FIFA World Cup 2026™: Who Is This World Cup For?

A banned referee, detained players, fans who cannot board a plane, tickets that cost more than a year’s salary, and tornado sirens over the defending champions’ hotel. The 2026 World Cup has not yet kicked off. It is already a disgrace.

AI Generated: The 2026 World Cup

Omar Abdulkadir Artan flew into Miami International Airport on Saturday with a valid visa in his passport and a FIFA appointment on his calendar.

He was going to become the first Somali to referee a World Cup match. He had navigated explosions on his way to training grounds back home. He had won CAF’s Referee of the Year award for 2025. He had earned his place on football’s biggest stage.

He was held for eleven hours. Questioned about Somali politics. Asked about al-Shabaab. Then denied entry on grounds of “vetting concerns”, a phrase so deliberately vague as to be meaningless — and put on a flight back to Istanbul.

FIFA confirmed the news in a statement of spectacular cowardice: the host government “ultimately determines who receives a visa and who is admitted into their country.”

The governing body of world football, hosting a World Cup, had nothing further to add.

The Incidents · Before a Ball Has Been Kicked

Somalia: Referee Omar Artan, CAF Referee of the Year 2025, was denied entry at Miami. Set to become the first Somali to officiate at a World Cup. Turned back after 11 hours of questioning.

Iraq: Striker Aymen Hussein — key player for a squad making their first World Cup since 1986 — detained and questioned for seven hours at Chicago O’Hare. Phone confiscated. Iraq’s team photographer was denied entry entirely.

Iran: 13 administrative and technical staff denied visas. The squad itself is based in Mexico, commuting across the border only to play their matches, then returning south.

Senegal & Uzbekistan: Viral footage showed Senegalese players being screened with security wands on an airport tarmac; Uzbekistan’s squad met by dogs sniffing their bags as they stepped off their bus ahead of a friendly in New York. Uzbekistan coach Fabio Cannavaro — an Italian World Cup winner, a man who has played at every level of this game — said: “They said to me it’s the rules, but in the end the check was only for us.”

This is how the United States has welcomed the world. Not with open arms. With wands and dogs and eleven-hour interrogations in airport holding rooms.

I. The Locked Gate

Four competing nations — Haiti, Iran, Ivory Coast and Senegal — are subject to full or partial US travel bans under the Trump administration.

Of the 48 qualified nations, fans from the following face full or partial U.S. travel bans:

Haiti — full banFans cannot attend U.S. matches

Iran — full banPlayers awaiting visas days before kickoff

Côte d’Ivoire — partial ban

Senegal — partial ban

Algeria, Cabo Verde, Tunisia — $15,000 visa bond required

A further 12 nations qualifying for the tournament face suspended immigrant visa processing from the U.S. State Department.

The so-called FIFA Fast Track Pass that was announced with great fanfare will speed up your appointment. It will not override the ban. A Haitian fan in Port-au-Prince could apply today, show FIFA’s paperwork, prove their ticket, and still be told: no.

Haiti’s qualification for this tournament is one of the genuinely moving stories of world football.

They have not appeared at a World Cup since 1974. They achieved this without being able to play a single home match; their country is too dangerous, their stadia shuttered, and their federation operating out of exile.

And now they will play Scotland in Boston on 13 June, and the Haitians who lived through everything their country has endured over the last decade will watch on television, because the United States will not let them in.

“If you’re applying for a visa now, as a spectator and a fan, I do not think there’s a chance for you.”

Giselle Rodriguez, immigration attorney, on Haitian fans seeking to attend

It is worth being clear about the numbers. Citizens of 39 countries face US travel bans of varying severity.

At least four of those countries have qualified for the tournament. There is no carve-out for fans. There is no mechanism. There is only the policy — “to protect the security of the United States” — applied to people who want to watch a football match.

II. The Price of Entry

For those who can legally travel, FIFA has another barrier prepared: the bill.

At the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, a tournament that was heavily and often fairly criticised, a group-stage ticket cost as little as $11. The cheapest seat at the 2026 final in the same category costs $2,030. That is not a typo.

The cheapest seat. The top tier of final tickets has reached $32,970. FIFA tripled the ceiling price in May, weeks before kick-off, apparently unconcerned with any of this.

