With the 2026 FIFA World Cup set to be hosted in the United States this summer, calls have grown for a global boycott and ticket cancellations in protest of the Trump administration and its increasingly aggressive deployment of federal immigration agents.“I had to cancel my World Cup plans,” wrote R...
If FIFA weren’t so incredibly corrupt, by now they’d at least be talking about moving some of the US matches to Mexico and Canada. They have to know that there’s a good chance some of the athletes or coaches will be denied entry, or allowed in then thrown in a concentration camp.
This just happened with Ethiopian Runners, who were denied entry. Only 4 of the 18 were allowed in. Meanwhile Eritrea can’t send anybody because Trump put a travel ban on their country.
There are plenty of other suitable stadia in Canada and especially Mexico that could accommodate the games, and those countries aren’t going to be denying entry to any athletes or coaches.
See, this would be my issue as a football fan. How do we know the games won’t simply be rigged by “whoops we denied the visas to everyone we think we can’t beat”.
I mean, it’s the USA, the list of teams that qualified for the world cup that they can definitely beat might be shorter.
But as we both know, they are. Probably the most corrupt sporting organization on the planet.
There are probably boxing or MMA organizations that are more corrupt. But FIFA easily beats them in scale and the amount of money sloshing around.
Incidentally, for all the shitty things that the US has done, and all the contempt Americans tend to show towards football / soccer, the one thing you have to admire is that they were the ones to try to actually take on FIFA corruption a while back. They didn’t have much long-term impact, but no other country has done anything, so it was still impressive.