The most political World Cup in history kicks off in days, and no edition of the tournament has ever carried as much geopolitical weight as this one.
What was once framed as a celebration of continental unity among the United States, Canada and Mexico has fractured into something far more complicated, shaped by war, immigration crackdowns, a record number of Middle Eastern nations and a FIFA leadership that has grown uncomfortably close to power.
The game has always intersected with politics, from Mussolini’s bribed referees at the 1934 tournament to Argentina’s military junta basking in glory in 1978, but 2026 represents something different in scale and complexity. This time, the host nation is itself the source of the disruption.
At the centre of it all is a relationship that has defined the entire build-up. Since Donald Trump’s return to the White House, FIFA president Gianni Infantino has been a near-permanent fixture in the corridors of American power.
He visited Washington eight times in the lead-up to the tournament, five of those in the Oval Office, shared Trump’s messages on his own channels, attended the ceremony for his return to the White House, and moved the World Cup group draw from the Las Vegas Sphere to the Kennedy Center in Washington.
The masterstroke, or the low point depending on perspective, came in December 2025 when FIFA invented a brand new award and handed Trump the inaugural FIFA Peace Prize at the World Cup draw, complete with a trophy, medal and certificate recognising him for his peacemaking accomplishments.
Within weeks, the United States and Israel launched military action against Iran, one of the tournament’s qualified nations.
The Trump-Infantino axis has drawn fierce criticism. Advocacy group FairSquare filed a formal complaint with FIFA’s Ethics Committee, citing Infantino’s effusive praise of Trump and the political nature of the draw ceremony as a betrayal of FIFA’s own standards on neutrality.
What makes the criticism sting harder is context. The tournament was born from a 2016 bid that promised to be more inclusive and universal than ever, a celebration of a uniquely integrated continent. Since then, Trump has dismantled trade frameworks with Mexico and Canada, floated annexing Canada as the 51st state, and threatened military intervention against the cartels in Mexico.
Nowhere is that tension rawer than in the situation surrounding Iran. One of the qualified nations will be competing in the United States while the two countries are technically at war, with Iranian fans who chanted “death to America” at the team’s farewell parade banned from attending.
Washington declined to host the Iranian squad for the duration of the tournament, despite Iran being scheduled to play all three Group G matches on American soil. FIFA officially relocated the team’s base to Tijuana, in Mexico, where they will use the Centro Xoloitzcuintle as their training facility. Iran’s players will commute across the border on matchdays.
Trump, for his part, posted that while the Iranian team was welcome, he did not believe that “it is appropriate that they (Iran) be there, for their own life and safety,” a message that fell somewhere between a threat and a warning.
The Iran situation sits against a backdrop of the most significant Arab and Middle Eastern presence ever seen at a World Cup. Eight Arab nations have qualified for this tournament, nearly double the previous record of four set in Russia in 2018.
Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iraq, Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria and Egypt will all compete. Jordan make their debut, having never previously qualified. Morocco arrive as genuine contenders after their extraordinary run to the 2022 semi-finals.
The record representation is partly a product of the expanded 48-team format, but it also reflects the growing power of football across the region, and it places an enormous number of Muslim-majority nations inside the borders of a country whose government has spent months restricting visas, threatening immigration enforcement and maintaining an active military conflict with one of them.
Citizens of four qualified nations, Iran, Senegal, Cote d’Ivoire and Haiti, are unable to obtain any kind of US visa, with exemptions only for athletes and coaches.
Citizens of around a dozen more must pay a bond of between five and fifteen thousand dollars before travelling. The fans who have travelled furthest to follow their teams in every previous tournament face the highest barriers here.
Following US assertions about Greenland in January 2026, European political and sporting figures briefly discussed a potential boycott of the tournament, with calls emerging from the UK, Germany and the Netherlands. Those calls came to nothing, but their existence was telling.
The 2026 World Cup has generated pre-tournament political noise on a scale that no previous edition has matched, not even the deeply controversial tournaments in Russia and Qatar.
Those who do get in will find a tournament shaped by power in almost every direction. Mexico has deployed a security force of 100,000, as much a signal to Washington as to its own cartels. Canada arrives with football more popular than it has ever been but politically defined by its fraught relationship with its southern neighbour.
And over all of it looms Trump himself, who at the Club World Cup final earlier this year remained at the centre of the trophy presentation long after protocol would normally have seen him step aside.
For Trump, the World Cup is an opportunity to take centre stage as a global strongman. For Infantino and FIFA, it is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to generate extraordinary revenue. What the rest of the world gets out of it remains the more difficult question.
The tournament has never had more teams, more matches or more political baggage. Whether moments of beauty on the pitch can cut through what surrounds them is the only thing left to be decided.
