FIFA WORLD CUP: The Host Is Waging War Against Its Guests and Residents

The World Cup begins across three countries, and the largest of the hosts has gone to war with one of the participating nations. Above it all hangs a Peace Prize for Donald Trump, masked officers outside stadiums, and ticket prices that cost a small fortune.

When the United States, Canada, and Mexico won hosting rights in 2018, people in football circles saw it as a return to the familiar. Two of the three countries had already hosted some of the most successful World Cups in history, the bid book promised low risk and operational security, and it projected record revenues of fourteen billion dollars. Under the first full tournament of his presidency, it was supposed to become Gianni Infantino’s liberation from the burdens left behind by Russia and Qatar, two of the most politicized tournaments in history. Instead, this one has become the most political of them all. In ninety two years, the competition has never seen anything comparable.

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The hardest part first. One host nation launched a war against one of the participating states, the United States against Iran, at the end of February, and as these lines are being written, that war has entered its one hundred and second day. When news arrived that Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had been killed in an American strike, FIFA leadership was sitting at Hensol Castle in Wales during the 140th annual meeting of the International Football Association Board, listening to an opera singer while searching their phones for updates. How small everything suddenly became, concern for the tournament and even the question of whether Iran would be allowed to play at all, became clear when reports emerged that a missile had struck an elementary school in Minab and killed one hundred sixty eight people, one hundred ten of them children. When the Iranian team arrived in Mexico on Monday, players wore pins commemorating the incident after being denied accommodations in the United States and after thirteen staff members had been refused visas, while the war continued and, according to reports, additional Americans had been killed abroad.

If this were any other country, there would already be serious discussion about stripping the host of the tournament or organizing a boycott. Instead, attention revolves around whether the Iranian national team, which qualified fairly and has a strained relationship with its own government, will even be allowed to compete. Over the entire tournament hangs the possibility that Iran and the United States could face each other in the knockout stage.

The tournament itself includes forty eight teams and runs from June 11 through July 19 across Canada, Mexico, and the United States, with the United States hosting most of the venues and California and Texas hosting more than any other states. Matches will be played in Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, Houston, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Miami, the New York and New Jersey area, Philadelphia, Seattle, and the San Francisco Bay Area. The opening matches on Thursday are Mexico against South Africa at Azteca Stadium and afterward South Korea against the Czech Republic in Guadalajara. On Friday, Canada hosts Bosnia and Herzegovina, and that same evening the United States faces Paraguay at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles. On Saturday the tournament begins in the New York and New Jersey area and in Massachusetts, and on Sunday in Texas and Pennsylvania. Host cities have issued travel advisories and security notices, expecting heavier traffic and increased crime, while Customs and Border Protection, the Department of Homeland Security, and the FBI have prepared their operations.

Meanwhile, FIFA’s Peace Prize has become the punchline of a tasteless joke. Since Infantino handed it to Donald Trump with visible devotion, the United States has carried out military interventions in four different countries, including Iran, bringing the total number of such operations since the award of hosting rights in 2018 to twelve, depending on how one counts them. Human rights groups such as FairSquare describe some of them as acts of aggression, unprovoked, unsolicited, and without authorization from the United Nations Security Council, citing not only Iran and Venezuela but also the abduction of a foreign head of state, extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean, sanctions against judges of the International Criminal Court, and withdrawals from the United Nations Human Rights Council, the World Health Organization, and UNESCO. For a long time, the foreign policy of a host country was considered separate from hosting a tournament.

Some in football already call it the MAGA World Cup. Most of the domestic difficulties are concentrated in Democrat governed cities, while Democrat leaning institutions such as US Soccer remain largely untouched, giving the entire event a red political hue. As early as March 2025, voices in football warned that FIFA was extending a hand to Trump to help launder his image through sport and that he would use the tournament to project his political worldview. Amnesty International had already expressed fears at that time that the event could become a stage for hateful rhetoric, suppression of protest, and the undermining of labor agreements.

