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Just How Much Damage Can Trump’s Reverse Midas Touch Do to the Biggest Sports Show on Earth?

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FIFA hopes that this year’s expanded tournament will be the most spectacular — and lucrative — yet. However, there’s a lot standing in the way of that happening. 

There’s something magical about the football (aka “soccer”) World Cup — even if you’ve never seen your national team lift the trophy, which is the case for the overwhelming majority of fans. Of the more than 80 national teams that have competed in the tournament since its inaugural edition in 1930, only eight have actually won it: Brazil (5), Germany (4), Italy (4), Argentina (3), France (2), Uruguay (2), Spain (1) and England (1), long before yours truly was born.

Even those who don’t like football will grudgingly accept that the World Cup is the biggest sports show on earth. In many parts of the world, even people who are not big football fans, like my Mexican wife, tend to fall under its spell. Those who are, are instantly entranced. In 2022, over 1.5 billion people worldwide tuned in to watch Lionel Messi’s Argentina beat France 4-3 in a breath-taking final, making it the most watched event of any kind globally.

Despite its working class roots, football is now the world’s biggest grossing sport and arguably the one most corrupted by corporate interests. In his excellent book, El fútbol a sol y sombra, (Soccer in Sun and Shadow, 1995), the late Uruguayan writer, journalist, political activist and life-long football fan Eduardo Galeano describes the classic interplay between the so-called “beautiful game” and the ugly world of politics:

“The scorn of many conservative intellectuals comes from their belief that soccer-worship is exactly the religion people deserve. Possessed by soccer, the proles think with their feet, which is the only way they can think, and through such primitive ecstasy they fulfill their dreams. The animal instinct overtakes human reason, ignorance crushes culture, and the riff-raff get what they want. In contrast, many leftist intellectuals denigrate soccer because it castrates the masses and derails their revolutionary ardor. Bread and circus, circus without the bread: hypnotized by the ball, which exercises a perverse fascination, workers’ consciousness becomes atrophied and they let themselves be led about like sheep by their class enemies.”

The Most Lucrative Tournament Yet?

FIFA, football’s venal, money grubbing governing body, hopes that this year’s expanded World Cup, held in the three NAFTA countries of North America (USA, Canada and Mexico) with a total of 48 teams, up from the standard 32, will be the most spectacular — and, of course, most lucrative — yet. The organisation is already projecting revenues of $8.9bn from this tournament – almost double what the 2024 Olympics made.

There’s a lot standing in the way of that happening, however, including Trump’s reverse Midas touch as well as the simmering tensions between the three co-host nations. The price-gouging in all three countries, particularly the US, where 78 of the 104 matches will be held, is also taking a toll, reports Jon Sopel for the I Paper:

Hotels in host cities jacked up prices to the hilt. In New York, the train operator that will take fans out to the MetLife Stadium is raising the 18-mile return fare from $13 to $150 (NC: contrast that with Moscow’s decision to offer free train travel for all travelling football fans on match day during the 2018 World Cup).

Fans are voting with their feet. Hotel bookings are a fraction of what people FIFA promised and so prices are being slashed. Ticket sales have slumped. Not even games involving the US national side have sold out. Trump has put himself front and centre of this World Cup. But what if he’s unable to claim that it’s the biggest, best, greatest World Cup ever?

In addition, the geopolitical backdrop, with major wars escalating in Ukraine and the Persian Gulf, is hardly favourable. As the former English football pundit Gary Lineker told Morning Joe, “We have never had a World Cup where the host nation is at war with one of the competitors.”

The Trump administration is also aggressively pursuing a strategy of hegemonic domination of the American continent, including over its two World Cup co-hosts, Mexico and Canada. Following the US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s visit two days ago to Guantánamo, one can’t help but wonder whether Trump will end up signing off on a US military attack against the energy-starved island during the World Cup. One certainly wouldn’t put it past him.

Meanwhile, the economic pressures unleashed by the US’ war of choice against Iran are already being felt, as Yves has painstakingly documented. Tellingly, the only two times that the World Cup has not taken place in its 94-year history was in 1942, in the midst of World War II, and 1946, when the world was beginning the long process of recovery and reconstruction.

Today, we are either on the precipice of a new world war, or already in the beginning stages of it. Yet the main protagonist in the escalating hostilities, the United States of America, is now co-hosting the World Cup. And it is doing so in the most inhospitable fashion.

