The World Cup Is Exposing FIFA's Ugly Partnership With Power

The World Cup has already highlighted what a horrible cohost the United States is. Africa's leading referee, Omar Artan of Somalia, was denied a visa for entry into the United States, as was the head of the Palestinian football authority.

Iran's players are based in Mexico, only allowed entry to the United States on the days of the matches themselves, and have to leave immediately afterward. Several members of the Iranian delegation have been denied entry altogether, and the ticket allocation for Iran's fans has been revoked.

An Iraqi player was detained by immigration officials for seven hours of questioning on arrival. The players of Uzbekistan, South Africa, and Senegal have also been harassed and delayed. Moroccan fans have been denied visas en masse with no explanation offered, while visa rejection rates for nationals from many other countries are exceptionally high.

For those granted visas, expensive "visa bond" deposits often prevent their traveling. All this comes on top of extortionate ticket prices for the games themselves and egregious price gouging for match-day transport as well as food and drink inside the stadiums (this especially applies to the United States, but Mexicans are also angry on this score).

"Sportswashing" refers to the attempt by sports clubs and countries to use sport to airbrush their reputations. The Trump administration bucks this trend by not seeking to soften its image in the slightest and proudly flaunting its viciousness instead.

As Dave Braneck has observed, Donald Trump is "indifferent about building global legitimacy or deflecting from domestic human-rights abuses." Despite this, he is fawned over by Gianni Infantino, president of FIFA, world football's governing body. Most notoriously, Infantino presented Trump with a preposterous FIFA "peace prize" last year (a consolation for not getting the Nobel version).

Infantino's support for Trump includes a $75 million FIFA pledge to the president's Board of Peace for the "reconstruction" of Gaza. The money is ostensibly intended to support football infrastructure, including a twenty-thousand-seat stadium to be built atop Gaza's rubble and bones. Trump's board is widely seen as a means to facilitate the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and as a de facto legitimization of Israel's genocide.

Dodging these central issues, Infantino prefers to indulge in gimmicks like trying to get the heads of the Israeli and Palestinian football federations to shake hands at a recent FIFA congress — the Palestinian delegate was having none of it. Now he is trying to pressure Palestinian youth footballers to play against Israel in a tournament this September.

Football's legitimization of Israel does not stop at Infantino and Trump. The richest football clubs in the world are perfectly willing to do business as usual with Israel and its enablers, some even policing their own staff and supporters to serve Israeli interests.

One example is Arsenal, whose players have just won the English Premier League title for the first time in twenty-two years. It is not known if Mark Bonnick joined the celebrations. Bonnick, a lifelong supporter and an employee for twenty-two years, was sacked from his job as a club kit manager on Christmas Eve, 2024, for social media posts protesting Israel's genocide in Gaza.

Arsenal conceded that Bonnick was not guilty of antisemitism (Jewish anti-racist activists agreed), despite the allegations of pro-Israel campaigners, and an official inquiry cleared him of misconduct. But the sacking stood, with Arsenal claiming he had brought the club into disrepute. He is suing for wrongful dismissal.

Bonnick's case is one of many highlighted in a report issued by the UK charity War on Want titled "Red Card: English Premier League sportswashing of Israel's atrocities against the Palestinians." Several clubs are included in this indictment, with particular attention focused on corporate sponsors of different clubs (and of the league itself). Those sponsors include Big Tech and financial services firms that trade with Israel and, in some cases, work directly with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

The report rates Liverpool (with six of their sponsors deemed complicit in genocide) as the worst offenders, but Arsenal follow close behind. The club had already attracted criticism (including from some of its own fans) over sponsorship deals with the governments of Rwanda and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), both states guilty of repression at home and the fomenting of conflict and resource robbery abroad.

Arsenal shirts bear the slogan "Visit Rwanda," even though the Rwandan state sponsors terrorist militias in the Democratic Republic of the Congo who carry out large-scale sexual violence and massacres while stealing resources such as gold and coltan for delivery to Rwanda. Arsenal's stadium is named after the Emirates airline, even though the UAE supplies money and weapons — in exchange for stolen gold — to a Sudanese force guilty of atrocious war crimes.

While Rwanda looks set to be replaced as Arsenal shirt sponsor for next season, it is not a progressive substitution. The new sponsor is an Israeli personnel and payroll company called Deel, which is already Arsenal's human resources "partner" and is advertised prominently across the club. Deel executives have issued statements expressing strong support for the Israeli military and have personally furnished military personnel with supplies.

Deel is more welcome at Arsenal than a female supporter wearing a Palestine T-shirt who was denied entry to the ground in October 2025 unless she removed the offending item. But she might be considered lucky compared to a Brighton supporter who was banned from his club's ground for five years for wearing such a shirt.

In contrast, Tomer Hemed, a youth team coach at Brighton, has posted pictures of himself alongside Israeli soldiers in Gaza and written "Human animals are not human!!! Monsters! Let them die a death of suffering!" A thousand Brighton supporters complained to the club about Hemed, but, unlike Mark Bonnick at Arsenal, he has escaped sanction.

