Is it possible to hold a proper World Cup in the U.S. in 2026?

Gianni Infantino has facilitated imperial capture of FIFA. And the empire's agenda, as plainly articulated by Marco Rubio, is to resurrect Western colonial dominance

Infantino has facilitated the imperial capture of FIFA

Almost four years ago, now, my good friend Daniel Levy and I wrote a piece in The Nation challenging the hypocrisy with which Western media were covering the 2022 World Cup hosted by Qatar. And the relevance of our opening argument — questioning the moral and physical hazard of hosting the 2026 World Cup mostly in the USA — has, if anything, been amplified now that the U.S. leadership has openly proclaimed its dedication to white-supremacist colonial revanche. Of course, FIFA President Gianni Infantino has literally embraced the role of praise poet to the emperor, reducing the status governing body of the international game (and his own persona) to that of a tawdry bauble in the imperial trophy cabinet. Clearly, reestablishing any integrity to FIFA will require that the organization rid itself of the imperial satrap at its head. That’s unlikely to happen before the 2026 tournament, if it happens at all. So, here’s some of what we wrote four years ago:

Imagine that the BBC chose (as it did for Qatar 2022) to ignore the opening ceremony of the 2026 World Cup hosted by Canada, Mexico, and the United States, and to instead devote an hour of programming to the moral—and physical—hazards of staging a part of that tournament in the US.

How safe can visiting fans really feel, the presenter might ask, in a country where the authorities are unable or unwilling to prevent them from being shot dead on any day of the week in a mall, in a gay nightclub, in a church, synagogue, mosque, or anywhere else? And how safe are visiting Black fans (those lucky enough to get visas) in a country with shocking levels of racist police violence.

How could visitors really feel comfortable enjoying a sports festival in a country where, on any given day, there 2 million people are behind bars, more than half a million are homeless, and 41 million face hunger—in the world’s richest country, which spends more on arming its military than the next nine countries combined (and which has shown an unfortunate willingness to unleash that military abroad to disastrous effect and with scant regard for international law)? A country where one in six women has been raped or sexually assaulted, but where legal protection of women’s bodily autonomy is being systematically eroded.

And what of the climate crisis, when hundreds of thousands of fans fly in from every corner of the globe, and then fly thousands more miles between games in different cities?

There’s more than enough for an hour of gripping television there, but it’s a hypothetical, of course. We all know the BBC would never question the bona fides of any Western country as a World Cup host. Nor is the BBC alone: The Western mainstream media has a habitual inability to step outside of the self-serving narratives spun by its own rulers.

Obviously, the reality facing World Cup 2026 is far worse than we’d imagined four years ago:

The physical safety visiting black and brown fans is now threatened not only by the mass shooters that proliferate in a society where there are more privately owned guns than there are people (curiously enough, only 30% of American own those guns, meaning some folks are stockpiling); the government itself, via its violent, racist and unaccountable enforcement of immigration laws represents an arguably more palpable threat. How safe is any person of color speaking a foreign language on a U.S. street from being arbitrarily detained by ICE?

And when it comes to our observation about Black fans being lucky enough to get a visa, Trump travel bans and restrictions have made it highly unlikely that most fans from Iran, Senegal, Cabo Verde, Haiti will be able to enter the U.S. to watch their teams play, while travelers from Ghana, Ivory Coast, Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, Tunisia and South Africa have all faced high refusal rates of their visa applications. If Infantino’s FIFA had any integrity, such restrictions would obviously disqualify any nation from hosting hosting the tournament. But the reality is that Infantino has facilitated the imperial capture of the World Cup.

Climate crisis? Apparently, a hoax according to Infantino’s boss, and recipient of his “peace prize” despite illegally attacking Venezuela, blockading Cuba into starvation, and being poised to launch another illegal attack on Iran.

If our question had once been about whether the U.S. was a fit and proper host of the world cup, today it would be whether Infantino’s FIFA is a fit and proper steward of the tournament and of the inclusive global game.

One thing we did note, however, was how the Qatar 2022 World Cup highlighted the inability of any host nation to completely police the behavior of players and fans.

Western governments are comfortable talking about the need to uphold values and international legal principle when those are being violated by Russia in Ukraine, but they refuse to act on or even acknowledge the longer-standing systemic human rights abuses to which they are accomplices in Israel’s occupation, now designated as an apartheid reality by Palestinian, Israeli, and global human rights watchdogs such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. The fans (and many players) in Qatar had a different priority, making the Palestinian flag the ubiquitous symbol of the tournament in a conscious rebuke to Western powers’ indifference to the rights of the Palestinians and the “normalization” of Arab autocrats’ ties with Israel. The “Abraham Accords” initiative spearheaded by the United Arab Emirates had signaled Arab humiliation in the eyes of much of the region’s civil society; embracing the Palestinian flag at the World Cup became a symbol of pride, dignity, and defiance among fans and players from across the region.

This tracked with a peril I noted in a 2018 op ed for the New York Times about that year’s World Cup tournament in Russia:

The 2018 World Cup revealed much about the state of our world, and not simply in the triumphal smile of President Vladimir Putin of Russia, the arch-nemesis of the liberal global order, as he presided over the final match, the planet’s largest spectacle, at a time when traditional centers of Western power such as NATO, the Group of 7 and the European Union face existential crises. But it did rain on Mr. Putin’s parade, not only literally (a downpour began minutes after the final ended) but also figuratively in that the match provided an estimated television audience of at least one billion for a pitch-invasion protest by the dissident performance artists Pussy Riot.

Things we’ve seen at the Winter Olympics and other sports events recently make clear that the real-time platform reaching hundreds of millions of people provides unprecedented opportunities for disrupting the narratives of the emperor. Still, where we a little naïve in the observation below?

Evading the realities of nonalignment, multipolarity, and interdependence, the US and its entourage appears to be convinced that it can reassert the primacy it established at the end of World War II. That delusion is viewed by much of the Global South as indicating the absence of self-awareness of its declining hegemony (i.e., the ability to convince others that Western interests are their own interests) combined with its massive military and financial power threatens a turbulent decade ahead.

For all the complexities, contradictions, and possibilities, Qatar 2022 showed us we live in an era in which Western powers are no longer able to dictate terms to the rest of the world as easily as they’ve done since colonial times.

The World Cup always provides a tantalizing vision, a snapshot of a global community, bound by a shared humanity and an optimistic sense of common destiny across all divides. More than anything else, it was Morocco’s improbable journey to the semifinals in Qatar that invited us to believe that a different world is possible. That world will not be dictated and shaped by American exceptionalism and Western hegemony. The world made by the United States and its allies after 1945 has passed. While we will all be better off for that, those of us living in the West would do well to recognize these lessons of 2022.

Well, yes, a better and different world is possible. But a better world for all is not what the main host of 2026 has in mind. Indeed, its response to its declining hegemony is to seek a return, not to the imperial-liberal order of post-1945, but to the centuries that preceded it of unapologetic racist, extractivist and exploitative Western colonialism that brutalized the majority of humanity. A better world for rich white Westerners…

There’s no question that his gauche antics at last year’s club World Cup make clear that the emperor intends to turn the 2026 World Cup into a spectacle for his own aggrandizement. And Infantino will facilitate rather than prevent that. But the players often have the last word…