International law has a blind spot for gender, and Hilary Charlesworth located it precisely: not in the “public” world of states and treaties, which the discipline polices closely, but in the “private” world of family, culture, and commerce, which it mostly ignores — even though the private sphere is where most gendered meaning actually gets made. The 2026 FIFA World Cup makes that blind spot unusually easy to see, and shows how a change that looks like progress can leave the underlying hierarchy exactly where it was.

Sixty-nine per cent of starting players at this World Cup — 365 of 528 — have taken the pitch in pink football boots, a colour five competing manufacturers adopted independently of each other. Twelve years ago, the same colour still read as provocation. Puma’s mismatched “Tricks” boots, worn by Mario Balotelli in 2014, were built to shock, and Real Madrid marketed its fuchsia away kit that year as something the club had never done in 112 years.What counted as exceptional in 2014 counts as ordinary now.

The brands’ own account of the shift is commercial. Pink shows up best against green turf and on small screens, and with no national team wearing a pink home kit this year, the boots stand out against every jersey on the pitch. Executives frame the players themselves in the language of confidence: bold enough to wear it, bold enough to own the moment, as one industry voice put it.

That confidence is the exact kind of surface change Charlesworth’s framework should make us suspicious of. Pink has meant something like the opposite — soft, decorative, trivial — since it hardened into a marker of girlhood in the middle of the twentieth century, and even that was never a natural fact: a 1918 trade journal argued the reverse, that pink suited boys because it was the stronger colour. A sign carries only the meaning convention gives it, and gender itself, Judith Butler has argued, is produced by repetition rather than expressed from some underlying essence.

Change who does the repeating, and a sign’s local meaning can move without the hierarchy underneath it moving at all. Pink read as bold on a male footballer’s foot changes nothing about how pink, or femininity, gets read anywhere else. This is the private sphere doing exactly what Charlesworth says it does — absorbing and repackaging gendered meaning, invisible to any framework built to watch the public one.

FIFA is about as clean a specimen of that private sphere as exists: a non-state association registered in Switzerland, setting gender norms for a bigger audience than most states will ever reach, sitting almost entirely outside the state-centred accountability international law was built around. The same divide recurs one level down, inside FIFA’s own house. Prize money is a public number that sponsors and journalists track, so FIFA has at least begun to move on it: it paid roughly $871 million for the 2026 men’s tournament against $110 million for the entire 2023 women’s tournament, and its president has publicly promised to close that gap by 2027, unmet as the promise still is. Violence against women is not public in the same way. It happens off the pitch, and FIFA’s own Disciplinary Code — which fines racist chanting on a fixed schedule and closes stadiums over it — has no comparable provision for it; that is left to national courts and individual clubs, applied unevenly and rarely touching a player’s ability to keep playing. On Charlesworth’s account, FIFA does not simply ignore gender: it sees the gender harms that are public, and stays blind to the ones that are not — the same optic international law brings to FIFA itself. Scholars have already made a version of this argument, and others have pushed it further into sport governance generally. CEDAW obliges states, not companies, to dismantle stereotyped gender roles; the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights ask corporations to meet an expectation, not a binding obligation. None of it — colour, pay, protection — reaches a private federation, for the same reason a private federation doesn’t reach into its own players’ private lives.

Charlesworth has a name for this pattern already, drawn from watching the UN absorb gender concerns into its own routine practice: a technique can look like waving when it is really closer to drowning, change registered on the surface while power stays where it was underneath. Pink boots are a much smaller case than the ones she had in mind, but the mechanism doesn’t change: a devalued signifier gets pulled into elite men’s football, gets celebrated as change, and nobody asks what, if anything, actually moved.

None of this calls for cynicism about the boots. It calls for noticing that a colour, like any sign, means nothing by itself — and that international law’s feminist critics have long known how to tell the waving from the drowning.