U.S. President Donald Trump is hardly the first World Cup host to seek to score political points from the tournament. For almost a century, leaders ranging from Italian dictator Benito Mussolini to French President Jacques Chirac have done exactly that.

This year’s competition is also not the first to be overshadowed by conflict. North Korea tried to upstage the event in 2002 with a bloody naval assault on South Korea, and the Falklands War between Britain and Argentina loomed over the 1982 World Cup.

The big difference in 2026 is the extent to which the politics of MAGA — and controversy surrounding the war in Iran and Trump’s immigration crackdown — are coming back to bite football’s governing body FIFA.

The U.S. president casts a large shadow over this year’s tournament — a 48-country extravaganza that kicks off Thursday in Mexico City — and he has already styled it “the most successful” World Cup ever. At every step of the build-up, Trump has been lavished with adulation by FIFA President Gianni Infantino.   

Infantino’s sycophancy peaked last year when he sought to console Trump over his failure to win a Nobel Peace Prize by awarding the president a special FIFA peace prize. Trump followed up by toppling the leader of Venezuela and launching a war on Iran. Those moves have been coupled with a hard-line domestic policy, particularly on migration.

Trump’s uncompromising border policies were thrown into sharp focus this week when U.S. authorities barred a Somali referee — selected by FIFA to officiate at the World Cup — from entering the country.

This now all adds up to a major headache for FIFA. Russia in 2018 and Qatar in 2022 were hardly model host nations, but both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Doha’s supreme committee were largely reliable partners for FIFA — neither possessing Trump’s unpredictability, nor his desire to be the center of attention.

“Instead of this being the most inclusive tournament as FIFA President Gianni Infantino falsely insists, the 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup is unfolding against a backdrop of abusive immigration enforcement in the United States, banning of a referee whose job it is to work at the World Cup, threats to media freedom and discrimination,” Minky Worden, director of global initiatives at Human Rights Watch, told POLITICO.

Although the 2026 tournament is being co-hosted with Mexico and Canada, the U.S. will stage the bulk of the matches, setting up a potential whirlwind of visa disputes, concerns over fan access, social media spats, diplomatic rows, security controversies and outrage over sky-high ticket prices.

FIFA has faced criticism that the rejection of the referee at the border is symptomatic of wider problems.

“I think this is a very clear sign of their weakness, that they have no leverage, no influence on the Trump administration and, even more worryingly, that they’ve lost control of their own tournament,” said Ronan Evain, executive director of Football Supporters Europe, a representative group for fans.

Infantino brushed off much of the criticism during a pre-tournament press conference in Mexico City on Wednesday. “Maybe sometimes it’s good to chill, relax … Sometimes to immediately start screaming and shouting has the opposite effect of finding a solution,” he said.

Iran problems

World Cup history is awash with politics — and politicians — intruding on the football.

In 1934, Mussolini viewed a World Cup victory as a way to symbolize Italian might. Brazilian dictator Emílio Médici said that the 1970 triumph was testament to his country’s greatness. The Falklands War provided fraught context to England’s clash with Argentina in 1986, one of the most famous games in the tournament’s history.

In more recent times, Chirac cast himself as a big fan of the all-conquering national team in 1998. Putin exploited the 2018 tournament to project Russian soft power, while Gulf petromonarchy Qatar used the 2022 edition as part of a major nation-building project.

Yet unlike in Russia or Qatar, where politics largely provided the backdrop, the Trump-era World Cup is already being affected by policy decisions made far from the field of play.

Question marks over Iran’s entry to the U.S. for its group stage matches in Los Angeles and Seattle were already dominating the pre-tournament chatter when Omar Abdulkadir Artan arrived at the U.S. border in Miami.

Artan, a Somali match official and the African men’s referee of the year, was turned back by authorities, sparking a deluge of criticism for FIFA and the U.S. administration.

Andrew Giuliani, who is in charge of the White House’s World Cup task force, told the BBC that, “while I can’t go into the derog [derogatory information] on that I can tell you it was the right decision by customs and border patrol and I support that decision.”

