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FIFA World Cup 2026: “The Beautiful Game” in Grip of Trump and Financial Oligarchy

Andrea Lobo

The 2026 FIFA World Cup opened last week across the United States, Mexico and Canada with a spectacle designed to project an image of continental unity and economic power. What the world actually witnessed was something else entirely: a tournament seized at every level—organizational, financial and political—by the American financial oligarchy and its political leadership, the Trump administration.

From the moment FIFA President Gianni Infantino awarded Donald Trump the “FIFA Peace Prize” last December, prostrating the world governing body of football before a would-be American Führer, the character of this World Cup has been unmistakable. The most popular sporting event worldwide has been taken hostage.

The inauguration of the event made this reality impossible to ignore. In Mexico City, where the opening match was played on June 11, an estimated 50,000 people took to the streets—teachers demanding an end to the privatized pension system, collectives searching for Mexico’s tens of thousands of disappeared, transportation workers, indigenous and farming communities and youth who see in the tournament not a celebration but a squandering of massive resources. Riot police met demonstrators attempting to approach the Azteca Stadium with violence.

Inside SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles a day later, the US team defeated Paraguay 4–1 before a crowd in which billionaires, celebrities and tech moguls—including Bill Gates—occupied luxury suites that sold on the secondary market for tens of thousands of dollars. Meanwhile, around 2,000 food service and concessions workers had voted 96 percent to authorize a strike over stalled contracts and fears that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) thugs would be deployed at the matches. The Unite Here union, however, rammed through a last-minute settlement whose details were not even revealed to the membership. Hospitality workers in Seattle and Philadelphia also threatened to strike.

Trump appointed himself chair of the World Cup organizing task force, headquartered in the Trump Tower. While receiving a replica of the World Cup trophy in the Oval Office, he threatened co-host Mexico with military strikes for its failure to deal with drug cartels. While the opening match was played in Mexico City, FIFA made a massive concession to Washington by assigning all quarterfinals, semifinals, and the final to US venues, along with seven of eight round-of-sixteen matches.

The ticket prices complete the portrait. For the first time in World Cup history, pricing is governed by a “dynamic” market model—costs floating to whatever the wealthy will pay. Final tickets on official resale platforms begin at $10,990; others exceed $32,000; one has reportedly been listed at $2.3 million. The average price for a given match was nearly $600, according to Ticketdata.com.

Boston’s MBTA, New Jersey Transit and Manhattan-to-MetLife tickets were all raised to exorbitant levels. These prices are set not for working class football supporters but for the billionaires and millionaires.

That FIFA quietly slashed prices for all 104 matches and returned 70 percent of its blocked hotel rooms weeks before kickoff—but still failed to fill tens of thousands of seats so far—only highlights the injustice in a sport with hundreds of millions of avid fans.

However, the greatest outrage staining the tournament has been its transformation into a platform for imperialist arrogance, militarism and anti-immigrant chauvinism by the Trump administration, without protest by FIFA and its co-hosts.

The most substantial single act of discrimination has been the treatment of Iran. The Iranian national team has arrived at this World Cup under conditions no other nation faces: their country was being subjected to a US-Israeli bombing campaign and threatened with a kind of annihilation that can only be called genocidal. The athletes came anyway, to compete in a country that launched an illegal war of aggression against their own.

The United States rewarded this by barring Iran’s team from spending so much as a single night on US soil, despite all scheduled matches taking place in US venues. Compelled to set up their training base in Tijuana, across the border in Mexico, they must cross the border, play, and return the same day—treated not as guests but as security threats all along. Moreover, fifteen members of Iran’s technical staff, including senior federation officials, were denied US entry visas entirely, and a blanket prohibition was imposed on Iranian fans. Tijuana has given the Iranian players a heroes’ welcome, in defiance of Washington’s abuses.

In another unspeakable act of imperialist arrogance, FIFA ordered the Haitian national team—making only its second World Cup appearance—to remove from its kit a symbol commemorating the Battle of Vertières, fought on November 18, 1803, where Jean-Jacques Dessalines’s slave revolutionary army crushed Napoleon’s forces, which had been dispatched expressly to reimpose slavery.

A ruling aristocracy intent on recolonizing the hemisphere and the world is naturally hostile to the historical memory of the Haitian Revolution, the only successful slave revolution in human history that established the first independent black republic in 1804. FIFA deemed the portrayal as too “political;” this from a corrupt bureaucracy that has turned the Cup into a promotional vehicle for Donald Trump.

The censorship of its kit was accompanied by a US travel ban for Haitian fans, an insult to the history of US sport itself: Joe Gaetjens, an undocumented Haitian dishwasher in New York, scored the goal that defeated England for the United States at the 1950 World Cup in one of its most historic victories to date.

