World Cup Visibility: Nas Mohamed Launches “Love Is the Goal” at the 2026 World Cup

Over the coming weeks, OutSmart will follow Dr. Nas Mohamed and his Love Is the Goal campaign at the 2026 FIFA World Cup through a three-part series, beginning here with the launch of the campaign itself. Read part two and part three.

As the 2026 FIFA World Cup unfolds across North America, Dr. Nasser “Nas” Mohamed is using one of the world’s largest sporting events to tell a story that extends far beyond soccer. Mohamed, who became the first openly LGBTQIA+ Qatari when he came out publicly in 2022, has launched Love Is the Goal, a global campaign focused on visibility, human dignity, and what it means to be fully seen in a world where LGBTQIA+ people are still routinely dehumanized.

For Mohamed, centering queer Arab voices during the World Cup is not simply about representation. It is about reminding people that LGBTQIA+ people exist everywhere. “When I come out from Qatar and tell my story,” Mohamed says, “how I found queerness as an adolescent in Qatar, that didn’t speak any language besides Arabic, that had extreme censorship in media, zero visibility of LGBT individuals, no access to the internet, that had this content filtered from everything that I am, and I came from the most conservative Muslim background, and I still touched the truth that I hold, and described it in a poem in Arabic that I wrote in my own words. When people hear that, they would know that this is a story of a human.” That humanity sits at the center of Love Is the Goal.

As conversations about LGBTQIA+ rights often become consumed by politics, ideology, and culture wars, Mohamed believes the real issue is much simpler. “People start talking about an idea and not a person,” he explains. “And after a little while, the discourse becomes so dehumanized that you’re just talking about concepts. They’re no longer people in your mind. And that is not a good path.”

The campaign arrives at a moment when LGBTQIA+ communities around the world are confronting renewed attacks on their rights and safety. Mohamed sees those struggles as part of a broader conversation about freedom itself. “My story is a story of somebody that got crushed by authoritarian oppression,” he reveals. “Anybody that had their freedom to believe, their freedom to choose for their own bodies, and their freedom to choose who they have sex with knows what I’m talking about.”

For Mohamed, the World Cup provides a rare opportunity to bring that conversation directly to a global audience. “A lot of people are going to be advocating for human rights on the largest global platform,” he points out. “It would be a missed opportunity for queer people to not be where the people are.”

As soccer fans gather in cities across North America, Mohamed hopes the campaign encourages people to recognize something often lost in public debate. That is, of course, that queer people are not political abstractions, but human beings whose stories deserve to be heard. “This is why going to the ones that are most dehumanized right now is important,” he says, “because it makes us all human.”