2026 FIFA

Welcome to the World Cup from Hell

As most people will know, today is the opening ceremony of the 2026 FIFA World Cup in Mexico, the United States and Canada. I don’t watch much football, but I do make an exception for the World Cup, even though over the years there have been quite a few World Cups that I shouldn’t have watched.

The most egregious example would be Argentina 1978 - a political and moral nightmare in which some games were played within earshot of detention centres where opponents of the military dictatorship were being tortured and killed. In some of those centres, torturers would pause when Argentina were playing and bring the tortured out to watch or listen to the game with them.

Some prisoners who watched were already sick. Others were waiting to be ‘transferred’ - taken up into planes and thrown into the sea. One former prisoner later recalled his ordeal to the journalist Wright Thompson::

Pale and skinny ghosts, maybe 20 in total, with blindfolds pushed up on their foreheads, peering at a flickering screen. Some would be killed in the next transfer, just three days away. Around the corner, blood dried on the light blue walls of the torture chamber. Mario thought for sure he’d die here.

Argentina scored.

Guards pressured the prisoners to scream “Gooooooal!” during the game. No one dared turn away, or close his eyes. Not cheering loud enough could get a prisoner listed for the next transfer.

At the opening ceremony, the Junta leader General Jorge Videla hailed the tournament as a testament to ‘the innocence of youth, free from any suggestion of political involvement.’ Following Argentina’s victory, some prisoners were taken out into the streets by their captors to hear the cheering crowds, before being returned to their cells to wait for the next ‘death flight.’ In his final speech celebrating Argentina’s win, Videla celebrated the tournament as an expression of ‘peace’ and praised the ‘diverse group of people and nations’ who had come to Argentina to watch it.

Along with millions of people across the world, I watched the competition, because I loved the amazing Dutch teams of the 1970s and wanted to see that one win, and because I also allowed myself to be briefly seduced by the beautiful game to some not-very-distant point in my youth when World Cups were transcendent events. So whatever I knew about Argentina at that time, I just put it aside, which was rather shameful of me.

Of course, my watching it or not watching wouldn’t have made the slightest difference to what was going on off the pitch, but still, I shouldn’t have been there, watching what was effectively a classic case of sportswashing - perpetrated by one of the most hideous regimes of the twentieth century with the help of a New York advertising company.

If I was hoodwinked, it was because I allowed myself to be.

It’s true that the competition had some inadvertent positive consequences, in terms of journalistic access to the mothers and grandmothers of the disappeared - the regime didn’t want to kill them in front of the cameras. But that was absolutely not the intention.

I also watched Russia 2018, hosted by the butcher of Chechnya, whose ‘little green men’ were already swarming over the Crimea and the Donbas. And Qatar 2022, with its stadiums built from underpaid migrant labour and to some extent on migrant deaths, hosted by a state with no interest in football except as a means of making money and projecting a positive image of itself to the wider world.

That’s the magic of the beautiful game. It overrides everything: the murdered, the tortured and the invaded. Corruption, autocracy, dictatorship, labour abuses - all brushed aside by the strange ecstasy of World Cup football. It makes you believe - or pretend to believe - that you have re-entered some primordial footballing innocence, in which everything rotten in the world has miraculously vanished.

Like Persil, whatever football touches, it washes whiter, and it also makes some rich people even richer, which is why so many countries want to host the World Cup, and why FIFA has become the corrupt and dysfunctional monster that has turned the beautiful game into a moneymaking machine, by selling the tournament to whatever country can pay for it.

I recognize that there are other emotions involved in these spectacles than greed, nationalist fervour, and a better national brand. In Football in Sun and Shadow, Eduardo Galeano described himself as a ‘beggar for good football…And when good football happens, I give thanks for the miracle and I don’t give a damn which team or country performs it.’

I’m not that famished, but I also love to see the ‘insolent rascal’ who rebels against the ‘technocracy of modern sport’ with its ‘football of lightning speed and brute strength, a football that negates joy, kills fantasy and outlaws daring.’ Because I don’t follow any club or country, that’s really the only reason why I watch football at all, and the World Cup is the place where such football is most likely to be found.

I didn’t watch the 1966 World Cup, because I was living abroad. But I did see Mexico 1970, when the entire Brazilian team became ‘rascals’ or rather magicians, who dazzled the footballing world with a flair, beauty and exuberance that no Brazilian team has ever been able to match.

