Yes!
No, you haven’t missed anything. A FIFA World Cup cannot be stripped from any country that slides into authoritarianism or even totalitarianism under the current FIFA statutes. No change is in sight. On the contrary, the latest World Cup bidding phases show it tends to be favorable if solvent candidates impose their will on the population and can trample on human rights. This pimped-out sports event is becoming more and more the plaything of despots, because its guardians have recognized how much money they have to spare for the magnificent propaganda tool.
But wouldn’t it be urgently necessary to draw lines to curb this development? Absolutely! FIFA must amend its statutes accordingly and strip the United States and its President Donald Trump of the World Cup. The boundaries have been far exceeded. While host Qatar used human rights criticism as a pretext to liberalize laws slightly for the sake of a good World Cup permit, Trump these days is using the World Cup as a pliant instrument to intimidate those who stand in the way of his anti-human-rights policy.
A phone call to his friend Gianni Infantino would be enough, he warned. He can be sure of that, because FIFA chief has trailed after him—subservient and grateful—since taking office, even to the Gaza summit in Egypt this week. Therefore the tail can now wag the dog. FIFA has effectively abdicated under Infantino’s leadership.
Human rights agreements ahead of tournaments are anyway just ridiculous props. But it is no longer enough to rely on World Cup boycott calls from the sulk corner where everyone can feel comfortable. What is needed is an uprising by those who do not want football to be left to authoritarian powers. The situation has not been this precarious in a long time. At minimum, a debate about stripping the World Cup is needed. Johannes Kopp
No!
The men’s World Cup of 2026 will take place in North America. Two stadiums are in Canada, three stadiums in Mexico, and eleven stadiums in the USA. So power is currently distributed, unfortunately.
US President Donald Trump now threatens to withdraw World Cup hosting from cities that do not bow to his authoritarian policies. This is a violation of FIFA rules, but I won’t get worked up about it. The world football federation enforces its host contracts with impudence: tax exemptions for its own association, exclusive rights for FIFA sponsors, restrictions on freedom of assembly, appropriation of public infrastructure. In that way FIFA gets its way everywhere, because it wants to adorn the world with its valuable commodity “FIFA World Cup” and because it is a monopoly.
That Donald Trump is now targeting democratically governed cities is a scandal. But a resistance that argues only on FIFA’s rules is not enough. Such a form of protest lives on the theoretically buried, yet still vivid in discourse, lie that sport is different and better than politics and otherwise has little to do with it.
FIFA is, however, a world-political actor, and to put it mildly, a very unsympathetic one. In the 2026 World Cup, it can wield its power particularly well because it has formed a collusion with the White House—just as Donald Trump wants to enlarge his power by courting FIFA.
This is not new. The FIFA World Cup was held in 1934 in fascist Italy, in 1978 in the military dictatorship of Argentina, we had it in 2018 in Russia and 2022 in Qatar. Only the tempo of this roguish cronyism is getting shorter (by the 2026 World Cup in Saudi Arabia there are only nine years left). Each of these World Cups was a scandal in itself, but we could have learned that our political protest should never rely on FIFA and its, haha, “values” (and not on the IOC either, by the way. But that is another story.)
Martin Krauss