For many people, the heaviest concern is the possibility that someone enters the country or attends a match and is suddenly taken away by ICE officers. Amnesty International, in a report whose title effectively argues that humanity must prevail, spoke of a looming human rights emergency, of mass detentions and arbitrary arrests carried out by masked and armed ICE officers, CBP personnel, and other authorities. Dallas, Houston, and Miami, it said, had entered into troubling agreements allowing local police to cooperate with ICE. Some visitors also fear that their social media accounts may be examined and searched for content deemed un American. No one can guarantee, Amnesty’s Steve Cockburn argued, that guests and residents are safe from harassment based on origin. Nor are they protected from arbitrary raids or unlawful deportation. The American government removed more than five hundred thousand people from the country in 2025, more than six times the number expected to attend the final. FairSquare accuses FIFA of washing its hands of responsibility. ICE has not disclosed its operational plans for the tournament, and on the eve of the opening match Congress was debating a massive funding package intended to further expand deportations. An American civil rights organization, Move On Civic Action, collected more than thirteen thousand signatures demanding protection for fans, workers, and players from ICE. In Atlanta, Seattle, and Los Angeles, local authorities stated they would not cooperate with the agency’s activities around the tournament. ICE’s acting director Todd Lyons had previously announced that his personnel would play a key role in securing major events. At SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles, workers won an agreement on Wednesday allowing them to stop working if they felt endangered by ICE activity.

By now, possibility has become certainty. The Department of Homeland Security confirmed that ICE officers will be present at matches to secure them together with local and federal partners, as they put it. Human rights groups calculated that since January 2025 the agency has arrested more than one hundred sixty seven thousand people in host cities and accuse FIFA of remaining silent while awarding its Peace Prize to the same man whose raids produced that figure. A spokesperson for the department dismissed concerns and stated that anyone entering the World Cup legally has nothing to fear and that immigration enforcement will target only those who are unlawfully in the country, full stop.

New York City is distributing so called Know Your Rights cards intended to inform people about their rights during encounters with ICE. The cards explain, among other things, the right to remain silent, rules governing entry into homes and workplaces, and access to legal support. They also include emergency numbers for immigration assistance, victim support, and city services. The goal is to inform affected individuals about existing rights and available resources.

In New York, many consider that a weak reassurance. Mayor Zohran Mamdani handed visitors and residents something that borrows directly from the language of football: a World Cup Referee Kit containing a yellow card and a red card. Printed on them are the rights people have in encounters with ICE, together with protections for workers and consumers and contact numbers for agencies supporting victims of domestic and gender based violence and victims of crime. The cards are distributed to consumers, low wage workers, immigrants, and all other New Yorkers and translated into eleven languages, from Spanish and Chinese to Russian, Bengali, Haitian Creole, Korean, Arabic, Polish, Urdu, French, and Wolof. The World Cup, Mamdani said, is a time when the world comes together through a shared love of football, and he will not tolerate anyone using the tournament to exploit New Yorkers, whether through fraudulent business practices or labor violations. Nor, he said, will he accept any other form of exploitation. In this way the game receives its cards back, except this time the referee is a mayor and the warning is directed at the state.

Where people want to protest, space is becoming scarce. Mexico has deployed one hundred thousand security personnel, and Amnesty is concerned about those who plan to demonstrate. Women organizing a peaceful march for the opening match at Azteca Stadium are seeking truth and accountability for the disappearance of their relatives. Since World Cups have long served as places of public expression, especially now as the war in the Gulf and developments between Israel and Palestine intensify emotions, there is a growing concern that such voices may be suppressed, because all three host countries have restricted freedom of speech and assembly. The Trump administration has targeted foreign born students protesting Israel’s actions in Gaza, and American citizens who documented and opposed harsh immigration measures have been killed by federal officers. In Canada, demonstrations related to Gaza have been dispersed by police, and in Mexico resistance is growing against what preparations for the tournament have taken from local communities: water, access to land, affordable housing, and protection from displacement, while concerns remain that these protests too could disappear beneath the security buildup.

The southern host has contributed another first to the tournament. In February, violence erupted in Guadalajara, one of the host cities, when the Jalisco cartel set up roadblocks and burned vehicles after its leader, known as El Mencho, was killed in an operation. Since then, debate has continued over how safe Mexico can truly be. Trump had previously described Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum as deeply intimidated by the cartels and suggested that something would have to be done with Mexico after already threatening trade measures against both Mexico and Canada. For now, central Guadalajara remains calm beyond the tournament atmosphere.

