Soccer and politics do not mix. In recent years, this particular phrase has become common currency in global soccer, and all sports for that matter. It looms in the background, is always incorporated in statements, and goes public whenever the sport finds itself tangled in something it would rather not address. The idea of not mixing soccer with politics has a certain appeal. Soccer, at its best, does feel like something apart: ninety minutes where the noise of the world recedes and the only thing that matters is what happens on the pitch. It is one of the reasons billions of people love it.
But the World Cup, the sport’s greatest spectacle, tells a different story. From the moment a country is awarded hosting rights to the final whistle of the final match, the tournament is shaped by power, money, and the interests of the people who control both – with FIFA in the eye of the storm.
Much to the governing body’s dismay, soccer and politics have never been separate. Not in 1978, 1994, not in 2018 or 2022, and certainly not today. The notion that the sport exists in some pristine space above the messiness of power and ideology is not just naïve. Neutrality, when chosen selectively, is anything but neutral.
2026: United States, Mexico, Canada
The 2026 World Cup, co-hosted by the United States, Canada, and Mexico, did not wait for the opening whistle to demonstrate how intertwined the relationship between soccer and politics has become.
The relationship between FIFA President Gianni Infantino and U.S. President Donald Trump has become one of the defining examples of this dynamic ahead of this year’s tournament. At the World Cup draw held at the Kennedy Center in December 2025, Infantino presented Trump with the inaugural “FIFA Peace Prize”, an award created just three weeks after Trump had been passed over for the Nobel Peace Prize, allegedly with no consultation from FIFA’s Council or vice presidents and no published selection criteria. “You can always count, Mr. President, on my support and the entire football community,” Infantino told Trump on stage.
This was far from a one-off: Infantino has been a regular White House visitor, accompanied Trump on an official trip to the Middle East, and reportedly told senior FIFA management he was open to using his friendship with Trump to negotiate a moratorium on immigration raids during the tournament, an admission that FIFA’s political entanglements now reach into immigration enforcement.
In another example, amid the backdrop of the ongoing conflict in the Middle East between the U.S. and Iran, the U.S. has not yet issued any visas for the Iranian squad, with the tournament just weeks away. The team, originally slated to have its home base in Tucson, Arizona, will instead be based in Tijuana, Mexico, traveling to the U.S. only for its scheduled matches and then returning to Mexico. Iranian fans are also unable to obtain visas to support their team in person. President Trump even called for Iran’s exclusion from the tournament, with Iran responding by demanding the United States be removed from it. When FIFA held emergency talks in Istanbul to discuss the situation, Iran presented a list of demands covering visas, player safety, and the treatment of their national flag and anthem.
The heightened presence of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents expected to be at the games has also prompted worry among several international fans who had looked forward to traveling to the U.S. to support their country, but are concerned about ongoing deportation efforts from the United States.
Additionally, FIFA has been quietly shifting its operational center toward Miami, relocating its legal, audit, and compliance teams from Zurich to a 75,000-square-foot office in Coral Gables, with Infantino himself relocating to South Florida ahead of the tournament. FIFA’s formal headquarters remain in Zurich, but the power, and the politics, have crossed the Atlantic.
The organization that asked teams not to drag soccer into political battles is now mediating in a political standoff between a World Cup host nation and a participant making demands. This makes it clear that FIFA will bend its own rules as far as necessary to protect the commercial and political arrangements that keep it in power.
2022: Qatar
The tournament’s last iteration was also mired in controversy. “Please do not allow soccer to be dragged into every ideological or political battle that exists,” was the flagship phrase of a letter sent by FIFA’s Gianni Infantino and secretary general Fatma Samoura to the 32 football nations contesting the 2022 World Cup, held in Qatar.
The letter was a direct response to a coalition of European nations (including England, Germany, France, and the Netherlands–historically important teams for the tournament) who had been publicly pressuring FIFA to improve conditions for migrant workers and LGBT people in Qatar. It came just days before seven of those same nations planned to have their captains wear “One Love” rainbow armbands on the pitch in support for LGBT individuals, a protest FIFA would go on to ban under threat of sporting sanctions.
The controversy foreshadowed what would become one of the most debated tournaments in FIFA’s history, being held in a country facing accusations of human rights abuses, whose hosting rights had been the subject of corruption investigations for years, and whose infrastructure had been built largely by migrant workers under conditions that human rights organizations described as forced labor (and resulted in approximately 500 deaths). FIFA was aware of this, had made the decision to host the tournament there anyway, and was now asking teams to overlook these issues and do the same.
When challenged about these issues during the tournament’s opening press conference, Infantino’s response was, at the very least, interesting: “Today I feel Qatari. Today I feel Arab. Today I feel African. Today I feel gay.” This statement perfectly encapsulates FIFA’s approach to criticism: it managed simultaneously to mock the concerns of LGBT activists, appropriate the language of solidarity, and deflect accountability, all under FIFA’s banner.
2018: Russia
If any remaining doubt existed about the political nature of FIFA’s decision-making, Russia’s trajectory should dissolve it.
In 2018, Russia hosted one of the most geopolitically charged tournaments in the event’s history. Having been awarded the World Cup by FIFA back in 2010, Russia seized the opportunity to use the month of soccer and tourism as a soft-power tool, mainly to mitigate the reputational damage caused by its 2014 annexation of Crimea, a move widely condemned as a violation of international law that FIFA had met with conspicuous silence. It was not the first time Russia had leaned on major sporting events as a way to rehabilitate its image through soft-power; just four years earlier, it had hosted the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, mere months before its annexation of Crimea turned Russia into a global outsider.
