president Gianni Infantino, which gave the whole scene the feel of a reception line that had wandered into a World Cup. Nobody needed a program to figure out what kind of company de la Espriella now keeps. The message came through in the seating chart, the handshakes, the cameras, and the easy access to a high-profile sporting event that, on paper, should have been about Colombia’s run and Portugal’s resistance.
FIFA, for its part, has long been happy to put politicians in the frame when it suits the occasion. Its own note on the final-draw meeting with host-country leaders shows how naturally the organization blends sport with statecraft. What was looked by in miami , that pattern is less like a formal summit and more like a glossy photo op with a scoreboard behind it ( to put it mildly ) . The match became a place where access itself did the talking.
That matters in Colombia politics because de la Espriella’s rise isn’t being treated abroad as some odd local fluke. It’s being folded into a familiar script: a hard-edged right-wing leader, a U.S. political crowd that likes hard-edged right-wing leaders, and a Latin American chorus that now includes figures such as Nayib Bukele, whose prison-first, order-first style has become a kind of shorthand for the region’s new authoritarian flirtations. De la Espriella fits that mold neatly enough for allies to recognize him on sight.
The point isn’t that the Miami box changed policy. It didn’t need to, and symbolism was the whole game. When Rubio and Patel show up in the same frame as Infantino, and when the World Cup Miami spectacle provides the backdrop, the message lands without a press release, when Trump praises de la Espriella for being tough. Symbolism was the whole game. This is what access looks like when it’s being used as a signal. It reads as validation. For critics, it looks like a club with very selective entry rules.
And because this is Latin American politics, the symbolism rarely stays tidy for long. A football match can become a sorting exercise. Who gets invited? Who gets photographed? Who gets folded into the story as a friend of the new order, and who gets left outside the railings with everyone else?
That’s why the VIP section mattered more than the usual VIP section does. It wasn’t just a row of expensive seats. In short, it was a small stage for a larger political alliance, with de la Espriella’s ascent being treated by U.S. allies as part of a wider anti-left mood that runs from Washington to the southern cone (believe it or not). The jerseys on the field were one thing. The seating arrangement was another.
The celebration sits under a long shadow
Colombia has seen soccer joy and political violence sit uncomfortably close for decades, and the memory that still hangs over any big national celebration is Andrés Escobar. In 1994, after his own goal helped sink Colombia at the World Cup, Escobar returned home and was shot dead in Medellín. The details still sound unreal when you say them out loud, the kind of story that makes a stadium crowd suddenly feel a lot less harmless.
In Colombia, a cheer can turn into bad news before the replay ends.
That history makes the current victory lap feel less like a clean political triumph than a very Colombian kind of risk. The election campaign that brought Abelardo de la Espriella to power moved through a country already rattled by violence. There was an assassination, and there were bombings. There were kidnappings. None of that belongs to the tidy world of campaign slogans or VIP seating at a World Cup match, but it’s part of the same national picture, and it changes the mood in the room.
Luis Díaz’s family gave the country another reminder in 2023, when far-left guerrillas kidnapped his father. He was released nearly two weeks later, after days of tension that played out in public and on television. That episode landed hard because Díaz is one of the most visible names in Colombian soccer, and it put a plain fact in front of everyone watching: even the country’s brightest sports figures are not insulated from the political violence around them.
That is why the live-broadcast scenes from the stadium mattered so much, even when they looked almost comic at first glance. Fans burst into celebration when they thought a late winner had gone in, then had to sit with the awkward pause that followed. The body language said plenty. Arms up, then down, and faces lit up, then tightened. For a few seconds, the crowd had the future it wanted. Then the screen corrected them.
From there, that quick swing from joy to confusion feels familiar in Colombia. A chant can probably turn into a silence. A political celebration can carry a warning label. And a World Cup night that should have been all shirts, flags, and noise ends up carrying the memory of Escobar, the kidnapping of Díaz’s father, and a campaign season that never really let anyone forget what sits just offstage.
