Boycott Talk

In the history of the men’s World Cup, there was one rare case where a boycott did not merely make a point - it changed the rules.

Lately, so much ink is being spilled over whether boycotts “work.” The context is growing disquiet over conditions in the US, which is hosting the 2026 World Cup. Even those, like Sean, who generally support boycotts (he is South African), think the best thing to come out of the current boycott calls is the threat of it. But that doesn’t mean those thinking about it shouldn’t try.

And modern sports history is replete with examples. Think of the sports boycott against South African apartheid (which impacted the 1968 and 1976 Olympics), or the more opportunistic - and entangled by Cold War politics - boycott by more than 60 countries, led by the US, to oppose the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. In retaliation, the Soviet Union and 13 other Eastern Bloc nations boycotted the 1984 Los Angeles Games.

In football’s World Cup, by contrast, boycotts have mostly been inconsequential and have rarely been about political rights per se. For example, in 1934 and 1938, Uruguay (the defending champions) and Argentina refused to take part in the tournament. In 1934, it was over the fact that most European teams didn’t want to make the trip to Uruguay in 1930. And the second was that Italy hosted the World Cup in 1938, when a South American country was supposed to host it. In 1950, India - despite qualifying - withdrew from the World Cup not over the issue of playing barefoot, as is often claimed, but because the federation chose to prioritize the Olympics instead.

There were moments when politics appeared closer to the surface. In 1978, for instance, there were threats of a boycott by some countries, especially the Netherlands and Sweden, over Argentina’s repressive military dictatorship, but these never materialized. More recently, in 2022, the Danish Football Association sought to highlight Qatar’s human rights abuses, particularly around labor conditions and sexuality. Their proposal was to train in shirts bearing the message “Human Rights for All.” Yet the effort ultimately had little impact, as the other competitors proceeded with the tournament as if nothing were amiss.

Kwame Nkrumah at a football match in Accra in 1952 (James Barnor).

The pattern is clear: World Cup boycotts and protest threats have tended to dissolve in the face of commercial interests, institutional inertia, and competitive self-interest. Yet there is one striking exception: an episode in which a football boycott did not merely register moral disapproval but produced concrete political consequences, reshaping the sport itself. It happened in the run-up to the 1966 World Cup.

That World Cup is remembered more as England’s only World Cup championship. It is also the tournament that announced the first African-born global star, Eusebius, a Mozambican player who starred for Portugal, was the competition’s top scorer (9 goals), and helped Portugal finish third. Incidentally, Portugal’s team contained four other players from Mozambique: Mário Coluna, Vicente Lucas, Hilário, and Alberto da Costa Pereira.

But the 1966 World Cup’s more consequential legacy lies elsewhere: it was the first - and arguably only - time a boycott of the men’s World Cup actually worked.

By the mid-1960s, a wave of newly independent African and Asian states had entered international football, expecting that political sovereignty would be matched by sporting recognition. FIFA had other ideas. Of the sixteen places at the 1966 World Cup, Europe claimed ten, South America four, and North and Central America, named CONCACAF five years earlier, one. Africa and Asia - together representing the majority of the world’s population - were forced to share a single place, to be decided through a costly playoff. Ethiopian official Tessema Yidnekatchew, a founding member of the Confederation of African Football (CAF), called the arrangement what it was: “a mockery of economics, politics, and geography.”

Image by James Barnor.

The challenge to FIFA’s order was spearheaded by Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s nationalist and pan-Africanist leader, then president of the country, who saw football as a critical arena in which Africa could assert its place in the world. This was not symbolic posturing from a footballing backwater. Ghana entered the debate from a position of strength. The Black Stars were reigning Afcon champions, having won back-to-back Africa Cup of Nations titles in 1963 and 1965, and were widely regarded as one of the strongest teams outside Europe and South America.

Nkrumah could also count on numbers: Forty countries had gained their independence. At least fifteen were about to participate in World Cup qualifiers.

At the helm of FIFA stood Stanley Rous, whose racial views were barely concealed and whose conception of world football remained tethered to the empire. Africa, in FIFA’s eyes, was still a colonial appendage rather than a collection of independent footballing nations deserving direct representation. Rous and the FIFA executive treated African protests as little more than a negotiating tactic.

They miscalculated.

Rather than participate in qualifiers, the Africans viewed as both insulting and financially ruinous, CAF withdrew altogether. Ghana FA president Ohene Djan captured the mood in a memo that cut through FIFA’s technocratic language: “Afro-Asian countries struggling through painful, expensive qualifying series for ultimately one finalist representation is pathetic and unsound.” The insult was compounded by symbolism: The tournament would be held in England, the former imperial center for many of the boycotting nations.

FIFA assumed Africa would fold. Instead, the qualifiers collapsed. No African team appeared at the 1966 World Cup.

Even though Nkrumah and Djan were swept from power by a coup d’état that same year, the boycott had already achieved what few sporting protests ever do: structural change. Stung by the embarrassment and facing a diminished claim to global legitimacy, FIFA conceded. For the 1970 World Cup, Africa was granted its own guaranteed place for the first time.

That is the often-forgotten lesson of 1966. World Cup boycotts are usually remembered as symbolic gestures or political failures. This one was neither. It forced FIFA to recognize African football as independent, sovereign, and permanent. In the history of the men’s World Cup, it remains the rare case where a boycott did not merely make a point - it changed the rules. Those serious about boycotting the World Cup beyond cheap talk should revisit 1966.