There is a particular kind of irony in watching the United States prepare to host the world’s most beloved sporting event this summer. On one hand, FIFA’s 2026 World Cup promises to be the grandest tournament in history — 48 nations, 104 matches, and billions of viewers united by the beautiful game. On the other, the country at the heart of it all has spent recent months demonstrating, with remarkable consistency, that it is far more interested in itself than in the world it claims to welcome.
This is not merely a question of politics. It is a question of values and whether a nation whose Attorney General responds to questions about trafficked children by quoting the Dow Jones, whose streets see more than 110 people shot every single day, and whose government has banned supporters from qualifying nations from even entering its borders can genuinely lay claim to hosting the world’s game. Or whether it is simply hosting another American event that happens to feature non-American footballers.
A Tournament Facing an Unprecedented Crisis of Legitimacy
The World Cup has never been without controversy. Qatar 2022 was condemned worldwide for its treatment of migrant workers and particularly human rights abuses. But the moral outrage directed at the United States in the lead-up to 2026 is of a different kind, not just degree. It comes not from a small Gulf state navigating its place on the global stage, but from the self-proclaimed leader of the free world behaving in ways that make the concept of ‘leadership’ almost unrecognisable.
Former FIFA President Sepp Blatter, hardly a figure known for his own moral clarity, publicly called on fans to stay away from the United States during the tournament. The German Football Federation has debated the ethics of participation. South Africa’s opposition leader Julius Malema drew explicit parallels between the current US administration and apartheid-era South Africa, calling on his country’s team to withdraw. Twenty-three British MPs from four separate parties signed a parliamentary motion urging FIFA to consider expelling the US from major international competitions altogether. Nearly 17,000 supporters cancelled their World Cup tickets overnight in early 2026, citing safety concerns and unwillingness to travel to a country that no longer feels welcoming.
“Qatar was too political for everyone, and now we’re completely apolitical? That’s something that really, really bothers me.” — Oke Gottlich, Vice President, German Football Federation
FIFA, of course, has insisted on keeping sport separate from politics. But that firewall has never looked more theatrical. FIFA President Gianni Infantino has close personal ties with Donald Trump. At the World Cup draw in December, FIFA awarded Trump a ‘Peace Prize’ — a gesture that sparked immediate global ridicule and crystallised suspicions that the organisation’s stated values of diversity, equality, and inclusion are negotiable when the world’s largest economy is writing the cheques.
When the World Tries to Come, America Says: Not You
For a tournament that calls itself the World Cup, the optics of barring entire nations from attending are catastrophically bad. The Trump administration’s travel restrictions have suspended or severely restricted visa processing for citizens of more than 75 countries. Among those affected are fans from nations that have already qualified for the tournament — Iran, Haiti, and Ivory Coast among them. Ivory Coast manager Emerse Fae released a statement saying it would be ‘a real shame’ if his nation’s supporters were denied the chance to attend.
The World Cup is, at its heart, a festival of belonging. It is the one sporting event where the Senegalese fan, the Iranian supporter, the Haitian family all have equal claim to the celebrations. The US has, through its immigration apparatus, told swathes of the world that their presence is not welcome. You may send your footballers, and although we shall profit from the broadcast rights, don’t expect to walk through our airports without incident.
This is not a minor logistical issue. It is a philosophical contradiction at the tournament’s very soul. And it exposes something that critics of American exceptionalism have long argued: that the United States is most comfortable with international participation when it can control the terms of engagement and everything else along with it.
The Gun in the Room
Every international fan considering making the journey to the United States in 2026 must confront a reality that Americans have, through years of exposure, become largely numb to: the country has a gun violence problem with no equivalent anywhere else in the developed world.
The statistics, even in a year of improvement, are staggering. In 2025, despite a four-year consecutive decline in shooting deaths, more than 14,651 people were killed by firearms in the United States — not including suicides, which push the figure to nearly 39,000. That equates to roughly 110 people shot every single day. There were 408 mass shootings in 2025 alone. Firearms remain the leading cause of death for Americans under 18. As one criminologist at the University of Washington put it plainly: ‘We still have exceedingly high rates and numbers of mass shootings compared to anywhere else in the world.’
For a British fan travelling to Kansas City or an Australian family flying into Los Angeles, this is not an abstraction. It is a safety calculation they must make in a way they would not need to for any other World Cup venue in living memory. This is not about fear-mongering; it is about the very real and reasonable concern that the country hosting the world’s most-watched tournament cannot guarantee a basic standard of public safety that other host nations take as a given.
What makes this more painful is the knowing silence around it. When Qatar hosted the World Cup, the international media was relentless about cataloguing its failures.
