Over the past century, nothing has united the world in more rapturous joy than the World Cup. This remained the case in recent decades even as FIFA, world soccer’s governing body, eagerly allowed autocratic countries with shameful human rights records, including Russia and Qatar, to host the men’s side of the tournament. And yet, to our national shame, no nation has ever cast a shadow over the World Cup quite like the United States, the primary host, along with Canada and Mexico, of the 2026 games. This year, we will behold something that should be a contradiction in terms: a joyless World Cup.
While the United States is not Qatar or Russia on the authoritarianism scale, we are damn far from anyone’s idea of democracy. Even those countries did not openly threaten international visitors and entire teams with state oppression.
The Trump Administration has been quite open about its hostility in that regard. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), with its growing résumé of extrajudicial, unaccountable violence, will be omnipresent in a “security” role at game sites and even airports. Military surveillance will be dramatic. The unhoused populations in host cities are living under the threat of attack and displacement.
Blue cities are also targeted for not doing enough because dictatorships—even those of a wannabe variety—are never content with a modicum of fealty. In President Donald Trump’s words, using eerie language for someone who is an adjudicated rapist, “We’re going to have to do something when it comes World Cup time, and we’re going to have to force ourselves upon them.” He was referring to Los Angeles, California, a city that has already seen conflict with ICE. Clearly Trump views the World Cup as a pretext for increasing his control over a recalcitrant city.
Then there is Markwayne Mullin, the brutish new chief of the Department of Homeland Security who has announced that he might pull customs from airports in sanctuary cities as punishment for disobeying Trump on immigration. That would seriously inhibit the processing of all international arrivals. If his threat has actual teeth, it would result in travel chaos at a time when people will be visiting from across the globe.
The World Cup is supposed to promote tourism, not hostility. As a result, ticket sales to international guests have been particularly low. Unthinkable just a few years ago, several countries have issued travel advisories warning of the dangers of traveling to the so-called land of the free.
As I write this, a leading news story involves an eighty-five-year-old French widow of a military veteran who was held in ICE custody for more than two weeks. The cruelty is the point, because it sends the message that if officials can do this to her, they can brutalize anyone they want who crosses our borders.
Trumpists are not content merely to threaten visiting fans, either. The Iranian team, whose qualification for the Cup prompted celebrations throughout that country, soon thereafter had its facilities bombed by the United States and Israel. Trump also threatened the team on his social media site, where he wrote, “The Iran National Soccer Team is welcome to The World Cup, but I really don’t believe it is appropriate that they be there, for their own life and safety.” In response, the Iranian team asked if it could play its matches in Mexico, but FIFA, led by a MAGA hat-wearing Trump lickspittle named Gianni Infantino, told them to just deal with it. If forced to drop out, Iran would be the first team in seventy-five years to qualify for the World Cup but not play.
Infantino even has a seat on Trump’s ridiculously named Board of Peace, the pro-Zionist operation aimed at further colonizing the Middle East. He has promised to invest in “a complete football ecosystem” throughout the genocide zone that is Gaza, building stadiums upon mass graves. He conjured up this obscene plan in the weeks following his gift to Trump of something called the “FIFA Peace Prize.”
None of this is happenstance. As Jules Boykoff, author of Red Card: The 2026 World Cup, Sportswashing, and the FIFA Greed Machine, for which I wrote the introduction, said to me, “Trump skitters further and further off the rails. He has an incentive to rely more and more on sports to try to resuscitate his presidency. But soccer is the people’s game, and it must be protected.”
If we take this World Cup lying down and think that what Trump’s regime will be doing is “just sports,” autocracy will be strengthened and our civil liberties further trampled. That’s what the joyless World Cup will bring to our shores.