FIFA at the Borders: How Politics Shaped the 2026 World Cup

A Phone Call and a Red Card

In July 2026, a player at the World Cup received a red card. Under FIFA's own rules, that meant an automatic suspension for the next match, with no avenue for appeal. Then the president of the United States called the president of FIFA, and the suspension was lifted. "Yes, I asked for a review by FIFA," the player, the United States' Folarin Balogun, later confirmed — a detail Donald Trump himself also went on to describe. It was the first time since 1962 that a player had served a red card and still played a team's next World Cup match. Seven months earlier, that same president had been awarded FIFA's first-ever Peace Prize.

A Neutrality Rule Nobody Defines

FIFA's regulations contain Article 15, which requires every team and official to remain "politically neutral." What the organisation has never done is define what neutral actually means in practice. Critics argue that vagueness has let FIFA apply one standard to powerful countries and a much stricter one to weaker ones. The claim that football and politics don't mix has never really been true: FIFA excluded South Africa for 31 years, from 1961 to 1992, specifically over apartheid. The real question was never whether politics belonged in football — it was always which politics FIFA would choose to notice, and FIFA alone gets to decide.

A Peace Prize for Donald Trump

FIFA president Gianni Infantino has been a visible presence at moments of political theatre around the tournament — appearing, for instance, at a signing ceremony involving Abraham Accords-related diplomacy and announcing a partnership with a "Board of Peace" in 2026. Calls to sanction the Israeli Football Association over the war in Gaza, meanwhile, have gone nowhere; FIFA's response has been that the matter is legally complex under international law — the same language typically used by the American and Israeli governments, even as human-rights organisations have taken the issue to the International Criminal Court. By contrast, FIFA suspended Russian teams within days of Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The clearest illustration of that double standard came in December 2025, when Infantino created a new FIFA Peace Prize and gave its first edition to Donald Trump, praising him, in a ceremony at the Kennedy Center, for "exceptional and extraordinary action to promote peace and unity around the world" — at the same moment Trump's name was being tied to Israel's military campaign in Gaza, which multiple governments, UN experts and rights groups had described as genocide.

One Rule, Different Outcomes

The tournament produced a string of moments that raised the same question from different directions. Days before it began, the assigned referee Ümit Öztürk was denied a US visa over unproven terror-link suspicions; FIFA said nothing. When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was asked on a podcast which team he supported, he named Argentine President Javier Milei — calling him a champion of free markets and a close friend of Israel — before naming Argentina's team, openly attaching a national side to a political endorsement without any FIFA response. At the 2022 World Cup, European teams that wore protest armbands or covered their faces for cameras were praised by Western media as courageous; in 2026, with the US itself the largest military backer of the war in Gaza and under scrutiny over its border policies, those same teams stayed silent, even as reporters kept pressing Iranian and Egyptian players on LGBTQ rights before their match in Seattle. Poorer countries' teams are routinely expected to criticise their own governments; players from the US, UK, France or Germany are rarely asked about their countries' foreign policy, arms sales or border enforcement.

Money, Visas and Gaza

The politics tracked the money closely. FIFA is projected to earn roughly $13 billion from this World Cup cycle, its most profitable ever, helped by an expanded 48-team format; US broadcast rights values rose by around 94 percent this cycle, and 14 of FIFA's 26 sponsors are American companies, while Saudi Arabia's Aramco joined FIFA's top sponsor tier in 2024, the same year Saudi Arabia was awarded the 2034 World Cup. Enforcement of visa and border rules fell unevenly, too: Haiti's team was forced to change its kit hours before a match over a symbol referencing the 1803 battle that made it the world's first free Black republic, which FIFA called "too political," even as national and military flags flew unchallenged in American stadiums; most Iranian fans could not attend at all because of travel bans, and fans from Tunisia, Algeria and Cape Verde were asked for visa bonds worth thousands of dollars, while the DR Congo team was quarantined for 21 days and African journalists struggled for months to get visas to cover the tournament at all. The gravest asymmetry concerned Gaza. More than 1,000 Palestinian athletes, coaches and sports officials are reported to have been killed in the war, including over 34 registered football players, among them the former international Mohammed Barakat and Olympic coach Hani al-Masdar; stadiums such as Al-Yarmouk were reduced to rubble or turned into detention sites. Human-rights groups and the Palestinian Football Association call it "sportscide." Where action against Russia came within days, complaints over Gaza sat unresolved for months; the rights group FairSquare has now filed a formal complaint against Infantino with the IOC's ethics commission over the Peace Prize episode, arguing it undermines the neutrality principle every IOC member signs onto.

Whose Politics Counts

There is a bitter irony in how FIFA's biggest-ever corruption scandal was uncovered in 2015: by the FBI, the US Justice Department and the IRS — institutions of the same government whose sitting president, in 2026, made one phone call and had a suspension lifted. Football's field was probably never the fully neutral space it is often described as; it has always reflected the world around it. What the 2026 World Cup leaves behind is a sharper version of an old question: who gets permission to be political, and who is left to pay the price for it.