Price Comparison · 2022 Qatar vs. 2026 United States

Cheapest group-stage ticket: $11 (Qatar) → $100–120 (2026). A ninefold increase.

Cheapest final ticket: ~$206 (Qatar) → $2,030 (2026). Nearly tenfold.

Opening match, cheapest seat: $55 (Qatar) → $560 (2026). A tenfold increase — more than the priciest Category 1 group seat in Qatar.

Following your team, group stage to final, cheapest tier: approximately $6,900. Almost five times the equivalent in Qatar.

Top-tier final ticket: $32,970. Roughly twenty times Qatar’s ceiling of ~$1,600.

FIFA says this reflects “North American market norms.”

What it reflects is the decision to host a global sporting event in the most expensive sports market on earth and then price the game’s actual audience, the working people of Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East, who follow this sport with a fervour Americans have never mustered, out of the building entirely.

US lawmakers and European officials pushed FIFA to lower prices. FIFA told them, in effect, to mind their own business.

III. The Wrong Country

While we are at it: why here?

Football, the game the United States calls soccer with barely concealed contempt, the game they have spent decades treating as a children’s activity before a child grows old enough for proper sports, is hosting the World Cup.

Three-quarters of all matches. Seventy-eight of one hundred and four games, played across eleven American cities.

The weather has made its feelings known. When Argentina, the reigning world champions, Messi’s Argentina, arrived in Kansas City last week, they were woken in the middle of the night by tornado sirens.

A storm tore through, knocking over the security fencing outside their hotel. The defending champions experienced their first taste of America’s summer in tornado alley. It was, in its way, the perfect metaphor for this entire enterprise.

The heat is not a metaphor.

It is a documented medical concern. Fourteen of the sixteen host stadiums could exceed the 28°C wet-bulb globe temperature threshold at which governing bodies recommend delaying or postponing matches. Miami. Philadelphia. Kansas City. Boston. Stadiums without air conditioning, in the peak of an American summer, are hosting the most physically demanding version of this sport ever played.

FIFA has mandated hydration breaks in the 22nd and 67th minutes. They have also scheduled daytime kick-offs in several of those cities. The sport’s players — who were not consulted about any of this — will simply have to manage.

And for those of us in Europe and Africa who want to watch? Kick-off times have been set around American television schedules, which means the continent that invented this game, and the continent that cares about it most passionately, will be watching at 3 am.

Not as a one-off. For five weeks. The World Cup, designed around a market that calls it soccer.

IV. Who Allowed This

The answer to that question lives in Zurich and in Gianni Infantino’s singular vision of what football should become: a product, leveraged to its maximum commercial value, hosted by whoever offers the largest cheque and the most accommodating political conditions.

Infantino has presided over the expansion of the World Cup from 32 to 48 teams, the licensing of the tournament to the United States and Saudi Arabia in sequence, and a ticketing structure that makes the final effectively inaccessible to most of the world’s football-watching population.

FIFA’s response to the visa crisis has been to note that host-country immigration is not its department repeatedly. They have offered no public condemnation. No formal complaint. Nothing that might inconvenience the US federation or the Trump administration.

A man they appointed to referee this World Cup was denied entry, interrogated for eleven hours, and sent home. FIFA issued a statement and moved on.

V. And Yet

Here is what is also true.

The Haitian community in Boston will gather on 13 June in bars, in living rooms, in community centres and watch their national team play a World Cup match for the first time in fifty-two years.

The Senegalese diaspora in New York. The Ivorian communities in Atlanta. The Iranian families in Los Angeles. The immigrants from every country that built American cities and that America has spent the past year trying to erase from its own story, they will be at these stadiums, or watching from a few miles away, and they will be more present to this tournament than any American who picked it up as a bandwagon.

This is the contradiction at the heart of everything.

The United States government does not want the world at its door. The United States population, at least the part of it that will fill these stadiums and make this tournament feel like a World Cup rather than a major league night game, is precisely the immigrant communities that policy has been designed to suppress. The tournament will belong to them by accident, despite the best efforts of the institutions that arranged it.

Football always finds a way into the hands of people who actually love it. That is not a defence of what has happened here.

It is simply the one thing, in all of this, that still holds.