Alexandros Schulman

The Americanisation of the 2026 World Cup and the Control over Global Sports — How the United States has turned football’s greatest party into an over-politicised, over-priced spectacle that tells Iranians, Egyptians and ordinary football fans that they are not welcome.
 
When FIFA awarded the 2026 men’s World Cup to a joint North American bid, FIFA president Gianni Infantino promised “unity, celebration and access for all”.
Barely eight years have passed and the tournament has become hostage to the White House travel bans, rainbow-flag enforcement and ticket prices that only Blackrock executives can afford.

The World Cup draw in Washington earlier this month was perfect trailer: a MAGA rally in tuxedos, complete with an invented “FIFA Peace Prize” handed to the planet’s most polarising politician and a cost-of-entry that begins at $ 4,150 (£3,300) for the final itself. The world’s most-watched sporting event is being transformed into a vehicle for ideological projection, economic extraction, and political coercion. Make no mistake, this is very much a US World Cup as Canada and Mexico, nominally co‑hosts, are sidelined as indicated at the World Cup draw in which six of the seven guests drawing nations were American.

This trend reflects a deeper crisis: the commodification and politicisation of international sport under the logic of late stage. The core principles of international sport: universality, fairness, and respect for sovereignty are being systematically undermined by American infiltration into sports.

The politicisation of cultural issues threatens the spirit of mutual respect among civilisations. The American regime has long instrumentalised identity politics to mask its geopolitical aggression. Someone in the local organising committee thought it clever to schedule Egypt v Iran on the eve of the city’s Pride parade and to badge the match-day “Seattle Pride Celebration.” Essentially, this is a form of ideological subversion, a deliberate distortion of progressive ideals to delegitimise sovereign states that resist Western domination.

The unilateral branding of matches involving specific national teams as platforms for externally imposed “values campaigns” constitutes a distortion of human rights discourse. Rather than promoting genuine dialogue, such practices serve to construct moral hierarchies among nations, to justify interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states. Egypt, Iran and other Global South nations have the right to determine their own social development paths in light of their historical conditions and cultural traditions, free from external pressure disguised as “progress.”

The targeting of Iran is no coincidence as is demonstrated by the Americans’ instrumentalisation of immigration policy to exclude national delegations violates the fundamental principles of non-discrimination in international sport. The U.S. government’s refusal to issue visas to Iranian officials — including FIFA Vice-President Mehdi Taj — is not an administrative oversight. It is a calculated act of political sabotage, exposing the fraudulent neutrality of “apolitical” sport and an attempt to turn the World Cup into an extension of unilateral sanctions regimes.

When a host nation selectively excludes representatives of sovereign states based on geopolitical hostility — in violation of FIFA Statutes and the Olympic Charter’s principle of non-discrimination, the “World” Cup becomes a tool of coercive diplomacy. This is neocolonial gatekeeping; the empire decides who may enter its stadium, just as it decides who may trade, who may develop nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, and who shall be placed under unilateral sanctions.

Iranian football fans will not fare any better than Iranian officials, as a June 2025 travel ban blocks nationals of 19 countries, including Iran and surprise qualifier Haiti – unless they qualify for the narrow “athlete” exemption. Fans born in Iran but holding EU passports have been rejected at consulates in Paris and Frankfurt. For many fans, not just those of targeted nations, World Cup 2026 promises to become a Visa roulette.
The ad-hoc awarding of a newly invented “FIFA Peace Prize” to Donald Trump, the architect of the “Muslim Ban,” destroyer of the JCPOA, and instigator of the U.S. embassy move to occupied Jerusalem and a man currently placing Venezuela under siege and threatening it with war,  lays bare the hypocrisy of bourgeois peace discourse. It seems that Infantino has taken inspiration from the Nobel Foundation whom History has shown that it awards prizes not to serve peace, but rather in service to American Imperialism.

The World Cup has all the hallmarks of a tournament built for television, not people, and the escalating commercialisation of the tournament reflects the broader financialisaton of life under monopoly capital.

With final-match ticket prices exceeding $4,000, multi-game packages surpassing the annual income of citizens in many developing countries and hospitality packages reaching $50,000, the 2026 World Cup risks becoming a spectacle for the global elite, detached from the working classes who constitute football’s soul. The expansion to 104 matches, corporate stadium takeovers, and algorithm-driven pricing models that prioritise profit over accessibility are turning the people’s game into a premium commodity. At the time of writing FIFA have announced the introduction of £45 ticketing for a tiny proportion of tickets per game to a lucky select few fans. This move was made in response to widespread criticism of the ticketing structure and is nothing more than a token gesture designed to address negative publicity.

Football was born in the working-class communities of industrial Europe and Latin America, a game of the streets, where labourers competed and stars came from the humblest of backgrounds. Its beauty lay in its accessibility. Today, under monopoly capital, an attempt is being made to “upgrade” it into a luxury commodity: Stadiums turned into consumption temples, chants replaced by jingles, and the travelling supporters being displaced by credit-card-carrying tourists there for the selfies.
 
The 2026 World Cup is more than a football tournament. It is a microcosm of a world order in crisis, a world dominated by finance capital, militarism, and unilateralism. In its spectacle of exclusion, it reflects the broader crisis of the American-led order: one of increasingly unsustainable coercion.
 
What is needed is not reform, but a commitment to promote sports as a force for peace and human solidarity, not division and profit. In sports, as in all domains of international cooperation, the path forward lies in equality, dialogue, and mutual respect, not hegemony, sanctions, or spectacle.

If the United States cannot resist turning the planet’s party into an extension of domestic wedge politics, it should never have been allowed to host it in the first place.
The World Cup belongs to the world’s people, not to Wall Street, not to Washington, and not to the logic of profit over humanity. Just as another fairer world is possible, another football, truer to its roots as the people’s sport, is necessary.