I also remember Gheorghe Hagi’s astonishingly accurate and inventive passing and assists, when Romania beat Argentina 3:1 in a group match in USA 1994. It was the greatest moment in Romanian sporting history, and one of the most amazing matches I have ever seen.

The MAGA World Cup

America is not the same country as the one in which Romania blew Argentina away in California that day. This is MAGA America: a country in the midst of a collective moral collapse, that is wrecking itself and the world in front of our eyes; a country in the middle of a war that its maniacal leader started and cannot end; a country that terrorizes immigrants and is now actively seeking to encourage other countries to do the same.

In the last two weeks, vicious riots in Southampton and Belfast have followed migrant knife crimes - the only crimes that count for the ‘two-tier policing’ frauds - with rhetorical support from JD Vance, Pete Hegseth and the Trump administration’s favourite billionaire.

The summer has barely begun, and the MAGA rabble are openly colluding with Yaxley-Lennon, Lowe and their fascistic hordes, inciting racist violence in the UK under the guise of legitimate ‘protest’ against immigrant ‘invaders.’ It was not for nothing that Stephen Yaxley-Lennon AKA Tommy Robinson was finally allowed to enter the United States in February this year, despite multiple criminal convictions.

This was a privilege not granted to the Somali referee Omar Abdulkadir Artan, who was denied entry to the US last week. Artan had the right papers and had no criminal record, but he came from the wrong country, and therefore was unable to realise what he called ‘the biggest dream of my life, to come to the World Cup.’

White House World Cup chief Andrew Giuliani has since said that Artan was a ‘bad actor’ and a ‘national security threat’ due to his links to ‘suspected members of terror organisations.’

Do these idiots really believe that a World Cup referee is a national security threat? Of course they don’t.

The Swiss striker Breel Embolo has been barred from entering the US, supposedly because of a (non-violent) altercation in 2018. Once again, compare with Yaxley-Lennon - convicted of various violent offences but welcomed at the US State Department, and allowed to travel freely around country so that he could network with various Trump/MAGA luminaries.

Elsewhere, Iraq’s striker Aymen Hussein was held for several hours at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport,, and his phone examined before he was allowed in. The Iraqi team photographer was held for 10 hours and then turned away. The Uzbekistan squad were lined up with sniffer dogs and screened with metal detectors. Senegal’s team were inspected on the airport tarmac.

The Iranian team - no surprises here - is not allowed to sleep in the US during the tournament, while the Iranian football federation’s allocation of world cup tickets has been withdrawn, even though some fans had already brought tickets to the US, or already lived there.

In 1936, Hitler’s Berlin Olympics were intended to be a white supremacist showcase in the stadium itself, whilst overt displays of racism were played down for the benefit of the foreign spectators and visitors In the 2026 ‘MAGA World Cup’, the racism is so built into Trump’s depraved administration, that it doesn’t even bother to hide itself. It cannot even resist the temptation to humiliate black and brown footballers who come from what its monstrous president calls ‘shithole countries’.

The US has also restricted access to fans, in order to ‘protect US citizens from individuals who may pose security risks.’ These include already-existing full bans on 39 countries Iran, Haiti, Senegal and Cote d’Ivoire - all of whom are playing in the tournament - and up to 75 countries affected by more recent immigration restrictions that make travelling to the United States a risky proposition.

According to Amnesty’s ‘Humanity Must Win’ report:

The 2026 FIFA World Cup is taking place amidst an acute human rights crisis, with significant risks and impacts for fans, players, journalists, workers and local communities alike. The USA – where three quarters of World Cup matches will be held – is facing a “human rights emergency” and a recognizable pattern of authoritarian practices.

These practices include:

Armed agents…breaking down doors, detaining children and have deported hundreds of thousands of people. LGBTQI+ fan groups say it is not safe to have a visible presence, and supporters of four qualifying countries are barred from entering the country

The Report also notes:

Despite the astounding numbers of arrests and deportations, neither Fifa nor the US authorities have provided any guarantees that fans and local communities will be safe from ethnic and racial profiling, indiscriminate raids, or unlawful detention and deportation.

Even fans from the wrong nationalities or ethnic groups who escape these procedures are likely to be priced out, by tickets estimated at between $10,000 and $35,000 in total to follow their team throughout the tournament to watch their team go the distance, and which reach an astounding £2 million at the top end of the FIFA marketplace for World Cup final tickets,

None of this has received any pushback from FIFA, a sleazy, corrupt and utterly cynical organization led by a man who t has grovelled before the Trump administration like none of his predecessors. In July last year, FIFA opened an office in Trump Tower in New York City. And in December, to his eternal shame, FIFA president Gianni Infantino gave - in fact invented - a ‘FIFA Peace Prize’ specially for Donald Trump.

