Farewell, the beautiful game

Editor’s note: In our lead essay this week, Tariq Engineer—former sports journalist and lifelong football fan—writes about his conflicted feelings around the upcoming football World Cup, a joyous celebration of the beautiful game hijacked by Donald Trump and his volatile political agendas. This tournament seems to be at odds with the message of football: to bring the world together and bridge boundaries. How will that affect the viewing experience for fans?

Written by: Tariq Engineer

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I’ve been watching FIFA World Cups live since 1994. This is the first time I haven’t felt that familiar buzz of anticipation and excitement in the build-up to the event. There’s been so much going on around the tournament that it hasn’t left any space for those feelings to take root. 

I would normally devour every article I could get my hands on about the teams, the various players, and predictions for the tournament. I would watch videos about the teams and their best players, and decide which teams I wanted to support. I would cut out a tournament schedule so I could organise my days around the matches I wanted to see. And I would make plans with friends to watch the semi-finals and finals. 

This time around though, the headlines have only served to enumerate the many issues around this World Cup. The travel restrictions imposed by the Donald Trump administration, the controversy over high ticket prices, the hardline attitude towards immigration, including legal immigration, and most significantly, the war with Iran, has overshadowed the usual run-up to the event. So much so that I haven’t even looked at the match schedule yet, though I am sure I will do that once the tournament is just a few days away.

After Qatar in 2022 and Russia in 2018, the United States, Canada, and Mexico were picked as hosts for the tournament. At the time, the choice seemed uncontroversial. Instead, the US might be the most contentious host of them all. Yes, both Qatar and Russia used the World Cup to sportswash their tarnished human rights record. But the US will be the first host in the history of the World Cup that is at war with a country participating in the tournament. 

That alone has cast a huge shadow over the event. Back in March, Donald Trump, the US President, suggested Iran shouldn’t participate for their own good: “I really don’t believe it’s appropriate that they be there, for their own life and safety,” Trump wrote on Truth Social in an ominous show of faux concern. US special envoy Paolo Zampolli floated the absurd idea that Italy, which did not qualify, should replace Iran in the tournament. A suggestion that, if followed, would have violated a bedrock sporting principle of the game. Namely, that nothing is given to you and everything has to be earned on the field. Thankfully, the Italians swiftly closed that door, with one minister calling the idea "shameful", while another said, "it is not appropriate... You qualify on the pitch.”

FIFA has repeatedly said, over the past many months, that Iran will take part in the tournament. But the Iranian team’s visas for its players only arrived on June 5, a few days before the tournament, with over a dozen members of the support staff as well as officials being denied their visas. They had to move the training base from Arizona to Tijuana, Mexico due to the delays. Iran plays two of its group matches in Los Angeles and the other one in Seattle. This, naturally, has affected Iran’s preparations for the tournament, particularly their ability to acclimatise to the heat.  

It is not just Iranians who are unwelcome in America. The Trump administration has announced a range of travel restrictions on dozens of countries, including Senegal, Ivory Coast, and Haiti, which all have qualified teams. There is a lot of confusion about which fans will be allowed in for the tournament. The BBC reported that fans from Senegal and Ivory Coast will not get visas if they had not already received them by December 2025. Some Ghanaians have been denied US entry visas as well. 

"This form of exclusion threatens to suck much of the joy from the tournament, given that visiting football fans bring zest and passion to the festivities,” Jules Boykoff, the author of Red Card: The 2026 World Cup, Sportswashing, and the FIFA Greed Machine, told The Middle East Eye.

The potential inclusion of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as security at match venues has also had a chilling effect on attendance from immigrants within the United States. And what happens if there is a confrontation at one of the matches and someone gets injured, or worse, killed? This is not as far-fetched as it sounds given the two American citizens killed by ICE earlier this year. It is also not a scenario one normally has to think about during a World Cup. 

All of this has naturally had a knock on economic effect. According to a Forbes article from late April, nearly “40% of tickets remain unsold”. Though this is also partly due to FIFA’s dynamic ticket pricing, instituted for the first time, that has seen prices for the final climb as high as $11,000, making them unaffordable for many. 

Tournament-related hotel bookings are apparently falling way short of expectations so far as well. In May, the American Hotel and Lodging Association produced a report that concluded bookings were well below expectations in nearly every host city. In New York, for example, roughly two-thirds of respondents said their bookings were softer than expected. And around 60% of New York City operators cited international travel barriers and geopolitical concerns as the reasons why. 

A majority of respondents in Miami did report bookings ahead of expectations but Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Seattle claimed to be lagging too. According to the report: 

Nearly 80% of respondents [from these cities] report booking pace below expectations and behind a typical summer, with many describing the tournament as a “non-event” due to FIFA room releases and weak international fan travel. 

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In 1994, the last time the US hosted the World Cup, the tournament was a roaring success, setting records for overall attendance (nearly 3.6 million), with an average attendance per game of about 69,000. Those records still stand to this day. Within two years, the US league, Major League Soccer, kicked off its inaugural season, and the beginnings of a football revolution in the country.

This World Cup was supposed to give us more of those good vibes. MLS has embedded itself in US sports culture over the last 30 years. Starting with David Beckam in 2007, it began to attract global football stars, albeit at the tail end of their careers. Beckham would go on to buy an MLS expansion franchise in 2014. The club made its league debut in 2020 and has signed a number of high-profile players such as Blaise Matuidi, Gonzalo Higuaín, Sergio Busquets, Jordi Alba, and Luis Suárez. In 2023, the club signed the biggest star of them all, Lionel Messi, just one year after he won the World Cup with Argentina. 

League attendance was 6.21 million in 2021. By 2024, it had nearly doubled to 11.45 million. The league added three new teams in that span as well. 

Then, in January 2025, Trump was sworn in as president for the second time. And the good vibes vanished as it became clear that this time around, Trump was going to do whatever he wanted. There’s no indication that he cares about the World Cup itself, other than as a vehicle for publicity. In fact, you could argue that since Trump’s election, the World Cup storylines have been dominated by him rather than a specific team or player. In a blatant attempt to curry favour, unprecedented in FIFA history, president Gianni Infantino awarded Trump the so-called FIFA Peace Prize, an honour invented purely to flatter the president’s outsized ego. Trump promptly bombed Iran a few months later. 

This drumbeat of literal life-and-death news has drained my emotional reserves and left no place for the joy that these mega-sporting events usually bring. I also can’t ignore the callous way sports fans from certain places are being treated, especially since I can easily imagine myself in their shoes. In fact, no World Cup I can remember has had such disregard for the fans. Russia and Qatar created special pathways for fans to enter their countries for the 2018 and 2022 editions respectively. Even the military dictatorship that overthrew the Argentinian government in 1976 welcomed fans for the 1978 World Cup as they believed a successful tournament would burnish their reputation.

The Trump administration doesn’t need the World Cup to burnish their reputation. They barely seem to even care about it. Football is an immigrant sport in the United States, after all. 

To be sure, history tells us that once the games start, everything else tends to be forgotten. After all, sports has a way of bringing people together, even people you wouldn’t expect. Think of the Chennai crowd applauding the Pakistan Test team after they had beaten India by 12 runs on the final day in 1999. For all the talk of Qatar’s human rights record, the abiding memory of the 2022 tournament is an ecstatic Messi holding up the one trophy that had eluded him for decades. 

But for the love of the game to prevail, Trump has to step off the stage and cede the spotlight. And history also tells us that is a losing bet to make. 

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Tariq Engineer has been a journalist, editor, and content writer for more than two decades. He particularly enjoys watching sports of all kinds.