The catalogue of humiliations by US authorities can only be partially listed:

• US immigration officers carried out body-searches of Senegalese and Uzbek players on the airport tarmac as if they were terrorism suspects.
• Somali referee Omar Abdulkadir Artan—the first Somali ever appointed to a World Cup—was detained for eleven hours at Miami airport despite holding a valid visa and diplomatic passport, then expelled from the country. When asked about it, Infantino told supporters to “chill.”
• Swiss striker Breel Embolo, born in Cameroon, had his travel authorization revoked hours before his team’s flight.
• Iraqi player Aymen Hussein was interrogated for nearly seven hours at O’Hare; the Iraqi team’s photographer was denied entry outright.
• Fans from Senegal, Ivory Coast, Morocco and Iran also faced blanket visa denials.
• Countless African and Iranian journalists received single-entry US visas that prevent them from following their teams across all three host countries.
• The head of the Palestinian Football Association has been denied a visa entirely.

A comparison to the 1936 Berlin Olympics—already invoked by critics of the 1978 Argentina World Cup, where political prisoners in the military junta’s torture chambers could hear the fans cheering in the stadium—is not hyperbole or rhetorical. The Trump administration today wages an active war of aggression against Iran, arms a genocide in Gaza, detains immigrant workers in concentration camps and mass deports them, kills peaceful protesters, and kidnaps foreign heads of state, all while hosting what FIFA calls a celebration of “unity.”

With Trump himself a student of Hitler, the chauvinism today against foreign players, referees, fans and journalists from predominantly black nations today mirrors the Nazi vilification of “inferior” races, even as the tournament, like the Berlin Olympics, is staged behind militarized policing approaching a state of “total war.”

The $11 billion in expected revenue measures the extent to which the fusion of sport, state violence, oligarchic plunder and the turn to fascism has reached its logical endpoint under capitalism. Governing bodies like FIFA have become, as the WSWS has written of the International Olympic Committee, “little more than a direct tool of imperialism.”

The World Socialist Web Site does not share the ruling class’s contempt for sport. Football, at its most elemental, is a magnificent expression of collective human creativity, skill, movement and dedication. The working class invented the game in its modern form and has driven its culture for more than a century.

As we wrote of the 2012 London Olympics, the apparently superhuman character of athletic achievement is in reality proof of “the tremendous potentialities of the human race.”

The hundreds of millions who want to enjoy that mastery deserve to do so without it being turned into an instrument of nationalist poison and oligarchic enrichment. From de Coubertin’s Olympics—designed in part to better prepare French men to “fight and win wars”—to the Nazi Games of 1936 and the Cold War boycotts of 1980 and 1984, international sport has always been refracted through nationalism and political reaction.

What is new is the ever more malevolent fusion of nationalism and commercialism at an unprecedented scale, while the organizations of the labor movement that once gave workers the collective means to resist and find genuine means of international class solidarity have been systematically destroyed or subordinated to capital.

The antidote to nationalist poison is not indifference to sport, nor contempt for fans—that posture belongs to the liberal intelligentsia, not the socialist movement. The antidote is political class consciousness: the recognition that a Mexican worker, an American worker, an Iranian worker and a Haitian worker share common material interests that no flag-waving can dissolve. Sport belongs to everyone.

The teachers and workers who took to the streets outside the Azteca Stadium; the service workers at SoFi who pushed back against poverty wages and ICE threats; the athletes, journalists, fans and federation officials subjected to the humiliations of the Trump immigration machine—all express a single underlying contradiction. The financial aristocracy has seized a sport that belongs to humanity and turned it into a vehicle for its own enrichment, imperialist geopolitics and fascism.

Under capitalism it is appropriated by the ruling elite, denied to those who cannot pay, and degraded in the process. The expropriation of the oligarchy—of FIFA, of the media conglomerates, of the financial institutions that have colonized every arena of public life—is the precondition for reclaiming sport, alongside healthcare, education and housing, as a public and democratic good accessible to all.

[Andrea Lobo is a writer for the World Socialist Web Site. Courtesy: World Socialist Web Site, the online publication of the International Committee of the Fourth International.]

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From Hitler’s Olympics to Trump’s World Cup

Yorgos Mitralias

The first surprise in store for us with this 2026 World Cup is the impressive amnesia of everyone involved, including the international media. Nothing, not a word, absolutely no mention of its infamous “ancestor,” the 1936 Berlin Olympics. For, despite the 90 years that separate them, the elective affinities between Hitler’s Olympics and Trump’s World Cup are glaringly obvious: the same propagandistic exploitation of the sporting event by the same authoritarian, racist, and freedom-suppressing regimes led by megalomaniacal supreme leaders devoid of moral and democratic scruples.

That said, it is precisely these similarities and elective affinities that allow us to better understand and assess the differences between Hitler’s Olympics and Trump’s World Cup. And the first of these concerns the popular and other reactions they have provoked. Virtually none in 2026, at least on the part of states and international organizations. And only a few—rather rare—protests and criticisms here and there from NGOs and social movements. In short, an apathy that betrays a resigned acceptance of the event in the name of the highly fatalistic “what can one do against this gigantic circus?”.

