A World Cup of unity – or a spectacle of power, inequality, and politics? 

“It only took one call because when I heard World Cup, I wanted to do it.” 

- President Donald Trump 

Spoken by Donald Trump in 2018, as he welcomed FIFA President Gianni Infantino to the Oval Office to discuss the United States of America’s role in co-hosting the 2026 FIFA World Cup, are these the most chilling words in world football? Trump was not kidding. He really does want to do the World Cup. And, of course, that means doing it his way.  

At first glance, Trump might appear an unlikely enthusiast for the tournament. His preferred sport is golf. When not in Washington, he holds court at Mar el Largo, his gaudy, over-polished golf resort in Florida. His time spent on the course while in office exceeds even that of Dwight Eisenhower, president from a more leisurely era of American politics. 

The US men’s national team is unlikely to offer the kind of nationalist grandstanding enjoyed by Benito Mussolini at the 1934 World Cup in Italy, or General Videla in Argentina in 1978, when the host nations were victorious. In any case, many voices on the far-right have framed football as un-American, using the World Cup as an opportunity to make their case. 

In 2014, for example, commentator Ann Coulter dismissed football as ”a sport for girls” and “Third World peasants,” linking its popularity to what she called the “demographic switch effected by Teddy Kennedy’s 1965 immigration law.” More recently, the outspoken pro-LGBT+ stance of the US women’s national team, especially Megan Rapinoe, has drawn Trump’s ire and the wider MAGA movement’s opprobrium. 

However, Trump has some past form with football. He actually played the game in high school and appeared on British television in 1991 as part of the draw for the fifth round of the then Rumbelow’s League Cup, held in a board room in Trump Tower. More importantly, he is, above all, the former host of a television game show, hyper-alert to the power of television, social media and entertainment. And the World Cup offers coverage and ratings like no other spectacle.  

The President at the centre of the spectacle 

The 2025 FIFA Club World Cup trophy ceremony demonstrated that Trump is casting himself as the ‘host with the most’ at ‘the biggest bestest World Cup ever’. Having presented the trophy to Chelsea’s captain, Reese James, normal protocol would have seen the head of state leave the dais and the team would then lift the trophy accompanied by the usual confetti and fireworks.  

Trump, however, beaming widely, remained at the heart of the action as, of course, the host of a game show would; where else are you going to be when the winners are announced and the credits begin to roll?  

Given this, I would argue that the rashest and most aggressive of Trump’s threats to disrupt the tournament - to take matches away from Democratic cities or to allow ICE to aggressively patrol the environs of the stadiums – are just hot air. This is entertainment, and no one wants to be the villain. 

From continental unity to political fragmentation 

What kind of messages, then, what kind of meanings will this World Cup acquire? It certainly won’t be sending out the messages envisaged when the UNITED 2026 bid was first hatched in 2016, and the football federations USA, Canada and Mexico, were moving in lockstep around the globe with a promise to “create….a FIFA World Cup that is more inclusive, more universal than ever,” held across a uniquely integrated continent. 

Since then, Trump has dismantled NAFTA, the 1994 treaty between the host countries that eliminated most tariffs and trade barriers to foster economic ties. In his second term, Trump has shocked publics and politicians alike by imposing new tariffs on USA’s neighbours, floating the idea of Canada becoming the 51st state, and threatening direct military intervention against the cartels in Mexico. 

What was once intended as a celebration of regional integration has mutated into something closer to three separate World Cups, and though there is notionally a high-level trilateral coordinating committee, it has barely met. 

Three hosts, three political stories

In Canada, the 2026 World Cup arrives at a moment when football has never been more popular. The country hosted a very successful women’s World Cup with record breaking attendance and tv viewership in 2015, established men’s and women’s national professional leagues, and has seen a very sharp rise in the number of people playing the game. At the same time, ice hockey’s hegemonic hold on Canadian sport, while not broken, has been tarnished by persistent and widespread scandals over sexual abuse and bullying.

In this context, football has offered a different version of Canada, one in which the enormous waves of migration of the past thirty years are finally registering, not least the many players in the squad with Afro-Caribbean roots.