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In the United States, another danger emerged on Saturday when a shooting near the English team’s accommodations in Kansas City, Missouri injured nine people. The Gun Violence Archive counted more than four hundred mass shootings last year, and yet one of the country’s most painful realities is rarely discussed in connection with the tournament, unlike during the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.

In Canada, Amnesty fears that people experiencing homelessness will once again be pushed aside, as happened during the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, now intensified by the housing crisis. On March 15, the city of Toronto closed a winter warming center that had provided shelter for homeless residents because FIFA had booked the location in advance. In the United States as well, FairSquare warns that homeless people could be removed from areas surrounding venues for the sake of cleaner images.

The planet pays too. An analysis by Greenly estimates greenhouse gas emissions from this tournament at 7.8 million tons of carbon dioxide, 2.1 times higher than Qatar, and that figure does not even include the enormous construction campaign of 2022. The reasons are simple: the vast geography and the expansion to forty eight teams. At the same time, the same FIFA that partners with an oil company like Aramco claims it will protect players and spectators from extreme heat. An assessment by World Weather Attribution predicts that roughly one quarter of matches will be played at a wet bulb temperature of twenty six degrees Celsius or higher, the threshold experts use to measure how effectively the human body can cool itself. FairSquare describes FIFA’s heat protections as dramatically inadequate. While FIFPRO and others recommend intervention at twenty six degrees and postponement at twenty eight, FIFA only acts at thirty two, an approach scientists described in a letter as indefensible. From Qatar, where similar heat may have contributed to the deaths of thousands of migrant workers whose deaths were never fully explained, the federation appears to have learned nothing.

For spectators, the tournament has become a business many can barely afford anymore. Ticket prices are more than triple those of recent tournaments, and estimates suggest that following one’s national team throughout the entire competition may cost between ten thousand and thirty five thousand dollars. FIFA’s one sided agreements with host cities have driven costs even higher. Sometimes the argument is that revenue is being redistributed throughout sport, sometimes that FIFA is adapting to America’s entertainment culture, yet both explanations collapse under scrutiny, because record revenues had already been projected under the old pricing model and FIFA had never before adjusted itself to the customs of a host nation, not even in the United States in 1994. The fact that ticket resale is permitted on the American market could have been avoided, yet the federation embraces it. The result is a two tier version of football, where what was meant to belong to everyone increasingly belongs to only a few. The clearest example may be disabled supporters. Infantino speaks of the most inclusive tournament in history, while Football Supporters Europe calls it the first major international sports event in modern times that effectively excludes supporters with disabilities, offering no affordable seats in the lowest category and no free admission for an accompanying person, meaning a wheelchair user could end up paying as much as seven thousand dollars to attend the final. Ronan Evain from the organization called it, together with absurd parking prices, a tax on disability.

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What remains is the scale itself. The politically motivated expansion to forty eight teams created many of FIFA’s current problems and threatens to take away what once made the tournament special. Because forty eight teams cannot be divided cleanly, the ranking of third placed teams returns, creating safety nets and removing pressure from matches. Anyone who found the four team groups of 2022 compelling will recognize in this that Infantino does not understand his own sport. The number of matches has become difficult to grasp, and where nothing can be fully followed anymore, the magic fades. Curaçao qualified for the first time, which would be wonderful if there were not also the growing suspicion that the game is beginning to consume itself. Beneath everything lies the deeper story of decline, that of a FIFA selling and reshaping a global public good piece by piece without anyone seeming able to intervene. Infantino was supposed to serve the game, not the game serve him.

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It was supposed to be about football and the money it generates. Instead it became a tournament overshadowed by two contradictory fears, one that the wrong people might get in, the other that the wrong people might be dragged out, and at the center of it all stands a federation that awarded its Peace Prize to the man leading a war against one of the participating nations. It is fair to ask who a celebration belongs to when a wheelchair seat costs seven thousand dollars and an elementary school in Minab costs one hundred ten children. Perhaps that is the quietest truth of these weeks: that a global public good could be sold off piece by piece under the bright lights of the stadiums, and everyone watched it happen.