Art & Culture

Where Are the Boycott Calls Now? The 2026 World Cup is Exposing Football’s Double Standards

BYYassine Hariss

June 8, 2026

For a competition that’s supposed to bring the world together, we’ve spent an awful lot of time talking about everything except unity and the beautiful game. Instead, headlines surrounding the 2026 FIFA World Cup have revolved around shootings, travel restrictions, eye-watering ticket and hotel prices, and questions over whether fans, staff, journalists, and even some players from certain nations will be able to make it in the first place. And with just days before the 23rd edition of the quadrennial tournament kicks off, the mood around the tournament is hardly getting calmer.

In the past few days alone, the controversy surrounding the United States’ co-hosting duties has reached a fever pitch, drawing renewed scrutiny to a tournament that was already facing criticism from multiple fronts. If pundits weren’t busy discussing the tournament’s security—after a shooting only five miles away from the England team’s base left nine people injured over the weekend, or reports that the Swiss national team may have to move camps because of a snake infestation—they were busy dissecting the growing list of border and immigration concerns now hanging over the competition.

Far from being a surprise, these concerns have been brewing for months. Given the United States’ long and often contentious history with immigration—and, more recently, the increasingly aggressive approach taken by ICE since Donald Trump’s return to power—it was perhaps only a matter of time before questions surrounding border access and entry restrictions became fully-fledged parts of the World Cup conversation.

We all remember the many calls to boycott Qatar 2022. Fans, federations, media outlets, politicians, and even players spent months questioning whether the tournament should go ahead. Yet as controversy after controversy engulfs the 2026 edition, many of those same voices have gone remarkably quiet.

Some of the most widely discussed incidents involved Iraq’s striker Aymen Hussein, who was detained and questioned for nearly seven hours at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport after arriving with the rest of his squad. Though he was eventually allowed into the country, albeit emotionally distraught we assume, the team’s photographer, on his end, was denied entry altogether, leaving Iraq without anyone to document the squad’s arrival.

Another case that has attracted significant attention is Iran, which remains at war with the United States following the conflict that erupted in February. After months of speculation surrounding its participation, despite having qualified like every other nation, the Iranian team was eventually granted the visas needed to compete. However, the Iranian Football Federation revealed that 15 officials and support staff members were denied visas altogether, a decision that has only reinforced concerns about the uneven treatment some delegations have faced in the lead-up to the tournament.

To make matters worse, Iran—whose World Cup base camp is in co-host nation Mexico—was recently informed that, despite all three of its group-stage matches taking place in the United States, the squad would be required to fly into the country on match-day and leave immediately afterwards. In other words, one of the tournament’s qualified nations has effectively been placed on a footballing commute that no other team at the competition will have to endure, or at least not at this scale. Unsurprisingly, Iranian officials have described the arrangement as discriminatory and contrary to the spirit of the competition.

And the list keeps growing. South Africa spent weeks trying to resolve visa issues affecting members of its delegation, while many of the human rights concerns raised ahead of the tournament have been largely brushed aside. This is despite the fact that, in the space of just a few months, the United States has found itself at the centre of multiple international controversies, from mass deportations and immigration raids to its continued support for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu despite an outstanding arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC).

The same selective outrage applies to environmental concerns, which seemed to dominate the conversation ahead of Qatar 2022. Back then, critics rightly questioned the tournament’s carbon footprint, the construction of new infrastructure, and the environmental cost of hosting the competition. Yet far fewer people seem interested in discussing the logistics of a tournament spread across three countries and 16 host cities that are thousands of kilometres away from one another.

For the first time in World Cup history, teams, officials, journalists, and supporters will routinely be required to cross international borders and fly between cities separated by distances greater than those between entire countries, especially such a small one like Qatar. Fans following their teams from the group stage to the knockout rounds could end up travelling thousands of kilometres across North America in just a few weeks. So if environmental sustainability was a genuine concern in 2022, it is difficult to understand why the conversation has become so muted now.

None of this is to suggest that Qatar should not have faced scrutiny in 2022. It should have. The question is why so many of the standards applied then suddenly seem optional now. Because if human rights matter, they should matter everywhere. If environmental concerns matter, they should matter regardless of geography. And if politics belongs in football, it cannot only belong there when it is politically convenient. Four years ago, the World Cup was presented as a moral test and this 2026 edition is revealing just how selective that same morality can be: not because the criticisms are wrong, but because so many of the people making them seem to have misplaced them.

Where Are the Boycott Calls Now? The 2026 World Cup is Exposing Football’s Double Standards

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Where Are the Boycott Calls Now? The 2026 World Cup is Exposing Football’s Double Standards

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