World Cup 2026: Former Fifa president urges football fans to boycott US
The former president of Fifa, Sepp Blatter, has urged football fans on X to boycott the US, which is set to co-host the 2026 World Cup in June alongside Canada and Mexico.
“For the fans, there’s only one piece of advice: stay away from the USA!” Blatter wrote, echoing remarks made by the former chair of the Fifa governing committee, Mark Pieth, to a Swiss newspaper last week.
“I think Mark Pieth is right to question this World Cup,” Blatter added.
Blatter himself is barred from partaking in Fifa activities until 2027, owing to a 2015 decision from the Fifa ethics committee, stemming from Swiss criminal proceedings against him. He was cleared of all corruption charges in March 2025.
Pieth had warned that the US is too dangerous to visit.
“The country itself is in a huge uproar,” he told Der Bund.
“The marginalisation of political opponents, the attacks by immigration authorities and so on, does not turn you on as a fan to travel there… In Mexico it is the drug gangs that threaten assaults [while] in the USA it is a state becoming authoritarian.”
Such calls from Fifa officials are only likely to gain traction as US President Donald Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric, tariff threats, and ultimatums of occupying Greenland push European allies to consider looking further afield from the transatlantic relationship.
Canada is already doing it.
Intensified vetting, deportations
Europe is home to the world’s biggest and most lucrative football leagues. With US crackdowns on passport holders from across Africa and Asia – and given Fifa’s monumental pricing – it will be European football fans that are expected to fill the stadiums.
But the Trump administration can’t even give assurances that immigration raids won’t take place at World Cup stadiums, leaving non-US citizens vulnerable to arrest, regardless of their status.
The State Department has already boasted of revoking 100,000 visas in less than a year.
The Department of Homeland Security says its goal is to deport one million immigrants each year while Trump is in office. So far, it says half a million have either been forcibly deported or have self-deported out of fear.
Trump’s presidential campaign for his second term had promised a crackdown on “violent criminals” among those who entered the US illegally, mostly through the southern border.
But within his first few weeks in office, almost everyone who is undocumented or in the middle of an immigration process became a potential target.
Vocal critics of Israel, especially among the international student population, also became a target.
“If you apply for your visa, and you get your visa here legally, and let’s say you don’t do anything illegal while you’re here in the United States, then you’re going to have an unbelievable experience,” the head of the White House World Cup task force, Andrew Giuliani, told reporters in December.
Wait times for a US visa appointment for most nations whose teams have qualified for the World Cup are down to just a 60-day wait from what used to be more than a year in some cases, he added.
And while the State Department has bulked up staffing to make this possible, the actual vetting process has not changed, Andrew said.
While he declined to comment specifically on the screening of social media accounts, visa applicants and visa waiver visitors to the US should expect that to happen, given the broader orders issued by Secretary of State Marco Rubio earlier this year.
