The reactions have sounded similar everywhere since the debate about a possible boycott of the football World Cup in the United States reached the Bundesliga’s mixed zones. “I am a football player, and I have A: too little knowledge about it, and B: it’s not my job to talk about it,” says Robert Andrich, who, as a national team player and captain of Bayer Leverkusen, would ordinarily already be expected to have an opinion about the activities of the World Cup host, Donald Trump.
After the experiences with the World Cup in Qatar, there is, however, a great worry about getting entangled again in controversies and the sense of powerlessness regarding global affairs. “I no longer participate in political discussions. We have seen that it is not productive when players express themselves too politically,” explains Joshua Kimmich, the captain of the national team, and Leverkusen’s sporting director Rolfes says ironically: “I think it already worked well at the 2022 World Cup that Germany somehow tried to boycott the tournament, and the rest of the world saw it somewhat differently. Politics should do politics, and we should do sports.”
The reference is always the same: At the 2022 World Cup, the German protest attempts were not only ineffective, they damaged the team’s sporting ambitions and also seemed somewhat embarrassing. Therefore many people from the Bundesliga dislike that Oke Göttlich, the president of FC St. Pauli, who has joined the German Football Association’s presidency in recent weeks, is sparking a new debate about a boycott in response to the behavior of Donald Trump’s America: “I really wonder when the time is to think concretely about it and talk,” Göttlich told the Hamburger Morgenpost and referred to the history of the Olympic Games: “What were the justifications for the Olympic boycotts in the 1980s? In my assessment, the threat potential is greater today than it was then. We must have this discussion.” Göttlich explicitly does not call for a boycott; he merely wants to conduct a well-founded discussion about this option, and this process has now begun.”
The Bild has indeed learned from the milieu around DFB president Bernd Neuendorf that he is “not amused” by Göttlich’s initiative. Neuendorf avoids conflicts with the world federation FIFA, where he sits on the influential Council. And the experiences from Qatar also weigh on him. However, the comparison to the previous World Cup is completely inappropriate.
Higher-Dimensional Perspective
Back then it was about protesting against a host country that violates human rights, exploits guest workers, and is governed autocratically. All these accusations can also be leveled at the USA, but in the current case there is a higher dimension: In the USA there are imperial ambitions; Trump would like to own Canada and Greenland; Europe is under threat. Therefore Göttlich invoked the 1980 boycott, which at the height of the Cold War was a reaction to the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan.
The topic will remain relevant. Already on Sunday the talk format “Miosga” on ARD reached it. There it was also quickly clear that, in contrast to Qatar activism, it is at most about values and morals in a secondary sense. The possibility of a World Cup boycott is a tool in the toolbox of countermeasures, to which, for example, counter-tariffs and all kinds of deals belong. Handling these possibilities is “a ride on the razor’s edge,” says military historian Sönke Neitzel on “Miosga” and explains: “I think it’s good that this is discussed, that one can say: If the Europeans do not participate, you can basically forget your World Cup. And we can also resort to it.” The room holds the chance to strengthen one’s position in a world-political negotiating situation that is difficult to decipher.
First surveys among the other European associations clearly indicate that at present no one is pursuing a boycott, but here too it’s worth looking back at 1980. Back then the German National Olympic Committee (NOC) decided on the Olympic boycott. What preceded it, however, was a political debate in which Willy Brandt, in the spirit of his Ostpolitik, spoke in favor of participating in the Moscow Games. Chancellor Helmut Schmidt also found the boycott wrong, but yielded to pressure from the United States, the protective power, after which the Bundestag and the NOK decided to skip the Games.
Just as back then, this is about the question of whether football should be used as a political instrument at the highest level of world affairs.
