Visas, ICE, and Iran: This World Cup, the games off the court
The football starts Thursday. The world is arriving. The harder task, it seems, is for Washington to let it in
The worry with this administration is not that it will fail to manage the logistics. It is that it will keep intervening: Another visa denied, another team searched, another referee turned away at a border. Before a ball has been kicked, the 2026 World Cup has produced a set of images that have no place in any tournament. A Somali referee, Omar Artan, selected by FIFA, was stopped at Miami customs and sent home because of unspecified “vetting concerns”. Iran’s ticket allocation for its group games was revoked days before the tournament, its federation secretary-general and vice president denied visas, its fans left without legal means to watch their team play. Senegal’s players were searched on the tarmac after landing. Fabio Cannavaro’s Uzbekistan squad was made to step off their bus, place their bags on the ground, and submit to metal-detecting wands and sniffer dogs outside a football venue. Cannavaro, a World Cup winner who had spent 40 days travelling across Uzbekistan to understand his players and his project, asked afterwards: “Why only us?” Hillary Clinton called the referee decision “backward”. She was not wrong. The ICE presence at venues, the travel ban affecting four qualified nations, the geopolitical shadow of the US-Iran military confrontation — this is not what a host nation looks like when it is ready to welcome the world.
And yet. The world will fill those stadiums anyway, because the world always does. In 1994, when sceptics predicted empty venues and cultural indifference, the United States set an attendance record that still stands 32 years later: 3.587 million people across 52 matches, an average of nearly 69,000 per game. This week, a pre-tournament friendly match between Argentina and Iceland, just a warmup, drew 88,000 people to a college football stadium in Auburn, Alabama. Qatar arrived under a cloud of criticism over migrant worker deaths, LGBTQ rights and the fundamental legitimacy of its hosting. Once the football started, the cloud receded as the games took over.
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