One of João Victor Silva’s earliest memories from his childhood in São Paulo, Brazil, was the country’s victory in the 2002 World Cup—a day marked by celebration and cheering from the then five-year-old Silva’s family and friends.
“Being from Brazil, [soccer is] a big thing,” Silva tells The Progressive. “It was a big part of my childhood. It is a big part of cultural life in Brazil.”
Soccer, known outside of the United States as football, is considered the most widely followed sport worldwide by far, estimated to have 3.5 billion fans. Its cultural centerpiece and elite global championship, the World Cup, draws billions of viewers across the globe every four years.
This year’s World Cup, hosted jointly by Canada, Mexico, and the United States, has already been labeled the most-attended in the competition’s history, surpassing 4.6 million attendees across the first seventy-two games.
But international turnout has so far been a disappointment in the United States. Before the tournament, FIFA, or the Fédération Internationale de Football Association, and the U.S. State Department estimated between five and ten million visitors over the course of the competition this summer. In reality, the most recent estimates are totaling closer to 1.24 million. In New York City, FIFA originally projected 1.2 million visiting fans, but in June, Vijay Dandapani, the CEO of the Hotel Association of New York City, said he was only expecting half a million.
Early reports from hotels and airlines this summer were far underbooked compared to predictions. Some host cities—including New York and Miami—have even recorded fewer hotel bookings on match days than they did during the same period in 2025, in a year without a World Cup.
Some fans have pointed to the Cup’s high ticket prices as one clear contributing factor to the international underattendance and empty seats, as even many soccer enthusiasts are unwilling to spend hundreds on a single ticket, especially in combination with travel and hotel costs.
In a change from previous World Cups, FIFA instituted a “dynamic pricing” model for this year’s tournament that hikes ticket prices based on demand and remaining inventory. Two months before the competition began, the average cost of one ticket in Los Angeles, California, was more than $1,000. The least expensive tickets for the final game are currently as high as $8,000.
“Initially, I wanted to see a game,” Silva says. “But it was so expensive, I just couldn’t do it.”
But in addition to steep costs, Silva and other international citizens say the Trump Administration’s strict immigration and border policies have turned many potential visitors away from the tournament. Silva says he feels the United States doesn’t have a welcoming environment for international visitors or immigrants—his own friends and family members have hesitated to visit him during his time studying here, fearing being turned away or detained upon entry to the country.
“Being here and watching how immigration policy has been enforced toward Latin American citizens, and some of them American citizens of Hispanic descent as well, it’s just been awful,” he says.
In the past year, the Trump Administration has adopted much harsher border and immigration policy, and implemented major expansions to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Hundreds of thousands of immigrants in the United States have been detained since January 2025, as well as more than 170 U.S. citizens. For people outside of the United States, especially those who have never visited the country, these headlines can be terrifying enough to deter any future visits.
Lily, a Chinese-American living in the United Kingdom who asked that her real name be withheld due to concerns that the Trump Administration could target her as a dual citizen who travels to and from the United States, says several of her friends changed their travel plans to the United States earlier this year.
“They canceled them because they didn’t feel comfortable,” Lily tells The Progressive “They didn’t feel safe reading and hearing about what was happening with ICE. On the international stage, it makes the United States look terrible.”
Khalid, a Saudi Arabian international student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who asked that his real name not be used out of concern about losing his student visa, tells The Progressive that his father feared for his safety when he applied for a student visa in the United States in 2024, even before Donald Trump had returned to office. “It was during the Biden era, before everything became even worse,” Khalid says. “People [in Saudi Arabia] perceive the United States as dangerous.” This stereotype primarily results from the discrimination and mistreatment that many citizens from the Middle East have faced in the United States since 2001. Now, the recent World Cup controversies, he says, are “not really helping with that stereotype.”
Leading up to the World Cup, more than 120 civil society groups across the globe issued a travel advisory warning people visiting the United States for the tournament that they could be at risk of serious rights violations under the Trump Administration, including “arbitrary denial of entry and risk of arrest, detention and/or deportation.” In May, Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin also stated that ICE would be present at World Cup matches—a decision met with protests and boycotts in the United States and around the world.
“I know people that just refuse to go to the United States, even though they’re huge, huge soccer fans, just because of the political climate,” Khalid says.
Beyond the economic benefit that tourists and international visitors bring to the United States, Lily and Khalid believe that visiting may have allowed international citizens to gain a more nuanced perspective of the country and its people beyond the notoriety of the Trump Administration, improving the United States’s global reputation.
But fans are not the only ones at risk of denied entry, deportation, and discrimination during this World Cup season. In May, Iran’s soccer team moved its World Cup base camp from Tucson, Arizona, to Tijuana, Mexico, after facing unusually harsh restrictions from the United States, including its players and staff being made to leave the country immediately and return to their base camp in Mexico after the final whistle of every game. Other international teams were permitted to establish base camps in the United States and remain in the host country between matches without issue. Just weeks later, World Cup referee Omar Artan was denied entry to the United States from his home country of Somalia, despite being selected to officiate at the tournament, with no reason offered by U.S. authorities for his repatriation.
“It’s really kind of tainted the benefit that I think the United States would have gotten otherwise for being one of the host countries,” Lily says. “It’s a missed opportunity for the United States to improve its reputation and earn back some goodwill.”
Silva reflected on the recent FIFA decision to reverse the automatic one-game suspension for the U.S. Men’s National Team striker, Folarin Balogun, after Trump called Gianni Infantino, the president of FIFA, to review the red card. This decision marked the first time since 1962 that FIFA has reversed a red-card suspension during the World Cup, leading to global backlash.
“It’s not surprising,” Silva says. “But it’s shocking . . . that a sitting President would actually interfere with the Cup on that level.”
While this is not the first time international politics have cast a shadow on the World Cup, Silva says that because soccer is not as central to American national identity as it is in many other countries, the tournament has been “marked” by the Trump Administration’s xenophobia and international hostility. “I feel like it has been partially defined by it, if not totally,” she says.
“If people are choosing not to go to the United States,” Lily says, “I think this is the current administration reaping what they’ve sown economically, in a small sense.”