Then, FIFA did not emit any statement asking Russia or the participant nations to keep politics out of football. For comparison, the International Olympic Committee that same year quietly allowed Russian athletes to compete at the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang under a neutral flag; a symbolic gesture that at least acknowledged the problem existed. FIFA didn’t bother with the gesture.
In February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine in full. Within days, FIFA and UEFA (the European governing soccer body) suspended Russia and all of its clubs from all competitions.
The point to be made here is not one of whether or not the ban was wrong, it is what the contrast reveals. FIFA does not avoid politics, nor does it try to. It takes political positions constantly, and those positions reliably reflect the preferences of the most powerful actors in the room. FIFA has a consistent record of acting when external pressure aligns with its commercial interests, and of producing diplomatic non-responses when it doesn’t. NGOs documenting labor abuses in the Gulf learned this the hard way, as their reports were met with letters asking everyone to focus on the sporting aspects of the tournament.
The Maradona Case (1994)
Another interesting example is the 1994 World Cup, hosted in the United States. This decision was strategic: FIFA wanted to crack open the largest untapped sports market on the planet, and a World Cup on U.S. soil was the key. The country was also at the height of its War on Drugs, and with the 1994 Crime Bill on the verge of being approved by the U.S. Congress, the spotlights were put on enforcing drug control policies, and knowing the world’s eyes would be on the World Cup.
Argentina had arrived as contenders. Diego Maradona, who had had arguably the best individual performance of a World Cup in 1986, and whose return had been demanded by the public to secure qualification, was having a very good performance, reminding the viewers of his talent once again. After a 4-0 rout over Greece and a 2-1 win over Nigeria, the dream was starting to look real.
And then came the final whistle, and the dream was gone with the wind. After the Nigeria match, Maradona was escorted by the hand to the control room for a random doping test. Hours later, the results came back: Maradona had tested positive for five derivatives of ephedrine, a then-banned stimulant, but not a performance-enhancing drug. It was later revealed that the amounts detected should not have constituted a doping violation. Nevertheless, FIFA handed Maradona a 15-month ban, a ruling that effectively served U.S. policy priorities at a moment when the organization could not afford to antagonize its host nation.
Questions persisted about whether the selection of the test itself was truly random (it was known that Maradona had used drugs in the past), and why Argentina’s football association never mounted a serious legal defense. In a tournament that was explicitly political in its hosting decision, the expulsion of the world’s most famous player (and the most compelling story of the tournament) must have had some political background.
The Maradona case can be seen as the norm rather than as an anomaly in the system.
1978: Argentina
If there is a single World Cup that makes the argument on its own, it is Argentina 1978. The tournament was hosted by a military junta that had seized power two years earlier, oversaw the forced disappearance of approximately 30,000 of its own citizens, and was actively running clandestine detention centers. One of those, the ESMA naval school, was located approximately eight kilometers away from the River Plate stadium, the most important stadium of the tournament. Prisoners later testified that they could hear the crowds cheering from their cells.
FIFA, which had awarded Argentina the tournament in 1966, gave no serious consideration to its potential relocation despite knowing what was happening in the country. The junta, for its part, understood exactly what hosting the World Cup meant: international legitimacy, domestic distraction, and a global audience for a choreographed image of a country at peace with itself, similar to Russia’s use of the tournament decades later. Argentina ended up winning the tournament in the final against the Netherlands.
What happened in 1978 is now called sportswashing (the use of major sporting events to launder the reputation of authoritarian regimes). Sportswashing did not begin in Qatar; it had been around for at least 13 editions of the World Cup.
The System Behind the Scandals
Critically, the same organization that lectured the world about keeping politics out of football had been for years running a shadow government of its own, benefiting its allies and lowballing the different bids made by countries trying to host the World Cup.
FIFA’s governance, for most of its modern history, operated less like a sports regulator and more like a patronage network, where hosting rights, television deals and disciplinary decisions are used as currency in a vast system of political exchange. This became impossible to ignore in May 2015, when Swiss police arrested a group of FIFA executives at a luxury Zurich hotel at the request of the United States Department of Justice. The charges ranged from racketeering to wire fraud and money laundering in the span of over two decades. The subsequent investigation confirmed the long-term suspicions of football fans: the right to host tournaments, including the 2010, 2018 and 2022 World Cups, had been traded for bribes.
FIFA’s insistence on the separation of football and politics is not a principle, it is a strategy. Like any institution with vast financial interests and global reach, FIFA benefits from a world in which its decisions are seen as technical rather than political and administrative rather than ideological. The “focus on the football” letter was not a plea for purity; it was a silent request not to be held accountable. The stadiums were built, the rights were sold, and the deals were done. FIFA was now asking to turn a blind eye and enjoy the spectacle.
What the history of the World Cup actually shows, from the crowds cheering above the ESMA detention center in 1978, to Russia’s controversial exclusion, to Infantino embracing authoritarian hosts while lecturing players about activism, is that football has always been a space where power is exercised, negotiated, and occasionally exposed. The sport does not get dragged into political battles, because the battles were already there, long before the first whistle blew.
Acknowledging that fact is not politicizing football. It is just watching the whole game.
About the author:
Gianfranco Benedossi
The views, positions, and conclusions expressed in Cefeidas Notebook belong exclusively to the individual authors and do not necessarily reflect the official institutional stance of Cefeidas Group.