Mexico has been here before; twice in fact. It hosted in 1970 and 1986, during the era of the PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional), whose long and often authoritarian rule lasted until the 21st century. Third time around, Mexico has democratised and is now governed by a left-leaning administration led by Claudia Sheinbaum, following the presidency of Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

Promising a social and accessible World Cup, the Mexican government has funded a nationwide festival of grassroots football, music and culture and put on huge community arts projects, including assembling the largest ever football shirt made out of human beings and the biggest ever communal football practice. 

Yet security has been a concern. Mexico’s drug wars have leaked into the nation’s football before - inter-cartel gun battles at football games, narco money laundering through clubs, and prominent players, like Rafael Marquez, accused of links to the cartels. The proximity of the violence to the game was symbolically reenforced in early 2026 when 400 hitherto ‘forgotten’ body bags were unearthed near the stadium in Guadalajara, and empirically reinforced in late April when gunmen invaded the pitch and opened fire at a game in central Mexico killing 11 people. 

The killing of drug lord El Mencho by the Mexican military in February 2026 has unleashed another wave of revenge killings and turf wars amongst the splintered cartels in the north of the country. In a show of strength aimed as much at Washington as the cartels, the Mexican government is mobilising a security force of 100,000 for the tournament.  

The renovation of the Azteca Stadium in Mexico City has also been controversial. The owners - the media conglomerate Televesia - have been accused by local residents of refusing to share the neighbourhoods only water well and water supply with the local and long-standing working-class community. Residents have regularly been protesting against being edged out by the gentrification that the development has triggered.

The United States has also been here before, but in what seems a more innocent age. The 1994 World Cup, designed to relaunch men’s football in the United States, may have begun with Diana Ross inexplicably missing a penalty from two metres, but it was an enormous success.   

In the three decades since, football in the United States has grown out of all proportion: it remains a dominant force in women’s football; MLS has expanded, and filled its new soccer specific stadiums, developed its own idiosyncratic fan cultures, and been joined by new national leagues;  the country’s growing Latino population has made the game more popular than ever before; while the value of European sports TV rights, in the US market, climbed and climbed. 

In another world, this America might have been on display at the World Cup; urban, diverse, cosmopolitan, progressive. Quite how this America will feel about large public gatherings in an era of ICE and National Guard mobilisation is hard to gauge but those energies will be muted and cautious for sure. In any case, the failure of US Congress to agree the release of World Cup funding during this year’s government shut down has sharply curtailed plans for fan parks and public viewing spaces, the most democratic element of the modern World Cup. 

FIFA President Infantino’s politics of proximity 

Instead, it is Trump’s USA that will be most clearly foregrounded this summer, and nowhere more so than in the relationship between Trump and Infantino - a master class in how power currently works in the United States and the world of football.   

Having presided over World Cups in Russia and Qatar, and arranged for another one to be hosted by Saudi Arabia, Infantino is not unfamiliar with the personal politics of authoritarian states and their leaders. In Trump’s case, he has clearly understood that a capricious, self-regarding and vengeful leader is best managed through a mixture of showbiz glad-handing and the obsequious flattery.

In this respect, Infantino has played a blinder; though I increasingly think that he has crossed over from the cynical and performative into actually believing his and Trump’s propaganda. Beginning with his fawning presence at Trump’s inauguration in 2025, he has gone on to form part of Trump’s retinue at Davos, spoken at the launch of his farcical Gaza Board of Peace and worn a “red cap” marked with ‘USA’ and ‘45-47’ – a clear reference to Trump’s non-consecutive presidencies. 

His master stoke was to loan the World Club Cup trophy to Trump. Its aesthetic was tailored to the president’s - an enormous, ostentatious piece of gold kitsch - and it sat on Trump’s desk for months. FIFA had only two trophies made - one for the winners and one for themselves - but had to let Trump keep the second one and have another produced.

Since then, Infantino has joined Ronaldo at the Oval Office for a selfie with Elon Musk and the Secretary of State for Trade and heroically was one of the very few to attend the gala opening of Netflix’s own genuflection to the Trumps, the film Melania.

Nothing, however, has quite topped the lickspittle of the draw for the World Cup which took place in November 2025, and at which FIFA presented its newly created Peace Prize to Trump. Thwarted, not unreasonably, in his desire to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, FIFA served up their own to him instead. Like a school prize giving, Trump received a medal, an illuminated scroll, and an extraordinary sculpture in which, many hands lifted a globe aloft - in fact a miniature of an Azerbaijani sculpture that was donated to the United Nations. One could be forgiven for thinking that a small army of dismembered zombie limbs were, in fact, dragging football down into the inferno below. 

