The Beautiful Game’s Ugly Politics

In July 1978, the Argentine military junta threw a party. The venue was the Estadio Monumental in Buenos Aires. The guests were seventy-seven thousand flag-waving supporters and, via television, hundreds of millions more around the world. The occasion was a World Cup final. The hosts won. General Videla stood in the presidential box and beamed. Somewhere beneath the city, in the network of detention centres that the regime called chupaderos, literally, “sucking places”, people were being tortured and disappeared. The party went on regardless.

Ahead of the 2026 FIFA WC, Toby Cadman examines the enduring relationship between football, politics, and power.

That is where I always begin when people tell me that football and politics do not mix. They have always mixed. They were never separate. The question is not whether football is political. The question is whose politics it serves, and whether we have the honesty to say so out loud.

As the 2026 World Cup approaches (to be hosted across the United States, Canada, and Mexico), it is worth pausing to ask that question again. Not because the answers will be comfortable, but because they rarely are.

FIFA is not a sporting body that occasionally makes poor political judgments. It is a political organisation that occasionally stages football tournaments. That distinction matters. The governance scandals that culminated in the 2015 US Department of Justice indictments (bribery, money laundering, racketeering stretching back decades) were not aberrations. They were the system working as designed. Votes were bought. Hosting rights were sold. Executives enriched themselves on a scale that would embarrass a mid-tier kleptocracy. And through it all, the football kept being played, and the world kept watching.

The 2026 tournament was awarded in 2018, during Donald Trump’s first term in office, at a moment when his administration was engaged in a very public campaign to renegotiate NAFTA with Canada and Mexico, the same two nations now sharing the hosting rights. That coincidence was noted at the time and then quietly forgotten, as such coincidences tend to be. With Trump back in the White House, the optics are, if anything, more striking. The world’s most watched sporting event will unfold on American soil, under an American president who has rarely missed an opportunity to turn a global stage into a domestic one. Expect the tournament to be spoken of in the same breath as trade deals, border policy, and bilateral leverage. FIFA awarded the United States a football tournament. Trump will use it as a geopolitical instrument. He would not be the first, and he will not be the last.

The relationship between FIFA and the current American administration was laid bare in December 2025, at the World Cup draw held, with no apparent sense of irony, at the Kennedy Center in Washington. There, Gianni Infantino presented Donald Trump with the inaugural FIFA Peace Prize, a brand-new award created for “individuals who have taken exceptional and extraordinary actions for peace.” The prize had been announced just three weeks after Trump had been overlooked for the Nobel Peace Prize, the one he so publicly coveted, which was awarded instead to Venezuelan democracy campaigner Maria Corina Machado. There was no explanation for the process behind the award, no candidates named, no selection criteria given. Senior officials within FIFA were reportedly surprised by the announcement, which had not been discussed with the FIFA Council. Trump called it “truly one of the great honours of my life.” Infantino beamed. The cameras rolled. If you needed a single image to illustrate the relationship between football’s governing body and the political power it depends upon, it could not have been staged better.

The shadow falling most darkly over the tournament, however, is not domestic politics but the conflict in the Middle East. The war in Iran following the US and Israeli strikes of February 2026, which killed Supreme Leader Khamenei and drew retaliatory missile barrages across the region (and its cascading regional consequences), has introduced a layer of geopolitical instability that no amount of careful tournament planning can insulate against. Several competing nations have significant Iranian diaspora communities, and the question of how players with dual heritage or familial connections to the region will navigate the tournament (personally, publicly, politically) is one that team managers and football associations are already quietly wrestling with. Flags, armbands, and pre-match silences have become charged acts in a way they were not four years ago. Sponsors are nervous. Broadcasters are preparing contingency scripts.

There is also the harder question of participation itself. That question has already been answered, in real time, and the answer was a spectacle even by FIFA’s standards. Iran’s football federation president initially declared that his side would “boycott America, but not the World Cup”, meaning they would participate in the tournament while refusing to play their group matches on US soil, demanding relocation to Mexico. FIFA refused. Iran’s sports minister went further, declaring that “under no circumstances can we participate.” Infantino flew to Washington. Trump was consulted. Trump said Iran was “running on fumes” and he didn’t care whether they showed up. Infantino publicly confirmed that Trump had personally assured him Iran was “welcome to compete.” The Iranian government eventually relented: as of late May 2026, Iran has confirmed its participation. The geopolitical crisis that threatened to remove an entire nation from the world’s largest sporting event was resolved, or at least deferred, through a negotiation conducted between football’s governing body and an American president who had just overseen the military strikes that created the crisis in the first place. If that is not a picture of how football and politics mix in the modern era, nothing is. Football has never successfully insulated itself from the politics of war. It has tried, repeatedly, and it has always failed. It will fail again, and the failure will be instructive.

And then there is the money. On 28 May 2026, less than two weeks before the tournament begins, the Attorneys General of New York and New Jersey jointly subpoenaed FIFA as part of a formal investigation into its ticketing practices. The complaint is straightforward: FIFA has used dynamic pricing for the first time in World Cup history, and in doing so has driven ticket prices to levels that far exceed any previous tournament. Between October 2025 and April 2026, prices rose for more than ninety of the 104 matches, with average increases of thirty-four percent across the three main categories. Average prices at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, which will host the final on 19 July, are running at approximately $2,800 per ticket. Fans have complained not only of unaffordable prices but of being misled: purchasing tickets in one section and receiving others in inferior locations after FIFA changed the stadium zone maps following purchase. “Being honest about ticket sales is not complicated,” New Jersey’s Attorney General observed. “But FIFA has turned buying a ticket to the World Cup into a gauntlet of confusion, fake scarcity, and impossibly high prices.” California’s Attorney General has separately opened his own inquiry. FIFA, the organisation that was federally indicted in 2015 for corruption, is now being subpoenaed in 2026 for consumer fraud. The system, as ever, is working as designed.

Behind the spectacle lies a game increasingly shaped by money, power, and influence.

None of this is to say that the football does not matter. It does. It matters profoundly, in ways that transcend politics even as politics tries to swallow it whole. The image of Didier Drogba, standing at the centre circle in Abidjan in 2005, pleading with the warring factions of Côte d’Ivoire to lay down their arms, and being heard, is not a footnote to football history. It is one of its defining moments. The sport can do things that diplomacy cannot. It speaks in a language that crosses borders and suspends, however briefly, the logic of violence and division.

But that power is precisely what makes its capture so dangerous. When authoritarian governments seek to host tournaments, when corrupt officials sell votes in hotel rooms, when FIFA presidents invent peace prizes to flatter their political patrons, and when the world’s most volatile conflicts cast their shadow over the draw, the group stages, and the final itself, they are not hijacking something innocent. They are exploiting something powerful. They understand what football means to people, and they are using that meaning for their own ends.

The beautiful game deserves better than the institutions that have come to own it. So, for that matter, do we. By Toby Cadman