My friend Abdullah Al-Arian nailed it when he recently wrote that “rather than sanitizing the US image, the World Cup is actually serving as an extension of its war on the world”.
I have no time for the concept of “sportwashing”, of course, because of its colonial underpinnings. As Daniel Levy and I wrote around the Qatar 2022 tournament, it applies standards and measures to countries of the Global South hosting major international tournaments that are never applied to Western host countries. It assumes the West is “clean” of corruption, human rights violations, much less its often enduring colonial legacies, while those in the Global South need to “wash” themselves by hosting sports tournaments. We tabulated some of the moral and physical hazards of hosting a World Cup in the United States (it’s actually worse than we imagined back then) noting “We all know the BBC [and Western mainstream media] would never question the bona fides of any Western country as a World Cup host [because of their] habitual inability to step outside of the self-serving narratives spun by [their] own rulers.”
But as Abdullah is pointing out, the U.S. is not trying to be seen to conform to some global moral standard by hosting the World Cup. On the contrary, the restrictions it has imposed on teams, referees, journalists and fans from a number of Global South participants reflect a shameless trashing of the norms and rules that have long applied to host countries of the FIFA tournament. (No previous host would have gotten away with keeping its hosting rights while barring entry to so many…) And in doing so, the U.S. host is demonstrating a belligerent contempt not only for FIFA norms, but also its wider contempt for international law and norms. The U.S. wages an illegal and unprovoked war on Iran; it extrajudicially executes boatmen in the Caribbean and Pacific who it accuses (with no evidence) of being drug traffickers (former Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte is on trial at the Hague for extra-judicial killing of drug traffikcers); it invades Venezuela to kidnap its leader and install an alternative; it continues to arm and abet Israel’s genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleaning in the West Bank and Lebanon; it demands sovereignty over Greenland, seeks to buy an Albanian island, take control of Cuba, and on and on…
This is the power — and it’s all about power — that literally eclipsed the U.N. Security Council, creating a pay-to-play “Board of Peace” to legitimize Israel’s ongoing effort to erase Palestinian life in Gaza. So why would anyone expect it to abide by FIFA rules and norms? On the contrary, FIFA’s Quisling President appears quite happy to be owned by the United States, telling the football world to chill out and enjoy the occupation of the global game.
There was a time when, for better and for worse, the FIFA President ranked among heads of government as an eminence of global civil society, a kind of secular pontiff or sporting U.N. Secretary General. Infantinto by contrast presents as a kind of MAGA court flunky in a USA baseball cap, showering his master with invented “peace prizes” (equivalent in social value to the gold-foil-wrapped chocolates known as hanukah gelt) and simpering like a midtable donor/CEO seeking a regulatory favor.
If the World Cup is some sort of mirror to the state of our world, then what it reveals is that the what was left of the post-World War 2 global order in which multilateral institutions supposedly upheld and enforced a set of norms, rules and laws that supposedly applied equally to all nation states, is dead and buried. He who holds the whip hand can ignore those norms and laws at will, and suffer no consequences. Of course, the Gaza genocide made that much clear. So FIFA chilling out and learning to love and normalize the violation of its norms and rules should come as no surprise. Sportswashing? That would assume the U.S. believed its reputation needed “washing”. But those in power in the U.S. simply don’t care what the rest of humanity think. And the rest of humanity, particularly outside of the West, has taken notice.
You only have to count the number of sympathetic articles in the regular, “apolitical” sports media (e.g. ESPN, Sports Illustrated, BBC etc. ) drawing attention to the U.S. authorities’ gratuitous abuse of the Iran’s team at the tournament, patently unfair and mocking the idea that the World Cup sees football teams compete on a level playing field, to realize that those U.S. authorities have scored yet another spectacular own-goal in their political contest with the Islamic Republic. Because watching this team face constant harassment when crossing borders, forced to bivouac in Tijuana, Mexico, despite playing their matches in the United States, having their time in and around the stadiums ahead of the games restricted, being forced to fly back to Mexico immediately after the game when players from other teams are warming down, getting their muscles massaged, healing in ice baths etc. — all of that has created an unprecedented level of sympathy for the Iranians among the politically neutral global football public. Forcing Iran to play in metaphorical shackles is clearly abnormal and uncalled for in the eyes of the global football public. And moves by the same politically clumsy U.S. authorities late in the tournament to cope with the negative publicity by easing these requirements has simply made it abundantly clear that they were always baseless, gratuitous acts of political punishment that had no basis in any legitimate security concerns.
It’s blindingly obvious that Iran’s Team Melli, regardless of what anyone thinks of Iran’s regime, has been used as a kind of symbolic whipping boy to be ritually humiliated for the disastrous failure of the U.S. to topple that regime or achieve any kind of victory over it in 100-plus days of fullblown war despite being militarily vastly more powerful. My friend Ishaan Tharoor offers a crisp summary of that epic geopolitical own-goal in this excellent piece.
And, of course, Ishaan’s piece notes that the morbid impact of Trump’s failed war on the ability of the Global South to feed itself — another echo of what we see in a World Cup where fans from a number of countries are excluded, barred from traveling here, while even many of those who did come, even players, were subjected to humiliating searches and interrogations, simply confirming that this United States has little love or respect for the Global South. In hosting the World Cup, then, as in waging his unprovoked war, the Trump Administration has done a remarkable job generating sympathy for Iran. Mexican fans in Tijuana singing “Iran, hermano, ya eres Mexicano” (Iran, brother, you are Mexican!) captures the spirit of a World Cup being forged despite, and against, the U.S. co-host, challenging a global context in which the dignity and humanity of the Global South are subordinate to the whims of those in power in the West.
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