FIFA’s proclaimed values meet political reality 

One wonders quite how the conversation now runs at FIFA headquarters when they discuss the Peace Prize? Since the United States and Israel began their attack on Iran, we have been in the remarkable situation where the host of the World Cup and one of the qualified nations are effectively at war with each other.  

In one not entirely improbable scenario, the two could meet in the round of sixteen in Los Angeles. Iranian authorities have asked FIFA to move their games to Mexico and have threatened to ‘boycott’ the World Cup in the US but assured it will not withdraw from the tournament. 

In March, Trump posted a trademark veiled threat: ”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.“ Now, in late April, amid a fragile ceasefire, he has flipped again and on behalf the Trump-administration Secretary of State Marco Rubia said that while the Iranian players were welcome, anyone accompanying them who has links to the Iranian military would be denied entry. 

What will actually happen is anyone’s guess. For the lovers of macabre political theatre, it preserves the prospect of a group stage Egypt vs Iran clash (two countries in which homosexuality is illegal) designated by FIFA as the tournament’s LGBT+ pride game. 

The same grating contradictions between FIFAs milquetoast moralising and the reality of the world have been even more sharply exposed by the Trump administration’s migration, racial justice and citizenship policies. FIFA’s usual vocal if anodyne statements on anti-racism and internationalism have already been quieted by the White House’s aggressive assault on the language of diversity and inclusivity.

More substantially, the administration’s hardline border and immigration policies have had serious consequences for the tournament. International human rights organisations are warning travellers to be, at the very least, cautious how they handle their travel. Citizens of four qualified nations - Iran, Senegal, Cote d’Ivoire and Haiti - are unable to get any kind of US visa at all, though there are exemptions for athletes and coaches. 

Citizens of a dozen or so other qualified nations are able to get travel visas but must pay a bond of anything between five and fifteen thousand US dollars before traveling, with no exemption for the qualifying squads.   

Even where visas are available, it remains to be seen whether the enormous queues for visa appointments at US embassies will shrink enough to allow ticket holders to come to the tournament. 

This is a great shame. Not only is the World Cup enriched by the presence of travelling fans, inside and outside the stadiums, but a cursory examination of the teams that have qualified for this World Cup reveal a world that is being made by the innumerable and complex flows of temporary and permanent migration that make nativist notions of nations and national identity redundant.   

We could be celebrating this rather than deploring it. The multi-ethnic teams of France, England, Spain, Belgium and Germany are, at their best, testament to both their colonial pasts, contemporary migrations, and emergent multifaceted and inclusive versions of the nation. At the same time, Curaçao and Cape Verde are fielding the teams drawn from global diasporic networks rather than home territory, while Haiti players are all refugees from the now almost stateless island.  

A World Cup priced for the few 

Perhaps the most telling feature of this World Cup have been the ticketing arrangements.

When FIFA first announced the price of tickets in 2024, it was clear that there would be a very sharp increase from Qatar 2022 - in some categories a four-fold increase. It also emerged that this was just the beginning and, in line with much of the rapacious US entertainment industry, dynamic pricing would be applied, with popular tickets rising sharply in cost.

FIFA has also established a resale site for tickets and will take a 15 percent cut from both buyer and seller. Most recently the actual seating maps for the stadiums have been released; hitherto fans were buying just a category of ticket rather than a numbered seat.

It turns out that category 4 tickets - the only reasonably priced seats - make up less than five per cent of the stands, perhaps even less, and are banished to the far upper corners. Category 3 has become the new category 4, and all located behind the goals where the cheap seats used to be, but they will still set you back something in the region of 500 US dollars for just group stage games.

Category 1 and 2 tickets occupy more than 70 percent of the stadiums. They will cost thousands rather than hundreds of dollars and may even be located in the corners rather than along the sides of the pitch. In a final touch of class, FIFA has introduced a new and even more expensive category of ticket, for the front rows of the stands.  At the time of writing tickets for the final were trading at over $12,000.

