What Happened At The World Cup Is The Fatherhood Bonus Turned Inside Out

Jeremy Doku was criticized for choosing his newborn over a football match. Here is what that reaction reveals about how we still think about fathers.

On Father’s Day weekend, as the 2026 FIFA World Cup was generating headlines across the globe, one of the most significant stories had nothing to do with goals or group standings. It was about a 24-year-old Belgian footballer named Jérémy Doku, his pregnant wife Shireen, and the audacity, in the eyes of some, of a man who said he wanted to be present for the birth of his first child.

Doku, a winger for Belgium and Manchester City, told reporters on June 15 that his wife was due to give birth in early July, potentially during Belgium’s knockout stage matches. He was measured, even deferential: “No one wants to miss a birth. Moreover, it is my first child. But I also know that there is a lot involved in football. In any case, the federation sympathizes with the players and our situations, so we will see what we can do.”

The response from parts of Europe was swift and revealing. France Pierron, a presenter on the French sports channel L’Équipe, called Doku’s potential absence from the tournament “outraging,” said a father was “completely useless” at the moment of birth, and described the birth itself as a “disgustïng moment” that did not require a father’s presence. She later apologized for causing offence. But the reaction she sparked across social media, sports commentary, and dinner tables did not apologize. Thousands agreed with her.

I am not writing about football. I am writing about what this moment reveals about how we still think about fathers, care, and the question of what men owe their families versus what they owe the world’s watching eyes.

We have spent decades asking women to do more at home and at work. We have never seriously asked men to do the same.

The Fatherhood Bonus and the Care Penalty

There is a well-documented phenomenon in labor economics called the fatherhood bonus. When a man becomes a father, his earnings tend to increase. Employers perceive him as more stable, more motivated, more committed. The assumption is that he will work harder, not less, that someone else will be managing the home and the child, freeing him to be fully available. Fatherhood, in this model, is a status that improves a man’s professional value without requiring him to do any of the work that the status implies.

The counterpart is the motherhood penalty. When a woman becomes a mother, her earnings tend to fall. Research published in 2024 tracking child penalty estimates across 134 countries found that in Denmark, 80 to 90 percent of the post-30 gender earnings gap is attributable entirely to children. In the United States, recent studies attribute nearly all remaining gender inequality in labor force participation and pay to parenthood. The same life event, becoming a parent, makes men more valuable in the labor market and women less so. The mechanism is simple and devastating: the assumption that she will absorb the care, and that he will not.

What happened to Döku this week is the fatherhood bonus turned inside out. He dared to suggest that he might act like the father he is, that the birth of his child might be as important as a quarterfinal football match. And the culture that rewards men for having children without requiring them to raise them reacted with fury. Here are the data:

15.5% average earnings drop men face after requesting flexible work for family reasons (controlled study)

67% of employed fathers say they felt pressure to return from paternity leave as soon as possible

62% say their workplace had an unspoken rule that men should not take their full paternity leave

When we tell men that the birth of their child is not important enough to leave a football match, we are not protecting men. We are robbing them.

The Myth of the Useless Father

The claim that a father is “completely useless” at the birth of his child is worth examining carefully, because it is not simply rude. It is a structural argument. It says: the birth of a child is a medical and maternal event. The father’s role is peripheral, symbolic at most, an inconvenient distraction at worst. He holds a hand. He takes a photo. And then he gets out of the way of the real work.

This framing has a long history and real consequences. It is why paternity leave in most countries is measured in days rather than months. It is why 35 percent of American fathers take no leave at all after the birth of a child. It is why, when my husband took paternity leave after the birth of our son, his boss was visibly displeased made clear, without saying so directly, that this was an inconvenience, a weakness, a choice that marked him as less serious about his career. He was not being absent from his family. He was being present for it. And the workplace treated those two things as morally equivalent.

