America is about to host the FIFA World Cup with Canada and Mexico, and the timing is impossible to miss: the tournament runs from June to July and lands alongside the 250th anniversary of U.S. independence. That makes the event more than a sporting showcase. It turns into a test of who gets to come watch.

For people looking up Walter Camp, that question has old American roots. Camp, a Yale undergraduate in the late 1870s, rewrote the rules of English rugby into U.S. football, while Albert Goodwill Spalding later tried to pin baseball’s birth to a patriotic origin story of his own. The country has been arguing about where its games come from, and who they are for, since the 1870s.

The World Cup arrives into that argument with a sharper edge. The host administration’s broader immigration agenda has created significant barriers to attendance for fans from many of the qualifying nations, even as the United States is hosting the tournament and obstructing many of its would-be spectators at the same time. That collision matters because the World Cup is supposed to bring the world in; instead, many supporters may find the door harder to open.

The historical irony runs deep. A soccer match between England’s Eton College and Yale College on Dec. 6, 1873 is described as the first international soccer match in the United States, a reminder that the sport’s place in America has always been tied to questions of identity and belonging. Baseball and football were given American origin myths; soccer never fully escaped the national debate around who belongs here.

What happens next is clear enough. From June to July, the United States will co-host the FIFA World Cup with Canada and Mexico, and the fans most likely to feel the policy clash will be the ones trying to travel from qualifying nations while the visa and entry landscape remains tight. America gets the tournament either way. The harder question is how many of the people who helped make it global will be allowed to see it in person.