Arsenal and Brighton are far from alone. Manchester City are actually owned by the UAE, which means they are even more heavily implicated in UAE-supported crimes in Sudan and elsewhere. Specifically on Palestine, the chairman of Manchester City, Khaldoon Al Mubarak, has joined Trump's aforementioned Board of Peace for Gaza. Keeping him company on that board is Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabian tyrant and chairman of the company that owns a majority stake in Newcastle United.

Among Manchester City's sponsors is the website construction company Wix, founded by a former member of Israeli military intelligence. The company has internally messaged its employees, urging them to "show Westernity" and to highlight how Israelis "unlike the Gazans, look and live like Europeans or Americans." Wix employs about five hundred people in Dublin, Ireland, one of whom, Courtney Carey, was fired in October 2023 after calling Israel a "terrorist state" on social media.

Ireland is at the center of current debates about whether football should continue to normalize and legitimize Israel. Two Nations League football matches between Ireland and Israel are scheduled for this autumn. A huge groundswell of opposition has built up to the playing of these games.

The Irish government now says it is a matter for the football authorities, having previously called for the games to go ahead. By contrast, in 2022 the minister for sport (who is still a minister) wrote to every Irish sporting organization urging them to enforce a boycott of Russia and Belarus — so much for leaving it up to the sporting authorities.

The Football Association of Ireland (FAI), despite the protests of many of its own members, insists that the games with Israel must go ahead or else Irish football could be hit with financial and sporting penalties. The FAI has instead organized to play the "home" game scheduled for Dublin at a third-country location and behind closed doors (the "away" game was already due to be held outside Israel).

This venue switch only compounds the problem. It lets the Irish government off the hook, as it can now claim the game is outside its jurisdiction, and it deprives most Irish people of the opportunity to launch a massive protest at the ground. Most importantly, the games are still to be played, and the apartheid state of Israel — guilty of genocide in Gaza as well as escalating and murderous assaults on Palestinians in the West Bank and on the people of Lebanon and Iran — is still being treated as a normal, legitimate partner.

The case for a full boycott receives soccer-specific support from the racist nature of Israeli football, which reflects the wider culture of the state itself. Maccabi Tel Aviv FC, managed by Irish record goal scorer Robbie Keane from June 2023 to June 2024, has fans who routinely chant "Let the IDF win, f–k the Arabs." The Hind Rajab Foundation documents how Maccabi fans also construct "elaborate stadium choreographies, or tifos, that feature military insignias, nationalist slogans, and giant portraits of soldiers."

The fans include a hardcore IDF-linked group who seek out violent confrontation on their travels, including general thuggery as well as assaults on Palestinians and Muslims in Athens and Amsterdam in 2024. In November 2023, during Keane's tenure at the club, the Maccabi team was shown a "motivational video" of club staff who were also army reservists firing rockets in Gaza. The team applauded the spectacle.

Maccabi Tel Aviv is not even the most racist club in Israel — that dubious honor belongs to Beitar Jerusalem — and the actions and attitudes of Israeli clubs are outdone by the violent and illegal approach of the Israeli government toward Palestinian land and players. Ten Israeli football clubs are authorized by the state to operate out of illegally occupied Palestinian territories. Since October 2023, Israel has damaged or destroyed most Gazan sports facilities and killed at least 565 members of the Palestinian Footballers' Association.

To take just one example, Imad Abu Tima, who had represented Palestine at under-twenty level, was murdered by the IDF in 2024 along with nine members of his family. In December 2023, Israeli forces turned Gaza's Yarmouk stadium into an internment camp where men, women, and children were stripped to their underwear and blindfolded. Some were forced to kneel in front of a goal, its netting adorned with the Israeli flag. Israeli tanks and bulldozers later destroyed the pitch.

Critics may claim boycotting a football match is just gesture politics. But former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak told his good friend Jeffrey Epstein that a football boycott of Israel had "the most potential to change the fate of the country."

Activists in Ireland would also like to see the Irish state take more concrete action, such as properly implementing a long-promised Occupied Territories Bill banning the import of goods and services from illegal Israeli settlements — a watered-down version excluding trade in services looks set to become law soon — and banning the overflight through Irish airspace of armaments destined for Israel.

Symbolic gestures by individuals and civil society matter even when the wider powers that be will not step up to the mark. When Barcelona won Spanish football's latest league title, the prodigiously talented eighteen-year-old player Lamine Yamal waved a Palestinian flag on their celebratory open-top bus parade.

The gesture drew the ire of the Israeli government, with the Defense Minister Israel Katz claiming that it incited hate. He would hardly have bothered protesting if the gesture was inconsequential.

A mural of Yamal has been painted on war-damaged buildings in Gaza, showing that symbolic solidarity is noted and appreciated. Hopefully we might yet see similar gestures of solidarity — around Israel, migrant rights, or other issues — from footballers at the World Cup, defying Trump's authoritarianism and Infantino's sycophantic complicity.