President Donald Trump said Iran would still be welcome at the 2026 World Cup but suggested Iranian players might choose not to travel for their own safety. Tehran fired back that the United States — not Iran — should be excluded. FIFA president Gianni Infantino has insisted the tournament can unite people across divides, even as critics point to tensions between that aim and the organization’s actions.
FIFA’s rules do not automatically bar a host nation that is at war, but the governing body’s statutes also commit it to international human rights standards. Article 4 demands political neutrality, and critics say Infantino has repeatedly blurred those lines: he presented Trump with an inaugural FIFA Peace Prize and attended the launch of the US president’s “Board of Peace,” while previously accepting honours linked to Vladimir Putin and backing Qatar’s 2022 tournament.
“Both men, though, do as they please without serious commitment to the democratic principles of the organisations that they represent,” says Alan Tomlinson, a University of Brighton professor who studies sport and FIFA’s social history. For Tomlinson, a host country at war — led by a political leader willing to trade on symbolic peace gestures — presents a different, sharper ethical dilemma than previous controversies.
The 2026 tournament comes amid a raft of disputes: stepped-up immigration enforcement by ICE, travel bans and visa complications, rising ticket prices and periodic calls for boycotts, especially from European quarters during other political rows earlier in the year. The big question now is whether an armed conflict with Iran would be the decisive moral line that forces a wider response.
“I don’t think Iran will be the tipping point, but maybe it should be,” says Jake Wojtowicz, a researcher who studies the ethics of sport fandom. He notes perception matters: the US carries enormous cultural weight in the West, whereas hosts such as Qatar were perceived as more socially distant, which shaped how controversies were received.
Global sport has confronted ethical choices before — Russia in 2018 and Qatar in 2022 are recent examples — but a host actively engaged in warfare introduces new stakes. Tomlinson warns that moral boundaries are easily overridden by commercial interests and big-money imperatives that keep major events on schedule.
Wojtowicz adds another concern: the spectacle of the World Cup can dull moral scrutiny. “You begin to view a country through football moments — goals, victories — rather than its policies or human-rights practices,” he says. That diversion, he argues, can prevent sustained public engagement with the underlying political issues.
Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have publicly urged FIFA to honour its human-rights obligations; they declined to comment for this story. Observers say Infantino’s recent conduct — from accepting awards tied to Russia after 2018 to endorsing Qatar’s build-up, assigning the 2034 tournament to Saudi Arabia, and even setting up residence in Miami near Trump in the run-up to 2026 — has stretched FIFA’s ethical boundaries and intensified public scepticism about its neutrality.
Despite these controversies, past research suggests boycotts are hard to sustain. A 2025 study by Paul Bertin and Pauline Grippa found many fans who intended to boycott the 2022 World Cup ended up attending or following the event. Wojtowicz believes large-scale ethical boycotts remain unlikely because football’s pull is enormous, but he urges fans not to be passive.
“If someone says, ‘Well, Trump’s put on a great World Cup,’ the correct response is to question that narrative and to point out how the spectacle can be used to polish political images,” Wojtowicz says. He calls for active engagement and small acts of ethical resistance so that moral issues don’t get swallowed by the tournament’s pageantry.
Edited by: Matt Pearson