So far, the Trump administration has banned the Iranian national team from being able to stay overnight on US soil. This means that on each match day the team will have to travel from Tijuana to the stadium hosting the match and back to Tijuana before the close of day. This puts Iran at a huge disadvantage vis-a-vis its rivals.

The Trump administration is doing everything it can to undermine the country it is actively bombing. The Iranian team spent days dealing with visa procedures at the US Consulate in Türkiye. In the end, 15 members of the delegation were denied visas. US authorities have also made sure there won’t be many Iranian fans travelling with the team.

Visa denials are already a common theme in this World Cup. The Somali referee Omar Abdulkadir Artan, named CAF’s Best African Referee of 2025, was denied a visa and will not be able to participate in the tournament. Despite travelling to the US with a diplomatic passport, Artan was refused entry and sent back. Somalia is one of 19 countries on the Trump administration’s travel ban list.

Other teams that have been affected by visa denials or prolonged visa procedures include South Africa, the BRICS nation that launched the genocide case against Israel at the International Criminal Court; Senegal, whose national team staff were forced to remove their shoes and were subjected to lengthy searches, triggering accusations of racism; Uzbekistan, whose national team was searched with bomb-sniffing dogs.

It’s not just the national teams that have been affected. Many supporters who had already purchased tickets and booked accommodation have had their visa applications rejected, resulting in steep financial losses. AIPS The international sport journalist association, AIPS, has also called on FIFA to resolve the “countless and unacceptable” visa issues facing African & Iranian journalists.

Accused of already losing control of the tournament, FIFA chief executive Gianni Infantino claimed that FIFA is in no position to dictate conditions to the event’s hosts. Which is news to most football fans. After all, FIFA has a long history of dictating conditions to hosts, especially commercial ones, including most recently to Russia, which is now banned from participating in the tournament due to its war against Ukraine (while Israel of course isn’t), and Qatar.

Sixty years ago, the UK government considered denying entry visas to the North Korean national team for the 1966 World Cup. At the time, the UK did not officially recognise the communist nation and feared diplomatic fallout with the US and South Korea. However, FIFA threatened to strip England of hosting rights if any qualified team was banned, which prompted a swift U-turn.

Then there was this…

FIFA’s Dodgy Bromance With Trump

While Infanto pleads innocence, he knows full well that FIFA bent its own rules to award the US the co-hosting rights for this year’s World Cup. In 2017, a year before the US, Mexico and Canada were chosen as co-hosts, Infantino warned that the first Trump administration’s travel bans, which then applied to six majority-Muslim countries and now apply to 19 nations, were incompatible with FIFA tournament regulations. Infantino told reporters in London:

“Teams who qualify for a World Cup need to have access to the country, otherwise there is no World Cup. That is obvious.”

It may have been obvious then; it’s a lot less obvious now. As many fans are now saying, if the US government didn’t want other countries’ citizens in their nation, it shouldn’t have bid for the FIFA World Cup in the first place. And FIFA should not have picked the nation as a host.

Meanwhile, fears are rapidly growing about some of the more outwardly dystopian aspects of this edition of the World Cup. As WIRED reports, the dramas of this year’s event are as likely to be written off the pitch as on it:

Experts have warned that heightened terrorism concerns linked to the war in Iran could be used by the Trump administration to justify the deployment of invasive surveillance technologies without adequate safeguards. Moreover, there are concerns that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which has an array of advanced surveillance technologies in its arsenal – from face recognition to spyware – could carry out aggressive immigration enforcement during the tournament.

Human Rights Watch, in turn, has urged FIFA to seek an “ICE truce” for the duration of the event, even as ICE’s eventual role remains uncertain.

“Security is often used as an excuse for agendas that have nothing to do with security at all – and in the Trump administration, that often means using surveillance systems to assist in the administration’s abusive and lawless deportation drive,” Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union, tells WIRED.

Not only has the top management at FIFA been willing to allow the Trump administration to flout tournament regulations in a host of areas; it has done everything it can to endear itself to Trump and his inner circle, as the NYT reports in its article, “A Yearslong Effort to Woo Trump Culminates With the World Cup“:

Gianni Infantino, the FIFA president, has unabashedly courted the president’s favor. Soccer officials privately ask, who really benefits?

For the past year, FIFA, the governing body of international soccer, has leased an office on the 17th floor of New York’s Trump Tower that has sat all but empty. The rent goes to President Trump’s family business, but soccer officials say the space sits largely idle.

