Editorial: The beautiful game, tarnished

It should come as little surprise to many football fans that the World Cup’s opening week has been dominated by political and administrative shortcomings, price gouging and scandal.

For the last years now, FIFA president Gianni Infantino has scoffed at concerns about hosting football’s most important tournament in the sprawling United States-Mexico-Canada format.

He also ignored America’s problematic travel bans and inflammatory commentary on foreign workers and cosied up to Donald Trump with a contrived ‘peace prize’ to placate the imperious president.

As the World Cup gets underway, we have witnessed a top Somali referee being turned away at Miami International Airport, several Iranian and African journalists being denied the necessary US visas, and Iran’s national team relocating its training base to Mexico. The Senegalese team was said to have endured harsh security checks when arriving for their pre-World Cup camp.

Nationals of four World Cup countries – Senegal, Ivory Coast, Iran and Haiti – are under travel bans, and Iran said its ticket allocation for its three group games in the US had been cancelled. And concerns are rising that Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers will conduct sweeps for undocumented migrants at games involving South American teams with large followings in the US.

In short, the World Cup is overshadowed by the US’s MAGA-driven, far-right drift.

Infantino is caught in this crosshairs of American government policy; far from ‘football uniting the world’ as FIFA professes, Infantino has shown himself amenable to Trump’s theatrics with his frequent appearance at the Oval Office and Mar-A-Lago, even tip-toeing around FIFA political neutrality rules by opening a FIFA office in Trump Tower in Manhattan, and attending Trump’s Board of Peace events.

Soaring ticket prices, meanwhile, have priced fans out of games, cementing FIFA’s role as a handmaiden of capitalistic greed.

Unlike Russia 2018, where fixed ticket prices were announced two years earlier, this time around FIFA only announced a paucity of ticket information in September 2025.

It then preyed on fans’ anxieties with $999 ‘right-to-buy’ digital tokens, sold via a crypto partner – a rip-off that only gave buyers the future ability to purchase one or two World Cup tickets at a later date and then at a price yet to be determined.

For the first time ever, FIFA employed the much-disliked dynamic pricing system, where prices rise based on real or perceived demand. After claiming that it was unable to prevent ticket touts from reselling tickets, it decided to lean in and launched its own resale platform, charging 15% commission from both buyers and sellers on each sale – by April 2026, Category 1 tickets were reaching well over $10,000 for highly-sought matches.

These are by far the highest prices in World Cup history, with Football Supporters Europe calling it a “monumental betrayal of the tradition of the World Cup” and filing a complaint with the European Commission. In the US, the attorneys general of New York and New Jersey have accused FIFA of practicing “fake scarcity” by withholding blocks of tickets from sale to drive up the prices of the seats that remain.

These events are sobering wake-up calls on the route that international football and its governing body FIFA has been on, mirroring in no uncertain part the values of the Trump administration.

Clearly the World Cup is taking full advantage of a landscape in which the price of watching live sport is taking football away from its fans, and instead, through figures like Infantino, chooses to launder the reputations of authoritarian-style governments through the power of sports.