U.S. is deliberately fumbling the World Cup

Locking fans, team staffers and even referees out of the country for the biggest sporting event in the world is embarrassing, insulting, and financially stupid.

Hello from week two in Rio, where soccer fans (i.e. everyone) are starting to paint the streets and string Brazil flags on trees in anticipation of their first game against Morocco on Saturday. I’m super excited to be here for a World Cup and to witness the notorious chaos of this country’s fandom IRL, even as the Trump administration appears to be trying its best this year to ruin the tournament for everyone.

A light smattering of patriotism on my street.

There’s no logical explanation for deliberately fumbling the World Cup, which is supposed to provide a massively lucrative tourism boost for the countries that host it. But to no one’s surprise this year, hotel bookings are badly lagging in the U.S. compared to Mexico and Canada ahead of the tournament, with 80% of hotels in U.S. host cities reporting that the rooms they blocked off in anticipation of the travel boom are remaining empty. The U.S. tourism industry already saw a 5.5% decline last year due to the Trump administration’s cruel immigration “crackdown,” which translated to a loss of about $8 billion in revenue. And now the U.S. is going out of its way to squander the potential financial boom, reputational goodwill and unifying moment this tournament should have brought, apparently deciding that shutting out Iranians and Somalians and even random Scottish fans is more important than allowing anyone to feel joy.

Iran’s World Cup team touched down in Tijuana this week wearing gold pins featuring the number “168” on their jackets in honor of the 168 schoolgirls the U.S. bombed on day two of its senseless war. The gesture is being amplified by the fact that Iran says the U.S. is denying visas to key team staff members just days before the games, putting them at a disadvantage in the tournament out of pure vindictiveness. “By extending your whimsical hostilities against the Iranian nation into the realm of sport, the U.S. government in practice is depriving Iran’s national team of its right to play in the World Cup under normal conditions and without undue pressure and stress,” the Iranian embassy in Turkey wrote on X. (“Whimsical hostilities” is a perfect way to put it.)

The State Department said in reply that it “will not allow the Iranian team to abuse this system to sneak terrorists into the United States under false pretenses,” which frankly should be a disqualifying attitude for a host country to have toward participating teams.

Even more disqualifying is the fact that the Trump administration has now denied entry to the World Cup’s first Somalian referee, crushing his life dream as part of its propaganda campaign against alleged daycare fraud in Minnesota’s Somali community.

“I’m just simply a referee who’s trying to live his dream, the biggest dream of my life, to come to the World Cup,” Omar Artan told the New York Times after the U.S. denied his entry. “I had the right papers and everything. I had the right visa.”

U.S. Customs and Border Protection cited vague “vetting concerns” in the petty rejection of Artan, which comes after Trump terminated the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) designation for Somalia earlier this year and decided only to allow white “refugees” into the country going forward. Trump has been openly, viciously racist against Somalis in his crusade against the community. “Can you believe that? Somalia, they turned out to be higher-IQ than we thought,” Trump said in January, pretending to care about “fraud” while committing it himself on a massive scale. “I always say these are low-IQ people. How do they go into Minnesota and steal all that money?”

Again—that statement alone should have disqualified the United States from hosting a World Cup.

To put this into perspective, most autocratic nations will loosen their restrictions around big tournaments like the World Cup and the Olympics in order to pretend to the rest of the world like everything’s dandy there. Qatar, for instance, relaxed its public drinking laws and dress codes and punishments for minor offenses for the 2022 World Cup (which it also should not have been allowed to host). Even Hitler performatively allowed Black and Jewish people to compete in Germany’s 1936 Summer Olympics, including Jesse Owens, a Black American athlete who took home four gold medals. But Trump, for all his narcissism and image-consciousness and greed, appears hell bent on destroying any remaining goodwill the United States has with the rest of the world by going full North Korea during his turn to host and leaving New York hotels half empty for the games.

I’ll be down here rooting for Brazil and squeezing whatever joy can be squeezed out of a tournament so marred this year by the gutless xenophobia of my home country, but please let this be considered an embarrassing low point for both the United States and the FIFA World Cup in history books going forward. I refuse to accept that this is who we are.