Red Card

In this excerpt from his new book, Jules Boykoff argues that a 2026 World Cup boycott is unlikely. In the meantime, campaigners are ramping up to challenge FIFA’s greed machine.

In March 2025, Dave Zirin and I wrote an essay for The Nation titled, “With ICE Out of Control, How Can the US Cohost the 2026 World Cup?” In it, we argued that for the safety of the fans, players, and their families, matches scheduled for the United States needed to be relocated to Canada and Mexico, and that if FIFA refused to do so, every qualifying country should boycott the World Cup.

It’s been done before. The entire continent of Africa boycotted the 1966 World Cup in England. After FIFA allocated only one of sixteen slots at the tournament to Africa—and only if the team could defeat the Asian champion in a playoff match—a rebellion ensued. One Confederation of African Football official described FIFA’s egregiously Eurocentric qualification scheme as “a mockery of economics, politics, and geography.” As African countries cleaved free from colonialism and gained independence, many leaders viewed football—and specifically the World Cup—as an effective path for advancing their recognition on the global stage. They united in solidarity, and, under the leadership of the pan-Africanist Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, leveraged football as a space of resistance, refusing to attend the 1966 World Cup. FIFA soon relented, granting automatic qualification berths to both Africa and Asia for the 1970 World Cup in Mexico. The boycott worked.

A few years later, the Soviet Union opted to forgo qualification for the 1974 World Cup, choosing principle over participation. In 1973, after General Augusto Pinochet’s coup in Chile, the USSR was slated to play home-and-away playoff matches against Chile for the right to go to the World Cup. The first match in Moscow was a nil-nil draw. The Soviets then refused to play the second leg in Santiago’s Estadio Nacional because it had been used as a concentration camp for more than 30,000 supporters of Salvador Allende. FIFA insisted that the match must go on. So, at the kickoff, with no Soviet team on the pitch, Chile kicked off, strolled down the field, and scored into an empty net. Chile qualified for the World Cup in West Germany, while the Soviet Union missed out because of politics.

After Trump returned to office and unleashed mayhem both at home and abroad, calls to boycott the World Cup emerged from Western Europe. German Member of Parliament Jürgen Hardt suggested boycotting the tournament “as a last resort” in order to jar Trump “to his senses.” Hardt’s parliamentary colleague agreed, adding that he had a “hard time imagining that European countries would take part in the World Cup.” Oke Göttlich, a vice-president of the German soccer federation and president of the Bundesliga club St. Pauli—known for its fervent anti-fascist supporters—said it was time to “seriously consider and discuss” a boycott. “The life of a professional player is not worth more than the lives of countless people in various regions who are being directly or indirectly attacked or threatened by the World Cup host,” he said. In the UK, more than two dozen politicians from a range of parties put forth a motion demanding “the exclusion of the United States from the World Cup and other major international competitions until it demonstrates clear compliance with international law.” A diplomatic boycott is another possibility, as when numerous countries symbolically refused to send diplomats to the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing over human-rights abuses in the host country.

While a sporting boycott of the 2026 World Cup is highly unlikely, one thing is certain: campaigners are ramping up to fight the FIFA greed machine. To be sure, disrupting the world’s most popular sporting spectacle is no simple matter. The Italian theorist Umberto Eco even argued, “There is one thing that—even if it were essential—no student movement or urban revolt or global protest or what have you would ever be able to do. And that is to occupy the football field.” One could “fling Molotov cocktails on the jeeps of any police force” or occupy any religious cathedral, and fewer people would be killed, he wrote, because football inhabits “a deep area of the collective sensibility that no one, whether through conviction or demagogical calculation, will allow to be touched.”

Protesting against the World Cup may be complicated, but that hasn’t stopped activists who are gearing up in numerous host cities to challenge Trump for “using sports to wash his image,” noted Eric Sheehan, an organizer with the anti-Olympics group NOlympicsLA. “We don’t think the US deserves to be hosting a global event as it is a perpetrator of war crimes throughout the world and [while ICE is] running a multi-billion-dollar campaign to terrorize residents of host cities and the rest of the United States.” This sentiment was echoed by Ajamu Baraka of the Black Alliance for Peace. He told me, “Having the World Cup in the United States at this particular historical moment is not only bizarre, but morally obscene.” It risks “normalizing some of the most horrific crimes we have seen committed” in recent US history.

Activists tallied a long list of political reasons why the United States should not be allowed to host, from ICE’s reckless pillaging to the invasion of Venezuela to attacks on Iran. Many of them also highlighted that “FIFA is complicit with the aiding and abetting of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Palestine,” thereby “facilitating the ongoing Israeli occupation,” as LA-based activist Victor Quintero told me. Quintero is an organizer with Peoples Football, a political soccer project in Los Angeles. In late March, Peoples Football organized a soccer festival and political-education event that interspersed 5-a-side soccer with political talks and invitations to get involved in protesting the World Cup. The overall theme was “Football for Liberation,” and numerous community partners showed up in solidarity, such as Stop LAPD Spying, LA Street Care and Mutual Aid, and NOlympicsLA. Sheehan, the organizer with NOlympicsLA, brought along a 3D-printed Jules Rimet replica trophy as a political-education conversation starter. He says he plans on spattering the trophy in fake blood and bringing it to protests ahead of and during the World Cup in Los Angeles. Soccer, writes Stevphen Shukaitis, becomes “not merely a spectacle, but a medium through which new forms of life, solidarity, and resistance might be rehearsed.”

FIFA is a classic example of elite capture, which scholar Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò describes as a relationship whereby “the advantaged few steer resources and institutions that could serve the many toward their own narrower interests and aims.” It’s how “socially advantaged people tend to gain control over benefits meant for everyone.” When everyday people learn about how FIFA prioritizes profits over people, it makes an impression—and not a good one. Infantino, Trump, bin Salman, and their collaborators have the upper hand, but will they have the last word?

• An excerpt from Jules Boykoff, Red Card: The 2026 World Cup, Sportswashing, and the FIFA Greed Machine (OR Books, 2026).