Ian Buruma
With the 2026 FIFA World Cup, co-hosted by Canada, the United States, and Mexico, in its knockout rounds, it’s now win or go home. But as more teams are eliminated and the field narrows, the tournament looks increasingly like a success, despite many dire predictions. There were good reasons to be pessimistic at the tournament’s start. The prices for tickets—which swelled to more than $1,000 on average for group-stage matches in some cities and are substantially higher for prime knockout games—are beyond the reach of most soccer fans. The Trump administration has treated some competing countries with utter contempt. The Iran team was forced to go back to Mexico after every game. Omar Artan, a top referee from Somalia, was refused entry to the US. Many fans were denied visas.
Moreover, FIFA President Gianni Infantino is a megalomaniac who has put his face on global soccer in much the same way Donald Trump has done on US politics and the Washington skyline. The two men are kindred spirits with a weakness for hyperbole. In fantino declared this year’s World Cup to be “the greatest event in human history.”
Not the French Revolution, Waterloo, or D-Day—no, a soccer competition. He also lobbied hard for Trump to receive the Nobel Peace Prize and, when that didn’t happen, presented the US president with the inaugural FIFA Peace Prize. Infantino, like Trump, also has a weakness for dictators and autocrats: Just look at the infamous photograph of Infantino grinning like a schoolboy with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman at the 2018 World Cup in Moscow. But Trump appears to be his biggest catch. On one of his visits to the White House, Infantino said he felt “happy to be here, at home, if I can say that,” to which Trump replied: “You are home.” After attending Trump’s pre-inauguration victory rally, Infantino exclaimed: “Together we will make not only America great again, but also the entire world.” The worry that this year’s World Cup would be a Trump-Infantino clown show, with the US president hogging the limelight, or a festival of the oligarchs, with corrupt strongmen and their cronies enjoying soccer as US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents rounded up the riffraff, was not ill-founded. But so far, this has not happened.
Yes, Infantino still flies around North America in a private jet to be in full view of the television cameras at almost every game. But Trump has not been seen at all (although he is scheduled to attend the final on 19 July in New Jersey and present the trophy to the winning team). And small US cities have been turned into venues for nonstop soccer parties, with fans from all over the world mixing with locals. Players and fans from Algeria, Egypt, and Jordan, many of whom are of Palestinian descent, have also brandished symbols of Palestinian nationhood—something for which student protesters at US universities have been arrested. This points to another aspect of national soccer teams that is very much on display. Most of the best European teams, such as France, Spain, England, and the Netherlands, contain large numbers of immigrants or children of immigrants.
Zion Suzuki, Japan’s goalkeeper, has a Ghanaian father and was born in the US. The superb Morocco team, which recently beat Canada to reach the quarterfinals, consists mostly of players born abroad. If ever there was an example of the positive influence of immigration, soccer at the top level of clubs and national sides is it. The “diaspora World Cup,” as Guardian sports writer Barney Ronay has called it, is on full show in Middle America. And the local people, who otherwise may not have paid much attention to the tournament, seem to have embraced the event with gusto. People in Chattanooga, Tennessee, welcomed the Spanish team with pitchers of sangria and plates of tapas, while those in Lawrence, Kansas, greeted the Algerian team with cries of “Viva l’Algérie!” Just as it is easy to get carried away and attach too much importance to who wins or loses the games, the consequences of these periodic international jamborees might be overstated. But the impact of the World Cup on the US is not insignificant.
Most Americans have no experience of global sports— the baseball World Series is a US-Canadian affair. The intense but still entirely festive patriotism of Norwegians, Moroccans, Japanese, and many other nationalities has never been so visible to many Americans. This alone should make a slight dent in provincial American attitudes. Then there is the sight of American minorities—Mexicans, Haitians, Ecuadorians, Senegalese, and many others—partying in huge numbers. Even if Trump wanted to get attention, this is not his scene. It is the very opposite. FIFA may be a corrupt moneymaking machine that is only too happy to sportswash authoritarian regimes. But that hasn’t stopped this year’s World Cup fiesta from going against everything Trump’s MAGA movement stands for. The tournament does not belong to Trump, or Infantino, but to the masses from all corners of the world who have claimed it as their own.
The writer is the author of numerous books, most recently, Spinoza: Freedom’s Messiah (Yale University Press, 2024).
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