Paying rent to the Trumps was the choice of Gianni Infantino, FIFA’s president, who has made being close to Mr. Trump a top priority. He has lavished the president with praise, trophies and a medal. He has made pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago, the Trump National Doral golf club and even the “Melania” documentary premiere.

Mr. Infantino has publicly boosted the president through impeachments and plummeting poll numbers…

FIFA officials are clear about what they want from the World Cup. They want a higher profile in the United States and more growth in the world’s biggest consumer market. They also want to shed the reputation for corruption and cartoonish excess that led to Justice Department prosecutions.

FIFA’s 2018 decision to award the 2026 World Cup to the US was presumably predicated on the assumption that Trump himself would no longer be around when the event took place. Trump himself insinuated as much in one of his speeches. Yet here we are.

Trump’s Peace Prize

Infantino’s obsequiousness towards Trump reached cringe-worthy levels in December last year when it awarded the US president its first, and presumably only, ever “peace prize”. Trump was given the award for having “taken exceptional and extraordinary actions for peace” (after attacking eight countries in one year) and “united people across the world”.

In the weeks that followed, the Trump administration launched attacks on Nigeria and Venezuela, where US forces kidnapped the country’s head of state and his wife. Three months later, Trump’s reckless attack on Iran would spark a regional war, primarily on behalf of Israel’s genocidal regime.

As of June 3 2026, US forces had killed at least 207 people (including 7 who are missing and presumed dead) in at least 63 strikes on 64 vessels. The Trump administration has also killed countless Cubans with its near-total siege of the island.

Trump may well have united billions of people across the world but only in opposition to US gangster imperialism. Meanwhile, Trump cannot even feign unity with the US’ two World Cup co-hosts. On Wednesday, the day before the event began, he once again threatened to walk away from the USMCA agreement, which is scheduled for renewal at the end of this month.

“I’m not looking to renew ⁠it,” Trump said at the White House. “We don’t need anything that Canada ​has. We don’t need anything that Mexico has, but they need everything that ​we have. They have to treat us better.”

Trump also issued yet another threat of US intervention against Mexico. After making the dubious claim that the trafficking of fentanyl by sea had fallen by 97%, thanks to the US military’s extrajudicial strikes against speedboats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, Trump said his administration will now shift the focus of its operations to the land border with Mexico.

Meanwhile, Mexico’s Congress last week approved ‌a constitutional amendment that would allow for elections to be annulled if evidence of foreign interference was found. While critics have warned that the amendment would give Claudia Sheinbaum’s ruling MORENA party carte blanche to overturn the will of voters, the move is understandable given the Trump administration’s brazen meddling in elections throughout Latin America.

The US Embassy has also issued a travel warning to US citizens thinking of visiting Mexico to enjoy the World Cup. In Mexico City, for example, tourists should be on alert for terrorism and crime, the State Department said. In Nuevo León, visitors should be aware not just of the risks of terrorism and crime but also kidnapping.

If the 2026 World Cup is supposed to be a joint effort, it is certainly not looking that way. As El Monde notes, “FIFA seems to have forgotten that the 2026 World Cup is also co-hosted by Mexico and Canada, both of which have faced threats from Trump. Once again, FIFA has said nothing about the threats.”

It’s too early to tell just how much of a success or disaster this year’s World Cup will be. The 2022 World Cup was deservedly mired in controversy, especially over the labour and human rights abuses involved in its hugely costly preparation as well as its eye-watering environmental impact (the impact for this year’s event is expected to be more than double that). Yet it provided arguably the best final in the tournament’s history.

If thing is clear, it is that this year’s edition will be used as a tool for Trump’s self-aggrandizement, with the flagrant complicity of FIFA. How much more damage they wreak in the process is as yet unclear. As Lineker told Morning Joe, “normally in World Cups, once it starts we just focus on the football, and it’s all fun… But with this one, I think we’ll have to wait and see.”

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3 comments

  1. Carolinian

    Trump and his supporters doubtless find the world’s favorite version of football to be too tame and lacking in violence. His cage match trial balloon will soon be followed by a new and more compelling spectacle: the Hunger Games.

    Reply ↓
  2. Huey

    Thanks Nick, great article. I also found myself unusually watching the opening match yesterday, in spite of all of the controversy. There is something about the game, and something about hearing hotels had to slash their insane prices, that just puts a smile on your face.

    Reply ↓
  3. Ignacio

    Lineker feelings are well justified. There are chances that the championship goes sour under fascistoid Trump. I have the feeling that the idiot would even like it as a show of power or something.

    Reply ↓

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