The research on what happens when fathers are present in those early weeks is not ambiguous. Fathers who take two or more weeks of paternity leave are significantly more involved in their children’s care five years later. They develop competence through practice, the same way anyone develops competence in anything. The fathers who are kept away in the early weeks, by culture or economics or an employer’s disapproval, are the fathers who arrive at shared parenting with a skill gap that widens over time rather than closes. They fail to meet any minimum standard of care across childcare, household, and social task for the child.

The “useless” father narrative does not protect anyone. It does not protect women, who are then left to manage alone. It does not protect children, who lose a present parent. And it does not protect men, who are told that their humanity, their capacity to care, to be tender, to be present at the most irreversible moments of their own lives is worth less than ninety minutes on a football pitch.

What Society Is Actually Asking

When we tell Jérémy Doku to stay at the World Cup, we are not making an argument about football. We are making an argument about men. We are saying: your worth is in your performance. Your value to us is what you produce on the pitch. The fact that your wife is in labor, that your child is entering the world, that this moment will never come again, these are private inconveniences, and private inconveniences do not outrank public obligations.

This is precisely the argument that has kept men out of the domestic sphere for generations. Not that they are bad partners or absent fathers by nature. But that the culture in workplaces, in sports, in the casual cruelty of social media comment sections has consistently told men that showing up at home is a lesser act than showing up anywhere else. That care is not serious. That presence is not a contribution. That cutting an umbilical cord is a photo opportunity rather than the beginning of a relationship that will define a child’s life.

Retired boxer Brahim Asloum, who won Olympic gold for France in 2000, responded to Pierron’s remarks with a simplicity that the uproar deserved: “A baby is your entire life. A World Cup is over when it is over.” He is right. Doku is 24 years old. Belgium will play in other World Cups. He will score other goals. What he will not recover is the first breath of his first child. That moment belongs to no tournament, no federation, no audience.

The Broader Cost of This Argument

The Pew Research Center published data this month showing that in households where both parents work full time, 63 percent of mothers say they do more of the day-to-day parenting. Only 47 percent of fathers in those same households say the same thing about their partners. Same household. Dramatically different realities reported.

This is not primarily a story about dishonest men. It is a story about men who have been kept, by culture and by workplaces and by the accumulated weight of arguments like the one made this week about Jérémy Doku, from developing the knowledge, the competence, and the presence that equal parenting requires. The fatherhood bonus rewards men for having children. The culture then ensures they do not have to raise them. And then we act surprised when the care gap persists.

Equimundo’s State of the World’s Fathers 2026, which surveyed 8,000 parents across 16 countries, found that 91 percent of fathers say caregiving is one of the most enjoyable things in their lives. The desire is not absent. The structural permission is. And every time a commentator goes on television and tells a footballer that the birth of his child is less important than a group stage match, that permission is withdrawn a little further.

What We Owe the Next Generation of Fathers

I founded The Care Gap because I understood, from my own experience and from the research, that the unequal distribution of care is not a women’s problem to solve. It is a structural problem that requires structural solutions. Paid parental leave that is non-transferable for fathers. Workplaces that measure output rather than availability. A culture that stops treating a man’s presence in his own home as a sacrifice rather than a responsibility.

But structural change is built from moments. And this is a moment. A 24-year-old man, on the largest stage in international sport, said plainly that he wanted to be present for the birth of his child. He did not demand special treatment. He did not denounce football. He said what any loving parent would say and what the research shows produces better outcomes for children, for mothers, for families, and ultimately for men themselves: I want to be there.

The appropriate response to that statement is not outrage. It is recognition. It is the building of systems in sport, in workplaces, in the language we use about fathers that make his choice not controversial but ordinary. Not heroic but expected. Not a sacrifice he makes for his family despite his career, but a normal act of care that his career, his culture, and his society support.

Until we build those systems, we will keep having this argument. And the women at home, managing everything alone, already know exactly where it ends.

Go home, Jérémy. Cut the cord. Your child is your entire life. Everything else can wait.

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Blessing Oyeleye Adesiyan is the Founder & Chief Care Officer of The Care Gap and Caring Africa, and a former chemical engineer and executive at DuPont, BASF, PepsiCo, and Cargill. She writes on the redistribution of care as an economic and policy imperative.