The difference from what happened before and during the Berlin Olympics is striking. In contrast to the resignation prevailing in 2026, movements to boycott the 1936 Olympics—which brought thousands of demonstrators into the streets—had emerged in the United States, France, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Czechoslovakia. These movements were unable to prevent the Berlin Olympics from taking place, but they effectively articulated their anti-fascist cause, alerting the public and mobilizing anti-racist vanguards by fighting on a class-based line against supporters of the Olympics and other admirers of Hitler.[1]

In contrast, Spain’s Popular Front boycotted the Berlin Olympics, and even better, the left-wing Catalan government of Prime Minister Lluís Companys (later executed by Franco’s fascists) organized the People’s Olympics, in which 6,000 athletes from 49 countries were to participate. Ultimately, these alternative Olympics never took place because their opening on July 19, 1936, coincided with the outbreak of Franco’s coup. Many of these athletes, as well as sports journalists sent to Barcelona to cover the alternative Olympics, joined and fought in the left-wing militias (such as the author of “1984”, George Orwell, in those of the POUM), and some lost their lives in the anti-fascist struggle…

The comparison of popular reactions to Hitler’s Olympics and Trump’s World Cup speaks volumes and says a great deal about the current (miserable) state of the international left and popular movements. And it is probably this appalling state of the progressive camp that makes Trump feel he has more or less free rein to make his World Cup far more openly racist, repressive, fundamentally anti-democratic, and in the service of the ultra-rich than Hitler’s Olympics! Indeed, while the Nazi regime had taken care during the Olympics to appear almost… liberal by removing anything that might betray its pathological anti-Semitism as well as its anti-democratic and repressive “excesses,” Trump and his regime almost proudly flaunt their unapologetic racism, their contempt for the poor and…people of color, their ruthless hunt for migrants (even in the stadiums!), and their white supremacism. And all this while couldn’t care less about regulations or his own promises, going so far as to ban supporters of Third World teams from entering the United States, and even their staff (!) or the African referees chosen to officiate World Cup matches!

However, it must be noted that neither Hitler nor Trump could have done all this without the enthusiastic support of international sports leaders. And while Trump enjoys the unwavering support of FIFA President Gianni Infantino, whose almost comical servility rivals that of NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte—known for calling Trump… “Daddy”—Hitler had his own Infantino in the person of the famous Baron de Coubertin or Avery Brundage. Indeed, the notorious colonialist, racist, anti-Semite, and misogynist “father of the modern Olympics,” Baron de Coubertin, never hid his admiration for his “friend” Adolph Hitler, whom he celebrated as “one of the greatest builders of our time,” for the Nazi regime, which he praised, and for the Berlin Olympics, which he defended with all his might. As for the racist, white supremacist, and anti-Semitic American Avery Brundage, who led, for nearly half a century, the infamous International Olympic Committee—that den of princes and other fallen aristocrats, ultra-reactionary millionaires, and professional anti-communists—did everything in his power to thwart the boycott of the Berlin Olympics in his capacity as president of the U.S. Olympic Committee. And if today, the unspeakable Infantino calls on international public opinion—deeply shocked by the U.S. rejection of Somali referee Abdulkadir Artan—to… “chill and relax”, Avery Brundage described the boycott movement and all those who denounced the Nazis’ persecution of Jews in 1936 as a… “Jewish conspiracy.” An Avery Brundage who was at the time a member of an isolationist organization sympathetic to Nazism, with the evocative name… America First! Clearly, Trump didn’t invent anything…

Just as, for that matter, this ongoing World Cup—aptly dubbed the “World Cup of Money”—has invented nothing new except for its sheer scale and its total domination by the forces of big capital. These forces, of course, have no qualms about either unabashed racism or the repressive mania of that Nazified Caligula known as Donald Trump.

And while all this takes us back nearly a century, imperceptibly reminding us of the era of the Berlin Olympics celebrated then by the same elites who today celebrate Trump’s World Cup, there is nothing that can surprise or shock those who govern this world. Take, for example, that eternal bastion of reactionaryism, the International Olympic Committee (IOC), which has just reproduced and put on the market a T-shirt bearing the official poster of the 1936 Olympics glorifying the Third Reich!

All the more reason for us to take seriously the deadly threat posed by all these nostalgics for a past that is by no means over, and to react accordingly…

Note

1. For the Berlin Olympics, see our text “How long will the “Olympic flame” scam last? “The Olympic flame, a wonderful idea from Dr. Goebbels”!

[Yorgos Mitralias is a Greek journalist and left-wing activist. He is a founder and leading member of the Greek Committee Against the Debt, which belongs to the international Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt (CADTM) network. Courtesy: The Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt (CADTM), an international network of activists founded on 15 March 1990 in Belgium that campaigns for the cancellation of debts in developing countries and for “the creation of a world respectful of people’s fundamental rights, needs and liberties”.]