Charlotte Girard-Fabre, secretary general and chief executive of the International Federation for Sports Officials, told POLITICO: “Players have teams. Coaches have delegations. Referees often have neither. Their only delegation is the competition itself. Referees are asked to stand alone when making decisions. They should not be left alone when facing consequences they did not create.”

The governing body attempted to distance itself from the border fiasco, in a statement shared with media outlets this week. “FIFA is not involved in host country immigration processes, including visa adjudications, and has been informed by authorities that Mr. Artan’s status will not be changed at present,” a spokesperson said.

“In line with previous FIFA events, a host government ultimately determines who receives a visa and who is admitted into their country,” they added.

Iran’s participation has not yet been fully resolved. The team is currently training in Tijuana, Mexico, and planning to enter the U.S. for games against New Zealand, Belgium and Egypt. Complicating matters, the U.S. carried out airstrikes against targets in Iran the night before the tournament started.

After Trump told POLITICO earlier this year, “I really don’t care” whether Iran competes, Infantino rushed to the White House to gently remind the U.S. president that the Iranian team had qualified fairly and should be able to come.

By the next morning, Trump had lurched to another position that hardly drew a line under the matter. “The Iran National Soccer Team is welcome to the World Cup,” he wrote on Truth Social, “but I really don’t believe it is appropriate that they be there, for their own life and safety.”

It’s hot. Maybe too hot.

High-stakes geopolitics aren’t the only external factor threatening to hijack the tournament.

Perhaps ironically for a competition hosted by a U.S. president who is highly skeptical about climate change and says assertions about rising temperatures have been made “by stupid people,” the heat is very likely to be a problem.

Heat waves have become a persistent part of Northern Hemisphere summers — each one made hotter, longer and more likely to occur as a result of man-made global warming. The locations of several stadiums across the U.S. and Mexico, as well as the peak-summer timing of the World Cup, are expected to put players and fans at risk of overheating.

The problem isn’t just heat, but also humidity. The combination of the two feels far hotter and is measured with wet-bulb temperature, which mimics how the human body cools off through sweating. A wet-bulb temperature of 35 degrees Celsius can be fatal even to healthy people; the football players’ union FIFPRO says wet-bulb temperatures above 26C — which can be reached through a combination of 30C heat and 50 percent humidity, for example — will affect performance and health, and 28C should prompt the postponement of a match.
When scientists last month ran the numbers, they found that 26 of 104 matches are expected to take place in conditions of at least 26C wet-bulb temperature. Five matches are estimated to breach the 28C wet-bulb barrier. And a peer-reviewed study found that during last year’s FIFA Club World Cup in the U.S., average wet-bulb temperature exceeded 28C in 31 of 57 matches analyzed by scientists.

That study also found that high temperatures were associated with players covering less ground, forcing a change of tactics. Exhaustion sets in faster under high temperatures — at the Club World Cup, 10 players asked to be substituted in a single match. But heat doesn’t just affect gameplay. At the 2024 Copa America, an assistant referee collapsed in the heat and, last month, two people died during sports events held amid a heat wave in France.
As climate change continues to heat the planet, FIFA will have to grapple with the growing threat at every subsequent tournament. The 2030 men’s World Cup in Spain, Portugal and Morocco takes place in a global warming hotspot. The women’s World Cup next year will be in Brazil during a warming El Niño event, expected to supercharge the heating effect of climate change.

And that’s not even counting the other growing climate risks — from wildfire smoke to extreme rain — that threaten to disrupt future events.

“FIFA have clearly thought about heat but their guidelines omit the central pillar of any robust heat policy, which is breaks when the risk gets extreme. It’s like having a car safety policy that doesn’t mandate seatbelts,” said Nick McGeehan, director and co-founder of FairSquare, a rights group focused on sports issues.

“Based on FIFA’s prioritization of revenue generation the concern has to be that the commercial imperatives of broadcasters have been prioritised over the wellbeing of players and supporters,” he added.

Sophia Cai in Washington contributed to this report.