‘This is what we want from a leader…you definitely deserve the first FIFA Peace Prize for your action for what you have obtained in your way but you obtained it in an incredible way and you can always count Mr President on my support,’ gushed Infantino, in the kind of grovelling self-abasement that you might have expected from one of Stalin’s lackeys, except they at least operated in the knowledge of the Gulag.

Infantino even accompanied Trump on a visit to the Middle East last year, for reasons he has never explained. The FIFA president doesn’t even have fear as an excuse, just greed, and no one can say it isn’t working for him. Only days after Trump got his ‘peace prize’, the US Department of Justice ordered Brooklyn prosecutors to dismiss two bribery convictions against FIFA officials.

These convictions related to the 2015 ‘FIFAgate’ investigation resulting in criminal charges for bribery, fraud and money laundering against more than 50 defendants in 20 countries involved in international football, many of whom were FIFA officials.

In short, FIFA and the Trump crime family are joined at the hip, in a tournament that promises to be most lucrative in World Cup history, and do not expect much pushback from the lords of football, as the Trump administration imposes its vindictive agenda even on players and officials.

Last year, Infantino declared: ‘There is a lot of misconception out there. Everyone will be welcome in Canada, Mexico and the United States for the Fifa World Cup next year.’

So what has he had to say about the barring of a man named ‘Africa’s Best Referee’ in 2025? Nothing at all. Questioned about it at a press conference yesterday, Infantino told reporters to ‘chill and relax’ and suggested that things were being done behind the scenes.

Neither Infantino or any other official has commented on the bans on other foreign players or the demeaning searchers and checks inflicted upon them. FIFA has been less chilled and relaxed about the Haitian team jersey, with its design showing freed slaves raising the Haitian flag at the 1803 Battle of Vertières, when an army of freed slaves defeated the last attempt by French colonial troops to retake the island. This contradicted FIFA’s ban on ‘political, religious, or personal messages or slogans.’

Never mind the designer’s attempt to create a jersey that celebrated the ‘pride, resilience and spirit of the Haitian people’. Or the Haitian novelist Ardain Isma’s moving depiction of the Haitian team as ‘the living continuation of what Vertières already promised: that every generation has the power to write a new chapter of pride, even when the times are unbearably dark.’

With large swathes of the country overrun by gangs, times in Haiti are as dark as they can be right now, and pride is in short supply. But Haiti is small and powerless, and the lords of FIFA concluded that their jersey could be ‘interpreted differently’, and so the design has been modified.

This is not moral leadership, but cowardice and capitulation. And then there is FIFA’s four-year sponsorship agreement with Aramco - one of the world’s largest carbon polluters. For FIFA, only money counts, and that is why its lips will always be sealed whatever Trump does.

None of this is new, but it is noticeably worse. FIFA claims that ‘Football Unites the World’, but this tournament, even more than Argentina, is the mirror of the dark forces that are tearing the world to pieces. In Argentina, one evil regime used the tournament to hide its crimes, and FIFA went along with it.

This time, the World Cup is a dark mirror of the forces that are tearing the world apart, with its racism and insatiable greed, its failure to address the climate emergency, its growing disdain for human rights and the rights of migrants in particular. It’s also a mirror of the forces that are choking the life out of the beautiful game, and which are denying ordinary fans the chance to follow their national team, and turning football into a soulless moneymaking machine for rich men who think of nothing but getting richer.

Nothing that happens on the pitch can change these realities, and what happens on the pitch should not obscure them. And that is why ‘the biggest show on the planet’ leaves me cold, indifferent and mostly disgusted. Maybe some team will do what Romania did in California back in 1994 over the next six weeks. Perhaps some of Galeano’s ‘rascals’ will provide moments of grace, beauty and passion. Maybe there will be some Jesse Owens-like moment, in which a country like Haiti, Senegal or Iran knocks out the United States and wipes the smirk of JD Vance’s face.

But what I see now is a sour, soulless behemoth of a competition, ludicrously extended beyond common sense purely to make money for people who already have too much of it, and which offers no escape from the world we have, but only confirmation of how low football, and the world have sunk.