Where is the equivalent scrutiny of a nation where children are more likely to be killed by a gun than by any other cause?
The Epstein Hearing: A Mirror Held Up to a Nation
No single moment in recent American public life has more nakedly exposed the wrongdoings of the US elite more so than the release of the Epstein files. Key figures like Trump, Clinton, Gates just to name a few have their names littered across those documents coupled with horrific images about their actions which took place on the Island.
Whilst the ongoing speculation about the administration’s involvement in the Epstein case the spectacle that unfolded in the House Judiciary Committee on February 11th, 2026, confirmed to me the moral priorities of the state. Attorney General Pam Bondi appeared before Congress to answer for her Department of Justice’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files — the documents relating to one of the most significant child sex trafficking cases in American history, involving over 1,000 victims.
What followed was not an exercise in accountability but an embarrassment to the Epstein victims and those around the world who want to know the truth. When Representative Jerry Nadler asked how many of Epstein’s co-conspirators the DOJ had indicted, Bondi responded not with numbers, not with a commitment to justice, but by citing the stock market. The f*cking stock market. ‘The Dow is over 50,000 right now,’ she told the room. ‘The S&P at almost 7,000 and the Nasdaq smashing records. That’s what we should be talking about.’
In the same room, sitting behind Bondi, were survivors of Epstein’s abuse. When Democratic Representative Pramila Jayapal asked them to stand and raise their hands if they had not yet met with the DOJ, all eleven raised their hands. Jayapal then asked Bondi to turn around and apologise. She refused. Instead, she pivoted to attacking her predecessor. Jamie Raskin, the ranking Democrat on the committee, described the performance as representing ‘staggering incompetence, cold indifference and jaded cruelty toward more than 1,000 victims, raped, abused and trafficked.’
The Bondi hearing is relevant to the World Cup debate, not because sex trafficking and football share an obvious connection, but because it reveals something profound about the culture of a nation. When a country’s chief law enforcement officer responds to questions about child abuse victims by pointing at financial markets and faces no immediate consequences for doing so it tells the world something important about what that country values. It tells the world that the performance of wealth is more important than the dignity of the vulnerable. That economic metrics are the ultimate moral currency.
A country that cannot face its own victims is a country that cannot genuinely attempt to face the world.
Does America Deserve to Host This Tournament?
The honest answer is that ‘deserving’ has never been the primary criteria for hosting a World Cup. Qatar did not ‘deserve’ it by human rights standards. Russia did not deserve it by democratic standards. The World Cup has always been awarded through a complicated mixture of infrastructure capability, financial power, broadcast potential, and outright corruption. The United States, on those metrics, is a perfectly qualified host.
But there is a version of this question that matters more: can the United States host the World Cup in a way that honours what the tournament is supposed to represent? A celebration of the world — all of it, not just the parts America finds convenient? A gathering of nations without discrimination, violence, or the implication that some nations’ fans are more welcome than others?
On that question, the answer — as it stands today — is plainly no. A nation that bans the citizens of qualifying countries from attending their own team’s matches, that cannot guarantee its streets are safe from mass shootings, that employs an attorney general who responds to questions about child sex abuse with stock market quotes, and that has watched ICE agents kill eight people on American soil in 2026 alone, has not created the conditions for an inclusive, globally-celebrated sporting festival.
What it has created, instead, is the conditions for the world’s biggest sporting event to become the world’s most awkward geopolitical flashpoint — a summer-long argument about who belongs, who is welcome, and what America thinks the world owes it.
What This Moment Demands
None of this is an argument that football fans should stay home, that players should refuse to participate, or that the sport cannot transcend its context. Football has an extraordinary capacity to generate meaning and joy even in deeply imperfect circumstances. The matches will happen. They will be spectacular. Lionel Messi will open the tournament to a global audience of hundreds of millions, and for ninety minutes at a time, the politics will recede.
But the world is going to America this summer, and it should go with its eyes open. I will try my best to attend and enjoy what is a special event, an event which stops the world for a month, something you tell your grandkids about, but I will go recognising that the hospitality on offer comes wrapped in contradictions — between stated welcome and enacted exclusion, between the rhetoric of unity and the reality of division, between the world’s most commercially successful sporting event and the country that cannot keep its children safe from gunfire.
The World Cup belongs to the world. This summer, it is being hosted by a nation that has never been more insistently American. The tension between those two facts will define what the 2026 tournament means not just as a football competition, but as a moment in history.
The question is not whether America deserves to host it. The question is whether America is even capable, right now, of understanding what hosting it truly means.