World Cup 2026: What America Still Agrees On and the Looming Hospitality Strike

Ahead of the World Cup, FIFA President Gianni Infantino managed to ingratiate himself with Donald Trump and alienate almost everyone else. In a fractured country, contempt for him has become the rare thing both parties still share!

On a snowy January morning this year, dozens of mayors and other city officials gathered in a hotel ballroom in Washington, filled with anger and fear over the increasingly aggressive measures taken by the federal government against immigrants, during which two American citizens had been killed in Minneapolis. Then Gianni Infantino, the president of FIFA, stepped onto the stage.

For the first time in the 250 year history of the United States, Infantino said, the country would not merely be invaded but conquered. The National Conference of Mayors fell silent. It would be conquered by soccer, he added, trying to rescue the joke and excite the gathering about the World Cup that, beginning this Thursday through July 19, will be jointly hosted by the United States, Mexico, and Canada.

It is difficult to imagine a more unfortunate choice of words. In a room where those present feared for people being pursued by the state, and where news of two killed citizens still lingered, the highest official in world soccer spoke of invasion and conquest as if they were cheerful words. That in the end he meant only the ball changed nothing. Some sentences are already decided before the punchline arrives.

With one person, however, Infantino has done remarkably well before this tournament. He attached himself to Donald Trump, created a peace prize that was then awarded to Trump, and repeatedly visited the White House, most recently last week, when he was photographed beside the president admiring the construction changes outside the Oval Office. With nearly everyone else, he has struggled.

That is this man’s real achievement. In a deeply divided country, elected officials outside the White House are united by almost nothing as reliably as their distrust of Infantino and FIFA, the governing body of the world’s most popular sport. That feeling stretches across every divide, from Washington to state capitals and city halls.

It began with ticket prices. Mayors such as Zohran Mamdani of New York and Karen Bass of Los Angeles, both Democrats, rejected them, and Mamdani ultimately secured one thousand tickets for New Yorkers at fifty dollars each. The attorneys general of New York and New Jersey, also Democrats, opened an investigation last month into pricing practices. In New Jersey, Governor Mikie Sherrill, also a Democrat, demanded FIFA assistance with millions in transit costs before ultimately relying on new advertising revenue to cover the shortfall. Even Trump, despite his closeness to Infantino, criticized ticket prices. He told the New York Post that he would not pay one thousand dollars to attend the opening match of the American team against Paraguay.

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Republican Senator Todd Young of Indiana, who played top division soccer at the Naval Academy, calls FIFA disconnected from ordinary people around the world. In truth, he says, it is an elite driven conspiracy, one that has struggled with corruption over the years, and one gets the impression it is losing sight of its only mission, promoting the sport, especially among young people who otherwise would never have access to it. Every true supporter of international soccer, says Representative Rick Larsen of Washington, wishes Infantino appeared in the news a little less and promoted the game a little more.

A FIFA spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment. The skeptics nevertheless insisted they were looking forward to the tournament with its forty eight teams, and some lawmakers acknowledged that Infantino operates in a difficult political environment. He is simply doing, says Republican Darin LaHood, chairman of the congressional soccer caucus, what he must do to court the Trump administration.

The World Cup opens a sequence of events that during Trump’s second term are expected to polish his image and legacy in the glow of major sporting spectacles. This month he plans to stage a UFC fight on the South Lawn of the White House. The final act will come with the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles during the final year of his presidency. But the soccer tournament begins against the backdrop of a deeply divided country, with Trump himself standing at its center. According to a NORC survey from May, only thirty seven percent of adults approve of how he is handling his office.

Yet Trump continues with growing eagerness to place himself at the center of American life, especially as the country marks the 250th anniversary of its independence. He has begun a sweeping redesign of Washington and plans to appear as the leading figure at the Great American State Fair on June 24. On Monday he intends to attend the basketball championship final between the New York Knicks and the San Antonio Spurs, and in July he is expected to attend the World Cup final in his role as head of state.

But the tournament presents a test for an administration that has made aggressive immigration enforcement the centerpiece of its agenda. The most visible measures, including high profile arrests in cities such as Chicago and Minneapolis, have largely calmed. Toward visitors, officials now present a welcoming face and have suspended, for example, the proposal requiring travelers from countries that qualified for the tournament and purchased tickets to post entry deposits of up to fifteen thousand dollars.

At the same time, however, the White House continues to consider hard measures to punish what it sees as its opponents. Homeland Security chief Markwayne Mullin has threatened to suspend customs processing at airports in cities whose administrations resist Trump’s immigration policies. And the intense clashes at an immigration facility in New Jersey, roughly ten miles from the site where the final will be played, are a reminder of the tests awaiting the White House.

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Ashleigh Huffman, who led sports diplomacy at the State Department under Biden and during Trump’s first term, sees the World Cup at the intersection of two harsh realities. On one side stands an unprecedented opportunity to heal a divided country and a struggling world, on the other an unprecedented level of scrutiny. Everything that happens, she says, has the power to unite, but at the same time forces conversations about access and human rights, about immigration, and about who is included in this celebration. Anyone lawfully in the country, said Andrew Giuliani, head of the White House World Cup task force, to reporters in Miami last week, has nothing to fear. They want people to come and enjoy the tournament while also keeping the country safe. It is a sentence meant to reassure and yet achieves the opposite, because it divides guests into those who supposedly have nothing to fear and those who apparently do.

And the division that runs through so much of this country does not stop at the tournament. According to an Ipsos survey from May, Democrats and independents are more likely to watch than Republicans, and Democrats had already shown stronger interest in the matches before. Republicans, by contrast, though less eager to tune in, feel greater national pride in the performance of the American team. About two thirds of them say the team’s participation makes them proud to be American, compared with just under half of Democrats.

For soccer fans in Washington, the hope remains that the tournament may provide a rare pause in the endless partisan struggle. There is a real opportunity in this, says Young, to use this platform as a place of unity and shared experience across nations. And Larsen says that from kickoff to the final whistle he plans to call for red cards and celebrate goals.

It is the oldest art of power to offer games to a restless people. The only new part is that this time the bread that once came with them is missing, and the tickets cost one thousand dollars. The ruler attaches himself to the celebration because his own shine is fading. The official attaches himself to the ruler because hardly anyone else likes him anymore. Both hope that the cheering after a goal will drown out what is happening around the stadium. Sixteen kilometers from the final venue, people sit in detention, and an official promises that anyone lawfully here has nothing to fear. Perhaps the joke that nobody answered on that January morning ends up telling the truth about this tournament. A country that can no longer agree on anything found its last shared feeling in contempt for the man who wanted to sell it unity.