World Cup Schizophrenia: How FIFA Trashes “The Beautiful Game”

David Finkel

Posted July 6, 2026

Red Card. The 2026 World Cup, Sportswashing, and the FIFA Greed Machine. By Jules Boykoff, Introduction by Dave Zirin. OR Books, 2026. 138 pages + notes. $18 paperback, $10 ebook.

“Soccer is never just soccer. And sports are politics by other means.” (Red Card, 11)

With 72 group stage matches finishing up and the 32 single-elimination games beginning the weekend of June 28, observing the 2026 soccer World Cup is a bit schizophrenic on several levels.

As a spectacle, the joy of the various nations’ fans, especially among the underdogs — Curacao scores a goal! Cabo Verde ties Spain! South Africa reaches the knockout round, first time ever! — is undeniably real, difficult to match, and impossible to artificially manufacture.

The television coverage on Fox is wall to wall, including in nightly prime time, and with the games in North America this time we’re not stuck watching at 2 am or something.

On the other hand, on the big all-sports talk radio station here in Detroit, World Cup discussion is all but absent — even though the station’s biggest personality happens to be a very knowledgeable huge fan of Italian soccer — and their number-one job is to know what their audience wants. So the talk is all about the hockey team’s captain demanding a trade, whether the slumping baseball team needs to trade its superstar pitcher, and the football (American football, that is) team’s woes in the defensive secondary.

Presumably this might change if the U.S. men’s team goes deep in the tournament, where even reaching the semifinal would practically be an earthquake in World Cup soccer. But the gulf is obvious between the overwhelmingly male, heavily (American) football-oriented sportstalk audience and the broader viewing public.

Sportswash

Jules Boykoff’s Red Card explores the deep roots of World Cup schizophrenia. A lover of soccer and a former professional player, this is his 13th book on Olympic and other world sports and related topics.

Casual television viewers will already have seen FIFA (International Federation of Football Associations) president Gianni Infantino’s cringe-inducing presentation of a made-for-the-moment “FIFA Peace Prize” to Donald Trump. And they may have noted the unbelievable ticket prices, or revelations of nonexistent tickets sold on StubHub, leaving purchasers out of pocket to the tune of four or five figures.

Boykoff goes deeper into how “Infantino had already established his unabashed brand of supplication to the world’s oligarchs, but with Trump, he was taking his obsequiousness to a new level. Infantino is the pulsing id of the FIFA greed machine…

“FIFA expects more than $11 billion in revenues from the 2026 World Cup [which] is sloshing in Infantino and Trump’s symbiotic sleaze. Infantino treats the United States like FIFA’s private money pump while Trump gets to appear important, lording his mug over the biggest, most-watched sporting event on earth.” (24-5)

Since the book was published, the Trump regime’s power moves, true to form, included barring a Somali referee from U.S. entry, and barring the Iranian team from basing itself on U.S. territory, forcing it to fly in from Mexico for its matches and return immediately afterward.

Boykoff provides details of the “symbiotic sleaze,” although this will hardly surprise observers of Trump’s massive corruption. Subsequent chapters go further into the background of FIFA’s cozy relations with authoritarian regimes, including Argentina’s military dictatorship, Russia, and Qatar, whose crimes were sportswashed by FIFA’s selecting them as World Cup hosts. He also offers a capsule history of how the World Cup grew from modest origins in 1930 to its present mega-spectacle status and “a classic example of elite capture.” (127)

There have been not a few scandals along the way, including the Argentina military dictatorship in 1978 bribing the Peruvian team to lose by six goals to allow Argentina to get to the semifinal.

So the matches, by and large, are intriguing. But the damages behind the scenes — such as the death toll among immigrant laborers in Qatar as stadiums were built at breakneck speed for the 2022 World Cup — are rapidly forgotten.

Reviving a People’s Game?

Boykoff concludes with a more hopeful noting of the activist fightback, citing an organizer of Peoples Football in Los Angeles that “It’s up to working-class people to revive the spirit of what football is.” (138)

In this connection, with thanks to local reporters, I’d like to cite a letter signed by a coalition of Seattle union locals and community organizations, delivered to FIFA’s Seattle office on May 1, reading in part:

Our immigrant community is the backbone of our city. We work in hospitality, janitorial, retail, and service industries. We condemn the federal administration’s reign of terrorizing immigrants by increased ICE presence in cities all over the country. We are clear: immigrants are welcome here, and ICE is not.

• We demand, NO ICE IN OUR CUP:
• No ICE as security at the World Cup
• No ICE staying at hotels during the World Cup
• No ICE reviewing our personal information from FIFA background checks.

And in Los Angeles and other cities, “Chinatowns Against FIFA” (https://www.instagram.com/p/DY3KQTImQEL/) launched actions around the World Cup’s impacts on their communities. We can hope that sustained organizing may result from resisting the plague of “sportwashing” in the era of Trump and beyond.