FIFA had surely hit rock bottom? Think again! In late April it was reported that the price of tickets for wheelchair user was systematically higher than for able bodied fans, that there was no guarantee that a disabled fans companion would be actually allocated a ticket next to them.

If ticket prices were not enough, FIFA and some US transit authorities have been pushing the limits elsewhere. Parking at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles, for example, will cost 300 US dollars. The train from New York to the Met Life Stadium in New Jersey, normally 12.95 US dollar for a return ticket - will set you back 150 US dollars.

Of course, some people will stretch their budget or go into debt to buy a ticket. Foreign football associations have been given a small number of cheaper tickets for their most regular travelling fans. But for everyone else, it is hard to see how this is not a World Cup of,  if not the 1 percent, then certainly the 10 percent; the kind of rich Americans - and there are plenty of them - who can drop 10,000 US dollars on a family day out at the World Cup.

This is, of course, exactly what FIFA is banking on to ensure full stadiums, but be careful what you wish for. In South Africa in 2010, tickets that cost a fraction of today’s prices were still too expensive for many black South Africans, who formed the overwhelming majority of the country’s football fans. The crowds, as a consequence, were much whiter than the nation as a whole, and often full of people who had never been to a game before.

In this regard the vuvuzela, curse to many, was a blessing, giving the many novices a way to make noise. In Brazil in 2014, in a country that is at least fifty percent afro-Brazilian, the cost of tickets and Brazil’s racial and economic inequality meant that one observer could describe the crowd as something out of ”Kansas”. Brazilians, irrespective of income of ethnicity, know what to do at a football game, but one wonders if this will be true of their privileged equivalent in the United States?

Climate silence before the storm 

If this World Cup will put on show some of the cruelties and inequalities of its American host, one thing we have so far not heard much about is climate challenges.

Qatar 2022’s then record foot carbon footprint and its plans for carbon offsets were closely scrutinised and challenged. FIFA was enthusiastic in claiming green credentials for the event. This time around, even though the carbon emissions from this World Cup - now with 48 teams and 104 games in cities, often with poor public transit - will be the largest ever, but FIFA is curiously silent on the matter. In part, this is a function of the arrival of Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil giant Aramco - the world’s largest single corporate emitter - as one of FIFA’s leading sponsors. It is also testament to the Trump administration’s chilling impact on climate conversations and actions at every level.

It is possible that there might be a sting in the tail. North American summers have experienced more extreme weather over the last decade. Serious and prolonged heatwaves, intense precipitation, and increasingly powerful storms and hurricanes.

Games at the Copa America in 2024 were played in dangerously high heat and humidity in Arizona and Florida, with one player passing out from heat stroke. Matches at the 2025 World Club Cup were seriously delayed as lighting storms raged across the east coast.   

It may all be fine too, but the Rugby World Cup in 2019 was disrupted by typhoons, the Tokyo Olympics was forced to reschedule many events in the searing heat of the summer, the World Cup’s time is coming. 

Not with a bang, but a whimper? 

The greatest uncertainty is what Trump himself will do. One imagines he is currently preoccupied by other matters, but he will be a presence; online, on the screen, and perhaps at the games too.

One thing is for sure: on July 19th he will be handing over the World Cup to the victorious captain, though the booing received at the US Tennis Open might have given him pause for thought about such outings.

I hope, as ever, that despite everything, moments of beauty, resistance, and utopia will emerge from the World Cup.  A counterpoint and challenge to the spectacle and to the economic and political forces that have so systematically colonised the global game.  

Perhaps I am kidding myself. Perhaps, there will be none of this, and the spectacle will simply have triumph. In that case, there is another story that this World Cup might tell. 

Infantino has decided, seemingly unilaterally, to stage a half time show at the World Cup final, stretching the break from the usual 15 minutes to at least 20 or 25. One could, perhaps, overlook this sacrilegious break with ritual tradition, as a reasonable cameo for Americana.  But why ask Chris Martin of Cold Play to curate the roster? Couldn’t we do better than handing over this global moment to the insipid stadium rock of the Anglosphere?

And then, I wonder, at a moment when the world seems to be unravelling, and so few of us seem to either notice or know how to react, when the banality of the spectacle is complete, perhaps this is exactly who needs to be in charge.

To paraphrase T.S. Eliot’s ”The Hollow Men”; this is the way the World Cup ends - not with a bang, but a whimper.